Carousel Corner: Thinking Inside the Box.

With the ascendancy of the compact disc, the recording industry's ability to gather large amounts of material into a single product has likewise risen. Box sets, once the province of specialty publishers such as the Smithsonian Institution, are ubiquitous nowadays. They can focus on a genre (The Smithsonian's Anthology of American Folk Music or The Ska Box), an era (Nuggets), a style (Rock Instrumental Classics), or an individual artist. Depending on the commitment of the producer and the availability of high-quality master recordings, a box set can be alternately a hoot, a transcendent experience, or it can manufacture the kind of vagrant hash that makes a cauldron of paella seem organized by comparison. In fact, the current agglomeration of box sets is the only justification I know for one of those bilious CD jukeboxes. Nah.

Beg, Scream & Shout! The Big Ol' Box of '60s Soul (Rhino). This scrumptious collection of R&B essentials -- yeah, the title sez Soul, but "soul" wouldn't come to describe the genre until very late in the decade -- is musically brilliant, but we're going to start with its box, a tour de force of marketing nostalgia and genius. The box replicates one of those cheesy cardboard totes your big sister used to cart her 45s around in, complete with chrome-plated hasp and plastic handle. Each of the six CDs is nested in a plastic replica of a 45 r.p.m. single, which in turn resides in a record sleeve. Each the sleeves and the 45 "labels" -- the imprint on the CD -- is a gentle satire, the Rhino logo is morphed to resemble some classic soul logos from the '60s: Atlantic, Chess, Stax, Motown, and so on. Also included is a booklet with a longish essay, "What is Soul?", a quasi-rhetorical question that can only be answered by listening, and the complete label information for each of the tracks on all six CDs, including writer(s), producer(s), date of issue, and the song's highest position on both the R&B and pop charts.

But after the CDs, the prize is "The Li'l Ol' Box of '60s Soul Cards." Rhino has produced a numbered trading card for each of the 146 tracks, including a promotional photo of the artist, a trivia question (front) and answer (back), and a paragraph that gives extra information on the group, the producer, or the recording date -- and sometimes all three -- by the likes of David Gorman, Steve Greenberg, and Suzan Jenkins. But, boys and girls, the packaging is just the warm-up. Then there's the music.

The '60s witnessed arguably the most potent explosion of pop music in the second half of the century. As rock and R&B were jointly shedding their diapers, the Brits invaded, half of northern California dropped acid, half of LA hit the beach, and Detroit, Philly and Memphis spewed a new, urban black music -- soul -- sprung from equal measures of blues and gospel. The Soul Box pays passing homage to the stars: The Temptations, Martha Reeves, The Four Tops, and others. But this collection zeroes in on the one-hit wonders: Soul Survivors ("Expressway to Your Heart"), Bob Kuban and the In-Men ("The Cheater"), James and Bobby Purify ("I'm Your Puppet"), The Flirtations (the exquisite "Nothing But a Heartache"), and a host of lesser-knowns: Mel & Tim ("Backfield in Motion"), The Esquires ("Get On Up"), Brenton Wood ("The Oogum Boogum Song" -- no, really!), and Shorty Long ("Function at the Junction").

The Box includes a generous helping of originals that foundered on the R&B charts only to become rock hits years later: Marvelows, "I Do" (J. Geils Band); Kim Weston, "Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me a Little While)" (Doobie Bros.); The Temptations, "(I Know) I'm Losing You" (Rod Stewart); The Velvelettes, "He Was Really Sayin' Something" (Bananarama); Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart" (Big Brother and the Holding Company, i.e., Janis Joplin); Gloria Jones, "Tainted Love" (Soft Machine); Betty Everett, "You're No Good" (Linda Ronstadt). Rhino, to its credit, acknowledges their inclusion-by-association if only to pay tribute to the originals.

The Soul Box is pricey. It originally listed for a hundred big ones, but can be found on occasion for less. But ponder this, young audiophile -- you can spend at least that much on half of a pair of overrated, overpriced interconnects. Listen to JMC or HF or yerstruly: get the Radio Shack wire and spend your money on stuff like The Soul Box! And as you're listening-- hell, dancing! -- to Doris Troy's "Just One Look," Bob & Earl's classic "Harlem Shuffle," Johnnie Taylor's "Who's Making Love," or Shirley Ellis's "The Real Nitty Gritty," you'll thank us. Trust me on this one.

Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 (Rhino). Y'know, I get a lot of Grade A crapola from "serious audiophiles" for being a pop maven, a slave to the song and the incessant search for 3:30 of heaven. Can I help it if "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" does for me what some boring old fart and 10 of the l-o-n-g-e-s-t symphonies ever written, does for him? If the Big Ol' Box of '60s Soul covers one half of sub-stream, '60s rock, Nuggets covers the other, and the bootie you will shake after these four discs will vindicate the pop song now and forever.

Nuggets was originally compiled by Lenny Kaye and his search for pop ecstasy in 1972. Since then, Nuggets, in Rhino's able hands, has become synonymous with psychedelic indie rock run amok, white guys in garages, guitars tenuously flailing after Beatlesque stardom. The hits abound: The Standells' "Dirty Water," Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much to Dream," Swingin' Medallions' "Double Shot of My Baby's Love," Leaves' "Hey Joe," Syndicate of Sound's "Little Girl," The Castaways' "Liar, Liar," and more. But like The Soul Box, Nuggets plumbs rock's arcana for gems such as the Hombres' "Let It All Hang Out," The Premiers' "Farmer John," The Mojo Men's "Sit Down I Think I Love You," The Music Explosion's "Little Bit O' Soul," and the wondrous "I See the Light" by The Five Americans.

History buffs will dig the first incarnations of better known bands: The Golliwogs ("Fight Fire") became Creedence Clearwater Revival; Lyme & Cybelle ("Follow Me"), Warren Zevon--at least Lyme; The Amboy Dukes ("Journey to the Center of the Mind" and a take-no-prisoners version of "Baby, Please Don't Go"), Ted Nugent; The Choir ("It's Cold Outside"), the Raspberries; the Sir Douglas Quintet ("She's About a Mover"), Texas Tornadoes. There's also a generous dose of stateside Merseybeat wannabes: The "E" Types' "Put the Clock Back on the Wall," The Palace Guards' "Falling Sugar," The Gestures' "Run, Run, Run," The Rationals' "I Need You," and The New Colony Six's "At the River's Edge."

The undercurrent of faux savagery and teen angst that has propelled rock from the very beginning is showcased with a vengeance. Nascent punk anthems, swaddled in horrific lyrics and too much out-of-tune playing, scream for attention: The Daily Flash's "Jack of Diamonds" (so badly recorded that the harmonica overloads the microphone ...), The Rare Breed's "Beg, Borrow, and Steal," The Humane Society's "Knock, Knock," The Groupies' "Primitive," The Sonics' "Psycho," The Lyrics' sublime "So What," We the People's legendary "Mirror of Your Mind," even The Seeds' "Pushin' Too Hard," and many, many more. But punk was and is 'tude, an angry fist shaken -- and sometimes a lone finger waggled -- in the general direction of anything established, institutions a little too secure, self-satisfied, or smug. Punk's DIY m.o. characterizes most, if not all, of Nuggets' bands, self-taught, garage-nurtured, and simply recorded. In an era where even the most benign "home" studios are wonderlands of MIDI'd effects, 32-track mixing consoles, DATs, and various electronica -- check out any issue of Musician -- one appreciates the astonishing ability of small bands, mostly recording live, to make the kinds of records they did.

Once again Rhino's CD labels gently parody old 45s, this time from Laurie, UNI, Tower, and Bang. The accompanying booklet, like The Soul Box's trading cards, gives a brief history of each band -- most of whom have long since disappeared. Lenny Kaye's original Nuggets liner notes are included along with longer essays on the garage/punk phenomenon by Gary Stewart, the inestimable Jac Holzman, Greg Shaw, Alex Palao, and others. With a total of 118 cuts, Nuggets is an orgy of punk pop confection. I guess you can play them all at once -- I have several times -- but I'd suggest interspersing them with The Soul Box or Volumes 5 and 6 of Atlantic Rhythm and Blues, 1947-1974 and a generous smattering of Kinks, Turtles, and Yardbirds. I, for one, am waiting for Rhino to tackle the British invasion's one-hit wonders, The Easybeats, Freddie and the Dreamers, The Honeycombs, and so on. Maybe then we can put the '60s to rest.

