The Style Council (Biography)

Guitarist/vocalist Paul Weller broke up the Jam, the most popular British band of the early '80s, at the height of their success in 1982 because he was dissatisfied with their musical direction. Weller wanted to incorporate more elements of soul, R&B, and jazz into his songwriting, which is something he felt his punk-oriented bandmates were incapable of performing. In order to pursue this musical direction, he teamed up in 1983 with keyboardist Mick Talbot, a former member of the mod revival band the Merton Parkas. Together, Weller and Talbot became the Style Council -- other musicians were added according to what kind of music the duo were performing. With the Style Council, the underlying intellectual pretensions that ran throughout Weller's music came to the forefront.



Although the music was rooted in American R&B, it was performed slickly -- complete with layers of synthesizers and drum machines -- and filtered through European styles and attitudes. Weller's lyrics were typically earnest, yet his leftist political leanings became more pronounced. His scathing criticisms of racism, unemployment, Margaret Thatcher, and sexism sat uneasily beside his burgeoning obsession with high culture. As his pretensions increased, the number of hits the Style Council had decreased; by the end of the decade, the group was barely able to crack the British Top 40 and Weller had turned from a hero into a has-been.

Released in March of 1983, the Style Council's first single "Speak Like a Child" became an immediate hit, reaching number four on the British charts. Three months later, "The Money-Go-Round" peaked at number 11 on the charts as the group was recording an EP, Paris, which appeared in August; the EP reached number three. "Solid Bond in Your Heart" became another hit in November, peaking at number 11.

The Style Council released their first full-length album, Cafe Bleu, in March of 1984; two months later, a resequenced version of the record, retitled My Ever Changing Moods, was released in America. Cafe Bleu was Weller's most stylistically ambitious album to date, drawing from jazz, soul, rap, and pop. While it was musically all over the map, it was their most successful album, peaking at number five in the U.K. and number 56 in the U.S. "My Ever Changing Moods" became their first U.S. hit, peaking at number 29. In the summer of 1985, the Style Council had another U.K. Top Ten hit with "The Walls Come Tumbling Down." The single was taken from Our Favourite Shop, which reached number one on the U.K. charts; the record was released as Internationalists in the U.S. The live album, Home and Abroad, was released in the spring of 1986; it peaked at number eight.

The Style Council had its last Top Ten single with "It Didn't Matter" in January of 1987. The Cost of Loving, an album that featured a heavy emphasis on jazz-inspired soul, followed in February. Although it received unfavorable reviews, the record peaked at number two in the U.K. That spring, "Waiting" became the group's first single not to crack the British Top 40, signalling that their popularity was rapidly declining. In July of 1988, the Style Council released their last album, Confessions of a Pop Group, which featured Weller's most self-important and pompous music -- the second side featured a ten-minute orchestral suite called "The Gardener of Eden." The record charted fairly well, reaching number 15 in the U.K., but it received terrible reviews. In March of 1989, the Style Council released a compilation, The Singular Adventures of the Style Council, which reached number three on the charts. Later that year, Weller delivered a new Style Council album, which reflected his infatuation with house and club music, to the band's record label Polydor. Polydor rejected the album and dropped both the Style Council and Weller from the label.

Paul Weller and Mick Talbot officially broke up the Style Council in 1990. In 1991, Weller launched a solo career which would return him to popular and critical favor in the mid-'90s, while Talbot continued to play, both with Weller and as a solo musician.

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Infant Sorrow - Get Him to the Greek (2010) (OST)

