A rundown of this year’s top box sets from the pop world, ranked in descending order of importance and value:
“People Get Ready! The Curtis Mayfield Story” (Rhino). Mayfield not only fashioned a long string of pop and R&B hits, he created a soundtrack for the African-American experience of recent decades with his civil-rights anthems and gritty street dramas. This three-CD set is the most comprehensive overview yet of Mayfield’s work, in which his socially conscious songwriting, sublime guitar playing and distinctive voice–as wispy as a dream, as down-home as a kitchen-table conversation–create an enduring artistic vision.
Merle Haggard, “Down Every Road: 1962-1994” (Capitol). Johnny Cash played at San Quentin, but Haggard actually did time there, an experience that would inform his subsequent career as one of country’s most laconic, iconoclastic voices. Not for nothing did Haggard dub his band the Strangers: His was a virile outsider’s music that swam against the easy listening Nashville tide as he defined the “Bakersfield sound,” steeped in the dancing and drinking rhythms of honky-tonk. His ’60s material is impeccable, but “Down Every Road” makes astute choices from the more problematic decades to follow, such as plucking three tracks from Haggard’s best album from his mostly ignored middle period, the 1979 “Serving 190 Proof.”
“Rockin’ & Driftin’: The Drifters Box” (Rhino). The Drifters, led by Clyde McPhatter, predated rock ‘n’ roll with their sandpaper-and-velvet vocal-group brand of R&B in the ’50s. In the next decade with vocalists Ben. E. King and Rudy Lewis and producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and then Bert Berns, the group defined a sophisticated brand of urban music that blended Brill Building pop with a variety of grooves that hinted at Latin syncopations (“Spanish Harlem”) and sultry summer evenings (“Under the Boardwalk”). Although the band hung round well past its prime into the ’70s, the bulk of these three CDs represents an enduring slice of pop.
Pere Ubu, “Datapanik in the Year Zero” (Geffen). Not just the early history of a great band, but a secret history of rock and of a city that almost in spite of itself nurtured it. Even though the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is housed in the band’s hometown of Cleveland, the band has no place within its walls, and its fusion of garage rock and the avant-garde is rarely mentioned in rock histories. This essential set compiles Ubu’s works before their first break-up in 1982 on four CDs–including long unavailable singles such as “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” and “Final Solution”–and adds a disc of music by other denizens of the 1970s Cleveland underground.
“The Mercury Rhythm ‘n’ Blues Story: 1945-1955” (Mercury). This eight-disc set documents the first decade of Chicago’s first record label, preceding even Chess and Vee-Jay. Unlike those two imprints, Mercury favored a smoother brand of blues and R&B, with horns and lush big-band arrangements instead of gritty slide-guitar and harp. But as typified by Dinah Washington, there was still plenty of Saturday night gusto and innuendo, delivered with a sly wink and a seductive vocal touch (see her steamy “Long John Blues” and its sequel of sorts, “Fine Fine Daddy”). Besides the Chicago-based acts, Mercury nurtured the careers of such important figures as Jay McShann, Eddie “Mr. Cleanhead” Vinson, Johnny Otis and even the great New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair, who recorded for Mercury under his given name, Roy Byrd.
“The King R&B Box Set” (King/Polygram). The Cincinnati label is best-known as the home of James Brown, who is represented by “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” But Brown deserves, and already has, a box set devoted exclusively to his music, so this four-CD compilation justifiably concentrates on the other acts nurtured during the reign (1944-’68) of founder Syd Nathan: Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, the Dominoes, Earl Bostic, Bill Doggett, Little Willie John, Hank Ballard, Freddy King, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, the “5” Royales. A string of classics (Harris’ “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” the Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man,” John’s “Fever,” Doggett’s “Honky Tonk (Part 2),” Watson’s “Gangster of Love”) diluted by a handful of self-mythologizing speeches from Nathan at the end of the fourth disc.
“Blues Classics” (MCA) and “Mean Old World: The Blues From 1940 to 1994” (Smithsonian). The sheer girth and diversity of the blues makes both of these multi-disc packages less than definitive overviews, but both provide a solid starting point for novices and veritable “greatest hits” packages for less-fussy connoisseurs. The more scholarly approach is taken by the Smithsonian package, which provides a solid look at the idiom’s postwar development as the blues men moved north and plugged in their guitars, on through the present, in which relatively young artists such as Corey Harris are returning to the genre’s backporch acoustic roots. “Blues Classics” is limited to strictly MCA and affiliated acts, but with few exceptions the 72 tracks–from Furry Lewis’ 1927 version of the mythic “Billy Lyons and Stack O’Lee” to B.B. King’s 1969 hit “The Thrill Is Gone”–more than measure up to the title.
