A SELECTION OF RECENT RELEASES, WINTER 2000-2001:
Badfinger: Head First (Snapper Music). In December 1974, Badfinger recorded, under less than optimal circumstances, the ten previously unreleased tracks heard (in rough mix form) on this 2000 release. According to Badfinger biographer Dan Matovina's liner notes, the band were rushed into the studio with only a few weeks to record and rehearse material; some members suspected that this was because their business manager wanted to collect a quick advance. If that's the case, the rush shows in this erratic set, which other than a couple of nice Pete Ham compositions are average mainstream mid-1970s rock, and below-average by Badfinger's standards. These were also the band's first recordings with keyboardist Bob Jackson, who had just replaced Joey Molland, and his writing style (he has three full or partial songwriting credits) really didn't jibe with the band's knack for well-crafted, guitar-oriented pop-rock. There are inappropriately slick synth washes on some of the cuts too, but actually Jackson isn't the key reason this album is so-so at best. The chief culprit is the unremarkable songwriting, save Ham's "Lay Me Down," a typically (for Badfinger Paul McCartney-like number which might just have been a hit had enough people heard it, and his gentler "Keep Believing." Tom Evans weighs in with a couple of complaints about the music business that, while ham-fisted, do reflect the tense state of mind of the band at the time. It's for Badfinger fans only, then, but its worth is considerably inflated by the addition of a bonus CD of previously unavailable acoustic demos from the same era, only one of which ("Lay Me Down") was also recorded for the Head First sessions. These cuts are very nice, if tentative, tunes in the mold of acoustic-slanted White Album tracks, even if the songwriting of course is not as outstanding as Lennon-McCartney's. Six of the eleven songs on the bonus disc were penned by Ham; Evans, Jackson, and more surprisingly drummer Mike Gibbins (who wrote three of them) all offered some nice stuff too.
Dion: King of the New York Streets (The Right Stuff). At the time of this box set's release in 2000, Dion had been recording for almost 45 years, and gone through not just several different musical styles, but several different musical lives. There was the doo wop he did with the Belmonts when he started; the macho yet vulnerable pop-rock he did during his most commercially successful phase in the early 1960s; the folk-rock and blues-rock he ventured into during the mid-1960s; the soft folk-rock he made during his comeback during the late 1960s and early 1970s; and wanderings among roots rock, gospel, and adult contemporary singer-songwriting over the next few decades. Although his career wasn't over when this appeared, this three-CD package is likely to be the most thorough overview of his output to be heard in one place. "Most thorough" is not synonymous with "best music of his career," however, and while this box contains much of major significance, it really does slide downhill after the early 1970s. That point is reached around the middle of the second disc, so that leaves about half of this material as average, or duller than average, stuff. In its favor, it has all the familiar hits from the salad days, from the Belmonts' "I Wonder Why" through "Abraham, Martin & John," as well as a number of fine cuts that are largely only known to collectors. Those include his hard-rocking 1965 cover of the obscure Bob Dylan song "Baby, I'm in the Mood for You"; the folk-rock version of Tom Paxton's "I Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound" from the same era; the little-heard 1966 ABC single "My Girl the Month of May" (with the Belmonts); the bluesy B-side "Daddy Rollin'"; and the anti-drug "Your Own Backyard." The post-early-1970s tracks do have their high points, like "(I Used to Be a) Brooklyn Dodger," and Dion sings well on most of these, but they're just not remotely on the same level of what precedes them. A half-dozen of these tracks are previously unreleased, yet it's impossible to tell which of these are otherwise unissued from the liner notes, and the track listings offer surprisingly incomplete original release/recording dates for the material as a whole. If you want to focus on Dion's best music, you can get more of it, in more concentrated doses and for about the same amount of money, by buying several other less extensive compilations that target a specific period of his work.
