It’s one of the great paradoxes that the songs on the Nuggets boxed sets continue to offer pleasure 40-some years after they were recorded. Paradoxical because most of these tunes were banged out by youths in garages trying to score quick regional hits or simply seeking a creative outlet for their frustrations (with girls, mostly; this stuff remains a potent template for teen angst to this day; also, this domain is dominated by heterosexual males).

Both Nuggets boxed sets are essential. There are few duds among the hundreds of songs on the eight CDs contained on Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 and Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond 1964-1969. Although they consist of dozens of variations on a pretty narrow theme, the Nuggets boxes almost always deliver visceral thrills, no matter how familiar the formula sounds.

What prevails throughout most of the material here is the unabashed joy of rocking in an era when studios were becoming more sophisticated and hallucinogens more plentiful. Rock was in its first seriously expansive phase and you can sense the glorious smack of the new, the palpable eureka! of expanded possibilities with practically every song on Nuggets. The songs here are absolutely free of irony and postmodernism’s enervating effects.

After years of sifting through the contents of these boxes, the tracks with which I’ve become most obsessed are Richard and the Young Lions’ “Open Up Your Door” and the Del-Vetts’ “Last Time Around.” (I previously raved about another Nuggets classic on Slog, but I’m not as enamored of it as I am of these two.) I can listen to both tunes several times a day and not tire of them. If you know me, you know how rare of a phenomenon this is.

Something about “Open Up Your Door”� and “Last Time Around”� fills me with feelings of eternal youth and the attendant sense of indestructibility I obviously should know better to harbor. But such are these songs’ thrusting momentum, their utterly fulfilling sing-along choruses, their scuzzily fuzzed-up bass lines, and the singers’ thrilling hormonal expressiveness and desperation that I can’t debate my way out of my passionate embrace of them. The fact that I’ve not heard another note from the rest of either artist’s catalog makes the specialness of these gems even greater.

What Nuggets tracks have a similar affect on you, and why? Wake up, Nipper!