Bruce Springsteen, Tracks (Columbia). John Lennon, Anthology (Capitol). Box sets devoted exclusively to one artist fall into one of two categories: they repackage most if not all of the artist's recorded output, albums and occasional "B" sides, or they amass unreleased tracks, demos, false starts -- stuff that the artist never intended to release or exists only as an historical curiosity. Needless to say, die-hard fans find the latter sort irresistible. Hell, I'm one. I gobbled up The Beatles' Anthology even though I've owned most of it, courtesy of bootlegs, for years. Both Tracks and the Lennon Anthology are of the latter variety, and both are indispensable to the die-hard fan. But each demonstrates why artists, especially those as prolific as Lennon and Springsteen, rightfully leave things on the mixing room floor.

Tracks, after the five solo acoustic numbers that made up his 1972 audition for Columbia, is four CDs of mainly unreleased material. There are a few alternate takes and demos ("Pink Cadillac" and an acoustic version of "Born in the U.S.A." stand out), but most of the songs are recording session flotsam, deemed unworthy of release. There are several reasons for their ultimate omission. For instance, 1973's "Thundercrack" is an energetic number with a fiery Springsteen guitar solo that eventually trips over itself. Nonetheless, the E Street Band's original drummer, Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez, and Clarence Clemmons outdo themselves. The excellent live recording "Rendezvous" didn't make the grade for Live/1975-1985.

Mostly the songs represent stylistic departures, some only in minute part -- the weeping radish guitars on the bridge to 1973's "Santa Ana" for instance -- that they would have seemed out of place on the final album, either Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. or The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Others, like 1973's "Zero and Blind Terry" have no stylistic counterparts in Springsteen's oeuvre -- even early on, Springsteen had a vision of how he wanted to shape his sound. "Iceman" is a solid ballad, but almost too slow. Similarly, the bridge to "Bring on the Night" has a flimsy feeling to it -- an intolerable breach of E Street's drive and power. Springsteen's vocal on "Hearts of Stone" drags. "Stolen Car," while a lovely tune, suffers lyrically: "At first I thought it was just restlessness/That would fade as time went by and our love grew deep/But in the end it was something more, I guess/ That tore us apart and made us weep." "Johnny Bye-Bye" is a mere tease, a song that never developed beyond a couple of verses and a chorus.

Springsteen has always assimilated his influences so completely that although one "hears" debts to Phil Spector, Philly Soul, Mitch Ryder, Buddy Holly, or even Dylan, it takes effort to pinpoint any one element of a song that can be traced to a forebear. Some of the songs on Tracks plainly show surprisingly contemporary influences, something that would ultimately lead Springsteen to jettison them: "Living on the Edge of the World" (Holly), "Cynthia" (J. Geils Band), "Rockaway the Days" (Steve Miller), and "Man at the Top" (John Mellencamp). Ironically, Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" owes as much to Springsteen's "I Wanna Be with You" as the latter does Spector.

All of the songs, regardless of the reason they never made it on to albums, are excellent -- we're talking about one of rock's premier songwriters over the past two decades. "Give the Girl a Kiss," "So Young and in Love" (despite a weak chorale), "Loose Ends," "Take 'Em as They Come," "Be True," "Ricky Wants a Man of Her Own," "Mary Lou," "Shut Out the Light," "This Hard Land," and more are vintage E Street Band, the best edition with Miami Steve van Zandt on guitar and vocals. There aren't any "great lost songs" in this box, just some very solid rock `n' roll. Most of all, the set is 90% new material, unless you, like my buddy B.J. in Detroit City, scoop up the bootlegs as fast as they're pressed. Bruce and the E Street Band are going out on tour this year for the first time in a decade. Let's hope the experience will goad them into another studio album. Until then, if you want "new" Springsteen material, Tracks is where you'll find it.

John Lennon's Anthology is more problematic. One is tempted -- very, very tempted -- to point a weary finger at Yoko Ono for turning on the money-printing machine that is Lennon's 2,000 some-odd hours of home/ demo tapes. But Lennon's legacy, indeed the measure of his long relationship with Ono, is endlessly complex, their post-Beatles lives crushed into a mere decade, half of which Lennon disappeared from public and recording view while playing house-husband to their young son. Indeed, if taken at face value, Ono's essay would seem to say that Anthology is her way of exorcising her own demons, coming to public terms with the private side of a man whose life could never be completely private, nearly 20 years after Lennon's murder.

