"We got the Louisiana boogie and the Delta blues/We got country swing and rockabilly, too/We got jazz, country western, and Chicago blues/It's the greatest music that you ever knew." Dave Alvin was writing about "American Music" in his song of the same name when he penned those lines, but while he would never be quite so arrogant as to say so himself, he could have been talking about his band, the Blasters, who used the song as the title track of their first album. While often lumped in with the L.A. rockabilly scene that rose up in the wake of punk rock, from the start the Blasters displayed a wide-ranging musical diversity that set them far apart from, say, Levi and the Rockats.
The 5 Royales are legendary, primarily in the sense that their legend grew over the years, as the status of what they achieved began to be realized. Like many trailblazing groups, the 5 Royales made music that wasn't fully appreciated at the time and is pigeonholed into the influential but not heard category. This makes their list of accomplishments seem academic – they pushed through gospel and doo wop, incorporating jump and urban blues and, eventually, rock & roll, paving the way toward the soul of the '60s. Led by guitarist/songwriter Lowman Pauling, the group was remarkably versatile, stretching the accepted limits of what a vocal group could do, particularly because Pauling's guitar and earthy, soulful songwriting ignored boundaries and let the group follow suit.
Five CD box set containing a quintet of their albums housed together in an attractive slipcase: Chicago Transit Authority (1969), Chicago II (1970), Chicago V (1972), Chicago VI (1973) and Chicago VII (1974). While Chicago are oft remembered as a Pop/Rock hit making machine, their musical roots were Jazz-oriented and this quintet of albums features the band blending their commercial sensibilities with their excellent Jazz/Rock musicianship
Bread released a total of five albums during their original lifetime, and these are all collected here. After a breakup, they did one additional reunion album, Lost Without Your Love, which was inferior to the original string, and which is not included….
The British Invasion was a phenomenon that occurred in the mid-1960s when rock and pop music acts from the United Kingdom,as well as other aspects of British culture, became popular in the United States, and significant to the rising "counterculture" on both sides of the Atlantic. Pop and rock groups such as The Beatles, The Dave Clark Five, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits and The Whowere at the forefront of the invasion