British comedian/actor/seasoned TV presenter Russell Brand first introduced audiences to waifish, blown-out retro-rocker Aldous Snow in the 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Brand’s heroin-chic, hedonistic yet good-natured Lothario felt like an amalgamation of Mick Jagger, Johnny Rotten, David Bowie, Robert Plant, and Axl Rose, and the character proved popular enough with moviegoers to spawn a sequel of sorts, only this time around, it’s Snow’s turn in the spotlight. 2010’s Get Him to the Greek reunited Brand with Marshall director Nicholas Stoller and producer Judd Apatow, and Snow’s band, Infant Sorrow (named after a poem by William Blake), provided the film’s soundtrack. Part Spinal Tap, part Tenacious D and a whole lot of Buckcherry and the Darkness, Infant Sorrow’s 15-track “debut” sounds like something fellow fictional rock star Billy Mack (played by Bill Nighy in the 2003 film Love Actually) would have put out in his Dionysian heydays. With track titles like “The Clap,” “African Child (Trapped in Me),” “Bangers, Beans & Mash,” “Riding Daphne,” and “Furry Walls,” it’s easy to write the whole affair off as pure novelty. While that’s a fairly apt summation of the final product, the songs, which were penned by Brand, Jarvis Cocker (Pulp), Carl Barat (Libertines), singer/songwriter Dan Bern, and actor/musician Jason Segal, the latter of whom provided Sarah Marshall with the brilliant Dracula puppet rock opera, A Taste of Love, are immaculately stupid/clever, paying homage to the hard rock greats (and their myriad sexual deviances) while providing enough hooks to land Moby Dick, as well as his less famous father, Papa Boner.

by James Christopher Monger

Shutter Island [Music from the Motion Picture]

Director Martin Scorsese’s films have never used music as mere background noise. His attention to detail, especially when delving into a period piece, does not distinguish between the audible and the visual, a characteristic applied with great care on the two-disc soundtrack to 2010’s Shutter Island. Produced by longtime collaborator Robbie Robertson, the tale of two U.S. Marshals sent to a remote Massachusetts island to investigate a murder is lent enormous weight by a score cobbled from the dismal atmospherics (the majority of the film takes place in a hospital for the criminally insane) of modern classical heavyweights like John Cage, Ingram Marshall, Max Richter, John Adams, and Brian Eno. Peppered between the long slabs of ominous avant-garde minimalist chamber music are fleeting rays of light from period radio crooners Kay Starr, Lonnie Johnson, and Johnnie Ray, resulting in a harrowing listening experience in its own right, and one that further cements the filmmaker’s reputation as one of American cinema’s most original voices.

by James Christopher Monger

Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1 [Original Score]

The seventh and penultimate entry into the internationally successful Harry Potter franchise is also one of the series’ darkest, and composer Alexander Desplat (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Queen, The Painted Veil) infuses the young wizard’s world with the appropriate amount of gravitas. It’s been a decade since John Williams set the tone for the films, and his original theme exists only in the shadows of Harry Potter & Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1. Desplat’s score is both subtle and huge, lending quiet emotional depth (“Harry & Ginny”), playful wickedness (“Death Eaters”), and tense, robust action (“The Oblivation”) with masterful precision. Film series that employ this many different composers (and directors, for that matter) rarely find cohesion, and this first installment of Deathly Hallows does nothing in the way to tarnish that achievement.

by James Christopher Monger

Hans Zimmer - Inception (2010)

Between 1988 and 2010, composer Hanz Zimmer has had a hand in nearly every major action film, whether it’s him behind the keys or one of his numerous, Remote Control Productions (formerly known as Media Ventures) protégés like John Powell, Harry Gregson-Williams, or Klaus Badelt. His excellent work on director Christopher Nolan’s 2008 international blockbuster The Dark Knight, was disqualified for Oscar consideration due to too many cooks (composers) in the kitchen, a handicap that doesn’t apply to Nolan’s 2010 follow-up, Inception. Zimmer’s signature move, a four- to eight-chord round that builds from a subtle breeze to an F5 tornado, serves as the foundation for Inception’s dizzying score, and the addition of Smiths/Cribs guitarist Johnny Marr, who appears on eight of the twelve cuts, dutifully expands the layers of Zimmer’s melodies, much like the dream building that occurs onscreen. There are moments that bring to mind Vangelis' moody, jazz-kissed work on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but Inception's backbone is pure Zimmer. It’s beautiful and heroic, unhinged and unspeakably melancholy, and the finest and most fully realized soundtrack this prolific composer has crafted to date.

by James Christopher Monger

British Psychedelic (Essay)

Did psychedelic rock start in the United States or Great Britain? It's very much a chicken-and-the-egg question. Like folk rock, punk, and blues rock, the form was developing simultaneously, along very similar paths, on both sides of the Atlantic. It's also apparent that although there were a great many similarities between American and British psychedelia, British psychedelic music evolved along somewhat different lines, with striking and distinctive characteristics of its own. While both branches tapped heavily into Indian and eastern music, jazz/improvisational/experimental elements, and drug-inspired imagery, the British brand was usually perkier, more playful, and sunnier in disposition, although just as freaked-out and forceful.

