Educating Peter by Tom Cox Page B

maniacs (The Amboy Dukes’ Ted Nugent). On
Nuggets
, though, they sound like two-bit crooks who’d kidnap your mother, joyride her around the neighbourhood, and give her the best time she’d ever had.
    â€˜Kaye secured their place in the Sixties canon and recognised that they weren’t just derivative trash, but some of the greatest singles bands in history. Most of them had only one single in them, but it was invariably more than the sum of its parts, a scuzz-caked, phlegm-baked blast of attitude over aptitude concocted on the cheapest out-of-tune guitar in Pisswolf, Idaho, or Candlelicker, Illinois.
Nuggets
– justifiably extended on this box set to a 118-track marathon – is one of those rare albums that seems on the verge of bursting into flames from beginning to end. Those volts of excitement you can hear are the waves of electricity that the British invasion left behind: the mind-altering radiation that escaped when a million American teenagers heard the thrilling, squalid central riff of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”. Some Nuggeteers made carbon copies of their heroes’ music (play the Knickerbockers’ “Lies” to a Beatlemaniac and watch them squirm), but most simply didn’t have the talent or the patience. Through their boundless gusto and frantic inelegance, they made another form of equally cool, world-changing music by accident. Ever wondered what The Doors would have sounded like ifthey’d been sneering small-time hooligans without girlfriends? Check out The Seeds’ “Pushin’ Too Hard”.
    â€˜Groups like The Standells and The Sonics were inhabiting a pretend macho world where they looked like Mick Jagger, played guitar like Jimmy Page and were the bedtime fantasy of every girl on their street. When you were a disenfranchised, possibly virgin, male bursting with testosterone, it must have been a great place to live. To hear Minneapolians The Litter howling “Hey Miss High And Mighty/Walking Right Awn By Me/That’s Your Last Mistake” then attempting to make a two-dollar guitar sound like a sitar through a broken amplifier on “Action Woman” is to hear the essence of
Nuggets
: pseudo-sexual prowess plus playground sexism plus angst plus pseudo-satanic howling plus souped-up minimalist brilliance.
Nuggets
is the story of the psychedelic movement from the perspective of the people who couldn’t afford drugs, replacing LSD with snot, fuzz and bile. It’s the tale of the freaks and the outcasts who took over the garages and high school dances of Middle America. The sound of teenagers doing the exact thing they were invented for, doing it quickly, and doing it well.’
    Peter : ‘I can’t believe a lot of these bands are teenagers. They sound so old, but maybe that’s just ’cos the music’s old. I like some of it. There’s one song with a kind of duh, duh, duh, duh rhythm that’s from that old film with those guys at the college with the togas. You know: the one with all the food fights and stuff. I don’t know what the lyrics say – it sounds like the bloke’s got false teeth, so it’s hard to tell. All these bands sound like they’ve got something stuck in their mouth. But, yeah, that’s a good song. And then there’s another one, something about going to the centre ofyour mind, which has some nice FX on it – almost metal in a way. But a lot of it reminds me of people dancing in that way they do in
Austin Powers
films, with their arms flapping. It’s probably kind of okay in a film and stuff, but I’m not sure I’d listen to it, like, at home. It’s a bit buzzy-sounding, and I don’t really . . . relate to it. At least I know what psychedelia is now. I thought this was it, but I wasn’t sure. I thought there’d be more lyrics about heroin and stuff.’

HOMEWORK
    WHEN I WAS at secondary school, during