Music

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The Listening Post: February 2010

Tunes for the February chill:

  • Them Crooked Vultures—Them Crooked Vultures. What goes around comes around, and we seem to be going back to the era of the “supergroup,” the preposterously named aggregation of stars from various bands pitching together to create a new project. Not since the days of Cream and Blind Faith have the airwaves seen so many of these combos. It was kicked off by a combination of Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine (Audioslave), furthered by the Guns/Pilots/Nails combo of Velvet Revolver, and brought to an art form by Jack White (The Raconteurs, The Dead Weather). The most recent salvo is this combination of Queens Of The Stone Age, Nirvana/Foo Fighters, and Led Zeppelin. Them Crooked Vultures had a lot of buzz around them last year after an appearance at Austin’s South By Southwest festival and hopes were high for the debut album. Unfortunately, the album itself rarely rises to the hype. For starters, drummer Dave Grohl is particularly understated throughout, and while bassist John Paul Jones does his usual exemplary bass and keyboard work, he is all too frequently buried under the guitar onslaught of Josh Homme. Considering the star power of Grohl and Jones (the two most well-known members of the group), Them Crooked Vultures sounds a lot like a good record by Queens Of The Stone Age. Homme is unquestionably the dominant force here and the record has the good parts and the weak parts of any QOTSA album. There are some great riff rockers, like the four-song combination that opens the album: “No One Loves Me & Neither Do I,” the fantastic “Mind Eraser” and “New Fang,” and “Dead End Friends.” The brilliantly-titled “Caligulove” is a ferocious rocker, and “Gunman” rides a Tyrannosaurus-sized riff straight into your brain. But there are also plodding, dull riff rockers like “Elephants,” and meandering psychedelic mood pieces like “Interlude With Ludes.” Most of the rest resides somewhere between these two extremes: they’re good, but not great and not particularly memorable. The songs that work best are the ones that have melodies to go with the riffs, and unfortunately nearly half of the album lacks anything approaching memorable melodies. Grade: B-
  • Sailor—The Steve Miller Band. Several years before he was joking, smoking, and midnight toking, and making AM radio safe for smooth guitar rock, Steve Miller was one of the best and brightest stars to emerge from the San Francisco rock scene. Some of the early Steve Miller songs have survived, most notably “Living In The U.S.A.” and “Space Cowboy,” but the early albums are well worth hearing in their entirety. They are the best work of Miller’s long career. While Sailor doesn’t quite rise to the level of the album that followed it (Brave New World), it’s still a wonderful album. The opening “Song For Our Ancestors” is the only drag on the album: a five-minute instrumental that is comprised of the sounds of foghorns and a mournful organ sound. And yet…it works. While it doesn’t stand on its own as a song, it provides a nice mood setting for the album that follows, especially the gorgeous “Dear Mary” with it’s sleepy rhythm, plaintive vocal and low trumpets trilling in the back of the mix. But Miller at this point was not the pop rocker he became. “My Friend” is a terrific mid-tempo rocker, and signifies the beginning of when this album starts to pick up speed. The classic “Living In The U.S.A” revs the engine faster before Miller steps back with “Quicksilver Girl.” The country-tinged blues “Lucky Man,” and the Jimmy Reed cover “You’re So Fine” bring Miller back to his blues roots. While the cover of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster Of Love” is almost a throwaway, breaking down into laughter and incoherence less than a minute and a half into the song, it remains a Miller classic (largely due to the line in the huge hit “The Joker”: “Some call me the gangster of love.”) The album ends with a couple of Boz Scaggs-penned rockers, “Overdrive” and “Dime-A-Dance Romance,” and despite the fact that the opening and closing numbers of the album could not be more dissimilar, the album represents a coherent vision from start to finish. I love Steve Miller’s 1970s hits, but for me the real Steve Miller Band classics came out of the late Sixties. This album is one of them and deserves to be known for more than “Living In the U.S.A” and “Gangster Of Love.” Grade: A
  • Psychedelic Lollipop—The Blues Magoos. Generally speaking, it’s best to avoid full-length LPs from one-hit wonders. Especially one-hit wonders from the garage rock/psychedelic Sixties. The Music Machine’s Turn On is a case in point: a brilliant single and a decent album with several filler songs. So it’s a relief to say that the Blues Magoos’ Psychedelic Lollipop is a rough gem of an album. The kickoff of “We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet” is a hard act to follow; the song is rightly considered a garage rock classic. Somewhat surprisingly, the rest of the album sounds fresh. There isn’t a lot of original songwriting on the album, but the covers have been worked over enough so that they bear the stamp of the band. In this sense, it’s akin to The Who Sing My Generation (though not as good). “Tobacco Road” becomes an intense freakout, “Queen Of My Nights” is a really solid ballad, the band does a ? And the Mysterians-style take on James Brown’s “I’ll Go Crazy,” and the version of “Worried Life Blues” sounds like a cross between a great bar band and The Doors. Best of all are “Gotta Get Away” and “She’s Coming Home” which are as good as “We Ain’t Got Nothing Yet.” I wouldn’t go so far as to call the album a lost classic, but it’s definitely a work of a much higher order than what most of their garage band peers were turning out: cohesive, well-played, well-sung, and consistent. Grade: B+
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The Day The Music Died