John Fahey: Vol. 4: The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party (Takoma). This hodgepodge of tracks from 1962-66 was among the last of Fahey's early Takoma albums to make it onto CD (which it did in 2000). Perhaps that's because Fahey himself has a low estimation of the record. Nevertheless it stands as his most, well, far-out work, and one of his most innovative. Edited together from several pieces, the 19-minute "The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party" anticipated elements of psychedelia with its nervy improvisations and odd guitar tunings. The six briefer pieces that comprised the rest of the record also broke ground with their unsettling moods and dissonances, "Knott's Berry Farm Molly" suddenly moving from a characteristically placid instrumental to backwards tapes that Fahey assembled on a tape recorder, and the lo-fi "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" putting some aggressive picking against a mysterious church organ played by Flea. The beautiful "900 Miles" also had unexpected instrumental accompaniment, by Nancy McLean on flute, while future Canned Heat member Al Wilson played "veena" (sitar) on "Sail Away Ladies." Despite Fahey's curmudgeonly dismissal of the record several decades later, it's an important, if uneven, effort that ultimately endures as one of the highlights of his discography.
The Fantastic Baggys: Anywhere the Girls Are! The Best of...the Fantastic Baggys (Sundazed). Along with the entire Tell 'Em I'm Surfin'] LP, this CD adds a heap o' extras: the 1964 non-LP single "Debbie Be True"/"Anywhere the Girls Are," a couple of songs which showed up on a 1966 South African LP, the 1965 non-LP single "It Was I," and nine alternate/instrumental/vocal overdub/variations/versions, most of them previously unreleased. "Debbie Be True," complete with "Don't Worry Baby"-type guitar chording, would have been pretty fair Beach Boys album filler; "It Was I" is a not-bad update of the old Skip and Flip hit rockaballad; and "(Goes to Show) Just How Wrong You Can Be," which would be re-recorded by Sloan in the mid-1960s as a solo artist, shows Sloan-Barri's growth into more serious directions. To be honest, though, most of those extras are nothing more than very modest variations from the official tracks. But what the heck, if you're bothering to hunt down a Fantastic Baggys compilation in the first place, you might as well have everything you can, right? In addition there are lengthy liner notes, even including first-hand quotes from P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri. It remains about the best Jan & Dean album you could track down that is not in fact Jan & Dean.
The Hullaballoos: England's Newest Singing Sensations/On Hullabaloo (Collectables). This CD combines both of the Hullaballoos' albums onto one CD, handily summarizing this British Invasion footnote in one place (and just 51 minutes, although it contains 24 songs). The group play like a cross between the Searchers and Gerry & the Pacemakers on amphetamines on most of their self-titled album, which includes both "I'm Gonna Love You Too" and "Did You Ever." Enjoyable despite itself, and "I'll Show You How to Love" is actually a pretty and tuneful beat ballad worthy of a more skilled group. Their second LP stuck to much the same format as their first. A few Buddy Holly covers were stuck amidst new songs, supplied to the band, that aimed to combine Buddy Holly with the Merseybeat sound, in a simple and exploitative way. Like the debut, it's not bad in spite of all that, though the material is a little weaker this time around. "I Won't Turn Away Now" is about the best of the batch, with something of a melodramatic New York pop influence in the songwriting; it wouldn't be too hard to imagine the Shangri-Las doing it with a totally different arrangement, for instance.
Junior's Eyes: Battersea Power Station (Castle). Mick Wayne undoubtedly tried hard to be significant and progressive with his songs on Junior's Eyes' sole album. There were meter changes, skilled psychedelic hard rock guitar riffs, and moods both whimsical and cynical throughout. Although the predominant vibe was bluesy psych-prog, there were also quieter, more acoustic interludes. It doesn't add up to much without memorable hooks or vision, though, and the record fails to stick as a noteworthy effort, even by the standards of obscure late-1960s British psychedelia. If you disagree with that assessment, or in any case are still curious enough to track down this collectable release, the 2000 CD reissue on Castle couldn't possibly be a more thoughtful package. In addition to the songs from the original LP, it contains both sides of their three non-LP 1968-69 singles; four demos of songs from Battersea Power Station; and both sides of the 1967 psych-pop single by the Tickle, Mick Wayne's previous band, along with very extensive historical liner notes. Other than that Tickle single, the extra material doesn't contain anything too interesting, though a few of the 45 tracks are rather poppier in approach than most of the album. Unintentionally, no doubt, the Tickle gem "Subway (Smokey Pokey World)" blows everything else on the disc to smoke.
