Customer Reviews

Four Decades of Folk Rock

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is an amazing box set - but Amazon's got it wrong - this is a FOUR DISC SET - not one disc!

The album contains 71 songs. The first disc (The 60's) include Bob Dylan, Buffalo Springfield, The Stone Poneys, Jefferson Airplane - and my favorite - Barry MCguire's Eve of Destruction. Disc 2 (The 70's), features James Taylor, Jackson Browne (another favorite), Joan Baez, Fleetweed Mac, Crosby Stills & Nash, and of course, The Grateful Dead. The 3rd Disc (The 80's) contained some surprises, with R.E.M., Suzanne Vega, 10,000 Maniacs, and The Roches. The final disc (The 90's & Beyond) Includes Wilco, Sarah McLachlan (a great choice), and the Indigo Girls.

The liner notes (60 pages!) trace the history of folk rock and include some great photos of Bob Dylan, Wilco, CSN, The Grateful Dead and more.

All in all, this is great set with something for everyone.

Just for clarification, this is a 4 disc set! Not sure why it's listed here as only 1 disc...
This is a great compilation for many reasons. Firstly, it successfully documents the journey that the Folk Rock genre has taken over the last four decades. This is an ambitious goal, to say the least, but Time Life does a great job here!

The first two discs, the '60s and '70s, are chock full of true classics. The track listing reads like a "Who's Who" of the most important artists of the time (the Turtles, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Band, The Byrds, The Mamas and The Papas, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills & Nash, Arlo Guthrie, James Taylor, Grateful Dead, Rod Stewart, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Fleetwood Mac, and on and on...) These are a must have for any rock collector period!


In my opinion, the next two discs (the '80s and '90s) are what truly make this set unique. These discs feature the artists who have made Folk Rock what it is today (Steve Earle, The Pogues, Richard & Linda Thompson, 10,000 Maniacs, Lucinda Williams, Uncle Tupelo, Natalie Merchant, Son Volt, John Hiatt, Billy Bragg, the great Wilco, and many more...)

This is a great opportunity for the younger generations to learn the roots of Folk Rock. With over 60 pages of liner notes written by Ted Meyers, who compiled the set, this is a truly educational package.
Thanks Time Life, you've done it again!

Time Life Records was founded in the early `60s as a division of Time Inc., but sold off in 2003 to operate independently as part of the international conglomerate Direct Holdings Worldwide. Though no longer a part of the Time media empire, the label continues to be a terrific voice in the music reissue market, selling its wares via the Internet, standard retail channels, and most famously through television informercials. The latter may give Time Life the taint of earlier reissue labels like Ronco and K-Tel, but the high quality of their sets puts them firmly in league with the cream of the reissue industry. The label scored a coup last year with the first official reissue of the Hank Williams "Mother's Finest" radio transcriptions, and their more recent anthology of music from the civil rights movement, Let Freedom Sing, was a tour de force.

This 2007 4-CD set explores the combination of folk and rock that sprang from the intersection of the late-50s/early-60s folk revival and the arrival of the Beatles on U.S. shores. Each of the four discs covers a decade (more or less), starting with the `60s on disc one and Dylan's explosive electrification of "Like a Rolling Stone." It might have made more sense to open with the Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man," which hit the charts in June of 1965, but the compilation producers' focus on Dylan pegs Newport as the pivotal moment; the Byrds are represented by their end-of-65 hit of Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!" Notable in their absence are the Beatles, Beau Brummels and Simon & Garfunkel. The `60s could easily have consumed all four discs (and virtually do so on the Folk Years set), so the producers chose to cover a generous helping of familiar bases and flesh out the first disc with brilliantly selected album sides by Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, Jefferson Airplane, Tim Buckley, The Band and Tim Rose. The latter's oft-covered "Morning Dew," is particularly impressive in this original incarnation.

