1This contribution aims to make a case for rethinking object biography in popular music studies. By object biography, I am referring to a particular methodological and analytic approach to material culture that begins from the premise that objects—that is, commodities, goods, artefacts, and so on—have social lives that follow their own unique trajectories across time and space. A typical household good, for example, will assume a life cycle that begins in production and ends in its consumption and disposal. But objects often divert from this route—they can become collectibles or prized artefacts that circulate within niche markets, while others may be endowed with sentimental value as priceless family heirlooms that are handed down over generations. An object biographical approach sets out to map these trajectories in order to understand how and why cultural objects circulate in the way they do.
2Object biography is hardly a new idea, but rather has long been a methodological and analytic tool across various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. I propose, however, that its potential has not yet been fully realized to date in popular music studies. This article sets out to make the case for rethinking object biography in the context of recent trends in scholarship, particularly with regard to the so-called “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences. The first part of this paper will provide an overview of object biography as a methodological tool, wherein I situate the object biographical approach in the literature. The second part of the paper will present a brief object biography of an influential reissue album in rock music, namely, the Nuggets reissue anthology compilation, in order to explore some of the methodological nuances and challenges of doing object biography in popular music scholarship.
3What I hope to show is that object biography offers one way to overcome some of the biases and tendencies in popular music studies, which has long tended to privilege certain kinds of media goods over others, such as original albums, songs, or music videos, where the content of media tends to be the focus of analysis and interpretation. Reissue compilation albums, by contrast, obscure the relationship between medium and content, or at least the relationship is more oblique. A reissue album like Nuggets foregrounds its mediality. By following the trajectory of the Nuggets album from the 1970s through its various re-releases and expansions through to the 21st century, I aim to show how Nuggets is less a finite, singular thing than it is a key node in a larger assemblage of media, genre, and fandom.
- 1 This point is foundational to the study of material cultures in anthropology, perhaps most famously (...)
4Perhaps the best-known examples of object biography have been proffered in Arjun Appadurai’s influential edited volume, The Social Life of Things (1986a), most particularly the opening articles by Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff. While there are important differences between Kopytoff and Appadurai’s analytics, both apply the metaphor of biography to things in order to focus our attention on the unique temporal arcs through which objects circulate. Things have lives, in so far as objects can accrue biographies—that is, they take on distinct identities depending on their social contexts. Of course, biographies—as per the prefix of the term, “bio-”—are normally ascribed to living beings, and usually to human beings, no less. Referring to the biographies of things thus puts an emphasis on the culturally blurred distinctions between objects and persons, a point that has long been established in the ethnographic record, wherein objects can be venerated as living beings (for example, totemic objects) just as living beings can be objectified (as in the case of slaves, for instance).1 It also aligns with larger questions concerning value and consumption, particularly in regard to processes of commodification. The “social life of things” approach, according to Appadurai (1986b), is firstly a tool for analyzing the pathways and flows of objects that are exchangeable, and thus have at least the potential to assume the status of commodity. As objects circulate, they move across what Appadurai calls “regimes of value,” where the contexts of consumption can shift in ways that often radically transform the object’s very social being.
- 2 There are important distinctions between Kopytoff’s cultural biographies of things and Appadurai’s (...)
5To be sure, object biography represents a bigger conceptual and methodological terrain than the Appadurai-Kopytoff model, and there has been plenty of scholarship that borrow their methods to address questions and issues beyond their more particular focus on the “commodity candidacy” of things.2 Nicholas Thomas (1991: 27-30), for example, suggests that the key insight of the social lives of things for material culture studies is that it shifts the focus away from the fixed characteristics of certain classes of objects—say, the difference between gifts and commodities—to what he calls the inherent “mutability of things in recontextualizations” (28). The point, as Thomas notes, is to focus on the cultural construction of objects and their identities. Consequently, there have been many examples of object biographical scholarship in the years since the publication of Appadurai’s collection—in anthropology, history, archaeology, art history, among other fields (see, for example, MacKenzie, 1991; Hoskins, 1998; Daston, 2000; Lambourn, 2018; Tilley, 1996; see also Hoskins, 2006 for an overview of the literature). There is, however, a notable dearth of object biography in music scholarship. Hoskins’ (2006) survey of the literature, for instance, includes no scholarly studies of music. Some exceptions notwithstanding (Feld, 1996, Davies, 2009; Kibby, 2011; Bates, 2012; Kane, 2019; and Maalsen, 2019), it is striking how little music scholarship has engaged with object biographical methods.
