Hands down, one of the greatest compilations ever constructed. Every home should own a copy. It’s not even just the songs, stupendous as they are. There’s more to Nuggets than Lenny Kaye getting together all these psychedelic garage-rock tunes. It’s the sequencing, the way it flows and builds like a real album. There’s a cohesion to it, as though these acid-drenched gems were always meant to sit alongside one another in their own wee world. And what a world they create, like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test being conducted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s most secure wing, Kesey’s magic bus driven straight into the psych ward and somebody’s handed the patients guitars. Timothy Leary might have told them to “turn on, tune in, drop out”; these guys turned up, plugged in and went completely fucking sideways. This is psychedelia stripped of its wonder, a world away from the more whimsical compositions coming out of the UK. The Americans weren’t going on interstellar overdrives 2,000 light years from home. They were retreating to the grotty garage and taking high-octane trips, their LSD seemingly spiked with sulph. There’s something grimy, wired and faintly seedy about it. If these are hippies, they’re the ones that George and Pattie did a runner from at Haight-Ashbury. But listen to the way these bands play. Beneath all the fuzz and lysergic flurries lie tight, rapid-fire melodies being delivered at breakneck speed. Ridiculously catchy songs, they’d be chart toppers in a world where the weirdo wins. And there’s a real parallel there between the cast on Nuggets and America’s greatest purveyors of underappreciated pop. Da Bruddahs. The Ramones were always about pop underneath the speed. Their songs might arrive at pace, but behind the distortion and goofball sloganeering were melodies, hooks and an almost pathological love of pop music. Beatles, Beach Boys, Spector and the sweetest of AM hits had lodged themselves into their brains growing up. But Nuggets contains another strain of their DNA: fast, strange, primitive American pop. This is weirdo pop. Pop that’s been left out in the sun too long, then locked in a garage with a bunch of acid eaters. The melodies are still there, but they’re jagged and jaded, accelerated and occasionally deranged. The Ramones didn’t invent that combination of sweetness, strange and speed; they heard strains of it here, stripped it down and made it their own. No wonder Sire Records, home to the Ramones, went ahead and reissued Nuggets in 1976, the real year punk broke. Here were these magical artyfacts from almost a decade earlier, suddenly sitting comfortably alongside the new sounds of the day. Fancy some weird, primitive pop? Fancy hearing what a bunch of outsider kids were getting up to when psychedelia was supposed to be all paisley and peace signs? Here you go. This shower of weirdos were taking pop to strange places long before anyone had invented the word punk to describe it. And what about that word? Punk. Well, there it is, sitting right there in Kaye’s liner notes from 1972. “Punk rock”, he labelled this assortment of acid-drenched, speed loving, garage-rock oddballs. At the time, punk didn’t mean what it would come to mean. But by 1976, the world had caught up with his description.