The eMusic Dozen: Classic Rock

Extended concepts didn't always work out as well for Ray Davies as he or his staunchest worshippers pretend. But you don't have to be nostalgic for Queen Victoria to agree that there sure are loads of nutty people in the modern world if you know where to look. When Davies latches an ace music-hall melody to a lyric like "Acute Schizophrenia Paranoid Blues," you'll be too delighted to wonder why his distrust of technology didn't extend to electric guitars and microphones. Just the tonic when you need soothing after some jerk's car alarm frazzles your nerves at two in the morning.

Lots of "lost classics" are misplaced for very good reasons. But the final album Badfinger recorded before succumbing to financial shenanigans, career dead-ends and outright despair (shortly after the recording, singer/guitarist Pete Ham hanged himself) smartly adapts polished Abbey Road pop-rock to the stylistic conventions of the '70s. In other words, you get disillusioned lyrics, particularly in the showbiz complaints "Mr. Manager" (dour) and "Rock 'n' Roll Contract" (lively) plus slick yet spare music -- the taut lope of "Lay Me Down" anticipates Nicks-Buckingham-era Fleetwood Mac. Saddest of all, the demos here indicate that Badfinger had at least one more lost classic in them.

Like Steve Winwood, Alex Chilton started out as a big-voiced white soul kid, as teenaged frontman for the Boxtops. But where Winwood matured to the woozy British folk-jazz of Traffic, Chilton willfully regressed from mannish-boy earthiness, devising a musical language that allowed adults to admit they'd never fully shaken the lovelorn longing of adolescence. Most classic rockers turned to the Beatles for pomp or pop, but Big Star remembered the twisted guitars of '66, re-imagining Revolver as a complete genre unto itself. In the '80s, they provided a link to the pop romanticism of the '60s for punks who though they were too cool for the Beatles or the Byrds. R.E.M. would have never been classic rock without them.

The '60s saw no shortage of fanatical blues record collectors, and those obsessives were hardly shy about forming bands. But although harpist Al Wilson and guitarist Bob "The Bear" Hite could rattle off catalogue numbers and Delta lore with the best of them, the duo at the center of Canned Heat were entertainers before they were curators. And versatile entertainers at that -- though justifiably remembered for cuts like "On the Road Again," where Wilson's frail falsetto rendered hippie fatuity more idyllic than almost all competitors, their boogie could grow sharply urbane, as evinced by their 11-minute take on the B.B. King classic "Sweet Sixteen."

Their hits are so familiar and ("Proud Mary" notwithstanding) fresh, you think maybe you can slide by with the best-of Chronicle, but each of CCR's major albums has its own coherent identity. Green River is the sound of musicians who realize that the world is listening and rising to the challenge, Cosmo's Factory the sound of those musicians grown comfortable with the idiosyncrasies of each other's playing. But the middle child, Willy & the Poorboys, beats both for concision, precision and accuracy -- not a lick or syllable is wasted, humor and rage are doled out in precise proportions, and "Fortunate Son" and "It Came Out of the Sky" rail against privilege and ridicule media circuses with a righteousness we can only hope won't have to be timeless.

Every kid who thinks the wail of a pedal steel and the scrape of a fiddle taps instantly into some element of the American mythos owes a debt to Gram Parsons. Sadly, few have been canny enough to repay it -- including several of those who continued to call themselves the Flying Burrito Brothers after Parsons and co-founder Chris Hillman moved on. But this post-Parsons outing is a quality exception, largely because these guys understand that Parsons had not just a love of those myths but a knack for personalizing them, and not just a love of the music but a demand that it live in the present as well.

From Dylan to Patti Smith, poet-rockers in search of historic precedents generally hark to the French Symbolists. But these omnivorous '60s beatniks went for William Blake, who's certainly loopy enough for rock & roll, and all-but-forgotten Victorian A.C. Swinburne, who certainly wasn't until the Fugs got to him. The loose garage-folk lunacy here, which makes the Velvet Underground sound like the Monkees, more than earns gonzo titles like "In the Middle of Their First Recording Session the Fugs Sign the Worst Contract Since Leadbelly's." Recommended to anyone who likes boobs (the subject of one great song) more than the CIA (the subject of an even better one) -- and I know there are some of you out there.

Pre-fame tracks can be odd creatures, like gawky adolescents who haven't yet grown into their out-of-balance facial features. But on these pre-Woodstock studio jams, Carlos Santana and his accomplices rise from the haze of Haight-Ashbury fully formed. When Santana seems to noodle, it's usually because he's not so much improvising as ruminating, mulling over his options as he determines the ideal moment to blasting into lift-off. And no matter how high his clean sound soars, whatever polyrhythms are cutting against each other down below add up to a steadfast earthy groove.

If a classic rocker is a musician who mines a limited patch of sonic territory for all it's worth for as long as possible, then Doug Sahm is as classic as they come. On this concert recording, Sahm treats both "Wooly Bully" and Dylan's "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" as worthy candidates for his Tex-Mex three-chord rave-up treatment, so they earn their place next to his own unstoppable "She's About a Mover." Rarely has a rocker used the organ to such potential -- really, maybe on "Like a Rolling Stone" or "96 Tears," but not much beyond that.

With only a few hits still circulating in the popular consciousness, the Yardbirds retain legendary status largely on the basis of the work done by their most treasured alumni -- Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page -- after leaving the group. That's not entirely fair. Clapton, glimpsed here before his deification, could be a snarling axeman -- what some lads won't do when they're still scraping toward fame. Yes, the repertoire is similar to that of other bluesy beat groups from the era -- Bo Diddley ("Who Do You Love?"), John Lee Hooker ("Boom Boom"), Chuck Berry ("Let It Rock"). But if the Stones used R&B to project an attitude, these guys just used R&B till it had no more to give.

Like plenty other blues men, the whitest man in showbiz (well, he is an albino) is more a live performer than a recording artist. Captured onstage at his '70s peak, Winter not only rams the old blues snarl "Messin' With the Kid" into a version of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" marked by ferally howled vowels, he tosses in another Stones riff (from "Bitch") just to keep the train a-rollin'. Only "Mother Earth" and "Big Boss Man" lose their way as they ramble over the ten-minute mark -- and maybe those are just Johnny's way of catching his breath.