6One such exception is Steven Feld’s “Pygmy POP: A Genealogy of Schizophonic Mimesis” (1996), which charts the life history of a series of audio recordings of the hindewhu of the BaBenzélé people of Central Africa, from their original ethnographic contexts to their circulation as sampled media in various genres of popular music. Feld carefully outlines the power dynamics in play as sound is appropriated and reconfigured across cultural contexts—or, as Appadurai might put it, as it moves in and out of distinct “regimes of value.” Notably, the object in question is more abstract, more diffuse than the term “object biography” might suggest: the hindewhu is not a singular thing in the way that a musical instrument or a painting is, but rather, it is a cultural practice that has been reified and appropriated through the medium of audio recording. As the hindewhu travels across what Feld refers to as a “chain of imitation and inspiration,” it undergoes a series of transformations that render the object unrecognizable from its original meaning and use. These transformations include recordings and songs that make motivic reference to the original object, as in the case of Jimmie Rowles’s “the Peacocks,” as well as more exploitative appropriations, as with Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” or Madonna’s sampling of Hancock. In this sense, Feld’s analysis calls into question what exactly constitutes the object. Is the hindewhu a musical form, characterized by formulations of pitch and rhythm, or is it a collection of recordings, or is it a cultural practice defined by certain ritual contexts as enacted by the BaBenzélé people of Central Africa—or is it all of these? Rather, what Feld’s analysis shows is that the hindewhu is constantly made and remade across its many points of mediation, through its endless discursive, aesthetic, technological, and commercial mediators. To follow the social life of the hindewhu as audio media is to trace those mediations over time and space, and to take seriously the power dynamics between the myriad stakeholders in this particular nexus of industry, media, and commerce.
7Sophia Maalsen’s The Social Life of Sound (2019) presents a more recent example of object biography in popular music studies. In her third chapter, for example, she offers a careful ethnographic account of the social life of a highly collectible 1975 album called Yaraandoo, by Australian artist Rob Thomsett. Drawing on Alfred Gell, Maalsen builds a web of interrelationships between the original sound recording, the rare copies that circulated among collectors as sought-after collectibles, and the reissue album that was released in 2011. As Maalsen shows, the object is hardly static, but rather undergoes a series of transformations over time. As the album takes on the status of “rarity” in the decades after its release, it adumbrates the production of its later reissue. The reissue itself, though, mediates between the original album and its intended audience, while also—perhaps paradoxically—infringing on the uniqueness of Yaraandoo by making the album broadly accessible to a wider audience. Maalsen thus builds on Feld, Appadurai and Kopytoff, albeit with a theoretical orientation that emphasizes object agency, in this case, the ways in which the original album’s various incarnations generate new forms and new social relationships in the years since its initial release.
8From Appadurai via Maalsen and Feld, then, we can highlight some key features of the object biographical method for popular music scholarship. The first point is that object biography opens up ontological questions about the forms that music will take. This is especially true in the case of the hindewhu, where the object in question transforms from a musical practice of the BaBenzélé people defined by its original meaning and use, to other manifestations, as ethnographic sound recordings, as sampled media, or as motivic material to be referenced (the case of “The Peacocks”), or even mimicked and recreated in the studio (for example, the Headhunters). Through what Feld calls the “schizophonia” of sound recording, the hindewhu as a cultural practice has been captured by and reduced to audio media, for which is it made available to artists and musicians to be appropriated and “reworked,” so to speak. In the case of Yaraandoo, while the object is more easily defined—an album—its forms are in flux. That is to say, as with any music album, the Yaraandoo is not a static thing, but rather it is a complex cultural object that will take on new identities through its life-cycle—from commodity to highly prized collectible, for example. And as with most recorded media, the album will exist in multiple formats, editions, and copies. A record album like Yaraandoo is quite literally a distributed object in all senses of the term.
- 3 See also Prior (2011) for an overview of DeNora, Hennion, and Born’s writings on mediation. Also, t (...)
9The corollary from this is that object biography foregrounds mediation. This point is uncontroversial, in so far as any social life of things analysis concerns how, say, new technologies, markets, systems of value, and so on, can transform an object’s meaning and identity through their mediations. To the extent that object biography concerns the myriad entanglements through which objects circulate, then it inevitably casts focus on how those entanglements mediate any given object’s social life. Still, mediation theory has taken on a new urgency in recent years, particularly with regards to the material turn, but more generally through the influence of actor-network theory and Deleuzian philosophy in the humanities and social sciences. This is especially the case in the writings of Georgina Born (2005, 2010, 2011; Born & Barry, 2019–), Tia DeNora (2000, 2003; Acord & DeNora, 2008) and Antoine Hennion (2007, 2011, 2016), all of whom have written extensively on music. While these scholars have distinct theoretical and methodological approaches, they all begin from the premise that sociocultural accounts of art too often neglect the specific materialities and affordances of aesthetic culture. Mediation presents a framework through which to rethink aesthetics as generative of the social: music constitutes social life just as it is being constituted by it. Mediation theory thus foregrounds the processual, emergent, and fluid nature of the aesthetic as it is made manifest through its dynamic interrelationship with its mediators.3
10For object biography, mediation theory offers new insights into how we might rethink our analytic and methodological terms. The first is the obvious orientation towards matters of emergence and transformation as objects circulate. Through this lens, the object ceases to be a finite thing, but rather is continually remade through its mediations. Here, there is an obvious overlap with Appadurai’s concern with the social transformations of objects in motion, a basic premise of the social life of things model. Thomas makes this very point, as noted above. The key difference, however, between Appadurai’s methods and mediation theory as I have outlined it is the question of object agency, namely, the efficacy of objects and their affordances as generative of social relationships. Rather, as per Christopher Pinney’s (2005) critique of the social life of things approach, the problem is twofold: firstly, Appadurai’s model tends to reinforce the agency of subjects over objects; that is, it concerns the meanings and values that attach to objects through human agency. Following from this, as Pinney would suggest, is that object biography subsumes the object to its contexts of meaning and value. In other words, the social lives of things approach has the tendency to reaffirm contexts of consumption and use as the primary locus of meaning and value. Appadurai’s value regime, for example, in its crudest sense can easily devolve into a synonym for “culture” or “context” that pits one regime against another. Instead, what mediation theory offers is a framework for rethinking objects and their entanglements as complex assemblages of things, of people, technologies, discourses, and so on, which in turn affords autonomy not only to the assemblage itself, but also to its many constituent parts—to its mediators.