Folk rock passed to singer-songwriters in the 1970s, the most commercially successful of which were more socially passive than their 1960s antecedents. There was still discontent to be found, but it was found on the more expansive and less commercially mainstream FM dial. Arlo Guthrie could lift a hit onto the charts with the non-contentious "City of New Orleans," but his counterculture "Flying into Los Angeles" flew under AM's radar. Disc two finds the social consciousness of folk rock's first wave transplanted, post-Woodstock, into heavier arrangements and picking up progressive sounds from British acts Fairport Convention, Traffic, Thin Lizzy, Nick Drake, Steeleye Span and Pentangle. U.S. singer-songwriters are heard here, but some of the sharper edges, like Joni Mitchell and John Prine are missing.

The moribund `70s provoked a punk backlash by decade's end, and the DIY aesthetic sparked a parallel movement of retro-pop and roots. The "Paisley Underground" in Los Angeles took cues from Gram Parsons, the Lovin' Spoonful and Buffalo Springfield, and as imitation spun into innovation, the Bangles, Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade and Dave Alvin each found original footings. At the same time, a second wave of country outlaws began to chafe against the crossover aspirations of `80s Nashville, and unencumbered by mass commercial concerns, stretched their roots to the same folk sources from which their musical ancestors had grown. For a time the artists stayed underground, even as their songs, such as Lucinda Williams' "Passionate Kisses," became hits for others (Mary Chapin Carpenter in this case). In the next two decades, the underground would find more direct channels to its listeners.

By the `90s, the media landscape changing, and by the `00s the marketing landscape was quickly losing the friction imposed by major record labels. Music radio had all but imploded, replaced by individually programmed channels of a listener's iPod, and streams of music found their way through film and television, commercials, on-line downloading (both legal and illegal), YouTube videos, and a wealth of Internet critics and bloggers clamoring to tout their latest discoveries. The directness with which artists could connect to listeners via MySpace returned the intimate fan connection of the `60s coffeehouse. Ironically, the underground flourished amidst the mass exposure of the Internet.

Though "folk rock" as a named genre is generally regarded as having only opened a brief window in the `60s, its influence trickled into many subsequent forms, as collected across discs two through four. It's may seem like a stretch to apply the label to country-tinged works such as found on disc four, but there is a line through the singer-songwriters of the `70s, the roots movement of the `80s and the emergence of Americana (or at least its labeling) in the `90s. It's that through-line, rather than a catalog of songs from mid-to-late `60s, that is this set's offering. Transiting around from Uncle Tupelo, Wilco and Son Volt to the Band's 1968 cover of Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" on disc one completes an unbroken circle. Disc one gives a solid shot of nostalgia, discs two through four carry forward the producers' theme and provide deep content for connoisseurs.

The 63-page booklet accompanying this set includes a lengthy essay by author Bruce Pollock and extensive song notes by ex-Rhino Records producer Ted Myers. Discographical details include recording dates and locations, personnel, and release and chart dates. Everything here is stereo except for tracks 4, 11, and 13 on disc one, and the mastering engineers at DigiPrep have done a fine job of knitting disparate material into cohesive sounding discs. If you can get past thinking the title implies four CDs of music from 1965-1969, you'll be fascinated by the expansive view essayed here. [©2009 hyperbolium dot com]

I had recently heard Among the Oak & Ash, so was in no doubt that Folk Rock is still alive and flourishing. Listening to this box set, you might think it had long ago morphed into something quite different.

The evolutionary family tree of music is a complex, ever-changing proliferation of genres, sub-genres and sub-sub...etc genres. No two people will agree on how to categorize every song and indeed, the most interesting pieces are often those that do not neatly fit any classification. For what it's worth, this is how I remember it: The Folk revival (the foundations of which had been laid by Pete Seeger, Wood Guthrie and others) began with Lonnie Donegan, who had adopted Skiffle and had a major hit on both sides of the Atlantic with Rock Island Line. This was quickly followed up by The Kingston Trio, who really got the revival underway. Donegan was a major influence on the Beatles and other British groups, who eventually displaced the great man and mounted the British invasion. The Byrds, impressed by the Beatles, responded with what turned out to be the start of a new fusion genre, Folk Rock. Dylan wrote the Folk, the Byrds made it rock. From there, the genre has an unbroken lineage, and has been much more consistently recognizable than this collection would have you believe.