It was 51 years ago today that a plane crash took the life of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. Forever memorialized by Don McLean’s “American Pie” as “The Day The Music Died,” this was the first and biggest tragedy in the young life of rock ‘n’ roll music.

We’ll never know what would have happened with Valens. He was a promising newcomer, only 17 years old, with a fine voice. He wrote two great songs, “Donna” and “Come On, Let’s Go” and made “La Bamba” into a classic rock song. Whether he would have done anything else is a question that will never be answered. He’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but I think that has much more to do with his death and with the fact that he was the first Hispanic rock ‘n’ roller. Certainly his very slight output isn’t what got him through the door.

The Big Bopper, J.P. Richardson is an immortal for his classic novelty rock tune, “Chantilly Lace” and because he was on board the plane that snowy February night. His legacy in rock music is that of any one-hit wonder, but 51 years later, that one hit can still bring a smile to your face which is a whole lot more than most one-hit wonders can claim.

The great loss for music that night was Buddy Holly. It’s easy to forget now just how astounding Holly’s talent was. A white rocker who wrote his own songs and played lead guitar in his band was a sight to behold in 1959. The entire Crickets lineup of just guitars, bass, and drums set the template for the rock music of the Sixties. He was the first rocker to doubletrack his vocals (a trick later used by the Beatles before it became common). He was the first to put strings on a “rock” record. Country, ballads, charging rockers…Buddy Holly did it all and recorded and released a string of classic rock songs. Just look at the names and marvel at the talent: “That’ll Be The Day,” “Peggy Sue,” “Rave On,” “Heartbeat,” “Not Fade Away,” “Words Of Love,” “Maybe Baby,” “Everyday,” “Well, All Right,” “It’s So Easy”…and those are just some of the ones he wrote or co-wrote. Add in some that he didn’t write but made his own like “Oh, Boy!” and “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” and you’re talking about enough classics to fill a lengthy career.

Buddy Holly’s career was 18 months long. What he did in that time is simply staggering.

Add in Elvis’s stint in the Army, Little Richard’s discovery of religion, Jerry Lee Lewis’s scandalous marriage…and rock ‘n’ roll as a music form limped into the Sixties on its last legs. The early Sixties saw much great music, but only some of it could really be called “rock ‘n’ roll.” When the Beatles arrived they revitalized the form but at the same time they drove the final nail into the coffin. Rock ‘n’ roll as a music to dance to at the hop was dead, reinvented as heavier, headier “rock” music. Music to listen to, not dance to.

