Houston Music Blog

[Note: This is the final installment of Aftermath's survey of memorable 2008 concerts - the ones he attended and reviewed (mostly, but not always, by him) anyway; kudos to Valient Thorr, Ice Cube, Dr. Dog, Son Volt, Journey/Heart, Wilderness, the HPMA showcase and many others. Don't miss parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, and here's hoping 2009 is as bountiful.]

Black Crowes, House of Blues, November 20: "Of course, the Black Crowes are a band for whom no two set lists are alike, but so many coats of Warpaint meant some other era must suffer. In this case, it was their underrated middle period, offering just one song from Amorica (frequent live favorite "Wiser Time") and - sadly - nothing from Three Snakes and One Charm." (Bob Ruggiero)

B.B. King, House of Blues, November 22: "King had the luxury of acting as comic relief in his own show because he relies on his superlative band - "'bout half of 'em are from Texas anyway," he said near the end - to handle the musical heavy lifting, and did they ever."

Cheech & Chong/Willie Nelson, Verizon Wireless Theater/House of Blues, October 31: "This morning Aftermath thought his notes had vanished entirely before realizing he had simply mistook the back cover of his notebook for the front. Halloween 2008 was high times indeed."

Randy Weeks, Discovery Green, November 6: "New songs like 'Fine Way To Treat Me,' 'Hard To Believe' [and] 'Just A Little Bit of Sleep" all melded perfectly with Weeks' previous material and a funky cover of 'Down Home Girl.' (William Michael Smith)

Jay-Z, House of Blues, October 16: "Jay-Z and his dozen-man band tore through the Brooklyn rapper's phone-book-thick catalog -- topped by the thunderstruck, 'Back in Black'-­borrowing "99 Problems" -- as Bun B, several Houston Texans (and Texans Cheerleaders) and the rest of the sold-out house got their swerve on in high style."

Butthole Surfers, Meridian, October 23: "I can't speak for the band, but frontman Gibby Haynes was either on something unknown to even Central American shamen or, well, just being Gibby Haynes. It took an hour before I understood a single lyric that came out of his mouth."

Silver Jews, Walter's on Washington, September 18: "[Silver Jews frontman David] Berman strode around the stage with confidence; you wouldn't know he's still getting used to playing live. At times, he looked so loose that he might slump to the floor had he not been leaning on the mic stand." (Troy Schulze)

Drive-By Truckers, Meridian, September 24: "The Truckers have gradually infused more and more pre-rock music (both black and white) into their songs, which have as many gnarled roots and branches as the average Southern family tree. But at the core they remain a rock and roll band, and that core melted down all over Meridian's main room."

King's X, Meridian, August 19: "[dUg] Pinnick's bass was very much the lead instrument, negotiating the distance between the complicated vocal harmonies and searing chainsaw riffs with a low-to-the-ground, almost nonchalant assurance."

Masters of Metal, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, August 23: "Dilettantes contented ourselves with their screaming (for vengeance) renditions of metal mainstays 'Breaking the Law,' 'Electric Eye' and an absolutely insane 'Painkiller,' which closed the main set as [Judas Priest singer Rob] Halford deliberately stalked the main stage like a cross between Merlin and the biggest, baddest gay biker to ever walk the planet."

Metallica, Toyota Center, November 20: When Death Magnetic came out in September during Hurricane Ike, initially I dismissed it as I was knee-deep still in the new Black Keys and Beck albums and fence rubble. But somewhere along the line I picked this up again and destroyed my car stereo speakers.

The show was one of those magical metal things that only metal-heads can truly fathom. And seeing as I end up going to most of those, I'm hard to impress. But seeing the interplay between the bandmates, almost thirty years into their career was brutally magical. And my face was still red two days later from the pyro.

Hootenanny One, The Mink, January 5: Seeing members of the Mathletes, Young Mammals, and the Wild Moccasins bust through a cover set of Talking Heads tunes made me hopeful for the future of Houston music after being disillusioned for a good five years.

Ah, that nasty Grim Reaper took a lot of great musicians this year, and his scythe cut a wide swath across all genres, including many heavyweights in the blues and R&B world. The greatest loss comes in the form of someone who was a man, a song, and a beat all in one...