The Larks: The Best of the Larks (Jamie). These eighteen tracks, encompassing 1961-70 singles and a couple of unreleased cuts, are like a snapshot of Philadelphia soul during the time: almost pure doo wop at its conception, sweet and orchestrated at the decade's conclusion. Like many such releases, it's testimony to the depth of the Philadelphia soul scene, which harbored numerous groups like the Larks that made some local noise, recorded often, explored several different stylistic paths and devised a good chunk of original material, and never became nationally known. And, like many such releases, although the songs are fairly good, they're not so excellent, and the group does not exert such a strong, consistent, and innovative personality, as to qualify them as a major act. Indeed, as six lead singers are featured over the course of the disc, the tracks often sound like the work of different groups. It varies from the Flamingos-like doo wop (complete with dreamy organ) of some early cuts and the dead-ringer-for-Motown-circa-1962 sound of "For the Love of Money" to the competent sub-mid-sixties-female group production of "From the Bottom of My Heart (I Still Love You)" and the orchestrated pure circa-1970 Philly soul of "I Need Somebody to Love You." The mid-1960s Motown sound, truth be told, gets mined quite a bit (and pretty competently) on the songs featuring female vocals, including "Groovin' at the Go Go," "Without You Baby," and "Rain," the last of which leans more toward the more mature late-1960s Motown sound of Gladys Knight or the Temptations. Barbara Mason takes the lead on just one song here, the 1964 single "Dedicated to You," one of the Larks' last doo wop throwbacks. A nice fill-in-the-gaps compilation of a mid-level but worthy Philadelphia group, although the absence of any dates, songwriting credits, or original labels in the credits is lame.
Magnum: Fully Loaded (Jamie). The songwriting and innovation barometer may not be as high on this LP as it is on early 1970s discs by Sly & the Family Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic, Miles Davis, and Santana -- all of whom Magnum bear slight to strong resemblance to, at one point or another. Yet it's a pretty solid effort, and a reminder of a brief time when Black music effectively synthesized R&B with numerous progressive trends while remaining both optimistic and street-smart. The collision of influences makes itself known right from the opening "Evolution," with its celebratory/revolutionary lyrics, solid funk groove, James Brown-like horns, bongos, distorted hard rock guitar riffs, and intricate sailing background harmonies. The dragging beats and druggy ambience of "Your Mind" should recall Sly Stone's There's a Riot Goin' On period to many listeners. The wacky hallucinogenic sex sentiments of "Natural Juices" wouldn't sound too out of place in George Clinton's world, with its spaced-out narration "some people get off on a needle...then there is a thumb and blanket. But the ultimate pacifier is a warm, wet nipple." "Witch Doctor's Brew" and the more impressive, ten-minute "Composition Seven," by contrast, make much use of Miles Davis-ish jazz-rock fusion keyboards in their groove-oriented, jammy passages, the latter tune boosted by an irresistible Latin beat. The album was entirely overlooked in comparison to the more famous artists mining the same grooves, both when it was made and when such sounds have come back into fashion. And it absolutely demands a hearing by anyone who digs these sorts of combinations, even if the group were not as original as the giants of the genre.
Rick Nelson: Legacy (Capitol). As a four-CD set with 100 tracks spanning Nelson's entire career, this will likely stand as the most thorough overview of the singer's music ever issued. This doesn't mean, though, that it's the best anthology of his work, unless you subscribe to the viewpoint that his post-mid-1960s records were about as good as his pre-mid-1960s ones, since a full two discs (or half) of this package is devoted to that post-mid-1960s output. Basically, it illustrates his trajectory in phases: disc one, as a good-to-great pop-rockabilly singer; disc two, as a still-good but not quite as vital teen idol in the late 1950s and early 1960s; disc three, as a fair but not great country-rocker; and disc four, as a has-been playing out the string with uninspired, low-energy adult contemporary, country, and rockabilly revival tracks during his final years. It's an impressive feat of cross-licensing, though, starting with three songs from his first singles (for Verve, and never easy to find on reissues), drawing a lot from his creative peak at Imperial, and then from his spottier efforts for Decca and other labels. All of his Top Forty hits are here, along with a good helping of obscure early rockabilly cuts and late-1960s-early-1970s country-rock tunes. There are about a dozen previously unreleased tracks, none too remarkable, as well as an alternate take of "Just a Little Too Much" and the 45 single versions of a few early hits (which have sometimes been represented by different takes on albums and reissues). The song selection is very good, but not infallible: the absence of the moody "Mean Old World," which was about the best thing he did in the mid-1960s, is inexplicable. If you are a big fan and do like Nelson's country-rock phase, this is a reasonable investment, but if you don't, you should stick to those collections that focus on his 1957-65 recordings.
