WIKIPEDIA – 2011
Then I hit Wikipedia and looked up something on the legendary Nuggets collection (full name, and also how it is listed in Wikipedia: Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968), when what to my wondering eyes did appear but a total list of blue names sans one. Blue in the Wikipedia world indicates a "wikilink" to another article.
In other words, someone has now written a Wikipedia article on every band on the Nuggets double-album set except one: the Magicians. (Actually there are now Wikipedia articles on the great majority of the bands on the entire four-CD Nuggets Box Set). Oddly enough, the last several times that I have listened to Nuggets, their song "An Invitation to Cry" has really stood out as a highlight. It is a clever idea for a song that has happened to a lot of people: getting an invitation to the wedding of a former girlfriend.
I have already praised this album to the high heavens when writing the UARB article on Hacienda (January 2011) nearly a year ago, so I won't say too much more now. 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.
(December 2011)