Bo Diddley, singer-songwriter, guitarist, co-founder of rock and roll, all-around Bad Ass (1928-2008): If we ever get around to blasting a Mt. Rushmore to the founders of rock and roll, the faces on rock would be Chuck Berry, Little Richard, a rotating white guy (Elvis, Buddy, Jerry Lee...depending on the season, I guess) and "the Originator," Bo Diddley.

Yes, this is the blues/R&B list, but Diddley's wide stance encompassed many genres, starting with his early days at Chess. He had the attitude, the songs ("Bo Diddley," "Who Do You Love?" "Pretty Thing," "You Can't Judge a Book by the Cover") and - most importantly - the beat.

Bo Diddley didn't invent the "shave and a haircut" rhythm (Bomp-ba-bomp-ba-bomp-ba-BOMP-BOMP), but with it, he drew the blueprint of ground zero of rock and roll. Just listen to "Not Fade Away" by Buddy Holly, "Magic Bus" by the Who, "She's the One" by Bruce Springsteen, and "Desire" by U2 - Bo's beat is in them all and so many more.

Though he never stopped bemoaning slights - both real and imagined - in his place in history (locally, a shocked Rockefeller's crowed in the early '90s squirmed while he beat up on Elvis from the mike), his legacy was always secure. Diddley suffered a stroke in 2007 and suffered from hypertension and diabetes, finally dying of heart failure. At his funeral, it seemed wholly appropriate that mourners broke out into a spontaneous chant of "HEY, Bo Diddley!" as a way to send him home. Perhaps it was more of a warning to St. Peter. 

"Whiskey Deuce," News on the March: Oh, snap. Bet you thought we'd pick "Moving Pictures." Nope, that's a good one, but there is something a little more memorable track 2 off the country-fied/barber shop quintet's first official EP, Glory Be! "Whiskey Deuce" has pitch-perfect harmonies, two-step-ready drums and guitars and talks about Wisconsin -- where this Rocks Off writer spent a better part of her summers growing up. If there was ever a place to forget your sour sweetie, it's the Dairyland bluffs.

"Alien," Something Fierce: It only took nearly three years, but we finally got a new set of tunes from SF in the form of full length There Are No Answers. Well done. We dig the added harmonization where vocals seem to come from ten different people in ten different directions. We never knew punk rock could be so chapel-ready. 

5. Killer Mike feat. Ice Cube, "Pressure"

4. Weezer, "Pork and Beans"

3. Justice, "Stress" (above)

2. Hayes Carll, "She Left Me for Jesus"

And the best video of 2008 is... 

Tom Waits, Jones Hall, June 22: "Us Rain Dogs fans had to make do with a spastic "Cemetery Polka" that was a fair representation of Waits' cross-pollination of beatnik jazz and guttural blues; whether or not he's your cup of bourbon, the man does have a unique sound."

Peter Murphy, Meridian, July 10: "The rest of the set was dominated by snaky, sexual rock similar to the Cramps, Stooges or Gun Club that also flirted with metal in patches. This sound hit its zenith on Murphy's 1990 hit 'Cuts You Up,' which wouldn't have sounded out of place in a strip club."

10. TV on the Radio, "The Golden Age"

9. Arcade Fire, "Black Mirror"

8. The Kills, "U R A Fever"

"Song About My Mom," Jenny Westbury: This song likely encompasses all of Westbury's tunes. It's silly, serious and most of all lyrics meet instrumentation in perfect harmony. Westbury's lyrical phrasing makes it seem as though rhyming couplets pour as effortlessly out of her mouth as water does from a faucet.

She sings: "Hawaiian shirts and button-downs and party gowns are difficult, especially the sleeves / Her fingers were so delicate / experienced as she was / From securing the tightrope / And the flying trapeze for the fleas / We need no safety nets / Their second-nature stunts are guaranteed to crowd please."

"Freeway Land," Three Fantastic: There has never been a local band more underappreciated than Three Fantastic. These four dudes from Conroe are led by the band's two longest-standing members, Kelly Doyle and Charles Peters (two of Houston's best songwriters, period). The pair must have studied the elements of rock greats - The Beatles, Devo, Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Otis Redding, etc. etc. etc. - and plucked their strongest attributes.

This is exemplified throughout the band's second full-length, this year's Life Just Keeps Getting Better and Better, especially in the fast-paced, Arabian-nights-riff-driven "Freeway Land." Please, please, please, local bands, book these guys on your shows so we can hear them. We're losing our minds.