Gram Parsons: Another Side of This Life: The Lost Recordings of Gram Parsons 1965-1966 (Sundazed). The eighteen previously unreleased, solo acoustic performances on this collection were recorded between March 1965 and December 1966. These show Parsons not as a country singer, rock singer, or even folk-rock singer, but very much as a mid-1960s folkie, in the mold of so many artists to be heard in the Greenwich Village scene. There's no straight country music in his repertoire, comprised largely of covers of songs by then-contemporary writers such as Buffy Sainte-Marie ("Codine"), Tim Hardin, Tom Paxton, and Fred Neil, along with high-caliber compositions that would be popularized by rock groups (Billy Wheeler's "High Flyin' Bird" and Hamilton Camp's "Pride of Man"). There are also five Parsons originals, a few not available elsewhere, and others recorded at other points either by himself ("Brass Buttons" and "Zah's Blues") or different performers ("November Nights," placed on an obscure single by Peter Fonda). A bit of R&B pokes out in his covers of "Searchin'" and "Candy Man." This disc is definitely of historical interest, if only to demonstrate that Parsons' roots were certainly not country-soaked, but largely indebted to '60s folk as well. As music, it's very average (though certainly not bad) mid-1960s folk, of the kind you might hear by numerous coffeehouse support acts. He sings best on the jazzy "Zah's Blues," where he seems to reach further into himself than he does on most of the other material here.
The People's Choice: I Likes to Do It (Jamie). Collecting both sides of all four of their 1971-72 Phil-LA of Soul singles, and adding seven previously unreleased songs from the same era, this is notably rawer than their more famous material for TSOP later in the decade. Indeed, it's rawer than almost any soul-funk from the period that had a commercial impact, as three of these cuts did: "I Likes to Do It" made #9 R&B (and the pop Top Forty) in 1971, and "The Wootie-T-Woo" and "Let Me Do My Thing" were low-charting R&B singles. The People's Choice's stock-in-trade at this stage was loose, almost-improvised sounding funky workouts with basic but catchy riffing, semi-scatted vocals, and cool electric keyboard vamping, often devised by connecting a guitar wah-wah pedal to an organ. The what-ya-play-is-what-ya-hear production is a refreshing contrast to the slicker sounds that were so much more prevalent in early-'70s Philly soul. And that's the way it should have been: when they tried to play conventional vocal sweet soul with strings on "Magic," they sounded far more ordinary. The seven previously unissued tracks (including a much different version of "Magic") are nearly on par with the singles, though perhaps these lean toward more basic riffs and words (this is in a group that favored minimal song construction to begin with). Simplicity can be a virtue, though, and this is damned infectious stuff, really. It's quite a find for early funk fans, to whom this compilation is highly recommended.