John Lennon, who would have turned 59 this year, lived only a couple of months past his 40th birthday, cut down arguably, if Double Fantasy is any evidence, on the verge of crafting another extraordinary turn in an extraordinary career. One looked forward to his maturing as a songwriter and shedding the curse of having been a Beatle, though we know from McCartney's, Harrison's, and Starr's careers that Lennon would never have successfully abandoned his former identity. Anthology covers the last decade, the post-Beatles period of Lennon's career. Its four CDs and 94 tracks are divided chronologically/residentially: Ascot in England, New York City, The Lost Weekend (during which Lennon lived in LA while Ono stayed in New York), and Dakota, the Manhattan co-op where they spent their last five years.

Except for the inevitable bootlegs, precious few of the general public have heard the home/demo tapes. This set consists mostly of outtakes from recording sessions for Walls and Bridges, Mind Games, and Rock and Roll, lightly salted with snippets of studio banter and acoustic demos of songs which later took on electric personalities. In the end, it offers only a pauper's insight into Lennon's mind and work. It offers more insight into his methodology -- his approaches to making a song or a recording, his demands of his band and himself as a song built from an idea into a finished product. Anthology also offers glorious doses of Lennon's unadorned voice -- he hated it -- a vehicle of astonishing tonal range and sly mimicry. His ability to render Gene Vincent's "Be Bop-A-Lula" as well as Buddy Holly's "Peggy Sue" in equally convincing fashion is sheer joy. Equally fascinating are his demo vocals, lovingly crafted road maps for Ringo's "I Am the Greatest," "Goodnight Vienna," and "Only You." For good measure, the Dakota disc contains three devastating Dylan parodies.

Although I initially approached Anthology with a cynic's six-guns drawn and poised for the kill, I've been pretty much won over. I'll accept Ono's raising a tombstone to her deceased husband, and will thank her also for this small glance at her Lennon. Unlike Springsteen, Lennon will record no more. And to his legions of devotees, any previously unheard morsel is gold; if you will, an epitaph in progress. "Tombstones cheer the living, dear/They're no use to the dead" (Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, "Buy for Me the Rain").

Rock Instrumental Classics (Rhino). As a young man smitten by rock `n' roll, but fully ill-equipped to decipher most of the lyrics -- "Runaround Sue" and "Hello, Mary Lou" notwithstanding -- I loved stuff without words. To me great pop was a killer melody and a cool guitar hook. I mean, the words were mostly so lame that who wanted to listen to them anyhow, "Hey, hey, Paula, I want to marry you ..." Yu-u-u-ck. So back when rock was young and I was younger, the straight feed: melody, beat, guitar hooks, and no words was heaven. And rock answered with gems like "Rebel Rouser," "Bumble Boogie," "Apache," and "Teen Beat." The good news is that Rhino has 'em all in one package, partitioned by era and genre: the '50s, '60s, and '70s, soul, and surf. The bad news is that the '70s, the lamest decade for music since Wagner penned the Tristan chord, is there at all. (Yes, I love The Eagles and Steely Dan, and, yes, that was their decade, and, yes, they're the exceptions to the rule, and, please, don't send KWN hate mail ...) [That's right -- send it to KE. The '70s gave us some of the best work of folks such as The Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, The Allman Bros., Rod Stewart, Marvin Gaye, Elton John, Al Green, Neil Young, The Doobie Bros. -- unfortunately, along came disco, and the whole decade got tagged with an undeserved bad musical reputation from which it never recovered. Personally, I thought the '80s were much lamer. Bruce Springsteen? Ugh! And hey, Kev, the '70s was when the music of your old buddy Gustav Mahler really took off because of the efforts of conductors such as Bernstein, Abravanel, Tennstedt, Solti, Levine, Horenstein, and Haitink -- and yep, Kev, I'd take one movement of Mahler over the complete works of any of these groups, no question ... -KWN, old fart.]

The '50s includes standards such as Cozy Cole's "Topsy," Dave "Baby" Cortez's "The Happy Organ" -- we didn't get the joke -- Bill Justis's "Raunchy," Link Wray's seething "Rumble," Santo & Johnny's "Sleep Walk," and The Viscounts' "Harlem Nocturne." The '60s ups the ante with Lonnie Mack's "Memphis," The Ventures' "Walk-Don't Run," "The Fireballs' "Bulldog" (they would later score with "Sugar Shack" with Jimmy Gilmer on vocals), and Duane Eddy's gelatinous "Because They're Young." The '70s is one long disco inferno: Van McCoy's "The Hustle," Deodato's "Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001)," Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven," and Hot Butter's novelty hit, "Popcorn." Even minor hits such AWB's "Pick Up the Pieces," Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein," or Gary Glitter's stadium anthem, "Rock and Roll, Part 2," can't save this disc from excesses such ELO's "Daybreaker" and embarrassments such as King Curtis's "Whole Lotta Love." And it omits Steely Dan's remake of Duke Ellington's "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo." Puhleeze.