Sean Reefer & the Resin Valley Boys, Boondocks, April 28: "Reefer and friends can be a benign ensemble whose greatest sin (and virtue) is defibrillating the shade of Hank Williams Sr. for an audience whose appetite for debauchery is more in line with grandson Hank III."

Mike Ness and Jesse Dayton, Meridian, May 6: "Ness' hard-luck characters took an unplanned back seat Tuesday to-the-all too real predicament of opener Jesse Dayton. En route from Dallas, Dayton's tour bus was pulled over in Magnolia County for the stereotypical broken taillight; the subsequent search turned up a certain illegal substance in the singer's backpack that, he said later, had been there "since I don't know when."

 

You don't need a half-wit music critic to tell you it's been a remarkable year for America, one historians will be discussing and researching for centuries to come. War, financial collapse, politics, technology: All have been dinner-table topics for many Americans. Racial barriers in 2008 were demolished by a Midwestern black man, and gender barriers were hurdled by an Arkansan and an Alaskan.

Democracy has a few awesome new dance moves rolling into the Obama presidency, and it'll be a feast for the wonks to break 'em down. It's for those wonks that we've done some number crunching. When future pointy-headed academics are scouring data in attempts to better understand America in 2008, might it not be instructive to offer a snapshot of a different sort, one that attempts to explain the People and their mindset from a quasistatistical/analytical ethnomusicosociological perspective? 
Specifically, let's address the population in a head and/or heart space it cares deeply about: through its music.

How does it sing and dance? Who does this singing? Who best moves our collective booty and tugs at our heartstrings? I've been crunching Billboard album and singles chart data in order to better understand Who We Are in 2008. I've compiled information on every artist who cracked the Top 10 album chart and the Hot 100 singles chart this year. I've researched each artist and tallied the lot of them based on a number of factors, including gender, ethnicity, nationality, state of origin (if American) and record label. I've then analyzed these numbers. What follows are some conclusions.

(Note to Nate Silver: I'm a lowly music journalist who can add, subtract, multiply, divide, and use a calculator, but not much else. Let this serve as a springboard. Margin of error: 4 percent. Results reflect chart positions up to and including the Dec. 6 issue of Billboard.)




Gram Rabbit, Super Happy Fun Land, January 31: "Gram Rabbit is the face of 21st century glam; denser than Scissor Sisters and more fun than Ladytron. If everyone who heard Roxy Music got these sorts of ideas, the world would be a vastly better place." (Chris Henderson)

Over the Rhine, McGonigel's Mucky Duck, February 6: "Tempting the gods, [Karin] Bergquist segued into one of historic Cincinnati label King Records's most notable hits, 'Fever.' This could have easily become a cliché in less capable hands, but Bergquist and her ensemble breathed new life into this oft-covered blues chestnut." (William Michael Smith)

[Note: Aftermath attended all these shows and reviewed most of them. Even he couldn't see them all.]

Six Organs of Admittance, Walter's on Washington, January 18: "[Ben Chasny's] quieter moments reminded me of the softer side of bands like Pavement and Guided by Voices, and the mournful specter of Townes Van Zandt made its forlorn presence felt more than once."

Foo Fighters, Toyota Center, January 22: "Each song was embellished with the interplay between guitarist Chris Shiflett and Grohl's Slayer-cum-Cheap-Trick riffing, sometimes going off into tangents that burst onto the churning pit like an eruption." (Craig Hlavaty)

For the second (third?) year in a row, LOM didn't vote in either the Nashville Scene's best of country music poll or the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop best of American music poll. I'm just not a good list-maker. Detest that stuff. Just trying to compile a list of possibles makes my brain hate me.

Anyway, I rarely get serviced by the major labels, and I don't listen to the radio stations that kowtow to the major labels, so I don't feel I have much context in which to wrestle with the important national security problem of whether Carrie Underwood or Brooks and Dunn put out the superior radio-friendly, Wal-Mart-marketable schlock.

The only kind of list I know how to do is the What Did I Listen To A Lot This Year list. Even that list is not exactly a no-brainer, but at least it's attemptable. And I don't have to worry about genres (are the Drive-By Truckers country; is Steve Earle hip hop?). So here goes, in no particular order since I don't know how to honestly determine, for example, whether Sam Phillips should be above or below Fred Eaglesmith. 