Los Shakers: Por Favor (Big Beat). No doubt this will stand as the most definitive single-disc compilation of Uruguay's Shakers (referred to as "the Shakers" on some releases and "Los Shakers" on others, including this one). There are 32 tracks, and 79 minutes, taken from all three of the LPs they issued in South America between 1965-68, along with three cuts from 1966 singles, almost everything sung in English. It cements, as if any further proof were necessary, their well-deserved reputation as the top Beatlesque '60s band from South America, and indeed one of the most uncannily Beatlesque bands from anywhere, at any time. Does that mean that this is as good as, or nearly as good as, the Beatles themselves? No, but it's good fun all the same, even if much of the disc sounds like inverted, or at times barely altered, ideas from Beatles riffs and arrangements. They were at their best, perhaps, when mimicking the A Hard Day's Night-era fab four, as they did on their 1965 debut LP Los Shakers, most of which is here. They did, however, evolve to some degree artistically, albeit rather in tandem with how the Beatles' own records changed in 1965-67, adding some (but not much) native rhythmic styles and riffs here and there; putting Revolver-type vocals and meters into cuts like "Picking Up Troubles" and "Got Any Money?"; putting some downbeat jazzy riffs into the fine "Too Late"; using freaky backwards guitar and drones in "I Hope You'll Like It," their most advanced cut; and adopting the march-beat midtempo and sunny harmonies of many 1967 Beatles tunes on numbers like "On a Tuesday I Watch Channel 36." This anthology is not, incidentally, the last word on the Shakers' output: there are no tracks from their US-only 1966 LP Break It All (which featured re-recordings of their early South American sides), and a handful of other numbers show up on the Brazilian EMI CD All the Best.
Norma Tanega: Walkin' My Cat Named Dog (Collectables). Tanega's rare debut album, reissued in 1998 on CD, isn't bad, though it's not a major effort, and seems like it could have benefited from more polish in the vocal department especially. "Walkin' My Cat Named Dog" is here, of course, and the only track virtually any listener would know. Many of the cuts have a peculiar, if only in retrospect, blend of folky guitar and harmonica with full New York pop-rock-soul arrangements. Tanega's talents are moderate but appealing: decent melodies, even-tempered and slightly quirky folk-rock lyrics, and a low vocal range that's a bit out of the ordinary. Her vocals are erratic enough, however, to wonder if the album was recorded hastily, or at least if she had some serious trouble staying on pitch, particularly on the high notes. Some of the cuts are on or above the level of "Walkin' My Cat Named Dog" musically, if lacking the attention-getting lyrical hook of that song's title. "You're Dead," for instance, is fairly gutsy moody folk-pop, while "A Street That Rhymes at 6 AM" is probably the cut that would have been most likely to follow up "Walkin' My Cat Named Dog," with its rather AM-savvy tune. (In fact, it was the follow-up, but was not a hit.) At its worst, especially "What Are We Craving?" with its Napoleon XIV-like percussion, it can be grating, and somehow Tanega and Norma Kutzer end up with the songwriting credit for "Hey Girl," the song that was popularized by Leadbelly as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" The liner notes mention a non-LP single Tanega did for New Voice, "Bread," and it's too bad that and any other non-LP New Voice cuts were not added to the CD edition.
Johnnie Taylor: Lifetime (Stax). Taylor gets honored with a three-CD, 65-song box set for this career retrospective. And it truly is a career retrospective: although it's on the label for which he had the most hits, Stax, it spans 1956-1999, including a good deal of material that he did for other labels before and after his Stax stint. It's true that you have to be a pretty deep Taylor fan, and a pretty deep soul fan in general, to commit to nearly four hours of his music. It's also true that even if you are big Taylor fan, you're likely to need some patience to last through some of the average cuts, or his stylistic transition from gospel to soul to disco and retro-soul. Overall, however, it's a fine commemoration of an important if not quite great soul star. The most valuable components of the set are found on disc one, which kick off with a half-dozen gospel tunes from his stints with the Highway Q.C.'s and the Soul Stirrers in the late 1950s, moving into some of his little-known sub-Sam Cooke soul sides for Cooke's SAR label in the early 1960s. For the remainder of disc one and some of disc two, there are plenty of fine soul-blues cuts from his early days at Stax in the mid-to-late 1960s that will be familiar to relatively few listeners, along with his chart singles, including of course "Who's Making Love." These aren't just box-fillers; they represent some of his finest work, both for his fine soul-blues-gospel vocal blend and relatively unknown songs by the Isaac Hayes-David Porter songwriting team, as well as some on which Stax stalwarts Steve Cropper and Booker T. Jones played major compositional roles. As time wore on -- even starting in the early 1970s -- Taylor's material got duller and more homogenized, though there were always some highlights to perk up your ears. Unsurprisingly, then, like most box sets, this gets less interesting the closer it draws to the finish line, although wisely his late-1970s Columbia era (yes, "Disco Lady" is here) and post-1970s Malaco output is represented by a mere four cuts each. One could make some minor quibbles about the track selection: although the inclusion of five previously unreleased alternate takes (and three songs previously unissued in any form) from his early Stax days will satisfy collectors, those of us who don't have comprehensive Taylor libraries will be left wondering whether those alternates are better than the official ones, or just placed on disc one to whet completist appetites. Ultimately, though, it's a well-done summation of Taylor's legacy, with an accompanying 50-page booklet including essay, discography, and photos.
