E-Mail This Article to a Friend Stocking stuffers Compilations, greatest hits, books, DVDs, and special editions

The Beatles, Wilco, the Velvet Underground, Stevie Ray Vaughan — Santa (the one at the North Pole and the rest of you out there) won’t have to scratch his head too hard to figure out what to put in music lovers’ stockings this year . . .

The Beatles

The Capitol Albums Vol. 1

(Capitol)

In 1962, the liner notes to this modest Beatles box set assert, "no global economy existed." So though the Fab Four made albums and released them in England to enormous acclaim, in the US, Capitol Records (after initially passing on the band) waited for two years to issue music by the group. Once the company decided Beatlemania could catch on here, it sliced and diced the band’s albums into new shapes and released four Frankenstein LPs to American audiences in 1964: Meet the Beatles!, The Beatles’ Second Album, Something New, and Beatles ’65. The Capitol Albums Vol. 1 marks these albums’ debut on CD (in both mono and stereo versions), and though grown-ups will find a rush of nostalgia in rediscovering these lost track lists — as indeed I have, since my introduction to the Beatles came from my dad’s worn vinyl — the box’s real kick is a reaffirmation of the irrepressible energy of the early Beatles, the way their absurd rush of early-’60s hits still sounds like a refutation of nostalgia itself. They’d go on to complexity and profundity and intricacy later, of course, but for the moment they just wanted to hold your hand and dance with you and see you standing there. Who could refuse?

— Mikael Wood

The Dead Boys

Live at CBGB 1977

(Music Video Distributors)

The Screamers

Live in San Francisco September 2nd 1978

(Music Video Distributors)

Before hardcore kids enshrined DIY inclusivity as a practiceable faith, punk was understood primarily as performative and not as participatory. It can all look a little quaint now — with the exception of a few early-adopting pogo-ers, the audiences for the Dead Boys at CBGB in 1977 and, one year and 3000 miles away, the Screamers in 1978 San Francisco look almost as bored as your average 2004 Thursday-night indie-rock crowd. But both bands, each understanding the theatrical imperatives of its craft, are on fire. CBGB preserves a 10-song set by the Dead Boys — formed from the ashes of Cleveland’s Rocket from the Tombs and by then relocated to NYC — just after they’d signed to Sire. Stiv Bators shows up with pancakes safety-pinned to his T-shirt, growls about how he "don’t need no pretty face, don’t need no human race," and during "Ain’t Nothing To Do" hocks a loogie that he laboriously licks off the stage. Flip through the generous bonus-reel interview footage and you can hear guitarist Jimmy Zero admit that Stiv had already been doing the same "stage act" for two years.

There was even more ritual in the Screamers’ Tomata du Plenty, who’d previously been involved in the gay Frisco performance-art group the Cockettes. The Screamers, now all but forgotten outside LA, were at the time the most popular punk band in that town, and the most idiosyncratic: instead of bass and guitar, they turned electric piano and a sci-fi ARP Odyssey synthesizer into assault weapons. Watching Tomata’s choreographed anarchy — his manic dances, expressionist hand gestures, and arched-eyebrow stares seem spontaneous, except that he repeats them on this disc’s bonus reel, a five-song set of professionally recorded videos — you imagine Iggy Pop quantified, digitized, printed out, photocopied. All wild-eyed and shock-haired, du Plenty (dead in 2000 of cancer) flashes maniacal grins and barks cryptic soliloquies against horror-movie themes. Tomata is on stage not to commiserate but to confront. Before launching into a song called "Better World," he asks an audience member what his house is like and whether the band can move in. Then he changes his mind. "That might be inconvenient," he smirks. "I think I’d rather just peek in your windows. I think I’d rather be outside."

— Carly Carioli

Wilco

The Wilco Book

(D.A.P./Picturebox Inc.)

If Wilco are the best band on the planet, then The Wilco Book will be the first piece of evidence used in rock-crit court to prove it. Produced by the band as a visual complement to their music, the book, which comes with a CD of 12 previously unreleased songs and features photographs by Michael Schmelling, is a comprehensive collection of art and words, many by band members. The words cover topics from homemade drum sticks to the art of mixing a record to the meaning of life as it relates to watercolors, but all of it has the same directed, abstract feel of Wilco’s best recorded work. Singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy admits at one point that all of that obsessiveness is pretentious, but to an über-fan, it’s revelatory. The book’s not only for them, though: for those just passing through, there’s a disc of outtakes and improv sessions, many of them from the band’s most recent CD, A Ghost Is Born (Nonesuch), including a four-on-the-floor take of "Hummingbird." The way the band reinvent a dreamy, simple song as a butt bumper with near-techno breaks is further evidence of their willingness to think out of the box . . . or the book.

— Jeff Miller