That Driving Beat Vol.1 To Vol.5 (CD)

• Category:  Music  »  Rock & Pop  »  Psychedelic
• Format: CD   Learn more about the CD format using Tower WIKI.
• Release Date: October 6, 2008
• Number of Discs: 5
• Label: Psychic Circle
• UPC: 5051125100231
• WAPI (Tower ID): 112414462
• Average Customer Review: There are no customer reviews yet. Be the first to write a review!
• Tower.com Sales Rank: #66723 in Music (See Top 100 Music Bestsellers)
• #20345 in Rock & Pop (See Top 100 Rock & Pop Bestsellers)
• #224 in Psychedelic (See Top 100 Psychedelic Bestsellers)

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Devoted to the hybrid of '60s mod, British Invasion, and psychedelia known as "freakbeat," the series That Driving Beat ran to five volumes in the first decade of the 21st century. This five-CD box set brings them all together, presenting around 150 rarities from the 1963-1967 era, most of them British (a few items from Continental Europe are also thrown in). Pinpointing who this should be recommended to is tough, because any passionate collector of freakbeat is already going to have some to a lot (but almost certainly not all) of it. At the same time, it's likely too much for the novice, for whom single-volume comps with a higher percentage of killer cuts make far better initiations. But make no mistake: this certainly is good value if you like the style and don't have the majority of the contents, and not just for the sheer quantity of the material. Odd tracks like the Poets' "That's the Way It's Got to Be" and Him & the Others' "She's Got Eyes That Tell Lies" aside, there aren't that many absolute undisputed monsters of the genre here, most of it's at least decent, and good percentage of it is quite good. To name just a few songs, the Plebs' "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You," the Remo 4's "Sing Hallelujah," the Hi-Numbers' "Heart of Stone" (not to be confused with the High Numbers who became the Who), and the Mike Cotton Sound's "I Don't Wanna Know" are not only really good obscure British Invasion recordings, but not all that easy to find on other reissues.

On the other hand, a good number of selections are OK but nothing more, and there are too many covers of well-known songs, though even those do tend to be above average as those things rank. There are also a lot of songs that are frankly more Merseybeat than freakbeat, though really there's nothing wrong with that, unless you take the "freakbeat" label at face value and are expecting nothing but mod-psychedelia. If you approach this as an interesting survey of bands and songs that sort of floated between the major and minor leagues of mid-'60s British rock -- rather than a box set of similar size that that's going to be outstanding the whole way through, like Rhino's Nuggets extravaganzas -- it's certainly worth the investment. Though none of these songs were hits, it's astonishing how many records and bands had direct connections to bigger names, whether it's a cover of an altered version of the Who's "The Kids Are Alright" by the Rockin' Vickers (with a young Lemmy); obscurities produced by the Kinks' Dave Davies, Manfred Mann, and the Animals' Alan Price; no-hit groups including future members of Traffic, Manfred Mann, Fleetwood Mac, Deep Purple, and Yes, and ex-members of the Hollies, the Walker Brothers, and the Pretty Things; and little-known productions by Shel Talmy and Joe Meek. (The Meek-produced efforts by Heinz ("I'm Not a Bad Guy") and the Outlaws ("Shake with Me") aren't hard to get elsewhere, but are both really tough British Invasion pop numbers..) And while the packaging isn't on the Nuggets scale, the track-by-track annotation by leading British collector/expert Richard Morton Jack has a lot of info on these obscurities. ~ Richie Unterberger

Devoted to the hybrid of '60s mod, British Invasion, and psychedelia known as "freakbeat," the series That Driving Beat ran to five volumes in the first decade of the 21st century. This five-CD box set brings them all together, presenting around 150 rarities from the 1963-1967 era, most of them British (a few items from Continental Europe are also thrown in). Pinpointing who this should be recommended to is tough, because any passionate collector of freakbeat is already going to have some to a lot (but almost certainly not all) of it. At the same time, it's likely too much for the novice, for whom single-volume comps with a higher percentage of killer cuts make far better initiations. But make no mistake: this certainly is good value if you like the style and don't have the majority of the contents, and not just for the sheer quantity of the material. Odd tracks like the Poets' "That's the Way It's Got to Be" and Him & the Others' "She's Got Eyes That Tell Lies" aside, there aren't that many absolute undisputed monsters of the genre here, most of it's at least decent, and good percentage of it is quite good. To name just a few songs, the Plebs' "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You," the Remo 4's "Sing Hallelujah," the Hi-Numbers' "Heart of Stone" (not to be confused with the High Numbers who became the Who), and the Mike Cotton Sound's "I Don't Wanna Know" are not only really good obscure British Invasion recordings, but not all that easy to find on other reissues.
On the other hand, a good number of selections are OK but nothing more, and there are too many covers of well-known songs, though even those do tend to be above average as those things rank. There are also a lot of songs that are frankly more Merseybeat than freakbeat, though really there's nothing wrong with that, unless you take the "freakbeat" label at face value and are expecting nothing but mod-psychedelia. If you approach this as an interesting survey of bands and songs that sort of floated between the major and minor leagues of mid-'60s British rock -- rather than a box set of similar size that that's going to be outstanding the whole way through, like Rhino's Nuggets extravaganzas -- it's certainly worth the investment. Though none of these songs were hits, it's astonishing how many records and bands had direct connections to bigger names, whether it's a cover of an altered version of the Who's "The Kids Are Alright" by the Rockin' Vickers (with a young Lemmy); obscurities produced by the Kinks' Dave Davies, Manfred Mann, and the Animals' Alan Price; no-hit groups including future members of Traffic, Manfred Mann, Fleetwood Mac, Deep Purple, and Yes, and ex-members of the Hollies, the Walker Brothers, and the Pretty Things; and little-known productions by Shel Talmy and Joe Meek. (The Meek-produced efforts by Heinz ("I'm Not a Bad Guy") and the Outlaws ("Shake with Me") aren't hard to get elsewhere, but are both really tough British Invasion pop numbers..) And while the packaging isn't on the Nuggets scale, the track-by-track annotation by leading British collector/expert Richard Morton Jack has a lot of info on these obscurities. ~ Richie Unterberger

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