11For popular music studies, the implication is to rethink our approach to music’s material culture. To be sure, there is plenty of scholarship that has taken up the call. Sound studies and ecomusicological approaches, for example, have engaged in a long dialogue with the material turn. And yet one might think that popular music studies, rooted as it is in a widespread recognition of the importance of music’s material culture—its media, its collectibles, its commercial goods—might be more conducive to the object biographical approach. That is to say, it is surprising that there is not more object biography in popular music scholarship. One thinks, for example, of the vast amount of writing devoted to recordings, songs, and albums, and yet there are much fewer examples that might be described as object biographical in the sense outlined above. Instead, scholarship on popular music’s material culture overwhelmingly tends towards interpretation and contextualization. To survey, for example, the large output written for the 33 1/3rd series by Bloomsbury, one notes a wide range of interpretive and writerly approaches to popular music albums, but surprisingly no examples of object biography in any real sense of the term. Instead, objects are interpreted and/or historicized—“put into context”—but are rarely discussed as material things in themselves or as cultural objects in circulation. Put another way, the overwhelming focus is on the content of audio media and its contexts, rather than on albums as material objects with life histories. As Born (2010: 198) puts it, a focus on mediation allows us to “redirect the field of criticism itself, away from the banalized terms of object in ‘context’, or telos of innovation, towards a critical field that is focally concerned with the social and material, the temporal and ontological, as these mediate and imbue the aesthetic.” To put Born’s words in conversation with the objectives and methods of object biography, then, is to recast our analytic and methodological lenses towards a more sophisticated, nuanced understanding of the things of music, especially its audio media.
12I turn now to the Nuggets album, which I will use as my case study in order to offer up some suggestions on how object biography might work as an analytic tool. Here, I focus on a singular object, an album. More specifically, Nuggets is a reissue compilation album, in which previously released audio recordings are compiled and anthologized in album form. In the case of Nuggets, the album is comprised of twenty-seven rock and roll singles that were originally released between 1964 and 1968 (despite the album’s title), most of which were obscure recordings or lesser known “hits” at the time of the album’s release in 1972.
13Compilation albums are a distinct form of media. Despite their ubiquity in the circulation of popular music, compilations have largely been overlooked in scholarship, with some important if recent exceptions (Maalsen, 2016, 2019; Roy, 2015; Carlson, 2018; Bottomley, 2015). I would suggest that this is because popular music studies has tended to privilege certain kinds of media goods, such as studio albums and music videos, where value is enmeshed in particular forms of creative work—for example, songwriting, studio production, or videography. A reissue compilation, by contrast, is firstly a work of curation, in which aesthetic value is located in the selecting and framing of content—in the recycling of media goods—rather than in the production of new audio-visual material. From an analytical perspective, an album like Nuggets foregrounds its very mediality. It points to its diffuse nature as an object made of “recycled” materials, a collage of sound recordings. The diffuse, distributed nature of reissue compilation albums thus shifts our analytic focus away from the tendency to think of material goods as coherent, finite things, but rather to re-orient our analysis towards the contingent and multi-layered ways in which objects cohere as they do. This means avoiding the usual tendency to privilege “creation” or the album’s initial production and release under the Elektra label, but to consider Nuggets as a distributed object, from its release to its various re-releases and expansions from the 1970s to the present, and back through to its original recordings, namely, the 1960s songs that the album anthologizes.
14In this brief account of the Nuggets biography, I will focus on two key moments in the life of the album. First, I will discuss the album’s early years and its connection to the rise of punk; second, I will discuss the Nuggets concept in relation to garage rock compilations of the 1980s, and the development of Nuggets into a franchise from the 1980s to the present.
- 4 Today, Nuggets is regarded as a cultural touchstone of the punk movement and the garage rock reviva (...)