Rock ‘n’ roll music, the early primitive howling animal that burst out of its cage and into the popular consciousness with the drum snap that started “Rock Around The Clock,” may not have died with Buddy Holly, but it suffered a mortal blow. The music of the Sixties would build on the work done by Holly, Presley, Berry, et al, and expand it into dozens of different directions, some great, some not so great. Soon the Fifties rock ‘n’ rollers would sound tame and quaint in comparison to the Jefferson Airplanes, the Doors, the Led Zeppelins, and the Nirvanas of the world, and that’s really too bad.

The Sixties may or may not be the Golden Age of Rock Music depending on your personal preference, but I don’t think there’s any denying that the Fifties remain the Golden Age of Rock ‘N’ Roll.

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The Listening Post: December 2009

Rocking the Pod last month:

  • Before The Frost…Until The Freeze—The Black Crowes. When The Black Crowes burst onto the scene in 1990, their ambition was clear. They were dead set on reviving a classic rock sound best exemplified by bands like Faces and The Rolling Stones. The music was bluesy without being blues, soulful without being soul. Over the years they’ve followed that path with some great success (their soul-infused second album, The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion) and some real clunkers (the Zeppelin-isms of the unfortunate Lions). What the Crowes were never able to really convey was any sort of real authenticity. They always sounded like the guys who got their blues influences from bands like the Stones and Aerosmith. On Before The Frost, it sounds like the Crowes have stepped back and started listening not just to Muddy and The Wolf, but also to the old American folk music. It’s still a great big rock record, recorded mostly live in Levon Helms’s barn, but the Crowes have never sounded more like a part of the American canon of popular music. From the Middle Eastern-infused semi-instrumental “Aimless Peacock” that opens the LP, through the rock balladry of the the closing “The Last Place That Love Lives” this is a raw, rootsy album. There are plenty of guitar hero moves from Luther Dickinson (“Been A Long Time” “And The Band Played On”) mixed in with folk and country songs that sound like they could be covers of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music (“The Garden Gate,” “Appaloosa,” “Shine Along,” “Roll Old Jeremiah”). There are gentle, soulful ballads (“Lady Of Avenue A”), Stones-y disco (“I Ain’t Hiding” which starts like “Miss You” but ends in a ferocious jam), and country blues (“A Train Still Makes A Lonely Sound”). Through it all Chris Robinson’s vocals have never sounded better and the Crowes have never provided a more sympathetic backdrop. This was released as “Before The Frost” with a free download of “Until The Freeze” if you bought the regular CD. However, they also released the two combined with a different running order as a double LP, and that’s the version I think works best because the couple of clunkers that do show up (“The Last Place That Love Lives,” the generic “Kept My Soul”) are lost in the midst of so much material, where they would stand out more on shorter releases. Grade: A-
  • Scraps At Midnight—Mark Lanegan. At the current time, Jack White is getting a lot of well-deserved press for his modernistic, garage rock recasting of the blues. But White’s not the only one out there who is working in this field. Since the demise of the great Screaming Trees, singer Mark Lanegan has been quietly recording some of the darkest, scariest blues records this side of the Mississippi Delta. The fact that the music itself doesn’t conform to standard blues tropes is testament to his incredible talent. Scraps At Midnight is the sound of rehab, of coming down from your high and looking your demons square in the eye. All of the pain, desolation, and fear of the blues can be heard in these sparse, mostly acoustic songs. From the opening track (“Hospital Roll Call” where the only lyric is a horrifying repeated intonation of the word “sixteen”—allegedly Lanegan’s rehab room number) through the winding, Trees-ish psychedelia of the closer “Because Of This,” Lanegan takes the listener on a guided tour of Hell. It’s a harrowing listen, and not at all instantly likable. Like Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night or John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, this isn’t an album to play when lounging by the pool at a family barbecue. Also like those albums, it reveals it’s greatness only with repeated plays. If you’re up for the ride, a peek into the heart of darkness, then this is modern blues that pays off on the effort. Grade: B+
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The Rolling Stones: Beggars Banquet

Beggars Banquet

After the confusion and grappling for identity shown by Their Satanic Majesties Request, it was crucial for the Rolling Stones to find themselves. They had gone through being a blues band, an R&B band, a soul band, a pop band, and a psychedelic band, all with varying degrees of success. But with Beggars Banquet, the Stones found their real identity: they would take all the blues and country elements that they loved and synthesize them into a brand of bluesy rock and roll the likes of which hadn’t really been heard before.

