You can forget all about Kiss Alive! because Slade’s Slade Alive! is the real thing–a gut-bucket blast of pure rock ‘n’ roll energy from the poorest spellers in the history of music. This 1972 studio live affair captures this band of Wolverhampton rowdies at their rawest, and the spirit of raucous fun is contagious.

This baby was released before Slade reached full maturity and here’s how you can tell–there isn’t a single spelling error on it. And here’s another way you can tell–four of its seven cuts are covers, and the other three you probably don’t know.

The foursome’s subsequent release, 1972’s Slayed?, cemented the band’s reputation as Top of the Pops hit makers, but on Slade Alive! they established their bona fides as a formidable live act–one that pitted musical brutalism against vocalist Noddy Holder’s formidable tonsils and crowd-rousing charisma.

Slade gets filed under “Glam,” but theirs was an awkward fit. They looked ridiculous in their glitter clobber–like a bunch of roofers playing dress up–and unlike most of their Glam contemporaries appealed directly to England’s working stiffs.

Their proto-Oi! placed pints above androgyny, and their audiences did the same. When Noddy Holder says, “All the drunken louts can shout anything they like” he’s talking to the entire crowd, and not just a couple of unruly yobs.

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VIA PRESS RELEASE | This career spanning retrospective box marks the first time that all five of the band’s albums for Geffen/Mute have been collected in one complete box set.

The box set features expanded double black vinyl of each album (10 vinyl LPs in all), with several bonus tracks and hard to find 12” mixes—all carefully curated and remastered by Pylon Records. The original artwork has also been expanded into gatefold sleeves, with embossing and spot UV finish. It also contains a large size booklet with liner notes by the band’s co-founders Douglas McCarthy and Bon Harris, along with unseen photos, flyers and artwork, detailing their entire career in chronological order from Essex to Los Angeles. These albums have been out-of-print since the early ’90s and have never been reissued prior to this.

The actual two-piece box is made of hard board stock, wrapped with leather paper and the UV design is hot foiled stamped. The box also has accommodated extra space inside for their first self-released album, Basic Pain Procedure, from 1983 and their last release, Industrial Complex, from 2010, to complete the collection by the fans, as these titles have been in print in recent years.

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“I wish I had more of my early life’s moments at such clear and instant recall as this one: standing in the record section of Nichol’s department store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, happily holding onto my first album purchase, The Beatles’ double ‘red album’ of early singles.”

“This was not a purchase made lightly, (and where would the money have even come from? Maybe from cards I received for my Confirmation), but with it, I joined the privileged world of my older brothers and sisters and other People Who Owned Music. More importantly of course, I gained a soundtrack for my middle school years, a thrilling and understanding companion that echoed and sometimes intensified, sometimes calmed all of the emotions of eighth grade and beyond.

When I say I was holding my first album in the store, what I picture is holding on with both arms—besides containing music I loved, the red album was physically substantial. I liked that it opened to that wonderful black and white, Linda McCartney photo of John, Paul, George, and Ringo amongst a crowd of friendly looking people of all ages, in what I imagined to be Liverpool. The photo spanned both sides of the album’s interior. I also loved the white and green Apple labels which were such a visual connection to great music since I was very young.

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Remember a while back when the owner of Segway drove off a cliff and died—on a Segway? Well that’s kinda what England’s Gentle Giant reminds me of—they take all of the ingredients of progressive rock and drive them off a precipice. The problem is overkill: they’re all over the place, and I’m not talking about the album as a whole; I’m talking about individual songs.

Diagnosis: Musical attention deficit disorder. There was this kid in my grade school named Willie Wireman who was so exuberantly hyperactive his second grade teacher tied him to his chair—an act of sheer barbarism, I know, but things were different back in the sixties, and most teachers were war criminals. That said, if I were Gentle Giant’s teacher I would do the same thing; I would tie them to a chair.

The sextet’s manic tendencies border on the intolerable on 1972’s Octopus. Listening to its songs is like watching a game of professional ping-pong. I know full well that (1) Gentle Giant’s penchant for constantly shifting gears requires a high level of technical virtuosity across a variety of musical genres and (2) plenty of people love such displays. But I’ve known my fair share of clinical manic types, and like them Octopus makes me want to flee its company until it’s received proper medical attention.

From winsome folk rock to jazz to big symphonic interludes to fey madrigals they go, and the impression I get is a mash-up of Jethro Tull, Traffic, Fairport Convention, Kansas, Genesis, and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. And I’m just talking about opening cut “The Advent of Panurge,” which has its share of interesting moments but refuses to stay in one place long enough to make an indelible impression.

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The first album from Biloxi, MI-born and longtime Venice Beach, CA-based singer-songwriter-guitarist Ted Hawkins is one of those beauties that makes a lifetime of record collecting worth it. Originally released by Rounder in 1982 and composed of recordings made earlier, Watch Your Step finds Hawkins intermingling blues, country, folk, gospel, and a whole lot of soul into a mode of expression that’s simultaneously personal and warmly familiar; he cut more albums, but none were as striking as his debut, which gets its first-time vinyl reissue on August 3 via Craft Recordings.

The story of Ted Hawkins is a tale of struggle in Mississippi and later in California, where along with playing as a street performer in Venice Beach he also did a stretch in prison. That’s where he was when, based on the strength of these recordings made by producer Bruce Bromberg in the early ’70s, he signed to Rounder; the cover picture above was taken in the yard of the California State Penitentiary.

Like any niche of the musical landscape, the recordings of street performers vary in both content and quality. Hawkins is immediately of interest because, while out of step with pretty much anything that was coming out in 1982, his eccentricities are palatable as the focus of original, and more importantly personal, material keeps his highly approachable nature far away from any street corner oldies show.

However, it’s worth adding that fans of good oldies radio (does such a thing still exist?) are likely to take a special cotton to Hawkins’ work, specifically due to the resemblance of his voice to Mr. Sam Cooke, a likeness close enough that the aforementioned autobiographical uniqueness becomes an important factor in Watch Your Step’s success (it’s worth noting that it’s difficult to dream up any circumstance where sounding like Cooke would be a bad thing).

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