OLD-TIMER ROCK 'N' ROLL

I love Seventies rock. If you asked me to choose to listen only to rock records made between 1964-68 or only rock records made between 1969-75, I'd choose the latter without blinking.

(It may seem like I'm cheating by setting the boundaries that way, but aesthetically speaking, rock in 1969 really did start to get uglier and meaner, returning to a primitivism the Summer of Love had forced down. Think of the first albums by the MC5, the Stooges, Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath...only Blue Cheer were selling a truly unholy racket in '68.)

The early Seventies were a phenomenal period for rock music. I mean, I've done the litany before... Aerosmith, Alice Cooper (the band), the Allman Brothers Band, Atomic Rooster, Beck, Bogert & Appice, Black Cat Bones, Black Oak Arkansas, Black Widow, Buffalo, Cactus, Can, Captain Beyond, Deep Purple, Dr. Feelgood, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, the Faces, Faust, Flower Travellin' Band, Foghat, Free, Funkadelic, Genesis, Grand Funk Railroad, Granicus, the Grateful Dead (only the live albums, thanks), Groundhogs, Hawkwind, Randy Holden, Humble Pie, James Gang, Jethro Tull, Josefus, Jukin' Bone, King Crimson, Leaf Hound, Led Zeppelin, Les Rallizes Dénudés, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Magma, Malo, Montrose, Mott the Hoople (I don't love 'em as much as some, but they had their moments), Mountain, Nazareth, Neu!, Nico, November, Pink Floyd, Elvis Presley (his early '70s trilogy—Raised On Rock, Good Times and Promised Land—are close to unimpeachable), Lou Reed (only Lou Reed Live and Rock 'n' Roll Animal, thanks), the Rolling Stones, Santana (not to mention Carlos Santana's albums with John McLaughlin and Alice Coltrane), Savoy Brown, Bob Seger, Sir Lord Baltimore, Steppenwolf, Stray, Styx, Rod Stewart, Thin Lizzy, Toe Fat, Robin Trower, Uriah Heep, Van der Graaf Generator, West, Bruce & Laing, Wishbone Ash, Yes, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, ZZ Top... and that's just from scrolling my iPod. I'm sure there are dozens of groups I'm forgetting.

In the latter half of the decade, though, things really dropped off. At least that's how it seems to me. There were a few bands still producing quality work all the way up to the early '80s, like ZZ Top and Scorpions. And a new act or two popped up with records worth hearing (Rainbow, Van Halen, AC/DC). But in a lot of ways, rock really died after 1975. I'm not sure why. And don't tell me it was all due to punk. Punk was a ripple at the time, it seems to me; folks within the media bubble (New York, L.A.) paid attention to it, but it didn't filter out to the middle of the country for a couple of years, and when it did, it mutated into a hunchbacked, hairy-knuckled child named "hardcore." Whereupon the very critics who'd championed it in its art-school manifestation spat and turned their backs.

All this is a lead-in to say that I just got a six-pack of discs in the mail that probably won't cause me to re-evaluate my generally low opinion of mainstream hard rock from 1976 and beyond, but might convince me that there were some bright sparks I've heretofore overlooked. They're live albums created from episodes of the German TV show Rockpalast, and there are DVD versions, too (which I wasn't sent). I've got discs by the John Cipollina/Nick Gravenites Band, Jorma Kaukonen & Vital Parts (which might have been an ad hoc group, or records might be scarce, because none of the bandmembers are credited in the CD booklet), Spirit, Commander Cody, Paul Butterfield, and a double disc by Dickey Betts & Great Southern—one set from 1978, and a second from 2008.

I'm not sure any of these albums are gonna be any damn good at all. But they strike me as perfect examples of journeyman rock dudes cranking it up in a cultural atmosphere that really didn't have a place for them—they were past their prime, below the radar, touring European clubs instead of Stateside arenas, and falling back on the basics: country, blues and hard rock. (One surprise credit: Steve MacKay, saxophonist on the Stooges' Fun HouseFunhouse [Deluxe Edition], is blowing on the Commander Cody disc.) There are a lot of cover tunes, and a lot of extended jams, on these six discs. I'm hoping there are some pleasant surprises, too.

THE SECOND COMING

Faith No More, Alice In Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, Soundgarden...What Year Is It?

It's been assumed for some time that pop-cultural nostalgia runs on a 20-year clock. There was a tame 1950s revival in the '70s with Grease and Sha Na Na. Various appropriations of hippieism took over the '80s, even as original '60s bands stubbornly refused to go away. Grunge acts of the early '90s clearly drew inspiration from hard-rock acts of two decades prior, like the Stooges and Grand Funk Railroad. But after less than 15 years, a herd of '90s heavy-rock acts is already back, haunting festival stages and the few remaining record stores like unruly ghosts.

The grunge decade's parade of reunions, and fans' joyous responses, seems like an admission that as rock fans get older, staying hip gets harder, and looking backward becomes increasingly appealing. Generation X, like the boomers before it, is ready to snuggle up with old favorites.

Soundgarden's final studio album came out in 1996, but the band posted an enigmatic message on its Web site a few months ago, declaring, "The 12-year break is over and school is back in session," along with a downloadable live track. Stone Temple Pilots played at South by Southwest to prime the pump for a self-titled album, its first since 2001, due in May. Last year, Alice in Chains released Black Gives Way to Blue, its first studio disc since 1995, with new vocalist William DuVall.

