https://bigtakeover.com/concerts/squeeze-koka-booth-amphitheatre-cary-nc-august-23-2026?fbclid=IwY2xjawUSUxJwZG9mAWV4dG4DYWVtAjEwAGJyaWQRMWZCM2NaOU8ybEJIRUlPQ0lzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEenbEdZgEdv7dd47i8s3bNQIwGLPeJImpF-xALxufu_vfhZFoyqJPiCX055u8_aem_61vNPX6tZN4RtdOKWuwfCQ
-Daniel
September 7, 2026
Lenny Kaye: Of Nuggets And Moving Forward
by Daniel Coston
featured in the forthcoming issue 93 of the Big Takeover Magazine
Opportunities and new paths in life can be viewed as passing windows. Something that shows you the possibility of a greater life and perspective, if you’re willing to explore what you see through that window. The chance to glimpse something better can come in many forms. Your grandparents, a chance introduction to a record of movie, or finding an all night radio station that plays something that you’ve never heard before.
For many of us, the Nuggets compilation was a widescreen window that changed our perception of what the music of the 1960s was, and can still be. Curated by a young Lenny Kaye, the collection introduced many to the notion of what is now termed garage rock, and that music that changes your life is infinite. It doesn’t matter if it was created in the past, it just has to affect you now.
With Nuggets celebrating its 50th anniversary, Kaye is hitting the road for a few select shows this year, including a show at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, NC on November 12th. Over the years, music has taken Kaye many places. From over forty-five years in the Patti Smith Group, to music old and new that he still enjoys discovering, Kaye offers his thoughts about Nuggets, his upcoming show in North Carolina, and the influence that this music has had on himself and others.
Lenny Kaye: The thing about Nuggets is that they’re great songs. I have a sensibility about garage rock, and that’s its own kind of genre. I like songs that are beyond genres that are great records, essentially. That for me is why Nuggets has lived on. It’s not just a strange excavation of a moment in time, but they all are great records.
I think that you could make a Nuggets out of any slice of music. Girl groups, or reggae, any of the variety of hip hop. Just find the 20, 25 most accomplished records, and its a great listening experience. I think now they are called, playlists. (laughs) The fact is that I was really putting together songs that I thought were great, from a period of time. I guess the instincts came later, all seared in attitude, but I also thought that these were songs that need to live on. Amazing enough, a half century later, its still a signifier of something elemental in rock and roll.
I did one [Nuggets] show in Bethlehem, PA. I sang all of the songs there, which I don’t plan to do in North Carolina. Then we did the highly professional and well organized show in Glendale [CA] with the Wild Honey Orchestra. We also did one in San Francisco where Alec Palao led the house band. It was the other end [from the Wild Honey show]. It was funky in a cool rock setting. Then we did two nights in New York with a bunch of characters, including Bob Mould, Juliana Hatfield and a bunch of local stars. Now we’re coming to North Carolina. I like that a lot of people get up and sing songs they love. The North Carolina one is actually really great. A lot of friends will be there. Peter Buck, Kevn Kinney, Steve Wynn, Alejandro Escovedo. There are my brothers in arms, in the music universe, and its going to be a really great night celebrating great music.
Coston: Now that you’ve playing these songs live, what else have you discovered about the Nuggets collection? And what is it that makes this collection still thrive?
Kaye: In the end, there’s a core of why we play music. There’s a sense of yearning in them, there’s a sense of becoming who you can be, and the sense of desire. Which to me, is the root of any wish to make sense. I can only speak for myself, but in the early 60s, when I learned my first guitar chords, I’d hope to be a lonely folk singer in the garage. Then, seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, all of the sudden there was a new band model. You don’t have to be a doo-wop group and sing high tenor. It also happened at a formative moment for me, where I’m a mutant teenager in New Jersey. I’m not good at sports, I’m not a particular collegiate achiever. I’m looking for a way to understand who I might become, and at that moment in time, getting ann electric guitar, joining a bunch of your friends and howling at the moon is really a defining moment, especially for me.
Not that I thought that I’d be playing more than half a century later, but that I could become that, which I hoped I could become to be. That sense of identity, and learning one’s realization is at the core of any music that’s being made. There’s a sense of relief, and a sense of ecstasy about this music, because you’re turning it up, and trying to make yourself live up to the power of music. That’s a little abstract, but to me, there’s a sense of expressing these sounds. The very abstract language is one of the beautiful things about us being human. We see it all over the word, and how we go find way to express these undefined emotions within ourselves, and understand them.
There’s a lot of garage records where someone will come up and say, “This is a great garage record.” And I’ll listen to it, and it’ll have all of the tropes. The fuzztone, the yowling lead singer, and the banging drums. But does it transcend that? Is there more than what you would expect from a garage record? Some of these songs, I’ve been singing for as long as Nuggets has been out, and I never tire of them. I probably understand them far too well, at this point.
