Bill Haley Rock Around The Clock

Any casual listener looking over this 132-track five-CD set would probably conclude that it was far more Bill Haley than they need bite off in one gulp - and they'd be right, as casual listeners. For the serious rock & roll enthusiast, as well as the hardcore Bill Haley fan, however, there's a wealth of worthwhile material to be found here, some of which will amaze even those fans: a dozen great songs and 55 or so more that are good, and another 20 that are fascinating mistakes, and that's a good average for an artist who is generally thought of as having generated just a handful of important records. What Haley had most of all was a distinctive sound - between the backbeat, the country boogie roots, and the R&B sources - that pretty much defined white rock & roll for almost its first two years (until Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins emerged in the spring of 1956); the first two CDs here offer that sound in abundance…

Haley's band fired a bow across the musical world, scoring rock & roll's first smash with "Rock Around the Clock".

The rating of this six-CD set is no joke - yes, Bill Haley was supposed to be an irrelevant artist during the 1960s, but he did, in fact, generate well over 100 good and far-better-than-decent sides that are contained in this set. No, there's nothing remotely as earth-shattering or important as his best work for Decca from 1954-1955, and even most hardcore fans of that material may find the cost of this set difficult to justify; but take it from someone who shelled out for this box, it's worth a LOT more than you'd ever guess without hearing it - Haley and his band still knew how to work a song, as demonstrated several dozen times on this set. The title is actually a bit misleading, since the sides that Haley recorded for Warner Bros. Records amount to less than a third of the contents of this box…