“The Misfits” (Caroline). Blasting out of New Jersey in 1977, the Misfits dabbled in cartoon sci-fi and slasher-movie imagery, fused punk rhythms with metal’s bombastic roar, and topped it off with Glenn Danzig’s operatic blues yowl. These four CDs housed in a coffin-shaped box preserve a crucial piece of rock that you won’t hear on commercial radio stations or read about in most pop-culture histories.
Cheap Trick, “Sex, America, Cheap Trick” (Epic). Sarcastic songs that aspired to Beatlesque pop perfection, whomping guitars and drums that sounded as in-your-face as punk, and an attitude that both embraced rock stardom and made fun of it–that’s the blueprint for Nirvana’s “Teen Spirit,” and it was drafted by Cheap Trick more than a decade before. Unfortunately, the Rockford quartet spent a good part of the ’80s in a creative coma, its self-sufficiency compromised by outside songwriters, such as the hacks who engineered their biggest hit of the decade, “The Flame.” This four-CD set covers the crucial ’70s material, and is fleshed out with a trough of alternative takes and rarities, but the band would have been better served by a more concise package.
“Supernatural Fairy Tales: The Progressive Rock Era” (Rhino). Even without heavy hitters Pink Floyd and King Crimson, omitted because of licensing problems, this is an outstanding overview of the baroque charms and bombastic excesses, the passionate experimentation and unchecked ego that marked the “prog-rock” era, 1967-’76. A genre typecast for innumerable sins–wanky solos, Euro-classical pretension, an insufferable lack of humor–prog-rock also was a haven for wacko genius on a grand scale. Though tracks by the likes of Emerson Lake & Palmer, the Electric Light Orchestra, Genesis and Yes belabor the obvious, the set is distinguished by its loving attention to the less commercially potent “Krautrock” fringe of the movement and offers myriad rarities, such as “Mummy Was an Asteroid, Daddy Was a Small Non-Stick Kitchen Utensil” by Quiet Sun, a one-album side project by Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera.
Neil Diamond, “In My Lifetime” (Columbia). As the first Diamond anthology to bring together his early folk-rock classics (“Solitary Man,” “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”) on the Bang label and his breakthrough hits (“Sweet Caroline,” “Holly Holy”) on MCA with his more grandiose Columbia-era material, “In My Lifetime” is definitive. But definitive of what? An artist of generous spirit and enduring appeal prone to both shots of pop sizzle and Broadway schmaltz, the concise couplet and the overblown concept (“Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” “America”). The contradictions make him fascinating, but only diehards will find every note on these three CDs worth savoring.
“Cowabunga! The Surf Box” (Rhino). Surf music enjoyed a brief commercial burst in the early ’60s with mostly instrumental bands plucking reverb-drenched guitars to evoke the sensation of surfers riding the waves, and has retained a small but vital niche in the rock landscape ever since. True masters such as Dick Dale are well-represented, and modern innovators such as the Mermen who are pushing the genre into psychedelic territory are acknowledged, but at four CDs, “Cowabunga!” is more foam than substance.
Eric Clapton, “Crossroads 2 (Live in the Seventies)” (Polydor). The sequel to the career-spanning “Crossroads,” one of the best-selling box sets of all-time, is a much more narrowly defined beast, devoting four CDs to Clapton’s live performances from 1974 to ’78. Much of the material has not been previously released, and is laden with extended versions of Clapton’s beloved blues and warhorses such as “I Shot the Sheriff” and “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” There is much to respect and even admire, but the revelations are few–notably a version of the title song closer in feel to Robert Johnson’s original than to Clapton’s more well-known rampage with Cream.
Emmylou Harris, “Portraits” (Reprise). Once celebrated as a harmony singer, in part because of her duets with the late Gram Parsons, a smattering of which are included on this three-CD set, Harris has emerged as a courageous, classy act in her own right. Harris’ sweet but thin voice was first heard on records rooted in hard country, but she’s less concerned about genre than she is with emotional resonance, which is why she tackles the songs of everyone from Stephen Foster to Bruce Springsteen. But she rarely transforms the first-rate material she chooses; the idea of Harris is sometimes better than the execution, her integrity, attitude and good taste a more powerful influence than her music.
“Galaxie 500” (Rykodisc). A four-CD box set for a band that released only three albums in its brief lifetime, 1987-’91? The height of overkill, perhaps, but this handsome package restores those three out-of-print discs, adds a set of outtakes and makes the case for this co-ed Boston trio as the Kings and Queen of Drone, a minor but nonetheless compelling blip in the evolution of post-Velvet Underground guitar rock. The sound of Damon Krukowski’s drums, as recorded by producer Kramer, is luminous, as are the liner notes by bassist Naomi Yang, whose words capture the group’s haunted yet strangely uplifting 3 a.m. mood.
