The late 1960s was an era of kaleidoscopic shifts — psychedelia in full bloom, garage rock breaking through, and bands pushing the limits of sound as the world outside roiled with political unrest. It’s a period that’s been mythologised in countless films and books. But some stories remain in the margins, whispered rather than sung. One such tale belongs to Public Nuisance.

Formed in 1964, Public Nuisance began as a pop outfit, riding the same wave as countless garage hopefuls. By the decade’s close, they had sharpened their sound into a heavier, more psychedelic edge, sharing stages with the likes of Buffalo Springfield, The Doors, and the Grateful Dead. In late ’68 and early ’69, the band cut an album’s worth of material with heavyweight producer Terry Melcher.

Then history intervened. Melcher, having sub-let his Los Angeles home to Roman Polanski and Dennis Wilson of The Beach Boys, was caught in the dark aftershocks of the Manson Family murders. Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, was among the victims; Wilson had been socialising with Manson’s followers. The trauma drove Melcher into seclusion, shuttering his label and leaving Public Nuisance without a lifeline.

By 1970, the band was gone, their recordings shelved and unheard except by a handful of survivors from that drug-fuelled, free-falling era. It would take 35 years before their music finally surfaced — resurrected as Gotta Survive, a double-CD anthology that stands as both a time capsule and a testament to a band that might have been.

Public Nuisance never got their moment in the sun, but their belated debut still burns with the strange, vivid light of 1969 — a ghostly reminder that some of rock’s greatest stories are the ones that almost slipped away.