Psychedelia

Okay, I confess. I like psychedelia. I don't make any great claims for its genius or brilliance or artistry, but it makes me happy, and frankly, these days, that's enough.

And I like neo-psychedelia as well. The Dukes of the Stratosphear, for example, are one of the most delightful side projects of any band, pretty much ever. Give me a fuzzy guitar and a surreal lyric and I'm pretty happy, usually.

Here's a recent review of Children of Nuggets, a new compilation from Rhino which, if it misses some tunes I would have included (Shoes' "Treading Water," for example, a great psychedelic song), includes some I wouldn't have thought of (like Teenage Fanclub, who I love, but don't really class as psychedelic).

Kieron Tyler's liner notes deserve special praise, as he openly confronts the limitations of the whole Nuggets genre, while documenting the rise and fall of several fertile scenes. It's equally enlightening to hear scorching tracks by The Lyres, The Fleshtones, and The Chesterfield Kings, all of whom kept the garage-rock flame burning in cold times, more than a decade before the Detroit scene brought the heat back. And unlike recent disappointing Rhino boxes dedicated to punk (No Thanks!) and college rock (Left Of The Dial), Children Of Nuggets isn't propped up with songs that every interested music buff would already own. By the time the set hits its second disc, the programmers are lining up one obscure wonder after another, hitting a precipitous peak in the middle of disc three with the one-two of The Stems' molten power-pop anthem "Love Will Grow" and The Spongetones' fractured Beatles homage "She Goes Out With Everybody." Both those songs would've been too self-conscious for the original Nuggets, but here, they've been precisely filed.

The relationship between power pop and psychedelia is pretty direct, it seems to me. Psychedelia was the side street into which the first wave of power pop in the mid-1960's was shunted. So "And Your Bird Can Sing" became "Rain," for example. (Parenting/babysitting tip: you can while away a rainy afternoon by allowing children to jump on the bed to Yellow Submarine. The title track, of course, but also "All Together Now" and Hey Bulldog." Kids love to howl.) Power pop was kept alive, like an ember, under bands like The Move, who appeared to be psychedelic on the surface. And so I have a warm place in my heart for it.

Now I just need to find the scratch to get this record.....