Customer Reviews

The Essential Pebbles Collection, Vol. 2

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The "music fan from CA" is right: most of this music is obscure for a reason. It's simply not very good. After the incredible ESSENTIAL PEBBLES VOL. 1, where every single track was a surefire winner culled from the first 10 CD volumes of the PEBBLES series, I was really looking forward to popping this into my CD player. Unfortunately this was a major let-down; selecting songs from the PEBBLES LP's that haven't seen CD release yet, if these are the best of those, I'm not looking forward to those LP's seeing the light of the digital age.

The few good songs include: The Rogues' "How Many Times", Neal Ford and the Fanatics' "Shame on You", The Jelly Bean Bandits' "Generation", Sonny Flaherty and the Mark V's "Hey Conductor", The Live Wires' "Love", The Inmates' "More Than I Have", The Kama Del Sutras' "She Taught Me Love", and The Sweet Acids' "That Creature". That's 8 out of 26 songs that you'll find yourself glad you listened to. The rest are disposable.

If it's possible, the CD starts out at a good pace and each song progressively gets worse as the running time gets longer. Do yourself a favor and wear out your ESSENTIAL PEBBLES VOL. 1 CD rather than even consider the idea of purchasing this one. For hardcore completists only, who I expect will probably only give it a listen and toss it onto their shelf to collect dust.

Disc 2 holds some minor interest to collectors, as all 29 songs have never been reissued anywhere. Tracks actually worth hearing are: The Purple Haze's "Shades of Blue", The Dawn 5's instrumental "Mike's Bag", Denny Noie and the Catalinas' "It Ain't a Big Thing", The Fading Tribesmen's "More Feathers", and The Spires of Oxford's "But You're Gone". However, none of these songs are even all that memorable. Again, like CD 1, each song gets progressively worse as the disc goes on.

All in all, this is a supremely disappointing package that only hardcore completists will want to add to their collection. "Essential" is the one word that will NOT pop into your mind while listening to this misfire collection.

Picking up where volume 1 leaves off, "Pebbles Vol. 2" continues to dig deep into the bowels of garage rock to find the tastiest leftovers from those bands with no names, and what a collection it is!

Very few Beatles clone bands made it like the Knickerbockers, the Beau Brummels, or small bands like the Gants, did, but what the collection showcases is that whether in NYC or LA or a town of 50 people, the music was infectious, and the results are pure magic. Their names may be lost to history, but the music lives on, and its MAGIC to listen to!

Brian Eno once said that very few people listened to the Velvet Underground, but they all went out and formed a band because of them.. who knows, perhaps these tasty nuggets of Anglophiled Americana will cause the next great wave in music, as well..and it couldn't happen soon enough!!

Mange and bon appetit!!

While the Beatles and the Byrds were hitting the main stage; meanwhile Back in garage land the long, shaggy-haired, pre-Mansonite hipsters were trying to impress Mary Jane with the cave stomping send -ups in their best Kieth Relfian manner! Ahhh, sit back, drop a tab and relax!

I'd been out of the music scene since, oh, just a bit after most of the tracks here were recorded. But I still write, arrange and play and from time to time keep up with musical friends from 'back when.'

One such conversation got me thinking about my days in the music scene and that in turn moved me to make a video of my group from those days and post it on YouTube ( [..] and then share the link on a musician's forum. Well the reaction was fantastic. "That ought to be on Pebbles" someone wrote. Pebbles? I'd never heard of it. So I did a Google and found this. And lo and behold what else do I find. My old group, The Abstracts, performing the very recording I used on my video is on this set. Disc 2, track 19. So yeah, I love it. But I have to admit... that makes me a little biased. ;-)~

I picked this up because I already own the original Nuggets album, the original Pebbles Vol. 1 vinyl album, and the Rhino Nuggets box set. I liked most (not all) of the songs on those albums, and the good stuff on those was really good. I thought that this CD would be more of the same good stuff.

Well...some of it is salvageable, but I am sad to report that most of these are obscure for a reason: namely, they stink! Unfortunately, there are very, very few undiscovered gems on these 2 CDs. Most of it is stuff by bands that very much deserved their obscurity. These songs are very inferior to the best garage rock of the '60s -- sometimes painfully inferior.

There are an absolute ton of recycled Yardbirds and Kinks riffs here -- and a little of those go a long, long way. (The cover of "I'm a Man" by the Baker St. Irregulars is a good example of a cover version that makes me want to scream "Give it up, guys!" and sends me scrambling for my original, vastly superior Yardbirds version of the song.)

Only for serious archaeologists.

While the Beatles and the Byrds were hitting the main stage; meanwhile Back in garage land the long, shaggy-haired, pre-Masonite, hipsters were trying to impress Mary Jane with the cave stomping send -ups in their best Kieth Relfian manner! Ahhh, sit back, drop a tab and relax!

This is pure rock 'n' roll perfection. This collection demonstrates where the roots existed of what we consider "classic" today.