Pebbles is an extensive series of compilation albums in both LP and CD formats that have been issued on several record labels, though mostly by AIP.

In his review of the Pebbles series for Allmusic, Richie Unterberger comments: "Though 1972's Nuggets compilation reawakened listeners to the sounds of mid-'60s garage rock, it only focused on the tip of the iceberg.

More than any other factor, these compilations [in the Pebbles series] were responsible for the resurgence of interest in garage rock, which remains high among collectors to this day.

[2] By contrast, several of the bands presented on the original Nuggets compilation had one or more national hit songs, such as the Seeds, Blues Magoos, Electric Prunes, the Standells, Count Five and others.

As the Pebbles albums were compiled from record collections, dubbed from discs (not from the master tapes like the Nuggets series), often without the knowledge of the musicians or producers involved, BFD and AIP had a much larger range of music to choose from.

In this way Pebbles explicitly sought to connect the garage style of the 1960s to the then-current (1979) punk movement typified by artists like The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, and others.

The original release of the first Pebbles album was on the Mastercharge label in 1978 and was circulated primarily among a small group of collectors in Australia, where interest in this obscure music seems to have first germinated.

One radio playlist posted on the Internet mentioned a "Pebbles, Volume 2" on Mastercharge Records, but this was probably an incorrect reference to the BFD release.

The first 10 LPs in the Pebbles series, including a reissue of the original volume were credited in the name of BFD Records of Kookaburra, Australia.

"[5] The first licensing notation is clearly fictitious (possibly inspired by the location of the National Lampoon's High School Yearbook parody) – Dacron is an artificial fiber, while the city in Ohio is Akron – and the same might easily be true of the second.

Copyright notices referring to BFD continued to be exhibited on almost all of the albums in the Pebbles series well into the 2000s, including both the ESD CD's and the AIP CDs.

In addition to the 10 volumes on the BFD label that were reissued several times over the years, another 18 LPs and 12 CDs have been issued in the Pebbles series under their auspices.

When AIP renewed the Pebbles series in 1983, the company was apparently more interested in documenting local music scenes than in scattershot groupings of American garage rock records, so the Highs in the Mid-Sixties series was begun concurrently, with a total of 23 volumes devoted to recordings from specific American cities, states and regions, as compared to the 18 volumes of AIP Pebbles LPs.

What's more, 10 of the 18 LPs that AIP issued in the Pebbles series were compilations of recordings from continental Europe in the sub-series The Continent Lashes Back.