Thanks, again, Tim!
Not too long ago, before they realized what they had, many companies mined their archives for compilations. Many of the early compilations were lots of songs crammed into CDs; after all, it didn't cost them much more to press 20 songs than 10. If more songs sold more CDs from an otherwise moribund back issue, that was great! More recently, many of these same companies have gone the other way, cheating the public with issues of "Best of" CDs with 10 cuts. Pfeh. I have a lot of compilations, mostly random CDs from a set picked up at used CD places like Cheapo and the Fresh Air Radio record sale. Some are out of print, some aren't worthwhile to begin with. But many are good introductions to music that was around before CDs; many before my time. I'll try to direct you to some of the good ones.
Music Theory time. Art forms tend (note: tend) to go through the following phases: A Folk period (where people write what they want, draw what they see, play the music they like to hear), a Classical period (where someone tries to insult folk art by saying it's bad and someone else tries to distinguish good from bad by saying "It's good when it follows these rules"; the archetypal example being Aristotle's The Poetics), a Romantic period (where others look down on Classical and say, "art has to inspire, to make you feel an emotion), a Baroque period (where the art form gets very complex, sometimes self-referential, and uses the Classical rules to invoke Romantic responses; the archetypal example being JS Bach) and then finally people get tired of having to pay attention to the technique and rediscover how good the Folk period was (either by reinterpreting the older material or by simplifying their technique). The driving dynamic of the last several thousand years is that kids want to listen to music that really pisses off their parents.
Pop is a fickle, ephemeral field, and Nirvana is turning up on Oldies compilations. Whatever. In Rock terms, 50s Music was that era between the rise of rock and roll out of the post-war black music rhythm and blues and the Beatles and spans roughly 1955-1964, with fuzzy edges. 50s Music is Folk: raw (that is, played by untrained musicians) and works because it's full of energy and skill born of playing to an audience. 60s Music was that era between the rise of The Beatles and the rise of the Sex Pistols, roughly 1964-1975, again with fuzzy edges and considerable overlap (for example, The Beach Boys are definitely 50s except for Good Vibrations which is 60s; at least for my ear. Meanwhile, The Tokens (The Lion Sleeps Tonight) and Bobby Darin and others were developing a sound more associated with later 60s music. On the other end, Billy Joel, Bob Seeger and Bruce Springsteen are some of the rockers who keep going back to their roots.) 60s Music is Classical: Horny teenagers wanted to justify the music to their parents, so professors deconstructed the Beatles to find that their compositions had much in common with classical compostions. Following strict formulas gave rise to Phil Spector, Motown and The Monkees. Professional songwriters and studio musicians did a lot of the work. The later 60s period turned Baroque, with Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson and Funkadelic. As much as commercials want to establish marketing categories by numbers, 70s Music didn't really hit full stride until the two reactions to the Baroque period: Punk (a return to the Folk tradition of scatalogical insults with a beat) and Disco (a return to the Romantic notion that it's better to dance than to tell a story; another example of Music To Fuck To in the traditon of Mozart or Sinatra). The brief flowering of Baroque Funk as a precursor to Disco should be noted (eg Stevie Wonder), since funk has outlasted disco (thank heaven).
But I digress. I'll stop here, for the nonce, though Youth has a short attention span and what counts as Music of the Past is continually being created by Music of the Present. The songs that are so new you can only download the mp3s from the net will be on the oldies station by the time you get to your car. Meanwhile...
Haunting used bins might turn up individual CDs for cheap, but the 15-CD set of Oldies But Goodies is a good start on a collection if you have none of these and want to suddenly play Wolfman Jack. (Bizrate.com lists comparison prices for the set, which may change.) Many of the songs -- and most of the hits -- can be found in other places, and quite a few of the songs are mainly of interest to people who heard them originally through their car stereo, but it's still one of the best and still has songs that are hard to find anywhere else. Great but obscure songs like Sally Go 'Round The Roses by the Jaynetts, Sea Cruise by Frankie Ford, and even Memories of El Monte by the Penguins and co-written by Frank Zappa. The collection tends to the late 50s era, and went for songs they could license cheap: No Beatles. But it has a dash of almost everyone else from Elvis, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly to Betty Everett, Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight. Lots of regional hits. You probably won't appreciate all 250 songs, and 150 bucks is a lot to shell out all at once even for 15 disks, but overall it's a solid compilation.
If you're willing to send money to AOL, the Time Life collections are really good. They have the up-front money to spend on Elvis and the Beatles. Time Life offers a LOT of different compilation CDs and I can only personally recommend the few I have, but the site is worth exploring and they tend to pack a lot of music onto a disk. They even offer Real Audio samplings. I have several of the Rock N' Roll Era Collection, and for the hours I spent scouring the used bins I could have gotten them new for not much more. If you don't want to buy all 20 at once, they have smaller sets; I have 1958 and 1960 from this Special Set, with 23 and 22 songs respectively. Great collections: 1958 contains Johnny B. Goode, Sumertime Blues, Good Golly, Miss Molly, Yakety Yak, Rebel-'Rouser, Tequila, Do You Want To Dance and more. 1960 contains Save the Last Dance for Me, Walk -- Don't Run, Alley-Oop, Chain Gang, Stay and more. Bang for the buck, these are the best collections. Maybe they don't drive you down memory lane like the Oldies But Goodies collections because they stick to the chart toppers and songs that have stood the test of time, but there are reasons why songs are popular.
Still, be wary of hits, which are often the product of marketing (payola hasn't gone away, it's just gotten indirect and, annoyingly, doesn't line the pockets of the djs), hype and a fickle public taste. The Billboard Top Rock & Roll Hits tend to be uninteresting rip-offs. You only get 10 songs for just a bit cheaper than you get 17 or 22 songs on the other collections, and they're constrained by whatever topped the charts at the time. Some good stuff, to be sure, but they're some of my least used CDs since I have most of the songs on other compilations. If you spot one for a few bucks and it has a song you don't have, might be worth it.
Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia with a radio show, a very weird CD collection and an ever growing list of political links. He reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E here.
Charlie Wilken, left, and Miguel Almereyda prepare to take part in the 26th Annual Doo Dah parade Sunday, Nov. 24, 2002 in Pasadena, Calif. The parade, which began as a parody of Pasadena's famous
Rose Parade and follows much of the same route, has also become a tradition in the city.
Photo by Lee Celano
An unidentified couple sits by a campfire, watching the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour from Merritt Island, Fla., Nov. 23, 2002. Endeavour carried a crew of seven on a crew-exchange and construction mission to
the International Space Station. The photograph was a time exposure. Diagonal lines on right are telephone lines.
Photo by Duffin Mcgee
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Columns of thick ash and smoke pour out of the crater of Mt. Etna, Sicily, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2002, at dawn, as a wide tongue of magma moves down its slopes. Etna, which springs to life every few months, burst into activity Oct. 27 with rivers of lava pouring down the mountain near Catania in eastern Sicily.
Photo by Fabrizio Villa
The baby Asian elephant Kandula and his mother Shanthi eat a special treat prepared for them at the National Zoo in Washington Friday Nov. 22, prior to Kandula's first birthday on Nov. 25th. Kandula's first
year of life will be the subject of a detailed documentary film produced by the Discovery Channel and aired in 2003.
Photo by Joe Marquette