It couldn't really be said that there were any out-and-out British psychedelic records before 1966. But in the previous year, there were quite a few recordings by the best British groups that helped point the way for the style--more so than there were in the United States. The Who, the Kinks, and the Yardbirds all pioneered guitar distortion and feedback that year via such experimental (and hit!) singles such as "My Generation" and "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere." The Kinks and the Yardbirds didn't just fuzz up their riffs, but added middle eastern motifs on "See My Friends" (by the Kinks) and "Heart Full of Soul," a Yardbirds hit with a sitarish riff by Jeff Beck that was originally recorded with an actual sitar. On Rubber Soul, the Beatles introduced a genuine sitar on "Norwegian Wood," and on the same album's "The Word," they voiced the drug-influenced peace-and-love sentiments that would color many psychedelic lyrics.

The honor of the first psychedelic British single--and indeed, probably the first psychedelic single of all time--might go to the Yardbirds' "Shapes of Things," with its wild intertwining of feedback and snaky middle eastern melodic lines during its blistering guitar solo (delivered by Jeff Beck), its abrupt tempo changes from verse to chorus, and lyrics that ruminated over the future of mankind itself. The group had already employed unnerving guitar "rave-ups" on its 1965 studio recordings, and haunting Gregorian chants on the hit single (in Britain only) "Still I'm Sad." Their 1966 album Roger The Engineer, anchored by another single that featured a meltdown eastern guitar riff ("Over Under Sideways Down"), was an inconsistent but oft-thrilling effort that did much to pioneer psychedelic territory, shifting from blues-rock raveups to doom-laden dirge waltzes to piercing jazzy guitar solos to pensive piano ballads, sometimes within the course of the same tune. The late '66 single "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" (their only one to feature both Beck and Jimmy Page) was their psychedelic summit, with air-raid siren guitar duels, spooky harmonies, lyrics about reincarnation, and inscrutable, half-buried spoken word fragments. A relative commercial failure, it also signaled the end of the band as a creative force, Beck departing soon afterwards, and the group struggling with second-rate material and production during much of their final phase (with Page taking over lead guitar).

With hindsight, the Yardbirds' 1966 recordings are considered psychedelic landmarks. But at the time, far more listeners gained their first exposure to psychedelic music via the Beatles' 1966 releases. The "Paperback Writer"/"Rain" single served notice that the Beatles had assimilated all the guitar, lyrical, and production innovations of the previous year, especially on the B-side, with its hazy, droning guitars and backwards vocals on the fade. The album that followed in the summer, Revolver, owed much to mod pop and the sort of orchestral production Brian Wilson had recently devised for the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album (which itself had some psychedelic elements). But it was also, in many respects, one of the very first psychedelic LPs--not only in its numerous shifts in mood and production texture, but in its innovative manipulation of amplification and electronics to produce new sounds on guitars and other instruments. Specific, widely heralded examples would include the backwards riffs of "I'm Only Sleeping," the sound effects of "Yellow Submarine," the sitar of "Love You To," the blurry guitars of "She Said, She Said," and above all the seagull chanting, buzzing drones, megaphone vocals, free-assocation philosophizing, and varispeed tape effects of "Tomorrow Never Knows."

One other truly psychedelic album emerged from the United Kingdom in 1966 which, while not viewed with as much respect by subsequent critics, was nearly as influential and popular in its own time as Revolver. The record, Donovan's Sunshine Superman, was also a much more unlikely leap than the efforts by the Beatles and the Yardbirds, who had done much to lay a bedrock for their innovations with their work in 1965. In that same year, Donovan was not even using electric instruments on his records, but making a bid to become the British Bob Dylan, with troubadour musings (very well done, it should be added) much closer to the spirit of Bert Jansch than Lennon-McCartney. It's hard to say what made Donovan quick to embrace cosmic mythology and sitars--drug-inspired revelation, humiliation at being outclassed by Dylan himself during a head-to-head hootenanny in the documentary Don't Look Back, or, more mundanely, a correct realization that he'd need to electrify and complicate his sound to compete in the intensively competitive British pop scene.

