50th Anniversary of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts Review

James Mastro (Bongos, Ian Hunter) and Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith) first met in the early 1970s when Mastro was only 16 years old. Kaye and manager/producer Terry Ork (Television, Richard Lloyd) saw Mastro’s band play at the now defunct New York venue Copperfield’s and vociferously applauded Mastro and Co. as they played an empty room.

A friendship was born.

“I was excited because I was a huge Patti Smith fan, and Lenny Kaye played with Patti,” says Mastro via Zoom from Guitar Bar, the New Jersey guitar shop he’s run for three decades. Ever the eccentric, he’s wearing an over-sized black winter hat that he calls “survival.” “They were the only two people there, but they sounded like 10,000 people in an arena. Lenny and Terry cheered us on, and we’ve remained friends.”

Now, Mastro and Kaye get together on a regular basis to play music from the seminal compilation that Kaye curated in the ’70s, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era. They bring their show honoring the album’s 50th anniversary to the Beachland Ballroom on Friday, March 27.

An avid record collector as a teenager, Mastro bought the Nuggets compilation as a youth after reading about it in Cream magazine.

“It’s like an archaeological dig,” he says of Nuggets. “You’ve heard some of those songs done years later by other people, and then, you hear the original. It’s what I’ve always done. You go back to the source. That’s always exciting. And for me, I was able to play a lot of these songs. That’s also an incentive and gets you going. You think, ‘Oh, I can do this.’ When the original album came out on Elektra Records, those songs weren’t that old, but a lot of them were hard to find. Most record stores didn’t have a cache of old singles.”

A few years ago, Kaye put together a band to play the songs live and recruited Mastro to help him bring the show to fruition.

“When we did the first New York show together, the other musicians were all people I knew,” says Mastro. “It’s all about the hang. We get to play with friends who have the same appreciation for the music.”

The Cleveland show will feature Chris Butler of the Waitresses, local singer-songwriter Don Dixon and Tin Huey keyboardist Harvey Gold.

“Chris Butler was in Hoboken for a while,” says Mastro. “The Bongos and his band the Waitresses played together many times. It’s the same with Don Dixon. I’ve known him since the early ’80s, and I love him. Harvey Gold will join us on keyboards. There are a few Cleveland songs we’ll do. We let the artists pick a lot of the songs, so we get regional choices that maybe Lenny or I would not have thought of doing. In Boston, you have to do [the Standells’] ‘Dirty Water.’ In Cleveland, we have to do [the Choir’s] ‘It’s Cold Outside.’”

Mastro says that if anything, the show has “morphed” rather than evolved over the years.

“A lot of it is the guest choices,” he says. “Playing in the house band makes it fun for me because the easy thing would be to do the same set wherever you are, but everybody brings their own interpretation to a song, and that makes it more challenging.”

Initially, seeing The Monkees on TV inspired Mastro to pick up a guitar, and he formed a band that played CBGBs in 1975 and 1976. After that, he played with guitarist Richard Lloyd after Lloyd’s band Television broke up.

“I’ve been very lucky to play with people I love,” he says. “ From Richard Lloyd’s band, I played with the Bongos for many years. I had my own band, the Health and Happiness Show in the ‘90s, and I was with Ian Hunter for about 25 years.”

For the Nuggets tribute, he’s the de facto band leader, and revisiting the songs has provided some significant revelations.

“As a kid, I was always playing my own songs in bands that played original songs,” he says. “I never learned other people’s songs. Diving into them and learning them, the education keeps coming. I think the songs on Nuggets have just held up because they’re good songs, and they’re a time capsule of a very interesting period. When I’m listening or playing the songs, I’m suddenly this teenager again. That’s the power of good music. And they’re just two-minute bursts. By the time you figured out what’s going on, it’s over. You’re hitting that dopamine button to get another hit and figure out why it’s so exciting. When I finally figured out it was the electric jug in the background of those 13th Floor Elevators’ songs, I realized that someone must have been doing a lot of fun drugs.”

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