Perhaps most surprising, Faith No More is back. The San Francisco–based quintet evolved over the course of six studio albums between 1985 and 1997 from crude, witty funk-metal to a sonic mélange that contained smooth lounge-pop and grinding thrash. It also showcased the absurdist effects and genuinely powerful singing from smart-mouth vocalist Mike Patton, who has carved out a successful, if cult-sized, solo career since the group disbanded.

Faith No More's music always benefited from the ways its individual elements rubbed uncomfortably against one another. Patton's constantly mutating vocals and Roddy Bottum's light, melody-besotted keyboards were bolstered by Mike Bordin's pounding drums and Jim Martin's gleaming metal guitar work. Their combinations of genres and styles verged on the gratuitous, and the band threw far more sonic curveballs than straight pitches. Its members also seemed to enjoy tweaking rock fans' perceptions, whether by releasing a half-ironic cover of the Commodores' "Easy," using a slot opening for Guns N' Roses to ridicule the whole idea of arena metal, or giving deliberately provocative interviews.

For all these reasons, Faith No More was an extremely unlikely prospect for a cash-grabbing reunion tour. One member has resisted temptation: The lineup that will be playing three nights at the Warfield features the band's final guitarist, Jon Hudson, original axman Martin having given up music for farming. There are no new songs being performed, though the group has opened numerous European sets with a take on Peaches and Herb's "Reunited," and has also essayed covers of the Bee Gees' "I Started a Joke" and Crowded House's "Don't Dream It's Over," adding a few more layers of nostalgia (and ironic posturing) to the whole enterprise.

No matter how much Faith No More may snark, or avoid answering questions — the members refused all interview requests — a reunion tour is equal parts triumph and surrender. Ultimately, that's fine. Great music stays that way despite the context, be it reunion tours or beer commercials. Welcome back, Faith No More. How about a new album in 2011?

MUSIC BOXES

Last week, Amazon offered a pretty damn good deal on the Led Zeppelin 10CD Complete Studio Recordings box from 1993. Ordinarily it's $115, but they were selling it for $70, so I decided to grab it, since I've only ever owned Physical Graffiti on CD. Also, I wanted to get this version, rather than the 2009 Definitive Collection, because, frankly, the newer remasters were likely to be compressed and limited all to hell. (I visited a couple of audio-nerd burrows to figure out whether this is in fact the case; opinions varied.) Also, the fetishistic quality of that set actually turned me off - the idea of miniature reproductions of all six In Through the Out Door sleeves and a version of the Led Zeppelin III sleeve with a working pinwheel just felt obsessive and pathetic. Music is sound. I care about sound quality, not playing with (or just sitting and reverently staring at) packaging.

I think I made the right choice. The discs sound fantastic. (Assuming you like Led Zeppelin, of course.)

I have this weird ambivalence about packaging. On the one hand, as a reader and writer, I love a really well-written essay, and some boxes/deluxe reissues have terrific liner notes. The Robert Palmer essay in the Ornette Coleman box Beauty is a Rare Thing is a good example of this, and I'm sure I could dig through my collection and come up with a bunch of others, but you get my point. The trouble is, boxes are also frequently (especially now when they emerge as labors of love from indie labels desperate to dissuade folks from just downloading the audio content) loaded down with extraneous crap. The Albert Ayler box Holy Ghost had a pressed flower, postcards, reproductions of zines, and on and on, when all I wanted was the music and the book. And the new 3CD/1DVD/7"/book/photos edition of Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power just seems absurd to me. (The essays and "testimonials" are pretty much guaranteed to be a total waste of everyone's time, and I like Henry Rollins.)

So I like that the 1993 Led Zeppelin box pairs up the discs into little books, in the process juggling them out of release order so Physical Graffiti can get its own book. I like it because the perversity, the non-deluxeness of it, is so thoroughly in keeping with the spirit of Led Zeppelin, as I understand it: "Here's the album. No, there's no single. No, we don't have a publicist. See you on the road."

I also like it because it's that much easier to reconcile spending $70 on CDs that I'll immediately import into my MacBook and thence to my iPod. Maura Johnston, a writer who's too smart to waste her time talking about American Idol as much as she does, had a pretty good essay about ridding oneself of physical music and going digital-only on pastemagazine.com the other day. She's still got a romantic attachment to the idea of physical music-objects qua objects; "There was value in music having a physical presence—even those records that you’d only pull out for very specific reasons reminded you of their existence during a routine house-cleaning," she writes. "As music becomes less physical, its whole essence becomes more disposable."

I like having some stuff around in physical form, for the simple reason that my iPod and headphones are a unit, in my head. I have a cable that allows me to plug my iPod into my stereo, but I never do it. So there are certain CDs I keep around just because when I want to listen to them, I want to use speakers to do so. These range from Miles Davis's Agharta, which takes over my living room like a rabid animal when I let it loose in the apartment, to Ryoji Ikeda's Matrix, which uses ultra-high frequencies and panning to create effects that headphones simply can't duplicate - it's as much about audiology as aesthetics. And I have the feeling that although these Led Zeppelin albums are, indeed, gonna be permanent fixtures in my iPod, there are going to be plenty of times when I'm gonna want to hear "No Quarter" or "Achilles Last Stand" through speakers, at room-filling volume.