15Where does the album begin? The short answer is that the album was released in the fall of 1972 on the Elektra label as a double album of 27 songs. It was produced by Lenny Kaye, a then up-and-coming figure in the New York rock underground, under the guidance of Elektra founder, Jack Holzman. In terms of the album’s early production history, there are three key moments: following the album’s 1972 release, it was rereleased under Sire Records in 1975, and, finally, it was turned into a 15-volume series under Rhino Records from 1984 to 1989. This is, to be sure, a large time span that I am designating as the album’s early history, but I want to call attention to the interim—the gap between the album’s first releases in the 1970s, and its development into a multi-volume series in the mid-1980s. It is in this period that the album came to be a recognized and celebrated album among record collectors and rock and roll fans.4 In fact, initial sales for the 1972 release were middling at best, and plans for a second volume were quickly scrapped. Kaye’s account of the album’s 1972 release makes a point of the divergence between the album’s critical success and its otherwise poor sales:
“The feedback [at the time of its 1972 release] was always favourable….It was critically very well received, [which] wouldn’t surprise me because it was the product of a kind of critical groupthink that was in the air at the time. It was commercially received indifferently, and marketed fairly perfunctorily, all of which leads to your usual cult item. I would doubt—I mean, I don’t know how many copies it sold—I would doubt that there’s more than 10,000 in circulation. Saleswise, I can’t imagine that it topped 5,000.” (Interview in Cafarelli 2016)
16As “cult” items go, the album picked up interest through word-of-mouth in the years following its release. The precise details of sales and circulation are impossible to recover— “word-of-mouth,” of course, means that the album’s circulation does not reveal itself through the normal routes of sales and earnings, but rather comes out of the interstices of fan networks of knowledge and exchange. It nonetheless underscores the symbiotic relationship between the album and the communities of record collectors and fans it was intended for. This point is indeed alluded to in the quote above; Kaye obliquely refers to the networks of fans, collectors, fanzines, print media and second-hand record shops that formed the “critical groupthink” that was part of the album’s initial release.
17That Nuggets was primarily aimed at the collector community is hardly a revelation. As per the title, the album is more than a collection of songs, but rather, it is a collection of “original artyfacts” (sic) to be recovered and reclaimed. The liner notes, for example, refer to the album as an “archaeological dig into the bizarre splendor of the mid-sixties,” describing it as “a map of names and places which even at this chronologically short distance seem to belong to another world.” The metaphors of “digging” and “maps” refer to the mining metaphor in the album’s title—a nod to the idea of record collecting as digging for “buried” or “lost” treasure. The album purports to guide the listener to this trove of rare, obscure sound artefacts, which has been carefully curated for fans who have the knowledge and know-how to appreciate this piece of popular music history.
18The album’s liner notes play an important role in this respect, as they offer historical and critical insight into the album’s contents. They are in two parts: the main text printed on the back of the album, and the inner-sleeve notes, which feature short blurbs about each individual track, including biographical and historical details about the recordings. The back-cover liner notes, by contrast, seek to situate the music in rock history, referring to the songs as part of a “a transition period in rock and roll [that] … dashed by so fast that nobody knew much of what to make of it while it was around, only noticeable in retrospect… [italics added]”. Still further along, it refers to the music thusly:
“Most of these groups (and by and large, this was an era dominated by groups) were young, decidedly unprofessional, seemingly more at home practicing for a teen dance than going out on national tour. The name that has been unofficially coined for them—“punk rock” —seems particularly fitting in this case, for if nothing else they personified the berserk pleasure that comes from being onstage outrageous, the relentless middle finger drive and determination only offered by rock’n roll at its finest. And as these were kids who more often than not could’ve lived up the street, or at least in the same town, there was no question what even localized success could mean in terms of universal attraction.” (Lenny Kaye, Nuggets liner notes, Fall 1972)
19This passage is usually cited in etymologies of the term “punk rock” as among the first uses of the term in print. Punk rock had yet to mean what it does today, as the New York and London underground scenes of the 1970s were just taking off at the time of the album’s release. Instead, the idea of punk rock had been percolating in fanzines and rock music journalism to refer specifically to certain strains of 1960s rock and roll, especially its more marginal or obscure styles—that is, bands that had been mostly overlooked by “official” music history. In fact, there is a telling disjuncture between the different genre labels used in the album—including “punk rock” and the “first psychedelic era,” and even a yet more novel term, “garage punk”, which is used in the inner-sleeve notes to describe the song, “Oh Yeah” by Shadows of Knight.
20This confusion over genre labels shows the novelty of the archive at hand, but it also points to a connoisseurist strain in rock culture that was flourishing at the time. Publications like Rolling Stone, Creem, and the Village Voice, along with fanzines like Who Put the Bomp! (or simply Bomp!, as it was called after 1976) and Rock Marketplace, catered to an increasingly sophisticated readership of fans and collectors. Bomp!, in particular, was at the forefront of efforts to revive the lost and forgotten sounds of 1960s rock and roll—punk rock, as they called it then, or what we now call garage rock. In fact, Greg Shaw, the founder and editor of Bomp!, was likely the first to use the term “punk rock” in print. In the April 1971 issue of Rolling Stone, he refers to a track by the Guess Who as “good, not too imaginative, punk rock and roll” (Shaw, 1971a). He also used the term in the Fall 1971 edition of Bomp!, calling for discographical information on “what I have chosen to call “punkrock” bands — white teenage hard rock of ‘64-66 (Standells, Kingsmen, Shadows of Knight, etc.).” (Shaw, 1971b: 7)
- 5 See Markesich (2012: 294-295) on how to define garage rock. Also, Bovey (2019) and Abbey (2006) on (...)
