We The People were a garage rock supergroup from Orlando, Florida, formed from members of The Coachmen, the Nation Rocking Shadows, and The Offbeets. The band boasted two songwriters, Tommy Talton and Wayne Proctor. Talton’s ‘You Burn Me Up and Down’ is the second song from We The People featured on Nuggets. It was originally released as a b-side to their third single ‘He Doesn’t Go About It Right’. Note that the header art is taken from a later We The People single – it was the only hi-resolution artwork that I could find.
It’s commendable that the Nuggets compilers sifted through the group’s b-sides for material, but ‘You Burn Me Up and Down’ is one of the lesser tracks I’ve encountered on Nuggets so far. It sounds inspired by Van Morrison’s Them, with a bluesy feel and authoritative lead vocal.
We The People never released a studio album, but did release enough singles to justify several compilations; notably 1983’s Declaration of Independence. Like The Band and The The, We The People’s Declaration of Independence is not an easy item to find on Google! In an interesting piece of timing, today’s post shares its date with the “We The People” inauguration concert, featuring Fall Out Boy, Carole King, Ben Harper, and James Taylor.
Proctor wrote most of We The People’s material, but it was Tommy Talton who went onto a professional music career. He was part of the country rock band Cowboy who played with the Allman Brothers and Bonnie Bramlett. Cowboy released a reunion album in 2018, titled 10’ll Getcha Twenty.
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era is a compilation album of American psychedelic and garage rock singles released in the mid-to-late 1960s. It was assembled by Lenny Kaye, who at the time was a writer and clerk at the Village Oldies record shop in New York. He would later become the lead guitarist for the Patti Smith Group. Kaye worked on Nuggets under the supervision of Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records. Kaye initially conceived the project as a series of approximately eight individual LP installments, each focusing on US geographical regions, but Elektra convinced him that one 2-disc LP would be a more commercially viable format. The resulting double album was released on LP by Elektra in 1972 with liner notes by Kaye that contained one of the first uses of the term “punk rock”. It was reissued with a new cover design by Sire Records in 1976. In the 1980s Rhino Records issued Nuggets in a series of fifteen installments, and in 1998 as a 4-cd box set.
The Fat Angel Sings 