The Gutter Twins

Maybe Rocks Off spent a lot of 2008 with his head in the archives, but he was paying attention to new stuff too. Occasionally. It's as easy as satellite radio, channel 47's (Ethel/Alt Nation) weekly new-music hour Submission/Transmission. Monday night, S/T happened to be playing its picks for the past year.

One thing is immediately apparent: the '90s are back, big time. The Black Keys' "Strange Times" is total Soundgarden, the Kills' "Tape Song" almost out-Breeders Kim Deal (for real) and the Gutter Twins actually are two Clinton-era holdovers, ex-Afghan Whig Greg Dulli and no-longer-Screaming Tree Mark Lanegan. Radiohead is ubiquitous.

So, besides the Raconteurs, Elbow's disquieting "The Bones of You," and TV on the Radio's "Crying" (love it), what else is out there?

And now it's time for the "I love you like a fat kid loves cake" memorial Worst Lyrics of 2008, March Madness-style tournament, this year a terrifying mélange of appalling oral-sex requests, bargain-bin philosophies, grammatical atrocities, and cringe-inducing pillow talk. To elevate the drama, I provided a trusted colleague with the 16 artists who qualified and had him assign seeds--Lil Wayne you expect to go deep into a showdown like this, but Lucinda Williams? Some fantastic match-ups resulted, but in the end, nobody is topping Nickelback's backstage-pass bon mot, as devastating a blow to feminism as Katy Perry and Sarah Palin combined. Oh, for those innocent days of 50 Cent. Click to see the full "Worst Lyrics of 2008" finals

-- Rob Harvilla

Pop music often gets a bad rap for being disposable or vapid, and in many cases that's true. (Katy Perry, Danity Kane and the Pussycat Dolls, step right up!) But every year, a few irresistible bits of innovative ear candy rocket up the charts and seep into our subconscious.

The following ten singles saturated the Top 40 -- or what passes for hit-oriented radio in this topsy-turvy musical climate -- while proving that accessibility doesn't necessarily preclude creativity.

In a year worthy of your rage, metal delivered in spades. What with the economy circling the drain and Sarah Palin coming down from the tundra and then refusing to go back, 2008's been the kind of year that really makes you want to smash your head into walls or punch random strangers in the face. Good thing there were so many awesome records available to serve as a soundtrack for exactly that kind of behavior. The ten discs below are just the tip of a very big, very heavy iceberg. Metal seems to grow stronger each year; 2009 will bring new albums by Mastodon, Deftones, Lamb of God and more. In the meantime, check these out.

Metallica
Death Magnetic
(Warner Bros.)
Five years after their last comeback, they did it right. Combining the punishing thrash of their early glory years with the thick, bluesy grooves of their 1990s output, the members of Metallica reclaimed their throne as America's kings of metal. Songs like "That Was Just Your Life," "My Apocalypse" and "Cyanide" are made to be heard blasting through speakers bigger than your goddamn house, but even on an iPod, they'll have you clenching your fists and banging your head like a fourteen-year-old amped on testosterone and Red Bull.

Opeth
Watershed
(Roadrunner)
Opeth's last album, Ghost Reveries, took its progressive black/death-metal sound to its logical endpoint. So the band took a sharp left turn, incorporating a new guitarist and drummer, psychedelic studio trickery, odd rhythms and even a female vocalist on the folky, emotionally affecting opening track, "Coil." Of course, none of this means that Opeth has forgotten how to bring the heavy: "Heir Apparent" is one of the most assaultive songs of its career, including a drum solo that announces its evolution quite capably.

Americans who still think of Latin music as mariachi bands and gyrating Ricky Martins and Shakiras might want to lend a closer ear to the genre. This country's Hispanic population isn't just growing, it's growing more diverse. More and more unique musical styles are being gobbled up, and that should come as good news to alternative gringos hoping to spruce up their castellano. This year's Latin-music highlights come from all over the Spanish-speaking map. We'll start in the farthest geographic corner: an island in the Mediterranean.

BUIKA
Niña de Fuego
(WEA International)
Afro-Spanish artist Buika epitomizes cultural and ethnic diversity. Over three decades ago, her parents fled political turmoil in the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea and made a new life for themselves in a gypsy neighborhood on the island of Mallorca. After stints as a Tina Turner impersonator in Vegas and as the vocalist on some chic house and funk albums made for the European clubs, Buika has found her niche in flamenco and Latin jazz. This year's Niña de Fuego contains many of the same gitano elements found on her successful LP Mi Niña Lola, and pushes the boundaries further by adding Mexican ranchera. Only someone as strangely bohemian as Buika could pull together these emotive styles with just the right amount of melodrama.

