PUMP UP THE VOLUME 2

Not unlike the psychedelic cover art of his legendary 1972 garage rock compilation template Nuggets, Lenny Kaye’s musical journey has encompassed all manner of innovative rock ’n’ roll byways. Yet he always stays rooted in the guts of the hook—like the guy on the cover holding on to that car radio dial.

Kaye was a kid during the original rock ’n’ roll explosion; then a foundling creator of the fanzine format (his teenage sci-fi zine Obelisk, 1961); a participant in the 1960s garage band explosion; one of the first serious-minded rock critics; and finally part of the sonic canon himself as guitarist in the Patti Smith Group.

His musical journey also included a pit stop as a major-label A&R guy at the bumpy turn into the 1970s. Brought on staff by legendary Elektra Records mogul Jac Holzman to keep an eye out for cool new acts, Kaye’s discovery was instead a cracked-rearview-mirror look back to a treasure trove of regional hits and AM also-rans—just a few years old—that had mostly come out on the then-unhip 7-inch-single format. Kaye crafted the two-LP Nuggets into a commercial flop that would nevertheless soon become a major referential lynchpin of the ’70s underground rock desire to revive the raw excitement of early rock ’n’ roll.

While it wasn’t intentional at the time, Nuggets now aligns in overarching influence with Holzman’s band signings of the era—the Doors, Love, the Stooges, and the MC5—as a bedrock of rock’s devolution into serviceable madness, a.k.a. punk. (Holzman also signed Carly Simon, Judy Collins, and Bread, but hey, someone had to pay for those Stooges hotel bills.)

So gargantuanly influential was Nuggets that even after the incredible, expanded 1998 CD box set (and two more sequel sets) that reintroduced it to a new generation, Rhino nonetheless decided to finish the original plan and add a back-then scrapped “Volume 2” into the latest Nuggets 50th-anniversary reissue—an incredibly beautiful and info-packed Record Store Day vinyl box set that came out in May of this year, the promotion of which has only added to the unending activity of Kaye’s life. He recently released the book Lightning Striking, he’s a DJ on SiriusXM, and he still hits the stage with Patti Smith when the fates drop a solid backstage rider.

We caught him on the horn as he had just gotten back to NYC from L.A., where he DJ’d a Record Store Day party.

So you just did a Nuggets tribute show with some local luminaries out in L.A., right?

I went out there to take in the plaudits of a grateful universe about the history of Nuggets. It’s going to be fun to celebrate all this. This record has survived for over a half century, which is pretty remarkable for what is essentially an oldies album.

Would these songs have already been called oldies when Nuggets was put together?

Well, I remember one of the templates for Nuggets was this series of albums that came out in the early ’60s called Oldies but Goodies. They had hits from the last couple of years. Quite a bargain at the time because they’d have all these hit singles you would have had to buy separately. I also combined it with the more scholarly approach of the Yazoo label. So I tried to make it a collection of golden goodies, but also frame it in a historical context.

Most of the songs on Nuggets weren’t even five years old when you compiled them, but they would have already been hard to find— singles were quickly dismissed. If you walked into a store in 1971 and asked for the Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard,” they’d look at you funny. Yeah, at that moment a song like that was too recent to be viewed historically. I mean, you pull back the visor another 10 years and you see what happened. But I was so close to it. Jac Holzman, who was my mentor, noticed that there was a moment in time where some of these records had been left by the wayside. As you say in the liner notes, many of these songs—soon to be considered classics and major influences on punk—were then considered forgettable one-hit wonders, regional hits, or AM bubblegum.

Yeah. [Holzman’s] idea was perhaps more album-trackoriented in his initial discussions with me about the idea. He realized there was a certain era when rock ’n’ roll was progressing from being a hit-singles medium to being a more improvisational, hallucinatory moment. And of course his company was a big part of that.

I don’t think the album I finally assembled was what Jac expected, though. But he went with it; he understood it wasn’t just about “garage rock”—even though that term hadn’t even really been invented yet. It was about great records, and some of them off the beaten path.

I only worked as a talent scout for Holzman for about three or four months, and they didn’t like anything I suggested. And I thought Nuggets was over and done. But then I got a call about six months after I left the company. It was Michael Kapp, the company’s genius lawyer, who got the licensing for some of these arcane bands who had a moment in the sun, then broke up. So I thought, “Oh, the project is still happening.” So I pursued it and was able to finish it.