Coston: For me, there is still something beautiful about being able to play it loud, and let go.
Kaye: I don’t take the music that seriously. It helped form me. I don’t think that it’s better or worse than any other musical genre that you can choose out of the cornicopulatta (laughs) of musical manifestation. But the fact is that its fun to sing, and it’s fun for the audience to sing along. I’ve been so charmed by the response that these songs get. And if you go back fifty years from when these songs [came from], you’re in the era of Al Jolson, Mamie Smith. The microphone hadn’t been invented yet, so they’re still projecting to the far reaches of the balcony.
The fact that these songs are still honored, it’s a remarkable thing, and it speaks to their longevity, and a testament to a vital spark. I call it, the original sin of rock and roll. All of a sudden, there’s this blast of sound and noise, and it electrifies you. I feel that when I play these songs. They’re fun to negotiate, and they’re not even as easy to negotiate as people think. In all of these songs, if you started trying to understands how they work as a band, you’ll find lots of little strange hooks and sound effects, and ways in which the chords turn around on each other. They’re really fun to play, and at this point, I understand how to play them.
Coston: When you originally put Nuggets, my understanding is that you weren’t sure that [Elektra] was going to release it, so that the root of that original collection was, “I like these songs the way they sound together. Let’s see what happens.”
Kaye: At the time, all of the songs on Nuggets sounded wildly different from each other, and they still do. Back then, garage rock had yet to be defined. For me, as Mayo [Thompson] from the Red Krayola once said, “Definition defines limits.” If I had thought, “Oh, this is garage rock,” they all would have sounded similar. But then you have Sagittarius, which is symphonic rock. You have proto-punk like the Seeds. You have sophisticated musicians blending the blues and psychedelic [music], like the Blues Project. You had weird things like the Third Rail, which was two Brill Building writers creating a novelty record.
They sound very different to me, and its only with the passage of years that I see how it all fits together. Much more so than I did back then, and all credit to Jac Holzman and Elektra Records for letting me play in the fields of the Lord. Jac had this idea of an album that gathered together these orphan tracks of a one hit wonder, or a deep track on another album. He gave me hardly any direction, and let me put it together and trusted me. That was a great aspect of them as a creative record company. In the 60s and 70s, Elektra was the most forward and progressive record company of them all. Folk music, and then the Stooges, the Doors, and Clear Light. They also had Nonesuch Records.
Jac is a total visionary, and he gave me this project. I worked with them for about six months as a talent scout, and nothing I suggested to them took hold, and nothing they wanted me to get interested in took hold. So I had given them this list of random songs, many of which I was familiar with from working the Village Oldies record shop, in the Village. For a while, I thought that this was gone with my tenure at Elektra, but then they called up two months after I was at liberty, and they said, “We have the rights to all these songs.” And I said, “Let’s make this as good as we can.”
I turned down two covers, before that incredible Abe Gurvin cover came across the transom. It was like a weird accident. The record came out in the winter of 1972, and was not a commercial success. Rock critics liked it, but it found its place. especially in Europe. In America, we knew who the 13th Floor Elevators were. We probably even knew who the Seeds were, but in Europe that was quite a shock to the nervous system to have it over there. And then Seymour Stein with Sire reissued it in 1976, and then there was a new generation of bands who were having to reconstruct from the bottom up.
It just seemed to have a lifeline of its own. I can’t tell you how many times, I’m somewhere overseas, and someone walks up and says, “Nuggets changed my life. Can I buy you a beer?” And I say, “Well, it’s gonna change my life in about thirty seconds, when I enjoy a nice cold beer.” (laughs)
Coston: After that release, Elektra decided to pass on putting together another volume of Nuggets. In that gulf, a wave of independent garage rock compilations came out, and pushed that whole movement forward. Were you aware at that, at the time?
Kaye: I actually predicted it in the liner notes to volume one. I knew that there would be dedicated archeologists spreading out and finding all of these more obscure records. Ones that I would not have had to put in the original Nuggets.
[Elektra] did want to put the album out, but in the interim, when they picked up the option, Jac Holzman had sold the company to Warners. On the first album, we had a lawyer who, at a time when licensing wasn’t as easy as it today, now there’s departments for licensing, he was just chasing rogue people who owned the rights to these songs, and tried to figure out who to get them. He was dogged, Michael Kapp. And the new person, at the end of a year, they only had three clearances, so it faded.
But in the end, I felt like it was Johnny Appleseed. Planting seeds, and collectors being who they are fan out and find more. Its like the Gold Rush, “Oh, we’ve found a strike here,” and all of a sudden, hundreds, if not thousands of records are unearthed. Some are generic, and some are shot through with genius. I love that, because to be honest, I felt like I’d done what I needed to do with Nuggets.