Sunshine Superman, along with the lighter psychedelia of Revolver and the elegant but powerful mod commentary of the Who and the Kinks, helped introduce some of the whimsical traits which most distinguished British psychedelic rockers from their American counterparts. The arrangements on Sunshine Superman were exquisitely symphonic. They may have used exotic (for the time) blends of sitars, harpsichords, hard rock guitar, bongos, and mellotron, but at heart the songs were very much pop-rock, with hummable, cheery melodies. The lyrics were acidic visions of the benign sort, heavy on Olde English touches and fairytale imagery. Those who value angst and earth in their rock'n'roll have chastised Donovan for being too florid, even fruity, criticisms that are somewhat justified, but overriden by the charm and beauty of his best recordings. Ironically, the man responsible for much of Sunshine Superman's cosmic aura was not Donovan himself, but producer Mickie Most, who would--oddly, in retrospect--do much to ensure the demise of the Yardbirds after taking over their production in 1967, saddling them with bubblegumish songs and sugary arrangements. In a further irony, Sunshine Superman made much of its initial impact not in the U.K., but in the U.S. Donovan was embroiled in a complicated label dispute that found him unable to release material in his homeland for a time, and his early electric recordings appeared quite a few months earlier in the States.

While there were not many out-and-out full-length British psychedelic albums in 1966, the psychedelic influence was felt in key singles and album tracks by some of the best groups. The Rolling Stones were quick to appropriate the sitar for "Paint It Black"; John Lennon would later charge the Stones from having nicked the idea from "Norwegian Wood," but the consensus is that "Paint It Black" is the best use of sitar in a rock'n'roll song. Another 1966 single, "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?," may not have been designed as an explicit stab at psychedelia, but it certainly could have passed for one, with its dense web of guitar rumbles, horn crescendos, and make-what-you-will-of-these! lyrics. The Kinks were not one to follow trends, but "Fancy," from their 1966 LP Face To Face, made effective use of sitarish note bends. Face To Face was one of the first full-length statements that could be labeled (however vaguely) a concept album, and the Who made their first serious effort along this direction in late '66 with the lengthy "A Quick One While He's Away," a suite-like mini-opera.

1966 also saw the first psychedelic rumblings from bands who had not only not previously established themselves as commercially viable outfits, but had not even previously recorded. Much of what made this possible was the blossoming of a full-blown psychedelic underground in London, which found a home in the UFO club, and a voice through the countercultural journal International Times (often abbreviated to IT). In the UFO's early days, the Pink Floyd (and they were always called The Pink Floyd back then) were the house band of sorts. The best and most prominent of the first-generation British psychedelic bands without roots in the British Invasion, they took psychedelic music to further, freakier extremes. Song structures became looser, lengthier, more adventurous; steel balls were run up and down guitar strings to produce eerie electronic sounds; ghostly, spectral organ hovered over electronically distorted guitar. Many of the Floyd's early sets were dominated by instrumental freakouts, but their best achievements were actually grounded in the inspired melodies and wordplay of their eccentric original leader/singer/songwriter/guitarist, Syd Barrett, who had as much of an ear for fairytale whimsy and pop hooks as electronic experimentation.

Another important band held in high regard by UFO crowd were the Soft Machine. Although they would later branch out into avant-rock and jazz-rock, in their first incarnation they blended flower-power pop with genre-stretching instrumental chops and surreal songs. In the Pink Floyd biography A Saucerful Of Secrets, one UFO regular recalls that the Floyd and the Softs "were like the Beatles and the Stones of alternative music." The third notable early underground psychedelic band, and by far the least well-remembered, were Tomorrow, who adhered to conventional song structures more than their rivals, but also indulged in archetypically English character sketches and frequent experimentation; today, they are most famous for featuring guitarist Steve Howe in his pre-Yes days. The Pretty Things, though not as aligned with the UFO scene, made a few singles in '67-'68 that hold up well with Syd Barrett's Floyd efforts as examples of druggy psychedelia with equal footing in pop character sketches and experimentation.