21What is notable, between Shaw’s use of the term and Kaye’s in the Nuggets liner notes, is the self-conscious effort to define a new musical style—what they both refer to as punk rock. As noted above, the term would come to mean something else by the middle of the 1970s; what they were describing as punk rock is what we now call “garage rock,” a variant of mid-1960s rock and roll usually characterized as dance-oriented, blues-based music with an amplified sound that you might describe as “heavy” or “distorted.”5 It is notable that garage rock did not actually exist in the 1960 per se, but rather came to be identified and defined as a distinct genre in the 1970s by record collectors and critics, who retrospectively applied the term “garage rock” to refer to this music, especially its more obscure and marginal variants. For Shaw and readers of Bomp!, the lesser-known, knock-off bands of the period represented a more raw, unpolished (read: “authentic”) rock and roll than the mainstream bands of the 1960s and 1970s. Both Bomp! and Nuggets sought to elevate a style of sixties rock and roll that had been forgotten in the aftermath of the counterculture and the rise of art rock styles.
22A private letter from Kaye to Shaw, dated to 1971 but only published in 2007 in a Bomp! tribute compendium (Shaw and Farren: 148-149), helps piece together the connection between the Nuggets project and the niche circuit of fans and collectors that the album was aimed at. In the letter, Kaye outlines his plans for the album. As he explains to Shaw, Nuggets would be made up of “old singles, groups that only had one good song, strange stuff of differing natures… [to be geared towards] collectors and super-rock enthusiasts, which entails detailed liner notes, lots of pictures, esoteric information, etc. etc.” (sic). He goes on to say, “I’d like to make it a continuing series, a couple records every six months or so. If you can translate the Yazoo Blues series into rock, you have some idea of what I’m aiming at.” It is telling that Kaye had in mind the reissue compilation series by Yazoo Records, which was a series that specialized in reissuing obscure blues recordings of the 1920s and 1930s. The Yazoo series appealed to collectors and aficionados of folk and blues music, and, like Nuggets, sought to recover and document a body of music that was “lost” and was perceived by fans to be aesthetically and historically important, and thus in need of reviving. He also envisions that the series would be organized thematically; for example, as he describes it:
“The albums will cover a rough series of years from ‘65/’66 to about ‘69, and instead of being chronological, will be put out according to classifications. For example, one of the things I’m thinking of is doing one called “Southern California” (and list the years) and include “Acapulco Gold” by the Rainy Daze, “Yellow Balloon,” “Hey Joe” by the Leaves, and stuff like that.”
23The letter ends with a plea for Shaw’s help to compile lists of “everyone’s forgotten favorite singles and/or obscure album cuts.”
- 6 I have written about this in a short article for the fanzine, Ugly Things (#46), entitled “The Unto (...)
24There is, notably, a conspicuous disconnect between the contents of the letter and the final product that came together in 1972: Kaye makes no mention of punk, or of any genre, in fact, in his letter to Shaw, except for a passing reference to the music of Southern California. One perhaps has to be careful not read too much into Kaye’s letter, but it does raise questions as to how the album’s song list came together as it did, especially considering how novel the concept of punk was at the time. If the letter is an indication, punk was not on Kaye’s mind at the time of writing, in January 1971. In fact, the documentary evidence suggests that Kaye came to the idea of framing the album around punk later, probably after Shaw began writing about punk in Bomp! and other magazines.6
25The songs on the Nuggets album are also more varied than terms like “punk” and “garage punk” might imply, as it includes more pop-oriented fare like the Castaways’ “Liar, Liar” alongside more Dylanesque tracks like Mouse’s “Public Execution,” the frat rock stylings of “Farmer John” by the Premiers, and even a true novelty song, “Moulty,” by the Barbarians. Along the same lines, the album’s contents are hardly what Kaye refers to as the music of “young, decidedly unprofessional [bands]” or “kids who more often than not could’ve lived up the street.” This points to another seeming disconnect: the contents of the album hardly fit Kaye’s idea of punk as amateur, grassroots rock and roll, but instead the album mostly features songs that charted in Billboard’s Top 100, including six that broke the top twenty—and even one that charted in the Top 10, “Psychotic Reaction” by Count Five. Some bands like the Seeds, the Remains, the Chocolate Watchband, and the Magicians had major label support, although most of the bands featured were on smaller independent labels. In short, the contents are hardly the stuff of kids jamming in their garages, as the above descriptor might suggest.