The transformation started with a single, but what a single it was. “Jumping Jack Flash” tweaked the riff of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and added a myth-making blues rock lyric (“I was born in a crossfire hurricane/And I howled at my ma in the driving rain” is easily as good as anything Muddy Waters came up with) to define the sound of the Rolling Stones once and for all. Now, over 40 years later, it remains the definitive Stones song, if not the best.

The B-side was a holdover from the Majesties sessions, but far superior to almost everything on that album. “Child Of The Moon” was tinged with holdover psychedelia, but played tougher than anything except “2000 Light Years From Home.”

As good as the single was, it was just a foretaste of the album that followed. Beggars Banquet is an anomaly among Stones albums. It is a mostly acoustic album, with only snatches of snarling electric guitar. Brian Jones, who played so well on the previous albums, was a drug casualty at this point. He managed to rouse himself enough to contribute the masterful slide guitar on “No Expectations,” but is largely absent from the rest of the album. In practical terms, this meant that the experimentation Jones loved and the diverse instrumentation he had brought to the albums starting with Aftermath, was gone. The new sound was stripped down, lean, and ferocious.

Before its release, the album was already marked with controversy. The cover desired by the Stones featured a graffiti-covered toilet stall. The record company refused to release this cover, substituting a simple white cover with an elegant script, as if it was an invitation. Normally, I tend to side with the artist, but the record company-approved cover is beautiful and proper, while the Stones’ choice for the cover was simply tacky. Unfortunately, with the release of CDs, the Stones’ original cover replaced the “invitation” cover. Too bad.

If “Jumping Jack Flash” was myth-making from Mick Jagger, the myth became set in stone with the opening track, “Sympathy For The Devil.” Played as a samba, with heavy use of light percussion (congas, tablas, maracas), Jagger assumes the persona of Satan himself, casting himself as a major player in the long parade of history, from the Russian Revolution through the World Wars and up to the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy, all while the demonic chorus chants “woo hoo” behind him as if part of an invocation. Keith throws in a harsh, discordant guitar solo that seems pasted together from disjointed licks while Jagger scats and screams like a tribal shaman. Forty years has blunted the impact of the song, but I can still remember where I was when I first heard it and the mind-blowing impact it had on me.

And yet, “Sympathy For The Devil” is completely atypical of the songs on Beggars. The stunningly gorgeous “No Expectations” follows the voodoo ritual of "Devil." The slide guitar is one of the only things added to the album by Brian Jones, but it is among the finest examples of slide guitar in the long history of rock music. Over a soft acoustic backing, Jones’s slide cries real tears and adds a depth of feeling to Jagger’s brilliant lyrics of a love gone wrong. Bill Wyman comes close to stealing the show with his understated bass, on prominent display in the perfect mix, and session man extraordinaire Nicky Hopkins contributes a stately piano solo. “No Expectations” is possibly the finest ballad in the Stones discography, and one of the finest ballads in rock’s history. It is a new kind of acoustic blues, rooted in the past but sounding completely contemporary.

From the new blues to the new country, “Dear Doctor” provides some much-needed laughs after the sinister “Sympathy” and the heartbreaking “Expectations.” Over a surprisingly good, pure country and western backing track, Jagger camps up the story of a young man being forced into a wedding with a “bow-legged sow.” It’s nearly an irresistable sing along, as Keith proves by chiming in on prominent backing vocals at seemingly random intervals. The music is excellent, but the song itself is still somewhat of a parody of country music, as if the Stones were uncomfortable expressing their love for such an “unhip” style of music (in British rock circles, at least), so they compensated by performing the song in a jokey fashion. Whatever the level of seriousness, the song works perfectly as both parody and country song, and the lyrics are clever and funny without ever turning into the punch line of a joke.