I imagine at the time it was hard for Elektra to figure out who the audience was for this.

On the whole it was a commercial flop. I think Elektra just put it out; it got good reviews in the rock press because it appealed to rock writers. But with the general public, it didn’t do anything. I got a $750 advance, and after about eight years I got a note from WEA, who had taken over Elektra’s catalog, that said this thing is never going to make any money, so we’re going to stop sending you royalty statements.

All praises be to [Sire Records head] Seymour Stein, though. The Sire reissue of Nuggets in 1976 really helped bring it to a new generation of bands that took inspiration from it. It’s kind of a reductive return to the building blocks of sound, where you could have an entry point when it really became punk rock, in a sensory way.

Reissuing it right then was pretty visionary, as so many of the first-wave punk bands were covering those kinds of “forgotten” ’60s garage songs.

Yeah, [Nuggets] seemed to already have a life of its own. The first time I went to Europe with Patti Smith, in May 1976, our first stop was Copenhagen, and we were doing a press conference for the locals, and someone turned to me and said, “When is the next Nuggets coming out?” I thought, “Wow, they’ve heard of it in Denmark! ”

I also realized then that—even though many of the tracks on Nuggets were kind of vaguely known in America—in Europe, nobody had heard of the 13th Floor Elevators, the Blues Magoos, most of it. So it was a revelation over there, and it took root.

Did you get to see any of the bands on Nuggets?

I knew one of the guitar players in Richard and the Young Lions. They were my aspirationals. Nuggets is slightly autobiographical because this is what I wanted to be. I know I got to see the Blues Project live, the Vagrants. I believe I saw the Seeds at the Filmore once. But again, by the time I saw some of these bands, they were national acts. It was when I saw bands like the Driftwoods or the Renegades from my hometown, that really showed me I could partake of this music somewhat. Just knowing they existed, knowing that you could gather a few friends in a basement and try to partake of the divine wind that is rock ’n’ roll, and then get up on that stage and be yourself.

In 1963, I started to play guitar. I wanted to be a lonely folk singer in the backyard. Obviously a few months later in 1964, the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, so the entire sense of a band model presented itself to me. By November of that year I got an electric guitar and played my first show in a group called the Vandals. We’d play Rutgers’ fraternity row.

One time Delta Kappa Epsilon, the “Deke” house at Rutgers—mostly the football players—were going on probation for some kind of violation. And the social chairman, Terry Stewart, paid us an extra 25 dollars to not take a break for the four-hour show. Of course we said yes. Later Terry became the president of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and we fondly reminisce about that moment in time.

It always amazes me that when Sire Records reissued Nuggets in ’76, many of these songs were from 1966 or later. That’s less than 10 years, but it may as well have been 100 for all that transpired in the development of rock ’n’ roll over that period.

Yeah, rock moved very quickly, especially in its glorious adolescence, which was what the 1960s were. Those hormones in overload, it transformed from a teen pop music to something weightier, something that had ambitions and aspirations to art.

When you were gathering all these songs for Nuggets, I’m going to assume you had most on 45s, but were you trying to find original master tapes and such?

It was pretty easy to get the master tapes because that’s all there were.... I was working in a record store [in Greenwich Village], so I had all the stacks of 45s and could go through them on a Saturday night, have a beer, play my favorite records, and see how they might fit together.... Over the year and a half it took Nuggets to come together, like a planet out of cosmic dust, I just followed my instincts.

When you were contacting the bands, were there any that didn’t want to be included?

They were all excited to be included, but some were like, “Oh, if you like that song, we’ve got a whole album of unreleased material, and we wanna go on the road, and why doesn’t Elektra sign us?” You had your one hit a few years ago, you’re back home, and all of a sudden a record company finds you, and you think, “We’re getting the band back together!”

And then you have inter-band squabbles. It’s crazy. A lot of those early [post-Nuggets garage comps], though—like Greg Shaw’s Pebbles, and Boulders—they just put them out there without bothering to license, so they’re semi-bootlegs.

Even Rhino got into the act when they released a number of Nuggets offshoots in the ’80s. What did you think when all those kinds of garage comps started popping up, like on Norton and the great Back From the Grave comps on Crypt?

