Nuggets: Stop! Get A Ticket by Clefs of Lavender Hill

Before he became Patti Smith’s lead guitarist, Lenny Kaye compiled the 2 album set, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era. Released in 1972, the two-LP set covered American garage rock and psychedelia from the years from 1965-1968, and was a major influence on punk rock. Rhino Records reissued an expanded version of the set in 1998, with 118 tracks in total. I’m profiling and rating each of these 118 tracks, working backwards.

Track 102: Stop! Get A Ticket by Clefs of Lavender Hill
Release Date: 1966
From: Miami, Florida
Aphoristical Rating: 7/10

Miami folk-rock band Clefs of Lavender Hill are a relatively obscure band, even by Nuggets standards. They were headed by the brother and sister duo of Joseph and Loraine Ximenes, who used the stage names Travis and Coventry Fairchild. They were joined by another set of siblings, Fred and Bill Moss, who served as the rhythm section.

‘Stop! Get A Ticket’ was the b-side of their first single ‘First Tell Me Why’. It’s clearly inspired by The Beatles and other British Invasion bands like The Hollies, with the harmony singing and folk-rock guitars. The single was popular enough in Florida to gain nationwide release, and it reached #80 on the US charts. Subsequent singles weren’t successful, and the band’s completed album wasn’t released.

It’s understandable why Clefs of Lavender Hill weren’t widely successful. By 1967, when the full-length album was scheduled for release, their strait-laced Beatles/Hollies sound was probably considered obsolete. Their full-length album was belatedly released in 2010 as Stop! Get A Ticket. It collected up their four singles and b-sides, as well as covers like Cher’s ‘Bang Bang’ and Donovan’s ‘Sunshine Superman’.

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17 Comments

  1. I like First Tell Me Why a lot…this one I like the harmonies. this one is a bit different than the rest of nuggets…from what I’ve heard.
    What is must feel like…making an album 20-30 years before and then suddenly it comes out.

  2. A good tune but it’s definitely early 1960s at a time when the likes of The Doors and Jefferson Airplane were grabbing everyone’s attention. Even the Beatles were going in a different direction by then.

  3. Are you familiar with the “Highs in the Mid Sixties” series on Pebbles Records? It covered local music scenes in America. I’m from Ohio and have Vols. 9 and 21 (Ohio) and the band The Statesmen cover this song. I think it’s a better version, and the liner notes speculate The Statesmen actually wrote it, but it was ripped off by the Clefs of Lavender after they visited Cleveland. We may never know!

    • I have never heard of those! I don’t know if I have room in my heart for another collection of 1960s stuff (going to take me a few years to get through Nuggets and Nuggets 2), but it sounds interesting!

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Aphoristic Album Reviews is almost entirely written by one person. It features album reviews and blog posts across a growing spectrum of popular music.

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Graham Fyfe has been writing this website since his late teens. Now in his forties, he's been obsessively listening to albums for years. He works as a web editor and plays the piano.

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