Much more obscure, but on the same level, were the Misunderstood, actually a Californian group that moved to England at the urging of expatriate DJ John Ravenscroft (who would move back to his homeland and become the nation's top on-air rock personality as John Peel). Together for only a short time, the small batch of recordings they produced at their peak--some of which made it onto flop singles, some of which were only released many years later--have been belatedly recognized as some of the greatest early psychedelic music. These took the Yardbirds prototype to greater extremes with searing-but-gliding guitar electronics and heavily eastern-influenced original material of an overtly cosmic nature, but exhilarating quality.

The mod movement, with its emphasis upon autodestruct guitar riffs, outrage, and smart pop hooks, was also evolving in psychedelic directions. Long after the fact--a good 20 years later--some collectors dubbed this school of sound "freakbeat." Freakbeat was mod pop in psychedelic clothes, with some garage ethos thrown in. Young bands saw their musical heroes and social climate changing, and determined to keep up with a reckless enthusiasm that was often naive, but often made for some impressive records with their strainings against unwritten rules of pop and songwriting. Mod groups like the Smoke and John's Children made some great psychedelic records by adding adventurous songwriting and wild guitar flights to their pop base.

In the manner of American garage bands of the same era, quite a few British bands managed to record only a few singles or demos in a rush to tap into the zeitgeist of a special moment in musical evolution. There weren't nearly as many British freakbeat/psychedelic singles of this kind as their were in the American garage movement: Britain's a much smaller country, and at that time was dominated by four major labels, leaving little room for indie/regional/local releases. Just as there were many generic American garage singles, there were many generic British psychedelic singles, distinguished chiefly by ridiculous names like Ipsissimus, Edwick Rumbold, Aquarian Age, and the Penny Peeps (and that's just off one compilation).

But just as there were many great American garage singles, there were many great unknown British psychedelic singles, only fully appreciated long after the fact when they were assembled for collectors on anthologies like Chocolate Soup For Diabetics and The Perfumed Garden. Groups like Dantalian's Chariot, One In A Million, Tintern Abbey, Wimple Winch, and Syn recorded one or two psychedelic classics without ever managing to make a full album, let alone a hit song. It would be a mistake, though, to think of these British acts in the same way as U.S. garage bands, or even U.S. psychedelic garage bands. This British sound was more refined, more carefully arranged, and benefited from more elaborate production values (being that many of them were actually recorded for major labels). They also frequently used keyboards (and occasionally mellotrons), and were far more apt to deal with prim, arty pop than adolescent angst.

In doing so, these groups were following the lead of the biggest band of all, the Beatles. Their early '67 single, "Penny Lane"/"Strawberry Fields Forever," was not just, in all likelihood, the strongest double-A-sided release of all time, but the prototype of British pop-psychedelia. As much as the lyrics and musical settings may have inspired by lysergic substances, they were equally concerned with evoking states of child-like innocence (and, in this specific example, the very specific, real neighborhoods of John Lennon's and Paul McCartney's Liverpool childhoods). The Beatles' other 1967 releases largely followed this course, on the Sgt. Pepper album, the 1967 singles "All You Need Is Love" (psychedelia at its most anthemic and utopian) and "I Am The Walrus" (the cacophonous bad trip in the Beatles' 1967 catalog), and the Magical Mystery Tour songs (an EP in Britain, released with '67 singles as an LP elsewhere). On these productions, hard guitar rock (though not totally ignored) took a back seat to ornate, baroque instrumentation and arrangements, often using keyboards, mellotrons, and a barrage of unusual instruments, sound effects, and electronic manipulation (the use of which was greatly facilitated by producer George Martin). The early rock and R&B influences that had inspired the Beatles in the first place were, for the time being, deeply submerged in their work.