Rhino wanted to recreate what I’d wanted to do with Volume 2 [for the 1998 boxset]. I got to put some songs that I’d discovered in the intervening years. I also took some songs off that as the years had passed, they were not needing revelation. Nuggets is kind of in the middle ground. There’s some hits on there. On Volume 2, it opens with the Lovin Spoonful’s “Do You Believe In Magic”, because the Lovin Spoonful ultimately were a garage band.
My last notes in volume one was to have people write in and say if the magic was in the music, or if the music was in you. That was my concept, anyway (laughs), but the truth is that a lot of the songs on Nuggets are more familiar. It’s not like its a record designed for obscurest record collectors. It’s a listening above. For me, Back To The Grave, Pebbles, Boulders, all of them are for the cognoscenti. I’m still like a popularizer, in a certain way.
I always say that I’d known that I’d be talking about Nuggets fifty years in the future, I would have f—ked it up, because of the pressure and the weight of history. “Oh, am I being conceptual enough?” In a weird way, I was just indulging my fancy, and putting a lot of my favorite records out there. I can’t say that they’re the best of everything, but it definitely seems to have struck a chord and paved the way for, if you’re a fan of sunshine pop, there’s sunshine pop on there. If you like gritty, straighter-ahead two-chord mania, there’s that, too. Or sophisticated arrangements.
I feel like I opened the door and suddenly, everybody had a realization and flipped through it, in the same way that when I discovered the series Brown Acid a few years ago, it almost opened up a genre that I had not been aware of, which is proto-metal of the early 70s. I’m just happy it lives on, and at the Cat’s Cradle, it’s gonna be a real fun time.
We’re just going to have a good time, all the time, like they say in Spinal Tap.
Hello all-
I interviewed designer and illustrator Mark London for the new issue of The Big Takeover Magazine. (www.bigtakeover.com). Look for it on the newsstands, and look for a link to the article here soon.
-Daniel
May 12, 2023
The Music Explosion: Sunshine Games
by Daniel Coston
Big Takeover Magazine
Issue 91, out now
In the fall of 1967, the Music Explosion rode the wave of “Little Bit O’ Soul”. The catchy song sold over a million copies, launched the careers of Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffry Katz of Super K Productions as bubblegum svengalis, and put the band’s hometown of Mansfield, Ohio on the map for spawning great Garage Rock.
After many years away, bassist Burton Stahl and the Music Explosion returned to the stage last year, touring with the Cyrkle, the Outsiders, and fellow Mansfield legends, Dean Kastran and Dale Powers of the Ohio Express. “Little Bit O’ Soul” may have only lasted for two minutes and eighteen seconds, but all of these years later, Burton and guitarist Rick Nesta are still thankful to ride that wave.
Coston: The Mansfield, Ohio area produced three hit bands during the 1960s. The Music Explosion, Ohio Express, and Crazy Elephant. It’s amazing, the amount of talent that was around that area.
RICK NESTA: In Ohio, there’s a small ski area called Snow Trails, and they used to have shows there every night with the Mark Three Trio, and the sax player of the group was Grover Washington, Jr.. They were a little more smooth jazz, but they were trying to extend into some Rock & Roll clubs. Our lead guitar player, Don “Tudor” Adkins, Tudor and myself would sit in with the Mark Three Trio at these smoky basement clubs.
There was a lot of inspiration that came from them, because they were all accomplished musicians, and they were at least ten years older than us. We got schooling from some of the guys that had already polished their trade as musicians.
Coston: Your first single was a cover of “Little Black Egg”.
BUTON STAHL: When we went to New York to record “Little Bit O’Soul”, we recorded five songs. One of the others was “Little Black Egg”, so were recorded both songs at the same time. Jeff and Jerry liked that one, so they released “Little Black Egg” on Attack Records, which was their own record label that they had come up with. Jamie [Lyons], our singer, did such a great rendition of that. Jeff and Jerry then worked out a deal with Laurie Records for “Little Bit O’Soul”.
Coston: When you recorded “Little Bit O’ Soul”, did you think it was a hit?
Stahl: The one thing that stuck in my mind, was I wanted things more like a Rolling Stones song. The song was a little more melodic and pop, but when Jamie and I came back to the hotel room, we worked on doing the intro to the song, with more staccato, and a lot faster. Then we went back in and played it for Jeff and Jerry, and everybody was just on top of it. We had a whole lot of great people that worked with us. Ritchie Cordell, he was playing congas, and keyboards. They put it all together, and we heard it put together in the studio, it was like, “Wow! That’s pretty good!”
Coston: Were you aware that “Little Bit O’ Soul” was going up the charts?
Stahl: Our managers had a marketing plan for the West Coast. Rick’s mom and dad started calling long distance to radio stations, saying “We’d like to hear Little Bit O’Soul” again.” You get enough people doing that, the music producers and going, “Hmmm.” That’s what happened. We were getting picked up, and all different parts of California, and Arizona.