The Stones returned again to the acoustic blues with “Parachute Woman,” a more straightforward 12-bar blues than “No Expectations.” Jagger plays a haunting harmonica at the fade out. The song is, if anything, the “weak spot” on Beggars, if one exists. As weak spots go it’s terrific, a loping acoustic blues with unusual, sexually charged lyrics (“Parachute woman/Land on me tonight”).

Side one concludes with “Jigsaw Puzzle,” which is nearly as long as the epic “Sympathy For The Devil.” Once again acoustic guitars provide the main riff, with overdubbed slide (this time by Keith). The blues here is once again the “new” blues the Stones were crafting. The song avoids becoming a standard blues song on the strength of the lyric, a lengthy dissertation in the style of Bob Dylan’s character studies. Over Bill Wyman’s prominent bass, Charlie’s rock steady backbeat, Nicky Hopkins’ piano chords, and Keith’s acoustic riffing and stinging slide runs, Jagger sings about the outcasts of the world, from the tramp on the doorstep to the bishop’s daughter to the “family man” who is also a ruthless gangster. Jagger observes these characters from a disinterested, jaded perspective, waiting patiently for some revelation that will help it all make sense. The persona of the Stones is set in this song, as Jagger turns his lyrical attention to the band itself, defining them just as much as the film A Hard Day’s Night defined the Beatles for their fans. “Oh the singer he looks angry/At being thrown to the lions,” sings Jagger, likely remembering his recent drug bust and subsequent prosecution. “And the bass player he looks nervous/About the girls outside/And the drummer he’s so shattered/ Trying to keep on time/And the guitar players look damaged/They been outcasts all their lives.” The Stones encapsulated in a single verse: notorious ladies’ man Wyman, solid backbeat machine Watts, and wasted guitarists. It is the lyrics and Jagger’s performance of them that makes this song so extraordinary, with much credit going to Wyman’s rumbling bass and Richards’s stinging leads.

Side two begins with the furious acoustic strumming of “Street Fighting Man,” inspired by a peace march in London that turned violent. The song is so loud and propulsive it’s difficult to believe that it’s not a full-on electric guitar assault, but the primary riff is played by acoustic guitars that are pushed way into the red. With Watts playing an elemental drum pattern, really little more than just holding the beat steady, and Wyman once again stepping up and playing extraordinary bass guitar, Jagger sings one of the defining rock lyrics of 1968. In a dreadful year of war, violence, riots, assassinations, Jagger’s “Summer’s here and the time is right/For fighting in the street, boys” was a call to arms while the following lyric was a more jaded “What can a poor boy do/But sing in a rock and roll band?” Jones even contributes a few odd sitar drones, but they’re largely buried under that rocket-fuelled rhythm.

For the first time since December’s Children, the Stones included a cover song as the followup to “Street Fighting Man.” Unlike their earlier cover choices of Chuck Berry, fifties rock and roll and blues, and contemporary soul, the Stones dug back to the 1920s country blues for the Reverend Robert Wilkins’s musical retelling of the Bible story, “Prodigal Son.” The Stones play it straight, with Keith playing beautiful acoustic guitar and Jagger singing in a slurred voice that suits the music perfectly. It’s among the best Stones cover songs ever, sounding like a loose jam in the basement.