The Beatles' influence was such at the time that where they led, many followed. The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request (not to mention their "We Love You"/"Dandelion" single, which included some actual Beatle harmonies) is still seen by many as their Sgt. Pepper imitation/ripoff. The imperfections of the album (recorded at a time of great stress and conflict within the band, and between the Stones and their management) have worn very badly. But in fact the Stones pursued some interesting and, indeed, highly successful experiments with electronics, strings, and African rhythms on tracks like "She's A Rainbow," "2000 Light Years From Home," and "In Another Land," and one wishes that the avalanche of criticism with which the album was greeted hadn't discouraged them from exploring these avenues further. Among other top British groups, the Small Faces embraced the good-time vibes of psychedelia the most heartily, on singles like "Itchycoo Park" and the full-length story-concept album Ogden's Gone Nut Flake. The Who couldn't be said to have been heavily influenced by Sgt. Pepper, but their 1967 album, The Who Sell Out, expanded their lyrical and sonic ambition without comprimising their power, as well as offering a concept LP of sorts (with having the tracks linked by fake and real British radio jingles, and offering another mini-opera in "Rael," which would be recycled in Tommy).

Most British bands didn't have the resources to offer full-length albums of psychedelic adventurism. Some, such as the Hollies, the Move, and Manfred Mann, incorporated mild psychedelic influences into specific tracks to add a slightly hip dimension to their essentially pop material. Others took on the task whole-hog, and largely embarrassed themselves (Eric Burdon and his New Animals). More difficult to classify is the Zombies' final LP, Odessey And Oracle; if it didn't exactly offer incense and sugarcubes, it certainly had plenty of imagination and rarefied atmosphere, and used the mellotron more than just about any other previous rock album. And there were obscure bands that managed to produce entire psychedelic albums that remain little known to this day. The Blossom Toes, whose debut conjured up visions of the Kinks on acid, were probably the best of these, and indeed offered some of the finest meldings of symphonic pop and psychedelic British whimsy (though they went in far more progressive and somber directions on their second and final album).

Lest the impression be given that British rock was dominated by clever trickery, there were a couple of British hard rock superstar outfits that made major contributions to the psychedelic era. Although Jimi Hendrix was not British, his backing musicians in the Experience were, and it was Britain where he first became a star, not America. Debates have raged about whether Hendrix should be considered a blues-rock guitarist, a jazz-rock guitarist, or an entity unto himself. But the fact remains that his work with the Experience--as captured on their three studio albums, Are You Experienced?, Axis: Bold As Love, and Electric Ladyland--could hardly be considered anything but psychedelic. Along somewhat similar lines were Cream, which started out as a stone-cold blues-rock outfit, but quickly evolved into a hard rock group with strong psychedelic overtones, particularly on their second and best album, Disraeli Gears. Traffic, featuring Stevie Winwood, were the best at blending hard rock drive with more idiosyncratically British eclecticism, especially on their first two albums, Dear Mr. Fantasy and Traffic. If you're looking for the best British hard rock/psychedelic one-shot, go no further than The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. The fire-helmeted, overtly theatrical weirdo topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic with "Fire," and his sole album was an excessively demented but demonic slab of acid rock, with some of the best and loopiest organ to be found on any rock record.

There were also a few major efforts from the psychedelic era that are equally apt to be characterized as early progressive rock because of their heavy classical, symphonic influences and the generally overarching seriousness of their ambitions. Certainly the debut albums by Procol Harum, the Nice, and the Moody Blues (who took the Mellotron to greater heights of excess) could fall into this category. The early progressive bands gave the first indication of the fissure that would split the psychedelic bands into differing camps by the end of the 1960s: ones that returned to rootsier, earthier sounds, and ones that entertained progressively more grandoise ambitions.

It's been postulated that Bob Dylan's rustic John Wesley Harding was the signpost that motivated other rock kings to re-embrace their roots. Whether that's true or not, the first 1968 singles by the biggest British groups, the Beatles ("Lady Madonna") and the Rolling Stones ("Jumpin' Jack Flash"), found them deliberately scaling back to a more basic approach. By and large they would retain this throughout the rest of the '60s, refocusing on guitar rock and more concise songs, though the Beatles in particular never eschewed experimentation on their final recordings.

