Here’s a rundown of the year’s box sets in rock, pop and R&B, in descending order of significance:
Charley Patton, “Screamin’ and Hollerin’ the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton” (Revenant): The small but continually astonishing Texas label Revenant, founded by the late avant-folk guitarist John Fahey, has outdone itself with this seven-CD retrospective, easily the most lavish package of the season.
But just who the heck is Charley Patton, and is he worth all the fuss? Consider that Bob Dylan dedicates a song to Patton on his latest album, “Love and Theft,” and for good reason: Dylan’s music — or that of any performer steeped in the blues vernacular — wouldn’t be the same without the Mississippi legend’s influence. And note that even though Robert Johnson is more widely known and revered as a catalytic blues figure, Patton was 20 years older and had already died (in 1934) by the time Johnson began recording.
Though Johnson has come to define the hard Delta blues style in the rock era, Patton was the more versatile performer: There are hints of ragtime, hillbilly and folk idioms in his songs, as well as blues. His phrasing is playfully strange, his guitar rhythms approximate human speech, and his lyrics personalize even historic events; Patton gives the impression that the world revolves around him, and it gives his music an earthiness and immediacy that transcend the sometimes poor sound quality of these Depression-era recordings. Still, only hardcore fans or blues scholars need this much Patton; everyone else should seek out the best one-volume introduction, “Founder of the Delta Blues” (Yazoo).
Joy Division, “Heart and Soul” (Warner/Rhino): This four-CD box was initially issued only in England in 1997, and now makes its long overdue U.S. debut. It collects just about everything the British gloom merchants recorded in their brief lifetime, 1977-80, before singer Ian Curtis hanged himself and the survivors carried on as the far more commercially successful New Order.
Though derided as the ultimate bad trip, the members of Joy Division also did not go quietly to their doom. These were loners trapped in the wrong city at the wrong time, the dreary industrial dungeon of Manchester during the repressive regime of Margaret Thatcher, and their music spoke to English youth in a way that more happy-go-lucky bands never could: “Just for one moment I thought I’d found my way/Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away,” Curtis sang on “Twenty Four Hours.”
It worked because Curtis’ baritone horror-show never quite descended into self-pity; the band wouldn’t allow it, with its racing drum beats, voluptuous lead-bass tones and scratching, clawing guitars. This was the adrenaline of a cold-sweat nightmare, and it is still sometimes difficult to eavesdrop on it. But for a trip to the inner limits of rock’s most self-destructive impulses, it’s tough to imagine any band going deeper than this, and it’s impossible to hear the music of Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins or Moby without referencing it.
The Grateful Dead, “The Golden Road (1965-1973)” (Warner/Rhino): The most obsessively chronicled band in rock history gets a 12-CD box set documenting its early years, from its pre-Dead incarnation as the Warlocks through “American Beauty” and “Workingman’s Dead” (the twin peaks of the Dead’s studio work) and the quintessential live set “Europe ’72.” It’s all too much for the casual collector, but Deadheads will revel in the beautiful remastering of the psychedelic pioneer’s finest albums, which brings out previously unheard details in the mixes, and the generous allotment of bonus tracks.
Of particular interest is the two-CD “Birth of the Dead,” which chronicles the Dead’s garage-band roots and their Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test era, when Pigpen McKernan’s organ defined the sound as much as Jerry Garcia’s guitar. The band’s mutation of the electric blues, jug-band folk, ’50s rock ‘n’ roll and classic R&B, and an endless curiosity in the avant-garde leads to several wayward jams and flaccid cover versions. But the overall impression is that of a giddy experiment that continues to spiral outward in ever-more amazing shapes. The band that could produce a piece of music as artfully weird as “Dark Star,” which sounds like something off a Sun Ra album, was also capable of the sublime mournfulness heard on “Morning Dew,” only a step or two removed from protest-era folk music. The glue for this sprawling musicality is the band’s playfulness, its merriment in the face of anything like seriousness. The emcee who introduces them at one 1966 Acid Test says it best: “The oldest juveniles in the state of California …”
The Velvet Underground, “Bootleg Series, Volume 1: The Quine Tapes” (Universal): Though the Velvet Underground was reviled or simply ignored during its brief lifetime, 1965-70, the power of its music and the depth of its influence is now indisputable. Robert Quine, who would go on to play guitar in one of New York’s great punk-era bands, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and later joined Velvets founder Lou Reed on some of his greatest early ’80s albums and tours, was a Velvets groupie in the ’60s. At times he was one of only a handful of fans in the audience, and he always brought his tape recorder. He shares some of his archive on this three-CD set, which covers the band’s post-John Cale incarnation, circa 1969.
