Beat Book

In the early '70s, the India Tobacco Company sponsored an annual "All-India Simla Beat Contest." These events sparked compilations of Indian rock bands, Simla Beat 70 and Simla Beat 71, that have been combined into one package on this double-CD reissue. Very, very little Indian rock from this era has been heard in the West, and the sounds are both surprising and, in some ways, disappointing. Surprising in that it's uncanny how much this sounds like the garage bands that could have been playing in any country, although it actually sounds more like bands from Europe and South America that spoke English as a second language than it does like American or British groups. Surprising, also, in that it sounds much more like 1965-1968 rock than it does like early '70s rock, although that's understandable given that it can take years for Western trends make their impact on the other side of the globe.

The first of a duo of "two-fer" collections of Manfred Mann's earliest work from 1964 and 1965 oddly combines their first and third American albums onto a single disc. Although there aren't any extras added onto these straight 2001 reissues (except for replications of the original cheesy notes), the crisply remastered sound is in pristine stereo. As a cross between the jazzy style of the Zombies, the ragged R&B of Them, and the recycled American blues of the Pretty Things and Yardbirds, Manfred Mann hit a lot of diverse bases. Covering songs from Burt Bacharach, Muddy Waters, Goffin, King, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Bo Diddley, Joe South, and even early Bob Dylan, the band cut a wide musical swath.

Randy Haspel was a 16-year-old kid whose band the Radiants played dances and frat parties in Memphis, TN when one day, a fan at a show offered to introduce the band to his father. The fan was Knox Phillips, and his father, Sam Phillips, happened to run Sun Records, the legendary independent label that gave the world Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and many other trailblazing acts. Randy & the Radiants recorded for Sun during the label's waning days in the mid-'60s, with Sam Phillips producing most of their sessions, and Memphis Beat, which collects two dozen of the band's Sun sides, documents a curious time and place where the influences of the British Invasion and the garage rock explosion were being felt at the house that rockabilly built…

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