26All of this is to say that the way the parts of the album came together—the songs, the recording rights, the liner notes, the framing of the album as “punk rock”—seems to have been partly a result of happenstance, but also it was a real-time response to the “groupthink” around punk that was simmering at the time. The confusion over genre in the liner notes and the album’s title—from punk to psychedelic to garage—along with the eclectic song choices leads one to suppose that the process was very much in flux. One notes the network of interrelationships that came together in the album’s release, from Nuggets to fanzines like Bomp! through fans, collectors, and their media, but all of which was very much contingent on the curatorial choices of Kaye and Elektra—decisions about marketing, the process of acquiring rights to the songs, and so on. The album nonetheless served to articulate in sound what was still inchoate as a genre: it was to aggregate in album form a particular aesthetic realm of possibility that was just emerging in rock discourse at the time. Drawing on mediation theory, one might understand the album’s initial release as part of an assemblage of media, fans, commerce, genre, discourse, and on and on, that came together in highly contingent ways. The album is not simply born of its context, or a reflection of “the times,” but rather is a fluid object, that is both constituted by its mediations as it is generative of new aesthetic and discursive possibilities. It both points to the emergence of the underground punk movement of the mid-1970s in terms of its embrace of the punk concept, just as it was part of the early stages in the process through which garage rock came to be recognized as a distinct genre, separate from what we now call punk but also aligned to it historically and stylistically. Likewise, the album’s strange early trajectory, as it shuttled through the 1970s between obscurity and “cult” status, is best understood in terms of the particular matrix of contingencies that made the album both middling in terms of sales and a word-of-mouth success.
- 7 The series was initially produced on the label BFD, headquartered in the fictitious city of Kookabu (...)
27It is in the late 1970s and early 1980s, though, that the full potential of the Nuggets concept was finally realized, first by fans and collectors who put out their own compilation albums based on the Nuggets model, and then finally by Rhino Records, who developed Nuggets into a multi-volume compilation series, as Kaye had envisioned in his 1971 letter to Shaw. In fact, it was Greg Shaw and Bomp!, in an overt reference to the Nuggets concept, who created the Pebbles series of compilations from 1978, with the borrowed subtitle of “Original Artyfacts from the First Punk Era.”7 If Nuggets idealized the punk concept, referring to this music as the domain of obscure, teen bands (“kids who more often than not could’ve lived up the street”) then it was Shaw who realized this aesthetic ideal in sound and style in his albums, which included far more obscure, more amateur bands and their recordings. For example, in contrast with Nuggets, none of the songs featured in the first Pebbles album charted in the Top 100—in fact, with the exception of one band, Shadows of the Knight, none of the bands featured had any chart success at all, and none besides Shadows of Knight had any major label support. The result is a cruder, more obscure archive of garage rock to draw upon. For Pebbles, the series more overtly makes a connection to the historic and aesthetic lineage of punk, but it does so retrospectively—that is, it revisits 1960s rock and roll as filtered through the aftermath of the 1970s’s punk movement, at a time when punk was proliferating into countless variations and subgenres, including the live music garage rock revival scenes of the 1980s, which were explicitly modeled on the 1960s bands but often with inflections of punk in sound and style. In this sense, we can think of the Nuggets album as transmuting into a new form, that is, into the Pebbles series, which built itself upon the Nuggets model, albeit while asserting its own distance from the Kaye album in its embrace of a more grassroots punk ideal.
- 8 For any given song in this category, the rights owners can easily multiply into dozens of stakehold (...)
28The unique trajectory of the Nuggets album and the many mediations between Bomp!, the Pebbles series, the rock and roll archive of the 1960s, between fans and collectors and the punk ideal, can partly be understood in material terms. As noted above, the Nuggets album itself presents a vision of garage rock as amateur, grassroots music—rock and roll by and for teens jamming in the suburban garages of 1960s America. But this ideal could never be realized through the intellectual property regimes of popular music, which make it impractical, if not impossible, to obtain licensing agreements when dealing with the most rare, most obscure records of 1960s rock and roll—that is, the countless vanity records made by teenage bands for which ownership was rarely made formal, as the songs were often not registered for copyright.8 Add to this the problem of tracking down bands that may have only existed for a brief period and had very limited recognition—perhaps recording one single, of which barely a few dozen copies survive, on a vanity label or small independent label that no longer exists. In sum, Nuggets was limited by a system of licensing and property rights that made reissuing the more amateur, more obscure bands impractical. Reissue labels like Bomp Records, on the other hand, were mostly bootleg, and thus, by skirting copyright laws, had unlimited access to the more impossible-to-find records of the 1960s. It is as if the first Nuggets album set a standard for itself that could only be realized by bootleg outfits like Bomp, whereas Elektra—and Sire and Rhino afterwards—were committed to a different class of 1960s rock and roll, the one-hit wonders and also-ran bands like the Seeds and the Standells, for whom access was mostly available and negotiable. To put it another way, Elektra and the likes were working with a proper set of back-catalogs that were fully integrated into the copyright regimes of recorded music, whereas Bomp and similar bootleg labels were working with the entire archive of 1960s rock and roll, most of which was only available in the personal collections of fans or buried in attics still waiting to be unearthed.
