Pebbles Series 1

PEBBLES SERIES – Overview

I have written about bootleg albums before, but I haven’t mentioned that the Pebbles Series is also a group of bootleg albums (as are many of the retrospective albums and compilation albums of garage rock and psychedelic rock records that have been started since). The recordings on the Pebbles Series were taken from one of the world’s greatest record collections, that of music historian and Bomp! Records founder Greg Shaw. He began collecting records at a time when last year’s albums were regarded as being not much above trash, when whole boxes of albums and 45’s could be purchased for a few dollars. The Pebbles albums were his way of getting some of the impossibly rare songs in his collection out to the general public; the series was started in 1978, about 6 years after the Nuggets compilation was released.

One thing that bootleggers don’t like though is when their records are bootlegged by others, as Mark Prindle admitted to doing at the start of his article on Phil and the Frantics. That is what inadvertently happened with the final volume in the Pebbles Series – Pebbles, Volume 11 among the CD’s (the Pebbles, Volume 12 CD had been released several years earlier) – so it was pulled from the market. I have one of the few extant copies, since I ordered it immediately after it became available.

(August 2012)