Music Arcades: Various: Nuggets - Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968

Damn, missed a day again. I've had a couple of long days and rough nights in the last three days, looking after the Boy while his mum recovers.

My mum and dad got me this for Christmas 2002, plucking it from my Amazon wishlist. I'd put it there under the influence of books like Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung and Please Kill Me.

When I first read Lester Bangs' essay on the Count Five, I reached the bit where he listed he their releases as including not just Carburetor Dung but also Snowflakes Falling on the International Dateline and Cartesian Jetstream. The last of these, he wrote, had a track with guest musicians Marion Brown, Sun Ra, and Roland Kirk, titled Free All Political Prisoners! Seize the Time! Keep the Faith! Sock it to 'Em! Shut the Motherfucker Down! Then Burn it Up! Then Give the Ashes to the Indians! All Power to the People! Right On! All Power to the Woodstock Generation! And Watch for Falling Rocks!, and I thought, Hang on, this is all some elaborate hoax, a completely fabricated history of an invented band. I was baffled to find that the Count Five did actually exist — their Psychotic Reaction is included on the first disc of Nuggets — and marvelled at the reach of their collaborators, and of their titles. However, Wikipedia alleges that much of Bangs' account, including those albums and track titles, were fictions after all.

Anyway, 118 tracks on four CDs; that's a lot to digest. Sometime in 2004 I put the whole lot on my iPod as a gesture of intent, to encourage myself to work through all the songs. Thanks to iTunes, I can see that until yesterday I hadn't listened to any of them since 28 April 2005. I've whisked through two thirds of the tracks in the last few of days.

A handful of the 118 tracks have now been lifted out of whatever obscurity they were languishing in: Louie Louie, Mr Pharmacist, 7 and 7 Is, Farmer John, I Want Candy and I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night. What's remarkable is how many of remaining tracks, still in relative obscurity, are just as good (or, in the case of Farmer John, significantly better).