Traffic:
Paper
Rain (Colosseum, bootleg).
This very enjoyable bootleg is largely comprised of 1967-68 live
performances
by the band, including seven songs from a gig in Stockholm in September
1967; a couple from Fillmore West in San Francisco in March 1968; and
three
from Copenhagen in May 1968. Rounding out the disc are both sides of
the
rare and good (though not brilliant) Dave Mason solo single "Just For
You"/"Little
Woman," issued on Island in 1968, as well as a 1967 studio version of
"Hope
I Never Find Me There" (here retitled "Hope They Never Find Me Here").
Mason appears on all the cuts except the two March 1968 ones from San
Francisco.
The sound is very good for live recordings of the period, and the band
play very well and spiritedly, even on the songs requiring duplication
of relatively exotic effects. Even if the fidelity might be somewhat
below
the standards of official releases, it's not at all hard to dig, though
it is odd to hear a male voice doing the spoken interlude in "Hole in
My
Shoe" rather than a childish female one. The songs encompass many of
the
best early numbers by the band: "Hole in My Shoe," "Feelin' Alright,"
"Paper
Sun," "Smiling Phases," "You Can All Join In," "Coloured Rain." This is
not just something for insane collectors; anyone who's a serious fan of
the band, which you presumably are if you're even considering buying a
Traffic bootleg, will find it a highly pleasurable listen.
Various Artists: Follow the Music
(FirstMedia). While this compilation CD is commercially sold, take
note:
it is only available as a bound-in disc in the paperback edition of the
book Follow the Music, the autobiography of Elektra Records
founder
and president Jac Holzman (written with Gavan Daws). The disc contains
26 songs from the 1950s and 1960s, and with just a couple of
exceptions,
none of them post-date the mid-1960s. This means that Elektra's
ventures
into folk-rock, psychedelia, and singer-songwriters -- their most
enduring contributions to popular music -- are heavily
underrepresented.
There's nothing by the Doors, for instance, or the electric-period Judy
Collins, or Love, or the MC5, or the Stooges. On the other hand, just
about
every artist here was an important exponent of Elektra's acoustic folk
and blues catalog. Included are cuts by Jean Ritchie, Josh White,
Theodore
Bikel, Cynthia Gooding, the Limeliters, Jean Redpath, the Dillards,
Judy
Henske, Mark Spoelstra, Korner, Ray & Glover, Tom Rush, Fred Neil,
the Incredible String Band, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, and Judy Collins;
the
early Elektra electric rock period is represented, just barely, by Tim
Buckley and the Butterfield Blues Band. There's another major reason
that
this CD is valuable, which is that most of the early Elektra LP
catalog,
lamentably, has not made it onto compact disc, which means that you'll
have a hard time finding much of this material unless you're willing to
shell out for scratchy out-of-print LPs. Actually, this isn't the ideal
antidote, since many of these songs sound as if they were mastered from
vinyl (surface noise intact) and not the master tapes. But that's not
the
point: this is a good, though not ideally packaged, CD surveying the
growth
of an important label, through its twee early White folk to important
singer-songwriters
of the 1960s and early blues-rock and psychedelia. Some of the cuts are
downright excellent (Neil's "Blues on the Ceiling," Ochs' "I Ain't
Marching
Anymore," Henske's "Wade in the Water"), and most are at the least
good.