Coston: You then toured with several groups, including the Easybeats.
Stahl: We all became really good friends with the Easybeats. Their bass player, Dick Diamonde, taught me more on bass than I had ever known before. I stayed in touch with him for a long time.
Nesta: We toured with the Easybeats for five weeks on the Gene Pitney tour. Gene Pitney had six or seven acts that he toured with. He was a great guy. The Easybeats were definitely an inspiration. When we started the tour, they had two tour buses to take care of all of us that were on the tour. The congregation point was at 55th and 7th Avenue, in New York City. As we walked on the tour bus, WABC announced, “The number one song this week, for the second week in a row, is “Little Bit O’ Soul!”” Half the bus booed!
Stahl: The Buckinghams, the Easybeats, the Happenings. Everybody started booing us as soon as we walked in, because we didn’t know them, and they didn’t know us. It was like, “What are we in for?”
Nesta: Do you know the name Ronnie James Dio? That was Gene Pitney’s bandleader, at the time. Gene had seven or eight guys that backed him up for his performance, and Ronnie was the leader of the Pitney band. He was a great musician, but he was also a schoolteacher.
When we were in New York, we would hang out at Steve Paul’s Scene. The first time there, we walked down the steps, and Steve Paul said, “You gotta be somebody for them to get in here!” We said, “We’re the Music Explosion!” and he let us in.
Coston: Tell me about playing American Bandstand in February of 1968.
Stahl: It was phenomenal. We had to pantomime the record, but the people just loved it. We had our stuff that we had bought on the Sunset Strip. People are looking at me like, “Who is this?” And then they heard the song, and they’re like, “Yeah! We love this song.”
The song was already a hit when we did that taping in February of ’68, but people still loved the song. We had a new song coming out, so we played that. It was so much fun to stand on a stage that you’d seen every Saturday afternoon since you were a little kid, and all of the sudden, you’re part of the scene.
Nesta: That might have been my first time in California. We did the show with Blue Cheer. It was a thrill, because growing up, and watching Rock & Roll with Dick Clark, that was a bridge that you crossed only when you’re able to climb the mountain.
Coston: Tell me about the singles that followed “Little Bit O’Soul”.
Nesta: “Sunshine Games” had great energy in the studio. Tight recording, lots of rhythmic things.
They had all of this great equipment, but then you take it down to these little speakers that you have in the dash of your car, and then mix it, so that it sounds good when you’re driving around, listening to the radio. That was just around the beginning of eight-track. I never thought that “Sunshine Games” came out with the right dynamics on a car radio. But I think that Burton will agree, we were all excited about “Sunshine Games”. We thought it might have been a little better than “Little Bit O’Soul.”
It kind of stalled out around 45 on the Hot 100, and Kasenetz and Katz made a strategic move to pull the record while it was still going up, and put out the song “We Gotta Go Home”, which was a good song. And who knows what a good song is until the public hears it, and they have the final decision if it will sell a million copies, or not.
Stahl: Our B-side of “Little Bit O’ Soul” was “I See The Light”, and when people heard that, they loved it. It was just a great song. We thought that that one might hit.
Nest: On the West Coast, there were some stations that played “I See The Light”, instead of the A-side. In some markets, it was a double hit.
Stahl: People didn’t know what side to play! The B-side sounded like something it would sell. If it had gotten a push, it could have been a really good follow-up.
Coston: How did the band end?
Stahl: For me, I was ready to get out of it. I wound up not as happy with everybody. Rick was still in the band, but we wound up with some other players. Our guitarist, Don got drafted, and had to go to Vietnam. All this stuff was going on, and it was hard to find out what our niche was. I thought, “Maybe it’s time for me to get a job.”
Nesta: I was invested in the band with Tudor. Losing him was like losing the inspiration.
We were doing a show in Akron, Ohio, and Jeff and Jerry came. They hardly ever came to any shows. They said, “This is going to be the last show of the Music Explosion. The name is going to be Crazy Elephant.” And that was my stepping off point.
Coston: How was it to take part in last year’s Re-Livin' The Dream tour?
Stahl: That was a lot of fun. The Cyrkle headlined the show, and backed us up. The Cyrkle is a great band. Our friend Jamie Lynch came along with us, as well. I couldn’t believe that there were two thousand people out there in the audience with gray hair, but they still knew how to clap their hands, and have a good time.
Coston: What is it like to be able to play with your friends for fifty-five years?
Nesta: Fifty-five years go by in a hurry. Every day, you turn on the news, and some other musician has left us. So it’s great that the friendships survived, and the music survived. I’ve guess you’ve got to count your blessings.
Tom Doody: I Wanna Meet You
by Daniel Coston