I was really happy, I loved the music. I was satisfied with my Volume 1, and now collectors and aficionados and crazy audio detectives will fan out across America and find all the records that have yet to be discovered.

I know you weren’t as involved in those three Nuggets CD box sets that Rhino released in the late ’90s...

I think what Rhino did with the CD box sets—much of which was based on my original list—was fantastic. But this [new reissue] I feel is more my particular vision of what I wanted Volume 2 to be. I got some strange records on there.... It’s great for me to see some tracks that I wanted quite desperately back then. To see them on Volume 2,1 feel a sense of completion.

Yeah, I remember talking to you at a Halloween party a few years ago, and you told me about the plan for a Volume 2, but the relative commercial failure of the first one negated it.

Right. Elektra picked up the option for Volume 2 in 1973 but then proved unable to get more than three tracks licensed, and the new lawyer didn’t have the same sense of mission.

So you’d say this Volume 2 in the new box set is exactly what you would have done had you put it together in 1973?

Pretty much. The listening experience while putting this together 50 years later is a lot different than it might’ve been. Tracks that in 1973 might’ve needed rediscovery have since been rediscovered to the max.

Yeah, like so many songs on this box set are considered standards at this point. Collector purists might grumble at some.

Yeah, but I put some of them on Volume 2 anyway, no matter how famous. Like “Do You Believe in Magic” by the Lovin’ Spoonful, because I had ended the liner notes for Volume 1 with the words:

“Send in suggestions, let us know whether the magic’s in the music or the music’s in you,” lyrics from that song. And I kind of liked that. But I also wanted to reconfigure the Lovin’ Spoonful as a garage band. They played at the Night Owl Cafe along with Blues Magoos, the Magicians,

Lothar and the Hand People, and others. So even though they had a little different sound— they weren’t the angry cliche of garage rock now—they nonetheless were definitely on that scene.

In the end, I didn’t want it to be some kind of obscure, collector-only thing. I wanted it to be like the first Nuggets, where I’m telling a story. So now it’s less an album of discovery and more a matter of appreciating the canon.

There’s also a new comp in the set called Also Dug-Its. Tell me the concept for that one.

The evolution of the Nuggets concept included a lot of songs that didn’t fit. When I first started thinking about it, I didn’t know which way it might go, and I had a finite amount of room, plus licensing issues. So there were some leftovers. Like that Anthony & the Imperials track on Also Dug-Its, that has nothing to do with garage rock. I added my own nugget in there, “Crazy Like a Fox.” That gave me some humorous pleasure. [Released in 1966, “Crazy Like a Fox” was the A-side of a onetime recording project Kaye sang for called Link Cromwell and was the first recording he was ever involved with.]

The CD version of this new box set has even more songs than the LP set, right?

Well, yeah, they had four CDs to fill up. I don’t like to repeat artists, and they have a couple songs from some artists. And a couple songs, some of them weren’t my favorite tracks. The [LP version is] my favorite tracks.

The Patti Smith Group formed around 1974. Did the band know you were the guy who did Nuggets?

By then, though, Nuggets had run its course, but it was there as a touchstone. Television would do a 13th Floor Elevators song, or “Psychotic Reaction.” The Ramones dipped into it. The sensibility of Nuggets was part of the aesthetic of CBGB, an inspiration. But it wasn’t like, “Were gonna form a band like Nuggets.” For us, it took so long to add a drummer, so by the time we were a full-fledged band, we were able to sound like ourselves.... And a lot of it had nothing to do with garage rock.

What Nuggets did was bring together a loose definition of a genre that people didn’t realize was a genre yet. Then it eventually acquired a name and a place marker in the record bins.

I believe rock ’n’ roll is in that moment right now. You’re not going to hear anything radically different from what has gone before. But that said, that doesn’t mean “rock is dead.” Music exists in the present. To me, the music of today is great. I may not make it, but I listen to it, I try to find favorite records, and I know somebody out there is putting together the Nuggets of the late 20-teens. The 1960s were a great time for rock ’n’ roll, it was like the Italian Renaissance. It was a wonderful time to be in a band. Today, maybe there’s a kid with a laptop and a sampler and digital technology who’ll create a sound that’s yet to be heard. And that is the sound I’m waiting to hear.