And there are some unexpected detours and collector's items: the
early-music
duo Kathy & Carol, the Ensemble of the Bulgarian Republic, and a
cut
by the Even Dozen Jug Band, whose ranks included a pre-Lovin' Spoonful
John Sebastian. It's unfortunate that there are no liner notes
whatsoever,
but then again many details are supplied by the book that it comes
with,
which is an excellent oral history of Elektra and its artists. If you
didn't
get the hardback edition (published in 1998), here's your reward for
waiting;
if you've already forked out for the hardback edition, well, the $18.95
cover price isn't that much more than you'd pay for a CD anyway.
Various Artists: Great R&B Duets (Ace). The R&B duets that this 25-track anthology emphasizes are those from the early days of rock'n'roll, spanning 1954-1960. The song selection is a bit quirky and uneven, but generally it's a pretty good sampling of some hits and choice obscurities from the era, emphasizing male-female duets most often, but also including male duos and a solitary female duo (the Teen Queens, with their doo wop hit "Eddie My Love"). A number of these tunes are familiar hit classics: Mickey & Sylvia's "Love Is Strange," Brook Benton & Dinah Washington's "Baby (You've Got What It Takes)" and "A Rockin' Good Way (To Mess Around and Fall in Love)," Ike & Tina Turner's "It's Gonna Work Out Fine," Shirley & Lee's "Let the Good Times Roll," Johnny & Joe's "Over the Mountain, Across the Sea." More intriguing for those in search of something they might have seldom or never heard are cuts like Tarheel Slim & Little Ann's splendid "It's Too Late," a minor-key haunter with scarifying blues/gospel overtones. Also on hand are a number of original versions of songs that became more famous via subsequent White cover versions: Gene & Eunice's "Ko Ko Mo (I Love You So)," Marvin & Johnny's "Cherry Pie" (later a hit for Skip & Flip), Don & Dewey's "I'm Leaving It (All) Up to You" (later a huge hit for Dale & Grace), and most enticingly of all, Willy & Ruth's original 1954 version of Leiber-Stoller's "Love Me" (covered in 1956 by Elvis Presley). Some of the other relatively unknown selections are on the forgettable side, but overall this is a good alternation of familiar and unfamiliar performances in this early rock'n'roll sub-genre.
Various Artists: The Stax Story (Stax). The legendary Memphis soul label Stax's legacy is well represented by this four-CD, 98-song box set, which manages to do what many similar box retrospectives don't. That is to provide a well-balanced overview of a genre of music that mixes the essential hits with many noteworthy lesser-known singles and rarities, coming about as close as possible to pleasing both the collector and the less intense soul fan. It's much more manageable (and affordable) than that trio of mammoth nine- or ten-CD boxes in theThe Complete Stax-Volt Singles series, and gives greater weight than those boxes could to the first and more vital half of Stax's chronology. The first alone, subtitled "The Hits," takes care of most of the consensus classics most listeners would demand from such a box, by Carla Thomas, Otis Redding, the Staple Singers, Sam & Dave, Booker T. & the MGs, Rufus Thomas, Albert King, Johnnie Taylor, and lower-profile acts like the Dramatics, Eddie Floyd, and Jean Knight. Disc two and disc three chronologically survey lower-profile chart hits and flops, taking in additional material by all of the stars, as well as great songs that have escaped the net of oldies radio (William Bell's "You Don't Miss Your Water," Albert King's "Crosscut Saw," Mable John's "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)," and a few interesting cuts that really aren't too well known by anyone, like the T.S.U. Toronados' sexy 1970 near-instrumental funk workout "Play the Music Toronados." Disc four is entirely devoted to live recordings, most by the company's biggest acts, that sometimes give a rawer sense of the performers' charisma than was evident on their studio efforts. Some pretty minor reservations might keep this box from getting awarded the highest possible score: some of the non-hit cuts aren't that exciting (particularly from the label's later years), the track annotation doesn't make it clear whether some of the live cuts were previously unreleased in any form, Booker T. & the MGs' "Hang 'Em High" is represented by a live 1993 reunion recording rather than the original hit single one, and some good mid-level hits by the biggest Stax acts aren't here. Still, it's a very worthy summation of the label's highlights, augmented by detailed liner notes.
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