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In the past, I've followed the sleigh tracks, recommending my favorite gazillion CD collections. Should you slap down $109.97 for the Miles Davis Quintet's Columbia recordings? Damn right! How about the 10-CD, $160 complete Hank Williams set? Hell, yeah! Don't even try me on the 24-disc, $407 Duke Ellington "Centennial Edition." That dope's essential.

But it's time to come clean, even if I'm too late to stop fat men in red suits from distributing Garth Brooks' "Limited Series" box.

First, a disclaimer. As a new grinch of music industry present, I'm a hypocrite. Just last year, I told readers to buy that Hank Williams box. And my shelves are stuffed with multi-disc collections.

Which is part of the point. The box set has widened the gulf between the regular listener and the fanatic. Among the latter, I include critics, who are blinded by one of the few benefits of this underpaid trade: Free, or much cheaper, sets. (Reviewers could buy the Duke box for $150.) This is in part how the product works against the spirit of recorded music, the egalitarian idea that it is somehow reaching the streets. Maybe that's a naive wish at a time when corporate mergers, high-powered publicists and rigid playlists make payola king Alan Freed look like the tooth fairy. But it's hard to deny what's obvious just by gazing at the prices. Jazz sets are so expensive -- Bill Evans on Verve at $305; Ella Fitzgerald "Songbooks" for $223.97 -- only reviewers or the wealthy can partake.

Looking at the Ellington set's paltry sales, 600 copies at last count, it might as well have been produced for the critics buying it at a discount or judges sure to give RCA a Grammy for liner notes. Same goes for the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds Sessions." As the masterpiece from critical darling Brian Wilson, it was reviewed everywhere and sold just 30,000 copies. Compare that to the 1.8 million who bought a set by the universally sneered-upon Brooks.

Maybe these terrible sales figures have a bright side, sending a directive to the record companies to spend more time on proper, single-disc reissues. Why can I buy a box that features Brian Wilson's dog barking but none of the Beach Boys' '70s albums? Why can't collectors buy John Coltrane's rarities without slapping down a Ben Franklin for a set with several albums that any hardcore fan would already own?

I have no problem with the first-generation CD sets. They were a natural progression from the turn-of-the-century, multiple 78-rpm record sets. The modern box as I define it -- multiple CDs with unreleased rarities, demos and/or outtakes -- is a different creature, driven by the ability to cram 80 minutes of music on a single disc just five inches in diameter.

So instead of beefed-up greatest hits surveys like Eric Clapton's "Crossroads" (sales to date: 550,000), the record companies offer an endless supply of unreleased archival material. The wishes of the artist, who is either dead or doesn't own the music, are usually irrelevant. Sometimes it's as if song order were determined on a roulette wheel, with alternative tracks and demos meant for general consumption. Imagine if Penguin scattered early drafts of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" throughout a new edition of the book.

Mixing vault material with completed studio work turns the music into homework, with the booklet as textbook. Last year, Eric Alterman -- a very sharp guy and, I suspect, a man with an excellent box-set collection -- wrote on these very pages of the great debates sparked by boxes. Should the Coltrane set, for instance, be ordered according to release schedule or recording schedule? The box phenomenon, he wrote, "has done as much to elevate the status of jazz as any university program or foundation grant during the past decade."

But maybe that's also why jazz has become so stale, reliant on reissues rather than new players. And elevating the status? Whatever happened to simple, teenage kicks?

This is why the "complete" sets also fail. Forgive the audiophile in me, but there is a nostalgic joy I feel with certain albums. Being 29, part of the last LP generation, the connection is about an album cover and an atmosphere that remains when a record is played over and over. Adding B-sides and alternates -- making it "complete" -- creates an amorphous slab where once there was a deliberate creation.

As for my collection, well, I've already admitted my conflict. I would never part with my Miles Davis "Complete Bitches Brew Sessions" set, which is bound with, check this out, blue brass. A beautiful piece. The Hank collection, thick as most hardcovers, is also on the bookshelf. My favorite box, though, is still the Ellington set. Each of the 24 discs comes in a thin, cardboard case with a fragment of a photograph on it. By stacking the discs just right in four little piles, each layer makes up a historical photograph. The liner notes, as always, are impeccable. Maybe, after New Year's, I'll actually listen to it.
salon.com | Dec. 24, 1999

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