Various Artists - Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets (CD)

All Music Guide

As the fourth Nuggets box from Rhino following the Children of Nuggets set, which may not count for some listeners as a true entry in the series as it documents the reverberations of Nuggets instead of the original big bang Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 19651970 is easily the most specific and idiosyncratic yet, a set devoted to a time and a place: namely the Bay Area that sowed the seeds of the Summer of Love in 1967. Released in conjunction with that 40th anniversary (although sadly missing the summer of nostalgia in 2007, reaching the stores that fall), Love Is the Song We Sing is surely a time capsule, but it may not be as much interest to those who lived through it as those who pine for the glory days of free love, hippies, and psychedelia. No less of an authority than legendary rock critic Greil Marcus noted in his Interview magazine review that many of these bands are obscure to him and he lived through the time, in the Bay Area, so he should know. If Marcus... has a gripe, chances are the average listener looking for a heavy dose of nostalgia will also find Love Is the Song We Sing rather overwhelming in its reliance on momentary sensations and obscurities, but that's kind of the point of all the Nuggets set: to dig way deeper than the surface and find the best of its chosen subculture. Fans of Nuggets whether in its original doubleLP Lenny Kaye incarnation or in the subsequent box sets know this, and that's who Love Is the Song We Sing is truly aimed at, but the odd thing is that they may not be entirely satisfied with this set either, as it deviates from the Nuggets formula in a couple of crucial ways. First, there are some genuinely huge songs by genuinely huge bands like Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," Country Joe the Fish's "I Feel Like I'm Fixing to Die Rag," Blue Cheer's "Summertime Blues," and Santana's "Evil Ways" a few more marquee names than normal (including the Grateful Dead, Steve Miller Band, Janis Joplin, Sly the Family Stone, and Moby Grape), and bands are occasionally repeated, but the biggest musical difference is that this is a decided shift away from the wild, wooly guitar rock of the previous Nuggets, lacking both the raw garage and hard, swirling psychedelia that has been the hallmark of the series. Instead, Love Is the Song We Sing is firmly within the camp of the hippies, documenting their rise, their peak, and softly disguising their fall by ending the set in 1970, when the Summer of Love was still echoing strongly but just beginning to fade. Read more Less