Big Boss Man

It slipped out of a Mississippi of hot biscuits, genteel table manners and working-class sense, suddenly overturned by a grave sinning and suicide. Carried on an evening breeze of strings and a supple, foreboding voice like sensually charged breath, “Ode to Bilie Joe”—Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 debut as a singer-songwriter and a Number One single for three weeks in the late Summer of Love—was the most psychedelic record of that year not from San Francisco or London, as if Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Brian Wilson had conspired to make a country-rock Pet Sounds. Except Gentry, just 23 when she wrote the song, got there first, in miniature.

Since The King of Rock 'n' Roll was the complete '50s masters, it was easy to assume that its five-disc '60s sequel, From Nashville to Memphis: The Essential 60's Masters, rounded up all the masters from that decade, which is simply not the case. The producers deliberately avoided the soundtracks to Elvis' movies, which perhaps makes sense, given that they are roundly and rightly disparaged as Presley's low point, which then opened the doors to presenting just what they judged as the best non-soundtrack recordings he made during the '60s. They also disregarded the gospel recordings, saving them for the double-disc 1994 collection Amazing Grace: His Greatest Gospel Songs, leaving this as an overview of the best of his pop and rock material of the '60s, all recorded after he got back from the army…

4CD box set celebrating the new post-Jam era and the mod scene as it progressed after their break up. 92 tracks showing the scene as an underground network and an influence on the mainstream music scene. With rarities on CD for the first time including singles by Wipeout, The Playn Jayn and Steve Cradock’s first band The Boys.

This 52-disc (no, that is not a typo) comp, ABC of the Blues: The Ultimate Collection from the Delta to the Big Cities, may just indeed live up to its name. There are 98 artists represented , performing 1,040 tracks. The music begins at the beginning (though the set is not sequenced chronologically) with Charlie Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson, and moves all the way through the vintage Chicago years of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, with stops along the way in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, New York, and all points in between. Certainly, some of these artists are considered more rhythm & blues than purely blues artists: the inclusion of music by Johnny Otis, Wynonie Harris, Bo Diddley, and others makes that clear…

MONO is how most listeners first heard Elvis in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was the predominant audio format. Until 1968, each Elvis album was given a unique MONO and STEREO mix, but Elvis always regarded the MONO mix as primary. This was also true for singles. Up until affordable home STEREO systems in the late 1960s, the record industry always regarded STEREO as secondary, going back to its debut in the late 1950s. MONO singles, EPs and LPs were the standard for retail and radio.

In several respects, this is a very strange album, though the music isn't strange at all and is in fact quite typical vintage Jimmy Reed. First, despite what the title might lead you to believe, this is not a live recording; all 23 of the tracks were done in the studio. Not only that, they weren't even performed at New York's famed venue Carnegie Hall, although producer Calvin Carter would later claim they were; instead, everything was cut elsewhere.
According to Pete Welding's notes to the record in the year (1961) the double LP was first issued, one-half is devoted to "recreations of some of Jimmy's most celebrated and biggest-selling recordings," while "the second LP here is Jimmy's celebratory recreation of his highly successful appearance at august Carnegie Hall this past May"…