On the other hand, some of the major early psychedelic bands, such as Pink Floyd (after Syd Barrett departed due to mental instability), would grow increasingly more serious, symphonic, and electronic in their approach. The Soft Machine, as previously noted, headed into jazz-rock and experimental rock after some personnel changes; they and various spinoff bands (Caravan, Kevin Ayers, Gong) would head the wing of humorous and whimsical progressive rock that became known as the Canterbury sound. A veteran of Tomorrow, guitarist Steve Howe, would become instrumental to the success of one of the biggest art-rock groups, Yes. The Pretty Things went very progressive with 1968's S.F. Sorrow, arguably rock's first true concept album, which helped inspire the Who's Tommy.

But some of the major psychedelic pioneers didn't so much choose sides as fizzle out. By the end of '68, Jimi Hendrix had made his final recording with the Experience, and Cream had broken up, as had Traffic (for an extended hiatus, anyway), the Zombies, and the Yardbirds (from whose ashes Led Zeppelin would arise). Donovan was still offering flower-power homilies, but he'd never truly expanded upon the achievements of Sunshine Superman, offering increasingly tired variations of the same theme.

Although many of the musicians that were integral to British psychedelia would have long careers--continuing in some cases right up to the present--it's fair to say that almost all of them have never created better and more imaginative work than they did at the height of the psychedelic era. Sometimes viewed by critics (and the musicians themselves) as embarrassingly naive and trendy, the best of the music endures as some of the most ambitious and euphoric produced in the whole of rock--which should be a source of pride, not shame.

22 Essential British Psychedelic Rock Records

The Beatles, Revolver (Capitol)

The Yardbirds, Roger The Engineer (Edsel)

Donovan, Sunshine Superman (Epic)

The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol)

The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour (Capitol)

Pink Floyd, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (Capitol)

The Soft Machine, Jet-Propelled Photograph (Charly)

Tomorrow, Tomorrow (Decal)

The Misunderstood, Before The Dream Faded (Cherry Red)

The Blossom Toes, Collection (Decal)

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced? (MCA)

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Axis: Bold As Love (MCA)

The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Electric Ladyland (MCA)

The Rolling Stones, Their Satanic Majesties Request (ABKCO)

Cream, Disraeli Gears (Polydor)

Traffic, Dear Mr. Fantasy (Island)

Traffic, Traffic (Island)

The Small Faces, Ogden's Gone Nut Flake (Sony)

The Zombies, Odessey And Oracle (Rhino)

The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown (Polydor)

Various Artists, Chocolate Soup For Diabetics Vol. 1-3 (Relics)

Various Artists, Perfumed Garden Vol. 1-3 (Reverberation)

by Richie Unterberger

Box Set (Essay)

Walk past a big record store during the Christmas rush, and you're apt to spy Annette Funicello, Barry Manilow, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin under the same tree. An all-star benefit, perhaps, in which legends agree to return from the dead and set aside their stylistic differences to join their negative mirror images for the sake of some good cause or another? Hardly. It's a phenomenon made possible by the rise of the box set. Literally hundreds of artists have now been anthologized in these lavish packages, which now encompass a smorgasbord of musical eras and styles that was unimaginable a decade ago.

According to Pulse! magazine, over 150 boxed set retrospectives were released in the U.S. and abroad in 1993. (The figure went down slightly in 1994.) If you were to buy all of them at once, that would set you back about $6500. No one's maniacal enough to go to that extreme, but listeners who go beyond the day's current charts to collect their music have more multi-disc options than ever before.

The box set has been a feature of the music industry for almost as long as records have been manufactured. Before the introduction of the long-playing record in the late 1940s, several 78 rpm discs were occasionally packaged together in boxes, sometimes in accordion-style binders. Material by superstars like Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman was released in this fashion, although the limitations of the 78 required a good deal more disc rotation than multiple CD collections do in the digital age.

With the LP format, it was possible to release several hours of music within a box at once. The boxed set rapidly became widespread in classical releases, but was used much less often to package jazz or pop music. It was virtually never used to house rock & roll music.