THE PINKER TONES
Wild Animals
(Nacional)
Barcelona's Pinker Tones have traded most of their native Catalán for English -- both in language and in beat. On Animals, harmonic backing vocals combine with synthesizers and wah-wah pedals to produce 1980s-style pop and rock steady. The song titles couldn't be more fitting. "Hold On" starts with a choir and then hits the gas with an accelerated Beck-like groove. That's followed by the even more retro number "S.E.X.Y.R.O.B.O.T." and the happy-go-lucky reggae track "The Whistling Song." But Pinkertones do take pride in some forms of hip-swiveling: Be prepared to shake your mod booty to "Electrotumbao."

Hip-hop A-listers including Rick Ross, Akon and Plies were caught grossly exaggerating their gangster credentials this year. (Turns out they were painfully law-abiding. The horror!) But even if your favorite rapper wasn't caught in a lie, you can bet he or she put out a hilariously absurd record or two in 2008. Here are the most preposterous rap songs of 2008.

RICK ROSS, FEATURING T-PAIN
"The Boss"
(Def Jam)
Though Rick Ross claimed on his debut album, Port of Miami, to know Manuel Noriega, The Smoking Gun website found that Ross was a prison guard rather than an international drug kingpin before he was famous. Perhaps they met in the can? In any case, his assertion on "The Boss" that he "made a couple million dollars last year dealing weight" is absurd. Still, we're tempted to give him a pass on his claim that "I don't make love/Baby we make magic," because, well, we wouldn't know.

USHER, FEATURING YOUNG JEEZY
"Love in This Club"
(LaFace)
Sex in a puddle of Patrón, anyone? The story line on Usher's latest album, Here I Stand, is roughly "former playboy takes on fidelity and diapers." But on "Love in This Club," all that goes out the window. Ursh combines hip-hop and R&B's two great passions (discos and humping) without, sadly, elaborating on his exhibitionist fetish. It's clear from Young Jeezy's verse, however -- "It's going down on aisle three/ I'll bag you like some groceries" -- that he prefers to make love in the Piggly Wiggly.

In 2008, independent rock returned to the underground, where it belongs. Given the grand catastrophe that is today's record industry, most major-label executives don't have the time or energy to convince music fans they might like something a little out of the ordinary. They're too busy recycling variations on what were once sure things while desperately searching for career exit strategies that don't involve tall buildings, open windows and running leaps. As a result, fringier artists have had the opportunity to develop outside the spotlight, sans the sort of unrealistic commercial expectations that can lead to self-consciousness, compromise and a lifetime of regret. Not selling means not selling out, as the following albums demonstrate.

Picking the best folk and Americana records of the year isn't nearly as hard as discarding those great records that just didn't feel right stuck in the category.

Releases by Calexico and DeVotchKa felt far too worldly to pigeonhole as folk or country, for instance, while Blitzen Trapper's fantastic Furr smells more like the Kinks than Neil Young. [Editor's note: That's why we put it on our indie-rock list.] We likewise discarded Shearwater's near-masterpiece Rook, despite the fact that the album's instrumentation includes both banjo and a hammered dulcimer. And while we certainly returned to releases by Bon Iver and Bowerbirds throughout the year, we actually heard both records last year, when they were first independently released.

After this arduous vetting process, these are the records that survived: ten releases that dabble equally in meat-and-potatoes alt-country, soft-focus '70s pop folk, and the old, weird America of Greil Marcus.

As a Zooey Deschanel character once put it, long before she ever met M. Ward: "Listen and light a candle, and your future will become clear."

Any knucklehead with DSL and a laptop can now make an electronic track. With a half hour of clicking and fiddling, you can sample enough cheesy beats and mashups to clog arteries from here to Berlin.

Simple dropdown mouse maneuvers can transform electro tracks into progressive house tracks (from dry and synthetic to wet and gushy), rhythm tracks can be tempo-tweaked with an upward toggle to change a Timbaland beat into a Chromeo one. Add some T-Pain-esque pitch-correction vocals to your between-track banter for that 2008 feel (actually, please don't). The rail guiding it all: that four-on-the-floor stomp. Herewith: nine collections of dance music (and one licentious exception), some of them mixed into sets, others unmixed for your own sampling pleasure.