29This distinction also matters in terms of sound production and style. Just as the more obscure, rare garage records are cumbersome to track down in terms of ownership and licensing rights, it follows that the same bootleg labels rarely acquire the master recordings. While Nuggets albums use master copies when recording and transferring content, Bomp albums mostly rely on vinyl copies to record their albums. One hears, for example, the hiss and pop of the vinyl in many of Pebbles’ compilations, whereas Nuggets albums have generally higher sound quality standards. But this, I would suggest, is also partly an aesthetic choice. That is, the vinyl hiss complements the amateur, raw styles that Bomp sought to celebrate. The original recordings by many independent, amateur 1960s bands were often cheaply and quickly made, using inferior recording equipment, for which they have come to represent what Kaye describes in his liner notes as the “decidedly unprofessional” sound of punk rock, “the relentless middle finger drive and determination only offered by rock and roll at its finest.” The Pebbles sound, even in the very production and manufacturing of the series, exudes the raw, primitive ideal of punk rock as it was imagined and idealized in the archive of 1960s rock and roll.
30Following Pebbles, countless other garage rock reissue compilation series took off in the 1980s, such that by the end of the decade there were at least around four hundred garage rock compilation albums in circulation. Series like Boulders, Digging for Gold, and Rubble, to name a few, drew inspiration from Nuggets’ sedimentary theme, but still plenty others took off in the wake of Pebbles, many of which were organized according to style or geographic region, and most of which were bootleg. These compilations provided a key means through which collectors and fans recovered, documented, and circulated the garage rock archive. It was to make accessible to fans a body of music that was mostly rare and limited to serious collectors. Nuggets too was finally revived under the Rhino label in 1984, now turned into a multi-volume series of compilations. Between 1984 and 1989, Rhino released fifteen Nuggets albums of 1960s rock. All the albums are organized thematically; for example, “Volume 1: the Hits” features mostly songs and bands from the original Nuggets album, volumes 3 to 6 are subtitled “Pop” and tend towards lighter, more pop-oriented songs, whereas volumes 9 and 10 are subtitled “Acid Rock” and “Folk Rock,” respectively. Overall, the series is more stylistically varied than Bomp’s more punk approach, and, as noted above, the musical material generally includes more bands that had chart success than the typical Pebbles album, let alone the many bootleg compilations in circulation that focused on the rarest of 1960s rock and roll.
31For Nuggets, the Rhino series marks yet a new incarnation—the rise of Nuggets as a brand and franchise. For Rhino and for garage rock fans, Nuggets itself had become a concept by the 1980s, a way of recovering 1960s rock and roll through the production of compilation albums. This is evinced, for example, in the many allusions to Nuggets in the reissue compilations that have been released since Pebbles, including the aforementioned Boulders and Rubble series, as well as the many compilations with album titles like Nuggets from the Golden State or Diggin’ In The Goldmine: Dutch Beat Nuggets or Michigan Nuggets—none of which are part of the official Nuggets franchise. With its series, Rhino was doing more than reviving the album itself, but rather was assuming rights to the Nuggets idea. That is, the series signaled a return to the Nuggets concept as Kaye might have intended it—as a continuing series organized thematically, carefully curated, intended for serious rock fans and collectors. Even the cover design of the Rhino series makes the point. The original 1972 album features a colorful psychedelic album design, which was curiously replaced in the 1975 Sire edition by a more austere, more abstract design cover. The Rhino series marks a return to the original 1972 album, not only in concept but even in terms of the visual design, particularly the new logo, which resembles the original Elektra cover with its bubbly, bright psychedelic look.
32Under Rhino, Nuggets has since developed into a franchise of reissue compilations. From the late 1990s, Rhino has released a series of Nuggets box-sets. The first box-set released in 1998 was intended as an expansion of the original 1972 album, albeit remastered and improved in terms of sound quality—for example, it featured the original mono mixes. The set includes 118 songs in four compact discs, the first of which reproduces the complete 1972 album in the original song sequence, while the second disc is organized around Kaye’s planned volume 2, which, as noted above, never came to fruition under Elektra or Sire. Discs 3 and 4 simply expanded on the Nuggets sound and style, and includes such garage rock anthems as the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and the Sonic’s “The Witch” among other classics of the genre. The box-set also includes the original 1972 album cover design along with three new covers for the CD cases, all designed by the original artist, Abe Gurvin. And it includes a thick, detailed set of liner notes; besides the original Kaye liner notes, it also features a series of short pieces by Lenny Kaye, Greg Shaw, and Jack Holzman, among others. Holzman’s reflection on the history and legacy of the album aptly distils the point as I have argued above, that Nuggets had become something bigger than the album itself. It had become a concept—or a “notion” as Holzman puts it, a way of appreciating rock as a unique cultural form. And in the years since the first set was released, Rhino has put out four other Nuggets box sets, each organized thematically or geographically; for example, the second box set is entitled Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964–1969 (2001), while the third, Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era, 1976–1995 (2005), revolves around post-punk garage rock revival bands. The fourth and fifth box-sets are on San Francisco and Los Angeles music of the 1960s, respectively. And still other Nuggets albums have been released in the past decade under Rhino, including the 40th anniversary reissue of the original 1972 album, only available on vinyl. The release is an exact reissue of the original album, although remastered and with added liner notes by Kaye and Holzman, where they both reflect on the Nuggets legacy and on the album’s beginnings in 1972.
