Brass Trax

It might be the last box set for record nerds. There will always be a market for Beatles reissues and the like, but the recent news that Rhino had to lay off a significant part of its workforce puts the future of the great collector’s box set in doubt. And that makes Rhino’s newest set, Where the Action Is!: Los Angeles Nuggets (1965-1968) something special indeed.

If the box set is about to die, at least it’s going out with a bang. Where the Action Is! is one of the best designed box sets in the history of the product. For one thing, there is no box. Where the Action Is! is a hardcover book, slightly larger than a sheet of letter paper, with the four CDs housed on the inside of the back cover. That means that the box set is the liner notes, which makes it quite a challenge to misplace them.

The book design is impeccable, from the groovy go-go dancer silhouette on the front cover to the show fliers that adorn the fly sheets inside. With its wealth of photographs and other ephemera, paging through the box set is a little like flipping through a crusty, old rocker’s scrapbook or visiting an archive. It offers an immersion into the three year period when the Los Angeles music scene erupted on the Sunset Strip, triggering an actual riot once in 1966, which, naturally served as the source material for a great song, the Standells’ “Riot on the Sunset Strip,” which is the first track on the first disc of the set.

If the box set sounds like a labor of love, it is. Andrew Sandoval, who curated Rhino’s other Nuggets sets, grew up in L.A., born a decade too late to actually experience the music scene he so painstakingly reconstructs. As he writes in his introduction to the set, “if I had a time machine, I would surely come back here to Los Angeles. But would it be 1965 or 1966? Maybe 1967?”

The Nuggets series, of course, captures the “alternative history” of the sixties counterculture, collecting overlooked rock tracks that never quite made it into the endless stream of prepackaged and perfunctory television documentaries about the period. The first Nuggets was an LP compiled by Lenny Kaye and Jac Holzman in 1972; Rhino took over the series in 1998, transforming a clutch of tracks into the canonical box set of sixties garage rock. The Nuggets name connotes both rarity and good taste, and Where the Action Is! does not disappoint on either count.

The four discs in the set were programmed thematically. The first disc focuses on the Sunset Strip scene of 1965-1966, and it’s a who’s who of the bands that rocked the Trip, Whiskey A-Go-Go, London Fog, and the rest of the venues. These bands were the hard kernel of psychedelia inside the grain of the L.A. scene at large, and you shouldn’t be surprised to find familiar names like Captain Beefheart, the Byrds, the Seeds, Sonny and Cher, and the Doors (a band that, like Bob Marley, needs to be saved from its fans). While most listeners will have heard the Doors hit “Take it As it Comes” or the well-traveled Bobby Fuller Four classic “Baby My Heart,” Sandoval did take pains not to go with the most obvious tracks from the well-known bands. But he still managed to dig up cuts that are representative of their sounds.

The second disc pulls back to consider bands from outside the center of the city, from South and East L.A. and the suburbs. Again, you will find familiar names on this disc—although we’ll ship you a dozen donuts if you hear the Turtles’ completely demented “Grim Reaper of Love” on an oldies station—but it manages to survey L.A.’s peripheral bands and the breadth of styles that they represented, from bluesy sludge to sunshine pop. The suburbs were a reflection of the city’s core.

The third disc might be the wildest. Its theme is “the studio scene,” and it documents the work of the era’s producers and session musicians. The studio wizards weren’t the ones who made the scenes on the Strip, and the majority of cuts on this disc were recorded in 1967 or 1968, when the L.A. scene had already gone pop. But in a city under the thrall of Beach Boy Brian Wilson, there had to be some alchemy at work in the studios, and tracks like The Yellow Balloon’s eponymous minor hit demonstrate his influence. Lee Hazelwood gets a nod with two tracks, one recorded under his own name and a second recorded with Dino, Desi & Billy. Even the Monkees find their way onto this disc, with the pleasantly demented “Daily Nightly” from the band’s criminally overlooked Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd., the record where the Monkees actually played the instruments.

The final disc, “New Directions,” captures L.A. as the garage stomp of the Strip was beginning to fade and musicians were exploring new territory. Songwriters like Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman find a place on this disc as stand-ins for the Canyon and country rock that mellowed out the throbbing teenage rebellion of the mid-60s. Love rightfully gets a track, “You Set the Scene,” one of Arthur Lee’s creepiest cuts, which he wrote when he thought he was about to die. More surprising might be the inclusion of Del Shannon, a has-been in 1967, but the cut, “I Think I Love You,” from The Further Adventures of Charles Westover, is a tripped out slice of pure psychedelia that had previously been a closely guarded secret of the record collecting hordes.

The music is great, of course, but the box set’s real strength is its power of contextualization. In an era when music arrives context-free, ripped from its history, on an iPod, it’s easy to hear a lot of different things but understand little about where they came from. Where the Action Is! strives to recreate a lost Los Angeles, whether through descriptions of rock clubs and radio stations, or through the pithy and biting descriptions of the bands on the disc. It’s a history trip, infotainment, and it’s an art that, sadly, might be disappearing now when music lovers need it the most.

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