However, life improves with Soul: Booker T. and the MGs' "Green Onions" and "Time is Tight," Alvin Cash and the Crawlers' "Twine Time," the Mar-Keys' "Last Night," and the Bar-Kays' "Soul Finger" -- we still didn't get the joke. Brotha', this disc cooks like hot chitlins, grits, and the nastiest hot sauce this side of KayCee. However, if you have The Soul Box, you'll already have these and more. Get ready for a little duplication. But life really gets better with Surf: Dick Dale's "Miserlou," the Chantays' "Pipeline," The Surfaris' "Wipeout," even Jack Nitzsche's "The Lonely Surfer." And that's just for openers. Surf revels in regional (mostly LA) tidbits such as The Tornadoes' (of "Telstar" fame -- it's on The '60s) "Bustin Surfboards," The Crossfires' "Fiberglass Jungles," sort of a "Rumble" for the beach, and The Pyramids' "Penetration" -- and, no, we didn't get the joke. Some of the sound is gawdawful, Fender Jaguars through Silvertone amps, but the energy is bodacious and the ambiance sublime.

Okay, what's missing? Kenny Bali's "Midnight in Moscow," the Village Stompers' "Washington Square," Mr. Acker Bilk's "Stranger on the Shore," Bent Fabric's "Alley Cat," Lawrence Welk's "Calcutta," Horst Jankowski's "Walk in the Black Forest," and Jimmy Smith's "Walk on the Wild Side" -- to name a few. Well, these critters are also '60s refugees, and Rhino, I guess, couldn't make room for them. Then again, they could have stuffed The '70s ... Collector's Choice (www.ccmusic.com/800-923-1122) has compiled most of these in another package (Instrumental Gems of the '60s) which I have yet to purchase. Why the wait? They don't have "Midnight in Moscow" either.

Anthology of American Folk Music, Harry Smith, Ed. (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings). If nothing else, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, originally issued in 1952, eviscerated a cultural consciousness, resurrecting for the new 12", 33-1/3 r.p.m., LP market songs so dusty and so encrusted with mold that few outside their immediate venues knew of their existence much less their significance. With the advent of radio in the early '20s, the recording industry, labels such as Victor, Vocalion, and Okeh, sought to prop sagging sales by introducing specialized lines of recordings devoted to specific audiences: Cajuns in and around Louisiana, Southern whites and blacks, mid-Western farmers. The Depression and the Second World War intervened to eradicate those markets in favor of the dominant popular culture: big band jazz, swing, singing cowboys, lounge crooners, and the like. Further, "folk" music had fragmented into bluegrass, country western, and rhythm and blues. What remained were warehouses full of musty 78s, relics of a fleeting era.

Smith's gift to the culture was reviving those regional recordings and resuscitating an oral/musical legacy, a tradition that stretched back over 150 years. He gobbled up forgotten 78s by the truckload and convinced Moses Asch at Folkways to release the Anthology, using his collection, all recorded between 1926 and 1932, as the source material -- what has been called "a bootleg of dubious legality." The 84 songs in the Anthology represent, in Smith's notion of historical chronological order, a grass-roots music making heritage rarely known, much less experienced, outside fairly constrained geographic regions, e.g., the Clinch River hill country of southern Virginia, the coal mining country of West Virginia, or the deep bayous of Louisiana. However, each song could be traced back to an Anglo-American or African-American forebear that more often than not predated the invention of recording. Smith carefully documented and annotated his selections, citing the evidence that would support his inclusion of one song or another in his Anthology.

