The Tokens

The Tokens are generally thought of as the vocal group who brought their "Lion Sleeps Tonight" hit to yet another generation through the success of The Lion King. But what we have here is the great lost Tokens album, recorded in 1968 and promptly turned down by Warner Bros…

The Ultimate Christmas Album, Vol. 5 collects more pop and rock holiday tunes, this time venturing further into the '70s and '80s with songs like Paul McCartney & Wings' "Wonderful Christmastime," Hall & Oates' "Jingle Bell Rock," and Barry Manilow's "It's Just Another New Year's Eve." The collection still features traditional pop chestnuts, including Dean Martin's "A Marshmallow World," Johnny Mathis' "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)," and Andy Williams' "Sleigh Ride," but this volume's overall feel is more contemporary than classic. Other highlights include Manhattan Transfer's "A Christmas Love Song," the Waitresses' "Christmas Wrapping," the Tokens' "Little Drummer Boy," and the Jackson 5's "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." If The Ultimate Christmas Album, Vol. 5 isn't necessarily the most coherent volume in the series, it's certainly one of the most interesting.

The Happenings are best-known for their hit single "See You in September," which is a sunny slice of sunshine pop featuring happy, bouncy vocals and intricate harmonies reminiscent of great white doo wop groups like the Four Seasons and the Tokens, who were not-so-coincidentally the Happenings' mentors and producers. Collectables has reissued both of the Happenings' records on one disc: 1966's The Happenings and 1967's Psycle. Both discs feature the stunning vocal gymnastics of their hit single and their updated doo wop sound coated with an easy listening gloss of strings on a not-very-thick Wall of Sound. Most of the songs on their debut were written by the members of the Tokens and are not bad but not that memorable, as they follow the formula of their hit but pale in comparison. An exception to this is the strange "You're in a Bad Way," which is a spooky track filled with death-related imagery that sports a surprisingly funky backbeat.

The Happenings, the '60s vocal group known for their updated, four-part harmony arrangements of pop standards, scored a series of hits, starting in the summer of 1966 with their Top Ten revival of the Tempos' 1959 Top 40 hit "See You in September." The Happenings recorded for fellow vocal group the Tokens' label, B.T. Puppy Records. In the summer of 1968, after they had placed eight singles in the Hot 100, B.T. Puppy issued the 12-track LP Golden Hits!, which collected those eight hits – "See You in September" and the group's other Top Ten, "I Got Rhythm"; the Top 20 hits "Go Away Little Girl" and "My Mammy"; and the chart entries "Goodnight My Love," "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," "Music Music Music," and "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do" – as well as three non-charting singles, "Girl on a Swing," "Randy," and "Sealed With a Kiss," and a previously unreleased revival of "Tea for Two."

In the late 1950s, the Doo Wop era began in a small subway arcade shop located beneath the Walgreen's Drug Store at Broadway and 42nd Street in New York City. Jerry Greene, a young teenager from Brooklyn, would travel to Times Square in search of records he heard on the Alan Freed radio show. One of his favorite stops was a costume jewelry store that strangely enough, also sold records - twenty for a dollar.

Where previous installments of Nuggets concentrated on singles, Hallucinations is a true excavation of the vaults, picking overlooked album tracks and neglected singles from a cornucopia of WEA-owned labels, including Warner Bros., Cotillion, Jubilee, Valiant, Reprise, and Atco. While the focus is on acts that released a single or forgotten album, there are a handful of recognizable names – the Association, Kim Fowley, the Electric Prunes, the Bonniwell Music Machine, the Tokens, the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – and in the Monkees' "Porpoise Song," there's even a genuine hit.

By mid-1968 there was a growing consensus that something had gone horribly wrong with the American dream. The nation's youth had loudly made their feelings clear, but now the older, pre-Beatles generations began to look at the country with urban riots, Vietnam, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and wondered what the hell was happening. This album includes rare classics (The Beach Boys 4th Of July), lost masterpieces (Roy Orbison's seven-minute Southbound Jericho Parkway), and forgotten gems by some of the biggest names in the business (Elvis Presley's Clean Up Your Own Back Yard). Reactions to America's existential crisis ranged in subject matter from divorce (Frank Sinatra's The Train) and the break-up of the nuclear family (The Four Seasons Saturday's Father), to eulogies for fallen heroes (Dion's Abraham Martin and John), sympathy for Vietnam vets (Johnny Tillotson's Welfare Hero), the church's institutional racism (Eartha Kitt's intense Paint Me Black Angels), and even questioning the ethics of the space programme (Bing Crosby's terrific What Do We Do With The World).

40 hits from the sixties indludins songs from Cliff Richard, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Booker T. & the MG’s, Roy Orbison etc.