Rock & Roll: The First 50 Years/The Late '60s: 25 Top 10 Hits

You can always get more thorough compilations, assembled by label or genre, but as a cross-section of late-Sixties AM gold, this is hard to top.

Hindsight is supposedly 20/20, but it's bit blurry when it comes to the details. If you ask anyone who wasn't listening to AM radio between 1966-1969, they'd probably tell you that this was the era of flower power -- a sonic roadmap of a fractured country. But there were a number of other trends arcing at exactly the same time, and Varese captures them perfectly in this, the latest in their series of compilations honoring the 50th anniversary of rock and roll.

Yes, the hippie stuff is here -- most notably present in The Youngbloods' "Get Together" and The 5th Dimension's "Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In," both present, happily, in their full-length forms. But this was also the era where soul came into the mainstream for good, and so you can also find Brenton Wood's "Gimme Little Sign," The Soul Survivors' "Expressway To Your Heart," and Joe Tex' "Skinny Legs And All."

That last song is about as close as this collection gets to novelty, and that's a blessing, but that doesn't mean there's no bubblegum (check out the Archies and Bobby Sherman hits). Add in some ace instrumentals ("The Horse," "Soulful Strut") and a string of glorious one-hit wonders you rarely see on these comps (Shocking Blue, Mercy, Five Americans) and the result is one excellent slab of Vietnam-era ear candy, 25 bonafide Top Ten hits, assembled more or less chronologically and with an excellent flow. Those looking for a portrait of America falling apart will have to look elsewhere, but the charts don't lie!