Boxed-set season is upon us, and this year is loaded with pricey sets focusing on some of the last century’s most enduring icons, including Johnny Cash, Ray Charles and the Grateful Dead.
Which ones are worth your dough? Here’s a guide to the best and worst of these multidisc packages (listed alphabetically by artist):
The Band: “A Musical History” (Capitol, $89.98)
This overstuffed 5-CD, 1-DVD box stands as the most exhaustive treatment yet of a quintet that transformed rock in the ’60s with its rustic voices and country-soul impulses. It arrives in a hardcover book with extensive liner notes, an authorized history of the band that avoids the warts-and-all insights of previous accounts. It also supplants the skimpier 1994 anthology, “Across the Great Divide,” by offering 111 audio and video tracks. Among them are 37 rarities, including a young Richard Manuel in Ray Charles mode, a pensive Robbie Robertson sketching out the obscure Band gem “Twilight,” and the Band embroidering Bob Dylan’s bile on outtakes from their epochal 1966 and 1974 tours.
Johnny Cash: “The Legend” (Columbia Legacy, $249.99)
Between the covers of a coffee-table book are rare photographs, liner notes, a beautiful lithograph of Cash, and five CDs spanning the artist’s career, as well as a DVD drawn from a 1980 TV special. Cash’s Sun Records material from the ’50s and his remarkable concept albums are skimmed over, yet this is the most comprehensive multivolume introduction to the singer’s career. A less spiffy but more affordable ($49.98) four-disc version is also available.
Ray Charles: “Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings (1952-1959)” (Atlantic, $149.98)
The first six discs of this sumptuous package, housed in a replica of a portable phonograph player, document not just the dawn of soul, but its flowering into a great American art form. Charles would go on to sell more records in subsequent decades, but these recordings remain his most spectacular musical achievement. They combine swinging jazz sophistication and gospel vocals with carnal intensity. Brother Ray’s impish humor surfaces on the mostly superfluous seventh disc, loaded with outtakes and studio dialogue. A concert DVD caps the era, with Charles and his great band, anchored by saxophonists David “Fathead” Newman and Hank Crawford, in flight. “Pure Genius” eclipses the more concise 1991 box set covering the same era, “The Birth of Soul,” but critic Robert Palmer’s musically incisive liner notes are greatly missed.
Donovan: “Try for the Sun: The Journey of Donovan” (Epic, $49.98)
Three CDs and a documentary DVD trace Donovan’s restless journey from folk and blues through ragga-rock, Celtic mysticism and jazz. He claims that his impact on the ’60s is now underestimated, and it’s difficult to argue with “Season of the Witch,” “Atlantis” and a dozen other classics. Though preciousness abounds in Donovan’s songbook, this set proves there was more to his music than can be contained in a one-disc hits collection.
Grateful Dead: “Fillmore West 1969, The Complete Recordings” (Grateful Dead Productions, $79.95)
The Dead’s first defining statement, “Live/Dead,” was culled from a four-night stand at San Francisco’s Fillmore West. This marks the first comprehensive release of that residency, spread over four CDs. It captures these acid freaks just as they were peaking, so to speak, as a seven-headed improvisational juggernaut. By this time, the band had established its working method: circling a song, then digging in with a fury that later incarnations of the Dead occasionally equaled, but never surpassed. The songs themselves are springboards for mad flights or, in the case of the luminous “Dark Star,” ghostly descents into the abyss. All that’s missing are the classic songs that would soon follow on the studio masterpieces “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty.” What’s here still stands as revolutionary, a crossroads of rock, jazz, blues, country and the avant-garde.
Guided By Voices: “Suitcase 2” (Recordhead, $45.98)
Robert Pollard put his longtime Dayton, Ohio, band to rest last year in an epic grand finale at Metro, but the music from his bottomless archive keeps pouring out. “Suitcase 2,” like its predecessor, consists of 100 homemade songs, fragments, experiments and digressions. Part of the fun is figuring out how the fanciful song titles became attached to the even more fanciful band names that Pollard invented: Ax, U B Hitler, Christopher Lightship. Non-fans will be bewildered by Pollard’s secret history of rock, but to the initiated, the usual treasure hunt will yield upward of two dozen jewels.
Billy Joel, “My Lives” (Columbia Legacy, $59.98)
If the prospect of searching through the Piano Man’s discards sounds thrilling, this relatively hit-free, rarities-packed 4-CD, 1-DVD package is for you. Joel-aholics doubtlessly will be fascinated by glimpses into the singer’s early career, when he dabbled in vocal-group harmonizing, R&B and even heavy metal.
Lee Perry: “I Am the Upsetter: The Story of the Lee `Scratch’ Perry Golden Years” (Trojan/Sanctuary, $39.98)
A 4-disc companion to the 1997 “Arkology” box, “I Am the Upsetter” is essential listening for any reggae buff. A huge influence on artists ranging from the Clash to Sinead O’Connor, this Jamaican maverick remains one of the most innovative producers of the last half-century. The songs included are less well-known than those on the hits-packed “Arkology,” but the sonics still sound as raw and cutting edge as they did in the ’70s. An instrumental disc focuses exclusively on Perry’s groundbreaking dub mixes, in which he brilliantly manipulated and distorted sound with mad-scientist genius.
Ramones: “Weird Tales of the Ramones” (Rhino/WEA, $64.98)
What separates this estimable career retrospective from just about all of the others is the liner notes. Rather than enlisting a critic or pop historian to put its music in context, punk’s most important band turns the job over to a bevy of comic-book artists. They tell the quartet’s story with the irreverence and humor it deserves, ably complementing songs that still blast through the clutter of leather-jacketed Ramones imitators like a bugle at dawn.
Talking Heads: “Talking Heads Brick” (Rhino/WEA, $149.98)
The new wavers’ 8-album discography of punked-up groove and abstract pop gets an overdue sonic upgrade, with bonus tracks and videos. The quartet’s first six CDs, spanning “Talking Heads: 77” through “Little Creatures” (1985) are just about perfect, so if you don’t already own them, here’s a great place to catch up. Those who’ve already worn out multiple copies of those essential discs will be enticed by the vastly improved sound (including a 5.1 surround-sound DVD for each CD) and the rarities; the outtakes from the “Remain in Light” sessions, in particular, sound as if they could inspire at least 1,001 dance-club remixes.
Various artists: “Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era 1976-1996” (Rhino/WEA, $64.98)
“Nuggets,” the masterful 1972 compilation put together by future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye to honor the one-hit wonders of the ’60s, has spawned a cottage industry of follow-ups. But Kaye’s original hodgepodge coalesced into a terrific overview of garage rock’s original unsung heroes, whereas subsequent collections lack similar focus. “Children of Nuggets” is no exception; it contains the kernels of what could’ve been a fine two-disc overview of the 1980s acid-rock revival (Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade, Green on Red), but it spreads itself too thin by including artists as disparate as the La’s, the Cramps and Primal Scream.
Various artists: “One Kiss Can Lead to Another: Girl Group Sounds, Lost & Found” (Rhino, $69.98)
A vintage hatbox houses 120 tracks devoted to the ladies who ruled the pop charts in the ’60s, from giants such as the Ronettes and the Shirelles to best-forgotten mediocrities such as the What Four. Fleshed out with way too many lesser tracks from the Supremes, Dusty Springfield and even Dolly Parton (improbably trying to imitate the Shangri-Las before her country career took off), this set proffers too much pop melodrama and not enough genuine classics.
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