33The story of Nuggets, as I have outlined it above, is a long and winding one, and I have only just touched on a few key points. The trajectory I have followed here begins with the network of fans and collectors that constituted what Kaye refers to the as the “critical groupthink” of the 1970s. As I have sought to show, the album did not merely emerge out of the “context” of rock connoisseurism and print media of the early 1970s, but rather, it was in dialogue with it. This point is crucial for understanding how the album both articulated and adumbrated the punk concept—an idea that was just reverberating at the time, and which came together in the form of the 1972 album in highly contingent if generative ways. The complicated story of punk and its relationship to the Nuggets album can be overstated when thinking of the history of the genre, but it nonetheless is true that the garage rock revival is indelibly linked to the punk ideal, both historically and stylistically. The garage rock revival that coalesced around Bomp! and similar zines like Rock Marketplace, were one node in a much larger assemblage of discourse, media, commerce, fans, and musicians that were part of the process of genre formation through which punk emerged in the 1970s. To this end, one can think of the Nuggets album in terms of its protentions and retentions, as Born (2015) suggests. The 1972 album protends the punk of the later 1970s, just as its protends the many bootleg compilations such as Pebbles and Boulders, that explicitly sought to rewrite the history of garage rock retrospectively through punk’s legacy in the late 1970s and 1980s. This is perhaps most obviously the case with Pebbles, which builds on the Nuggets concept and form—through its many retentions—but it does so through punk and the post-punk scenes of the 1980s. It is to map a constellation of interrelationships that have formed between Nuggets and the many reissue labels and compilation series that have followed Pebbles. To think of the garage rock compilation as a specific body of music, then, one sees the explosion of garage rock “comps” in the 1980s as building up a vast physical archive of sound, which traces its own history through Nuggets via Pebbles and on to the styles and sounds of 1960s rock and roll.
34By framing my analysis in these terms, I draw on object biographical methods to focus on the mutability of popular music’s material forms as they circulate. Nuggets is an album, but it has morphed into a brand and a franchise under Rhino Records, just as it has become a concept in the years since its 1972 release, as realized in the many knock-off compilation albums released by labels like Bomp Records and so many others. Crucially, object biography dislodges the tendency in scholarship to focus on the contents and contexts of the songs, albums, videos and the likes, that make up the material cultures of popular music. It also opens up ontological questions concerning the forms that music’s things might take. In the case of Nuggets, its forms have fluctuated over time, from its initial release to its various expansions and reissues. As I have suggested, tracking these changes show that the album’s identity is hardly fixed, but has indeed transmuted across many platforms and formats through the years, including its protensions into the many garage rock compilations of the 1980s and beyond. Of course, my analysis leaves out a lot from this story; for example, I say little about its consumption history, just as I say little about its musical contents, which extend backwards into the sounds and styles of the 1960s. There is much to say about how specific songs compiled in the anthologies have been entangled in the Nuggets concept, and thus have been afforded second lives through the revival of 1960s garage rock. Likewise, I have said very little about formats—for example, how the album’s myriad life-cycles have moved according to the unique temporalities of specific media formats, from vinyl to cassette tape to digital media. When dealing with a complex cultural object like an album, there is rarely a single trajectory to follow, but rather many competing and diverging pathways through which the object moves. Object biography is about focusing on specific instances and formulations of the life cycle of any given object, rather than a complete survey of where, when, and how objects circulate.
35What object biography offers popular music studies is a set of analytic and methodological tools to rethink popular music’s material cultures. In this sense, I offer suggestions as to how one might move beyond Appadurai’s more narrow concern with value and processes of commodification. Following the life history of an album like Nuggets offers insights into questions of genre, aesthetics, and media. Value is foundational to any object biography, in that any given object has meaning and value to its listeners and makers, but, as I have suggested above, object biography opens up other questions and issues, for example, matters of genre and aesthetics, as well as questions surrounding the particular media ecologies through which music circulates. The relationship between punk and Nuggets, and the many ways the album and its various instantiations have appropriated and remade the punk ideal serves to underscore the complex mediations through which genres form. How the idea of punk was both entangled and disentangled from the concept of garage rock likewise is partly refracted through the long arc of the Nuggets album as it has travelled from 1972 through to the present.
36Lastly, as I have also sought to show, object biography upends the tendency in popular music scholarship to overstate the agency of human actors—the intentions, the meanings, the functions—of experts, of fans, of communities, and so on. As I have tried to show, object biography lends itself to a more networked, assemblage model of the social, for which I have drawn on mediation theory to de-centre the “expertise” of individuals and their actions, but rather, to focus on the circulatory logics through which popular music’s things—its media, its goods, and so on—mutate, coalesce, and diverge over time.