The first disc is pretty good. We could argue about the details - there are much better Donovan songs than Season of the Witch, for example, and the exclusion of Peter, Paul & Mary but the inclusion of Nilsson makes zero sense - but for the most part, it's a worthy selection of 60s Folk Rock.

The cracks begin to show in disc 2, the 70s. No Albion Band, either on this or subsequent disks? No Fiddler's Dram? And including Rod Stewart - much as I like the fellow - is a bit of a stretch. "Few would think of him as a folk rocker..." say the notes. Quite. But the essentials - Pentangle, Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention and others - are represented.

Disc 3 starts to get truly annoying. The Rain Parade has no place here. X is another stretch. The Dream Syndicate's Let it Rain is entirely out of place. No Oyster Band, still no Albion Band. Toto, I have the feeling we're not in Folk Rock anymore.

By disc 4 all pretence is abandoned and we merely have some Folk-Rock-influenced music. The main thread of the genre is entirely lost.

I'm afraid I found Bruce Pollock's A Partial History near-unreadable, with its meandering sentences and cutesy phrases. "...coming out of the static at the end of the FM dial...so underground it could have been offshore...like an SOS on a deserted island of the senses...in the traffic jam of life at the freeway toll plaza, going nowhere." is from a typical 90-word-plus sentence. His notes on individual tracks are much better - informative, clear and to the point.

There is plenty of good music in this collection, many rip-and-burn candidates, but it is absolutely not a representative selection of Folk Rock.

Listen to Mike Harding online on BBC Radio 2 if you really would like to know where Folk Rock stands today. For stand it does, as strong as the Oak & Ash.
[PeterReeve]

This set doesn't know what it wants to be. Some tracks are clearly definitive of their respective periods, while the others are marginal (or, certainly, non-definitive) tracks by great artists.

I'd say this is about a CD and a half's worth of definitive folk-rock songs from various periods -- along with two and a half CD's worth of an extended sampler/teaser CD of great artists, showcasing something other than their definitive songs/recordings.

Could have been so much better if the label had a focused viewpoint.

What in the world was Time-Life thinking on this one?

If you can buy it for 4 bucks a CD, it might be worth it -- but just barely. Or, instead, seek out better representations elsewhere by some of these very talented artists.

Fantastic selection for a well rounded representation of each decade !
Great artists, bold choices of songs. I was totally blown away.

This is a VERY good collection of eclectic folk-oriented music, beginning with Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" from 1965, when the electrifying of Folk music was catching on, up through the years to later releases which were influenced by this movement. I won't belabor the reader with extensive comments, because there are 71(!) individual tracks in this set. Some are very well-known hits, such as Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth," and Tim Rose's much-covered "Morning Dew," as well as some more pop-oriented material, such as The Bangles' "Hazy Shade Of Winter" and the 1980's staple, Dexy's Midnight Runners' "Come On Eileen."

Despite it all being Folk-oriented, it is a staggering, sprawling collection of material with something good for most people's tastes. The sound quality is good, immediate, loud, and clear, so, why, you would ask, is this otherwise excellent collection rated as only four star? It's because of an error in the formatting of tracks themselves. At the end of every selection, the first second of the following selection is played before the track number changes. This flaw is unnoticed if you play the whole disc from beginning to end, but if you shuffle the order of the tracks to random or want to rip/burn to another disc, the first second of the music is missing, and the first second of the following track is appended to it. It consistently does this throughout all four discs, and that's a real shame, because, as I said earlier, this is an EXCELLENT collection of well-played, nicely recorded music from many diverse, talented musicians, forty years worth.

Most of the songs are oldies and good ones, some of them I don't remember ever hearing.

Although the product itself is nice, it seems some of the music escapes me. Maybe its the years I was in the service during Vietnam. Some of the music is very memorable;some I don't ever recall hearing it. Could be that I was just aloof at the time. It is a very good variety of eclectic music that most older audiophile buffs would appreciate.

This is just a correction to the above review. The main liner notes are by Bruce Pollock, who is also the co-producer of the package. Thank you.