The Definitive Garge Beat

For years, the Garage Beat ‘66 series spanned the U.S. and Canada, with each volume meticulously assembled from the original source tapes and with full participation of many of the artists. That means this stuff has never sounded so wonderful! Garage Beat ‘66 pushes its way onto the digital scene with a legion of rail-thin kids wielding obnoxiously loud guitars! The original army of teenage garage bands, the ones who made life worth living in the ‘60s and the heroic subjects of Sundazed’s long running series, has made their presence known. It’s the most far-reaching, legit, vintage garage-rock series ever, and we’ve culled from the piles of tape boxes a brief 49 track introduction to GB ‘66’s bruisingly upbeat screamers, longhaired R&B lunacy, and an unhealthy dose of some of the darkest, most disturbingly intense records from the summer of hate.

This two-CD, 56-song anthology is an excellent value even at an import price. It contains all their Australian hits, lots of album tracks, and some rarities that don't show up very often, like the 1965 B-side "The Old Oak Tree."…

This is one of nearly a dozen anthologies of Manfred Mann's music that cover their EMI period, and the 25 songs here make it the biggest of them. Additionally, there is an 11-minute interview with the band here, dating from December of 1964, that has never before appeared on record in the United States. The hits are all here, sometimes in more than one version, along with a cross-section of album tracks and B-sides, and it all sounds very good, though EMI's recent 24-bit remasterings of the band's original British LPs are much more impressive. But this CD misses being "definitive" because it leaves out some key B-sides to their early singles and overlooks the contents of several top-selling British EPs. The truth be told, no single CD, even one 73 minutes long, would be adequate to the task of defining this group's history or sound, even just covering the years 1963-66.

All of their U.K. and U.S. hits are included on this compilation. Highlights are "You're No Good," "Hippy Hippy Shake," and their fine (pre-Who) cover of Johnny Kidd's "Shakin' All Over," though even for the Anglophile, about half of this CD is forgettable, especially the dreary post-1966 stuff. This anthology includes several non-LP/rare singles and unreleased songs.

One strongly suspects that the existence of this five-CD box, in tandem with a handful of other packages of this type, was largely responsible for getting Paul McCartney (and others) to take a serious look at what was in EMI's vaults, resulting in the release of the Beatles' Anthology series. In 1993, however, this was the only game in town: 124 choice outtakes, live concert tracks, demos, overdub sessions, and rehearsals covering the group's known recordings from 1958 through 1970 – it's essentially a best-of the Beatles' unauthorized output, from what were then the best-known sources of every track represented…