Simian Mobile Disco
FabricLive 41
(Fabric)
At least four different Fabric mixes could have landed on any reputable list of the year's best dance collections. Depending on your mood and your hormonal levels, either Metro Area's syrupy Demerol disco mix, M.A.N.D.Y.'s 25-track thumpfest (featuring Yello, Gui Burrato and Booka Shade), or DJ Yoda's insanely diverse FabricLive mix (Violent Femmes, Jurassic 5, Bell Biv Devoe, Adam F, Wiley), could effectively wobble your azz. Simian's stands a little above the rest (save one - see below) in its audacity, inclusiveness and ability to celebrate electro and house without resorting to the stupid futuristic robotic stuff. The set opens with Japanese 1970s cheeseball Tomita, features the year's best dance track, Hercules & Love Affair's "Blind," transforms "Suite Equitra" by the late NYC street composer Moondog (who's having a very healthy afterlife as a mixtape MC) into a dancefloor stomper, hits on current faves Deadmau5, and digs deep in the crates to uncover genius inventor/musician Raymond Scott. It closes with a great threesome: Plastikman's "Spastik" into Green Velvet's "Flash" into (of all things) the Walker Brothers' "Night Flight." This mix will totally transform your rush hour slog home from work.

Plastikman
"Spastik"
(M_nus) (from Simian Mobile Disco's FabricLive.41 mix)

A couple of weeks ago, an expert on the Harry Potter series told an audience of high school kids how lucky they were to have this Big Shared Experience--these seven books and 41,000 words in common. What does Harry Potter have to do with hip-hop in 2008? In an age when many year-end lists should be subtitled "Ten More Albums You've Never Heard of and Will Never, Ever Hear," plenty.

Technology has made the world smaller, and in response, we've found smaller and smaller worlds to inhabit. Think of a specific era--in some cases, a specific artist's work from a specific era, or even a specific year--and someone, somewhere is re-creating those very sounds. Which is fine, and sometimes a lot of fun. It's just that those folks who are still striving for the Big Shared Experience were the most interesting stories of the past year in hip-hop. They were the people who believed that hip-pop didn't automatically equal T-Pain, or the real pain of automatic IQ loss.

There were several such moments in 2008.

See the Top 10 after the jump...

[Note: This is the first in a series of articles that constitute Village Voice Media's year-end music package. The others - pop, indie-rock, dance mixes, Latin, country, alt-country/Americana, metal, rap/hip-hop and special graphics breaking down the year in charts and 2008's worst lyrics - will be posted on Rocks Off throughout the rest of the holiday season.]

It's time to rank the best of what went around and came around again.

BILLY JOEL
The Stranger
(Columbia/Legacy)
As punk and disco exploded, the Piano Man's deeply unhip 1978 breakthrough proved that top-shelf Broadway/Brill Building songwriting could still sell - and, occasionally, rock. "Scenes From an Italian Restaurant" and "Anthony's Song (Movin' Out)" remain priceless snapshots of Annie Hall-era NYC, the title track bares real teeth, and the Kenny Chesney fave "Only the Good Die Young" - banned from several college-radio stations for its unseemly insinuations about Catholic schoolgirls - is still a corker.

Extras: Complete June 1977 Carnegie Hall concert; DVD of Joel's March 1978 appearance on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test; thirty-minute making-of doc and facsimile of his lyric sketchbook, scratch-outs and all.

WILLIE NELSON
Stardust
(Columbia/Legacy)
Nelson's 1978 dunking of the Great American Songbook into his whiskey river, with producer Booker T. Jones riding soulful shotgun, shattered all sorts of precedents. It gave Irving Berlin ("Blue Skies") and Hoagy Carmichael ("Georgia on My Mind") their first number-one country hits, proved record-buyers wouldn't blanch at long-haired rednecks covering Duke Ellington and Kurt Weill (more than five million copies sold) and set the tone for this year's stellar Wynton Marsalis Quartet collaboration, Two Men With the Blues.

Extras: A complete second disc of Stardust outtakes, wherein Nelson unleashes trusty acoustic guitar Trigger on "What a Wonderful World," "Stormy Weather," "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)" and more.