Considering that one of the obsessions of the Rolling Stones from even their earliest days was sex, Beggars Banquet is largely a sex-free zone. There’s the fun wordplay of “Parachute Woman,” and then the absolutely salacious raunch of “Stray Cat Blues.” Jagger sounds more sinister on this song, being himself, than he does playing the Devil on “Sympathy.” “I can see that you’re just 15 years old/But I don’t want your I.D.” sings Jagger, promising his nubile young friend that there will be “a feast upstairs.” Even as the girl promises to be a wild cat, right down to scratching and biting, Jagger one-ups the ante: “You say you got a friend/That she’s wilder than you/Why don’t you bring her upstairs?/If she’s so wild, she can join in, too.” Keith plays wild electric guitar leads over Watts’s rolling drums before the song ends with an extended jam.

After the sexual fury of “Stray Cat Blues,” the acoustic blues of “Factory Girl,” with its Dave Mason-played Mellotron simulating a wildly strummed mandolin, and fiddle played by Family and future Blind Faith bassist Ric Grech, comes almost as a relief. The sister song of “Parachute Woman,” there is a down-home country feel to the song, but an almost Celtic underpinning. The congas (played by Rocky Dijon) and tabla (played by Charlie Watts) add a distinctly un-country sound to the background, but it all works beautifully. Jagger’s lyric of waiting for his blue-collar lover to get home is the icing on the cake.

Which brings the listener to the conclusion. A soft acoustic guitar introduces Keith Richards on lead vocal for the first verse before Jagger takes over. “Salt Of The Earth” is a classic workingman’s drinking song on first listen, but really is about how powerless the “common people” really are. Jagger’s refrain “When I search a faceless crowd/A swirling mass of grey and black and white/They don’t look real to me/In fact, they look so strange” seems to dilute the rousing verses until you listen more closely. While the verses seem to salute the “salt of the earth” with a series of toasts, prayers, and thoughts, the reality is quite different.

The answer lies in the verse “Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter/His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows/And a parade of the gray-suited grafters/A choice of cancer or polio.” Jagger will raise a glass to the hard-working people and drink a toast to the uncounted heads, but his real statement here is that the people no longer have power over their own lives, and that politics has failed (“they need leaders but get gamblers instead”). As the album closer, “Salt of the Earth” is breathtaking in its construction. The acoustic blues are there, but so is a gospel chorus, and a rave up finale that suggests that maybe there’s life in the people yet.

Beggars Banquet, released the same day at the Beatles’ White Album, was the peak of 1960s Rolling Stones. It marked the beginning of a five-year stretch where the Stones could seemingly do no wrong in the recording studio. It remains one of the best Stones albums ever, if not the best. It remains one of the greatest albums in the history of rock music.

Grade: A+

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Children Of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The Second Psychedelic Era, 1976-1995

Children Of Nuggets

I love Rhino Records. The packages the good folks at Rhino put together are beautiful to behold, and provide great listening experiences. Their crowning glory are the Nuggets compilations. The first, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 compiled the original Lenny Kaye two-record set Nuggets onto one disc, and then added three additional discs of mostly American garage rock. The box set was a goldmine of one- and two-hit wonders from the 1960s. It was a fascinating listen from the first song (the Electric Prunes’ classic “I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night”) through the last (“Blues’ Theme” by Davie Allan and The Arrows—who??). The box was a cornucopia of kids playing in garages with fuzztone guitars, three chords, and one shining moment of inspiration. This box set was followed by Nuggets, Vol. 2: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire & Beyond, four more fully-packed CDs pulling the same sort of one- and two-hit garage rockers from all over the globe, from Australia’s Easybeats to Brazil’s Os Mutantes. Far from scraping the bottom of the barrel, this second box was, if anything, better than the first.

Then came Children Of Nuggets. While the title boasts the songs as coming from the “second psychedelic era” the fact is that there was no second psychedelic era. What this box set includes are the bands who drew some or all of their influence from the bands compiled on the first two box sets. These are the acts who grew up listening to the original Nuggets album, and bands like The Remains, The Sonics, and The Standells.

Overall, the album is a great collection. The main difference between this box and the two preceding volumes is that the bands on the first two collections were earnestly forging their own path. There was no real psychedelic garage rock before them. On Children of Nuggets, we have the bands who are following the trailblazers.