The double-album “Live ’69” is the only other official release to cover this period in the quartet’s concert history, and it depicts the Velvets as impossibly cool folk-rock troubadours, albeit with some strange fetishes and disturbing subject matter. In contrast, “The Quine Tapes” present a noise band exploring the outer limits of guitar violence, with the bonus of preserving Reed’s priceless deadpan introductions for his tales of hard drugs, deviant sex and unexplained violence. (“This is about the adventures of a New York City boy who is going uptown to get something he couldn’t get downtown.”)
Reed’s solo on “I Can’t Stand It” will induce fits of ecstasy from skronk-guitar connoisseurs, as will three distinct, mind-melting versions of “Sister Ray.” Quine’s rudimentary tapes barely qualify as low-fi; their graininess is certain to offend listeners accustomed to the production values of, for example, Matchbox Twenty or Everclear. Certainly “The Quine Tapes” are not the best place for Velvets newcomers to start (any of the quartet’s four studio albums make for a better entry point), but to those who already know that the band is as essential as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones to rock’s development — what are you waiting for?
Creedence Clearwater Revival (Fantasy): With his flannel shirt, puddin’ bowl haircut and plainspoken lyrics, John Fogerty was a heartland rocker and an alternative-country icon before there even were such categories. Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp and Jeff Tweedy, for starters, all owe him, and here’s proof: a six-CD box that collects everything CCR ever released, plus some bonus material and live tracks, all of it pristinely remastered. In contrast to their San Francisco contemporaries, the Grateful Dead, Creedence approached their music with a rigorous attention to detail. Even when CCR “jammed,” it did so with a carefully arranged sense of purpose rather than a let’s-see-what-happens sense of exploration. CCR were stubborn throwbacks, channeling the rockabilly, hard-edged R&B, shot-gun blues and shot-glass country of their childhood into tightly constructed three-minute songs. The sound was designed to be timeless and it was: chunky guitars, implacable mid-tempo beats and drawled vocals that made the Berkeley, Calif.-born Fogerty sound like he just wandered off a Bayou barge.
“Can You Dig It? The ’70s Soul Experience” (Rhino): The companion to “Beg, Scream & Shout: The Big Ol’ Box of ’60s Soul,” this six-CD package, dressed up in a vintage eight-track carrying case, touches on some of the era’s landmark recordings — Sly Stone’s “Family Affair,” Earth Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star,” Bill Withers’ “Use Me,” War’s “The World is a Ghetto,” the Isley Brothers’ “That Lady” — but also suffers from serious omissions, notably Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5, Parliament-Funkadelic, Smokey Robinson, Chicago great Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack, among others, likely because of licensing issues. It’s a nice introduction to soul’s last golden decade, but hardly a definitive overview.
Simon & Garfunkel, “The Columbia Studio Recordings 1964-1970” (Columbia): In Cameron Crowe’s movie “Almost Famous,” the older sister of the young would-be rock critic holds up Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bookends” album and proclaims it “poetry.” Though much has been made of Paul Simon’s lyrics over the years, what draws this listener back to the Simon & Garfunkel catalog is the sound; not just the aching purity of Garfunkel’s tenor and the glorious harmonies, but Simon’s early experiments with groove and world rhythms, beautifully recorded by engineer Roy Halee.
That attention to aural pleasure is what distinguishes this reissue. In contrast to Columbia’s previous shoddy repackaging of Simon and Garfunkel’s studio recordings, this box offers impeccably remastered versions of the duo’s five increasingly sophisticated albums, plus illuminating bonus tracks. “Bookends” isn’t necessarily poetry, but as an album in which words, melody and rhythm combine to create a rapturous mood.
Four Tops, “Forever” (Motown): Though the Tops were among Motown’s most prolific vocal groups, producing 18 hits from 1964 to ’71, they aren’t nearly as celebrated as peers such as the Temptations, Supremes and Miracles. Yet no singer of his era embodied masculine vulnerability more persuasively than Levi Stubbs. Though Motown was famous for giving R&B a satin sheen that would make it palatable to white audiences, Stubbs brought an earthy drama to even the most homogenized arrangements.