We, you and I, are of a generation that has become accustomed to vintage recordings, from Columbia's Robert Johnson collection to various reissues, like Roots of Rock, pegging modern music making to long forgotten folk, mostly acoustic blues recordings. What has become commonplace for us, however, was a thunderbolt revelation to young musicians over 45 years ago. Smith's selections plumbed a chord deeply imbedded in the country's cultural psyche, "This is us, but where did it come from?" And Smith slyly refused to distinguish among black and white performers, demonstrating that for all its disparate backgrounds, the American folk ethos had evolved into a broad expanse of common ground, something that wasn't fully exploited until rock convincingly assimilated hillbilly music, blues, and gospel. Smith was fond of noting, "It took years before anybody discovered that Mississippi John Hurt wasn't a hillbilly."

The overall recording quality is poor. But the musical quality is wondrous: the Carter Family's "John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man" (dating from the 1890s), Kelly Harrell's "Charles Giteau" (circa 1881, the story of the man who assassinated President Garfield), Buell Kazee's "East Virginia" (an easily recognized 18th century English countryside ballad), and a lovely waltz-time version of "Home, Sweet, Home" by the Cajun band Beaux Freres. Regional delicacies such as Charley Patton's "Mississippi Boweavil Blues," later reworked by Brook Benton as "The Boll Weevil Song," or Frank Hutchison's "Stackalee," which became Lloyd Price's "Stagger Lee," offer a unique glance into R&B's diverse antecedents. The latter, which has taken on innumerable permutations, is the story of an actual murder in St. Louis in 1895. Even the legend of John Henry, dating from the 1870s, is present with the Williamson Brothers and Curry's "Gonna Die with a Hammer in My Hand." Woody Guthrie's celebration of an outlaw, "Pretty Boy Floyd," finds precedent with cowboy singer Edward L. Crain's "Bandit Cole Younger," recorded in 1930 but dating back to the 1870s. (And legitimizes "gangsta' rap?") "Peg and Awl" by the Carolina Tar Heels (1929), describes the impact of industrialization on the shoemaking industry and probably dates from 1804. Nelstone's Hawaiians' "Fatal Flower Garden" (1930) can be traced to a Shropshire folk ballad describing events from 1255. Clarence Ashley's "The House Carpenter" (1930) can be found in a Scottish text dated 1785. You surrender an involuntary shiver when you realize the scope of Smith's vast achievement: he helped rescue and preserve an unbroken oral tradition that reached back to the birth of American culture.

[Note: None of this is intended to dismiss or minimize well-documented archivists such as Alan Lomax and Zora Neale Hurston or the extensive research into the migration of English and Scottish music to the Americas by Francis James Child, Cecil Sharp, and Alfred Williams. Smith's Anthology linked these traditions to actual commercial recordings, and provided evidence of the missing linkages between popular music and its folk origins. Indeed, the recording masters had long since been destroyed.]

The Anthology is accompanied by Smith's original booklet, with all of its curious runic trappings and extensive bibliography, and a large, LP-format, 68-page booklet, which augments each of Smith's track notations with more up-to-date information. It also has exploratory essays by Greil Marcus ("The Old, Weird America"), Jon Pankake, Luis Kemnitzer, and Nell Rosenberg, and a memoir from Folkways founder, Moses Asch. Rosenberg's excellent essay also shines considerable light on the sticky issue of who owned the recordings that made up the Anthology then and now. The sixth disc, Disc 3B, contains an enhanced CD ROM program whose computing requirements are minimal and that installs easily on your hard drive. It also opens up the wonderful character called Harry Smith that the newer booklet, which focuses on the music, only hints at. Smith was a painter, Native American archivist, field folklife recorder, filmmaker, poet/philosopher, and more. You begin to understand the kind of historical vision and immense genius that it took to assemble a collection as vital as the Anthology of American Folk Music. The Anthology ain't cheap. It'll set you back a good 85 clams ... but, they'll be 85 of the best clams you've ever parted with. Like we noted about The Soul Box above, you can just as easily throw that money away on Shun Mook stones, green pens, or over-the-top interconnects. Don't. Buy music.

Ska: The Third Wave, The Checkered Box Set (Beloved Recordings). When we toured the broad array of LA ska punks in Issue 69, we made brief mention of the heady New York ska scene, where Britain's The Toasters took root in 1984. I suppose that if ska's transplantation to the East Coast is its "third wave" -- after originating in Jamaica and migrating to England -- the LA scene probably deserves merit as the fourth. Regardless, Beloved's remarkable stable of bands continues to produce wave after wave of hummable, toe-tapping, guitar chunky dance music.