Because this is second-generation, most of the bands here can be boiled down to one of three categories.

The first of these groups are the imitators. These are the bands who are trying their best to copy the sound and feel of the original garage rockers. Farfisa organs, fuzztone guitars, phased vocals, psychedelic subject matter…all the elements are there. Sometimes these bands succeed. Their mimicry is so adept that the song sounds like a lost classic from 1967, like The Last’s “She Don’t Know Why I’m Here” or The Pandoras’ “It’s About Time.” This would also include The Dukes of Stratosphear, the nom de psych of XTC. These are also the bands most likely to fail. Vibrasonics’s “Kingsley J” sounds like a song from 1967, but it practically screams out “imitation.” It’s not a bad song, but it sounds like a copy of something better and more original.

The second group contains the bands who were heavily influenced by the garage rockers, but who mix the primitive sound with their own take on it. These are the bands that assume many of the trappings of garage rock, but don’t sound like they’re imitating anyone. Here you’ve got odd surf bands like The Untamed Youth and The Mummies, keyboard-centric bands like the great Lyres, and jangly guitar rockers like The Funseekers.

The third group is the best. These are the bands who capture the spirit of the garage rockers but who don’t feel bound to imitate the sound. Unsurprisingly, this is the group that features the most “famous” names: The Posies, Primal Scream, The Bangles, Teenage Fanclub, The Church, Julian Cope, The dB’s, The Smithereens, Hoodoo Gurus, Screaming Trees, The Plimsouls, The Fleshtones—all common names for those who listened to “college radio” in the 1980s.

Whatever groups the bands belonged to, the bottom line is the quality of the songs. Children of Nuggets is not as consistently great as Nuggets, Vol. 2, and it seems like there was some sort of desire to put a couple of instantly recognizable “hits” on it (this was also done on the first Nuggets box). Still, the quality of the songs is pretty consistently great. There are a few real dogs here (“New Kind Of Kick” by The Cramps sounds timid compared to the Swingin’ Neckbreakers’s ferocious, similarly-themed “I Live For Buzz,” Revolving Paint Dream’s “Flowers In The Sky” goes nowhere, “Psycko [Themes From Psycho and Vertigo]” is a cheesy surf-style instrumental by Laika and The Cosmonauts, The Unknowns are featured with the annoying “Not My Memory,” and Plasticland’s “Mink Dress” is a one-note idea, and not a good idea). These dogs are more than compensated for by the truly great songs (“Help You Ann” by Lyres, the early Bangles gem “The Real World,” “We’re Living In Violent Times” by the Barracudas, the power pop gem “The Trains,” from The Nashville Ramblers, “There Must Be A Better Life” from Biff, Bang, Pow!, “I May Hate You Sometimes” from The Posies, Hoodoo Gurus’s “I Want You Back,” the Godfathers’s “This Damn Nation,” “Everyday Things” by The Plimsouls, The Soft Boys’ classic “I Wanna Destroy You,” and “Ahead of My Time” by The Droogs—and that’s just the great songs from the first half of the box.

The good news is that most of the rest of the songs are closer to being great than they are to being dogs. It is these very good songs that make up the bulk of the four discs. Out of 100 songs, more than 90% run the range from good to great, with the vast majority of those falling solidly in the very good to great category.

Children Of Nuggets is also an important history lesson. Rock radio was arguably at its nadir in the 1980s. It’s easy to forget now that hugely famous bands like R.E.M. toiled in obscurity for most of the 1980s, and even U2 were little more than a cult act until their fourth album. At a time when commercial rock radio was dominated by bands like Mr. Mister, Simple Minds, and The Hooters, it was college radio that provided a different venue and gave play to bands like the ones collected here. Alternative rock exploded into the mainstream in the early 1990s. Children Of Nuggets shows what it was like in the underground before Nirvana.

Grade: A