After landmark albums like Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, the Mothers of Invention's Freak Out, and the Beatles' White Album made double LPs acceptable in rock, boxes began to appear -- although very rarely -- to package multi-disc productions. George Harrison's All Things Must Pass and The Concert for Bangladesh were a couple of the best-selling examples, but they remained rare events. Eventually, box set collections appeared in small quantities by artists with devoted fan bases like the Beatles, Brian Eno and Bill Nelson

The introduction of the compact disc, along with the increasing spending power of Baby Boomers eager to assemble collected works of classic rock and soul musicians, began to spur the production of rock box sets in the mid-1980s. In 1986, Bob Dylan's five-LP Biograph set became the first rock retrospective of such size to reach the Top 40 album charts. More importantly, its mix of classic hits, key album cuts, rarities, and previously unreleased material, as well as a lavish booklet, became a model of sorts for the hundreds of rock and pop retrospectives that would follow. Later that year, a five-album box set of live Bruce Springsteen material went to number one. Multi-album live boxes didn't sprout in its aftermath; hardly anyone, after all, has as fanatical a following as Springsteen What it did prove was that fans were willing to pay for such big, lavish packages in much greater force than most people expected.

Within a few years, the box set as concept had picked up a lot of momentum. Most major rock artists -- including Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding and the Beach Boys -- have received the box set treatment. In some cases, such as Elvis' there are a few box sets, each devoted to different periods of his career. If your favorite famous artist doesn't have a box set yet, wait a while. It may take a few months or a few years, but odds are that one or several will certainly appear.

The impetus for box set production came from both consumers and the industry. Some music journalists may rant and rave about the ignorance of the great majority of the record-buying public, but the fact is that, on the whole, today's rock & roll buyers are probably more conscious of musical history than ever before, and more willing to revisit past favorites and explore vintage releases that they never became familiar with in the first place. From an industry viewpoint, the CD format has enabled labels to present mammoth quantities of material in a more, well, compact form than was possible with the 12-inch LP.

More cynically, the CD format has generated extensive back catalog reissues because it enables the industry to re-sell albums to consumers that listeners already have in their collection, but may wish to "upgrade" from analog to digital. In comparison with new artists, such back catalog releases require a minimum of fuss in terms of artist development, production, and promotion.

Collectors approach box set reissues with a mixture of joy and resentment. Often billed as "remixed" or "digitally remastered from the original tapes" (although the actual sonic differences may be extremely slight or even nonexistent), some listeners welcome the chance to replace their surface-noise-infested vinyl with fresh packages that will not deteriorate over time. Just as often, it seems, some killjoy or other determines that the remastered and remixed versions are actually distinctly inferior to their analog counterparts, sometimes radically so.

For listeners who aren't audiophiles, the issue of value-for-money remains. Who is the typical box set -- with its mixture of hits, rarities, and album cuts -- really satisfying? The casual fan will be more likely to pick up a greatest hits collection, or one or two LPs, and leave it at that. It's very rare that a box set will feature every last cut by an artist, so it's seldom that it acts as the definitive collection in and of itself.

Listeners who are serious fans of an artist, but not unduly concerned with fancy packaging or remastering, find themselves caught in the middle. Enticed by rare and unreleased cuts that appear on almost every of these sets -- but rarely make up the majority of the content -- they often find themselves paying quite a few dollars for the five-15 cuts from a multi-disc box that they really want, and forced to repurchase quite a bit of music that they've already ensconced in their collection, and had no intention of buying again. And it's rare that a record company will accommodate these discerning listeners by issuing a separate collection that only contains the sought-after rarities.

For the truly comprehensive box sets, listeners often need to look to Europe, where reissue labels are truly fanatical about their music. Germany's Bear Family is particularly legendary for its almost humorously exhaustive retrospectives, such as their five-CD Lesley Gore compilation, their four-CD Marvin Rainwater set, and its eight-CD Lonnie Donegan project. These can be just as exhausting as exhaustive -- do you really want to hear that Gene Vincent alternate take, or over 200 Fats Domino songs?

An essential part of record collecting as the 20th century ends, the box sets offer a mixed blessing -- access to more rock music than ever before, but at a higher price.

by Richie Unterberger