Each of the five discs focuses on a theme or style: straight ska, covers, instrumentals, punk crossovers, and swing/jump jive. There are many ska vets, like Mephiskapheles, Ruder Than You, The Toasters, The Scofflaws. But the set abounds with lesser known, but certainly not lesser, bands: The Porkers, Skavoovie and the Epitones, MU330, Loin Groin, and many, many more. Even the Cherry Poppin' Daddies, late of "Zoot Suit Riot" fame, turn up in roots guise with a blistering "Don Quixote" -- and it's not on the swing/jump jive disc.

Frankly, there isn't one bad cut among the 71 in the box. My favorites are the covers and jump jive discs. The covers, remember that ska started out as Jamaican mento covers of American '60s soul, aren't mere rehashes of chords and lyrics. Each of the bands absorbs the essence of the song and produces stunningly original arrangements. The Porkers' "Burnin' Love" rages with burbling hormones; the Skandalous All-Stars drolly shred Kiss's "Rock and Roll All Nite," while Ruder Than You cops "Pipeline" with the raucous "Misskaculation." Lite tunes get the devil's treatment: Undercover S.K.A.'s "Music to Watch Girls By," Heptet's "Inspector Gadget," and Insatiable's "Munster Cues" are a hoot. The pearls on this disc are Heptet's "Pennsylvania 6-5000" and Ruder Than You's outrageous, live "Paranoid" -- Black Sabbath never sounded so good. The swing/ jump jive disc rocks from beginning to end with a solid backbeat that even Ringo would admire. From Royal Crown Revue's sly "The Walkin' Blues" to their Stray Cat-tinged "Rise and Fall of the Great Mondello" to The Scofflaw's "Parish" (laced with a lovely chorus from "In the Mood"), the bands remind you where the jump jive revival got its impetus.

While I've given the short end to the other three discs in this set, they're every bit as good. You'll find sax players quoting Grieg, Benny Goodman, and Bill Haley in the middle of the same solo, the best melodic bass playing around these days, the tightest horn sections since Basie and Ellington, and wall-to-wall fun. Get it. Your significant other will thank you. Your children and grandchildren will thank you. You will be remembered as a great human being despite the fact you're an audiophile.

The Beatles Redux/Reductio: There are several recording artists whose labels endlessly repackage and churn their output. Sinatra (last Christmas I counted at least five box sets devoted exclusively to Ol' Blue Eyes), the whole Motown stable, The Beach Boys, The Byrds come to mind. The Fab Four are no less immune to posthumous greed. November 1998 marked the 30th anniversary of The Beatles, better known as The White Album. The original album contained an 8 x 10 color glossy of each of The Boys and a poster-sized insert with pop artist Richard Hamilton's photo collage on one side and the song lyrics on the other. Each front cover was individually numbered. In a sense, no two were alike. The original CD reissue did away with the numbering and reproduced the color photographs, lyrics, and chopped up photomontage in a standard booklet. To commemorate The Beatles' anniversary, Capitol has reissued the CDs in a compact version of the original packaging. Each album is individually numbered, and the color photos and poster have been faithfully reduced, er, reproduced ... uh, well, both.

I'm not one to second-guess record companies' motivations, so let's assume that the original album packaging is so coveted that Capitol is doing the ever-broadening hordes of Beatles fans a favor by giving everyone a chance to own a little slice of recording and packaging history. It probably did not dawn on them that these same hordes already own the original album, an unnumbered LP set, or the first generation CD reissue, so the notion of making a few quick millions as a happy by product of an "authentic replica" -- right down to the embossed album title -- probably neither occurred to them. Boy, are their stockholders ever in for a surprise, eh?

By the way, for those of you who care about the sound, it is indistinguishable from the original CD reissue. My hallowed LPs are so beat up that a comparison to them is unfair.

Historical Note: Three Degrees of Separation Dept. In Issue 73, Chris Hillman noted that he'd learned how to play mandolin from Scott Hambley, then sitting in for Roland White with the legendary LA bluegrass band, The Kentucky Colonels. The Anthology of American Folk Music contains a couple of ancient tunes performed by Bristol, Tennessee's The Stoneman Family, who started recording in 1927. The fiddler and founding member of the Kentucky Colonels was Scott Stoneman, son of Ernest "Pop" Stoneman, family patriarch.

E-mail: [e-mail]. Don't let the sun catch you crying ... -- KE