“Forever” is the first collection to include the group’s hit-making heyday and its post-Motown afterglow, through 1992. Remarkably, Stubbs and his fellow Tops — Renaldo “Obie” Benson, Lawrence Payton and Abdul “Duke” Fakir — remained an entity for 43 years, until Payton died in 1997. The group remains a class act, but the hits dried up after the mid-’70s and the latter half of this box finds the group struggling to keep its identity while producers try on different sounds: disco, funk, pop. Nothing suited the Tops quite like the orchestrations of Holland-Dozier-Holland in the ’60s, especially “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” “Bernadette” and the monumental “Reach Out I’ll Be There,” a cry of hope that still raises goose bumps.
“Say It Loud! A Celebration of Black Music in America” (Rhino): Here’s too little of a great thing: the history of African-American music distilled to six CDs. Not that the effort isn’t Herculean; what’s here is indisputably worthwhile, and the span of music presented — from blues and ragtime to hip-hop — is admirable. But “Say It Loud” is also profoundly unsatisfying on several levels; the booklet tries to compress a community’s music, culture, sociology and politics into a handful of pages. Similarly, the CDs inevitably bypass some crucial figures. Anything that dares to call itself a “Celebration of Black Music in America” and doesn’t include Sonny Rollins, Muddy Waters, Prince, Blind Lemon Jefferson or Curtis Mayfield must be regarded as a failure.
Echo & the Bunnymen, “Crystal Days 1979-1999” (Warner/Rhino): Overblown psychedelic revivalists or post-punk visionaries? The band once hailed by the British press as the biggest thing out of Liverpool since the Beatles certainly had its moments, though not enough of them to warrant a four-CD overview. Founded in 1978 as a trio, augmented by “Echo” the drum machine, the Bunnymen two years later emerged as a quartet and released one of the finest debut albums of the ’80s, “Crocodiles.” Its surging tempos and head-swimming guitar atmospherics tempered the dramatic excesses of singer Ian McCulloch, a sometimes deadly combination of Jim Morrison and Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr. The band’s later work is erratic, with singles both brilliant (“The Killing Moon”) and trite (“Lips Like Sugar”). One salvation is the band’s continuing potency as a live act, and its idiosyncratic taste in covers is well represented, from the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” to the Modern Lovers’ “She Cracked.”
Buffalo Springfield, “Box Set” (Atco/Rhino): Neil Young calls it the most significant band of his career, the only band he ever played in “where everyone was a peer.” Unfortunately, the band didn’t hang around long enough to produce more than two excellent albums, let alone warrant a four-CD box. In Young, singer-guitarist Stephen Stills, singer-guitarist Richie Furay, bassist Bruce Palmer and drummer Dewey Martin, the Springfield bottled five young talents long enough to produce the ground-breaking “Buffalo Springfield” and “Buffalo Springfield Again,” and a third lesser, posthumous album. Out of that meager output we somehow get this overly generous retrospective, which includes a number of demos of widely variable quality, plus every officially released studio track, some duplicated on the maddeningly redundant fourth disc, which includes the first studio albums in their entirety.
The Springfield’s somewhat underappreciated place in rock history deserves wider attention; the catholicity of the band members’ tastes produced a wide body of work, encompassing an early version of country rock (Furay’s “Kind Woman”), orchestral pop (Young’s staggering “Expecting to Fly”), wide-eyed balladry (“I Am a Child”), eerie protest rock (“For What It’s Worth”) and progressive guitar excursions (“Bluebird”). But all a fan, or any curiosity seeker, really needs is those first two studio albums.
“Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond, 1964-1969” (Rhino): The romance of the garage, a really loud guitar amplifier and a Beatles haircut (in lieu of the Beatles’ success) drove bands on both sides of the Atlantic into a creative frenzy during the mid-’60s. The sequel to Rhino’s first, indispensable “Nuggets” box acknowledges the non-American side of Beatlemania fallout, focusing on England but also including bands from such unlikely locales as Spain, the Netherlands and Brazil. The sound is imitation “mod” from the get-go — white, pill-popping dandies and punks emulating the rawness of American R&B, much as better-known English outfits such as the Beatles, Stones, Yardbirds, Who and Kinks did. Though there are few mainstream hits on this four-CD set, the sound is remarkably fresh, because of the palpable enthusiasm of the performers and the crude ambition of the neo-psychedelic production. Included are early or obscure efforts by the Guess Who, Van Morrison, Small Faces, Pretty Things, David Bowie (recording as Davy Jones), the Troggs and a pre-10cc Graham Gouldman, among others. But rediscovering great if short-lived bands such as the Mickey Finn and the Creation is where the real joy of “Nuggets II” lies.
