Reading between the lines, many of the songs on Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 were apparently chosen by what had hit the Top 100 at some point during that time period; that would explain the presence of the strangest of the songs, the closing track “It’s-a-Happening” by the Magic Mushrooms, which remarkably made it to something like #94 for a week.  Even more intriguing to me were the songs that hadn’t hit the Top 100 at all.  One immediate fave was “A Public Execution” by a Texas band called Mouse and the Traps (the song was officially issued under the name Mouse), doing something that I didn’t think would ever happen:  someone else creating music along the lines of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and Highway 61 Revisited.

 

(January 2011)

 

 

Back when Wikipedia was just a little over one-third its current size (as measured by the number of articles in the English-language version at least), I spotted a glaring hole in the rock band articles when I tried to look up something on Mouse and the Traps, a wonderful Texas garage rock band that I have long admired.  (At that time, there were articles on maybe half of the bands on Nuggets).  Their Nuggets entry “A Public Execution” sounds a lot like Bob Dylan, so you can imagine the appeal of that to me; as Lenny Kaye’s liner notes put it:  “There are some who say that Mouse does Dylan”s Highway 61 period better than The Master himself”.  On that band I found plenty on the Internet, including websites by at least one of the founding members of the group.  Someone in the Wikipedia community even awarded me a Barnstar award for that “long awaited” (as they put it) article, and that sure felt good.