Comic actors John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd received a lot of flak for their Blues Brothers shtick -- mostly for the albums, not 1980's beloved classic film. But they should be given credit for exposing many people -- including this reviewer -- to the music of blues and R&B veterans. The Blues Brothers soundtrack was released on Atlantic Records. On the surface this doesn't seem unusual, since the Blues Brothers' Atlantic debut, Briefcase Full of Blues, was a number one album; but the movie was released by Universal, and its parent company, MCA, passed on the soundtrack. The rollicking remake of the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'" was a hit, featuring an arrangement notable for the horn section that replaces Steve Winwood's rumbling organ work. Ray Charles has a good time with "Shake a Tail Feather," and he's helped out by Jake and Elwood Blues (Belushi and Aykroyd, respectively). The cover of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love" is a lot of fun, thanks to the great overall rhythm and Elwood's lightning-fast stage rap, while James Brown and the Reverend James Cleveland Choir provide a blast of gospel music on "Old Landmark." Aretha Franklin's "Think" is explosive, and Cab Calloway's "Minnie the Moocher" is slyly irresistible. Charles, Brown, Franklin, and Calloway all have small roles in the film, yet so does John Lee Hooker, but he's not represented here.© Bret Adams /TiVo

This album was rushed out to capitalize on the success of the title song, which was Wonder's biggest pop hit since "Fingertips, Pt. 2," and would not be bettered until "Superstition" in 1972. Other than the hit, it's all filler, but not uninteresting for that. There are several contributions from the Wonder team at Motown, covers of other Motown hits, and stabs at sounding like Ray Charles, James Brown, and Otis Redding. At 17, Wonder was becoming both a remarkable mimic, and an original talent on his own. © William Ruhlmann /TiVo

The group's second British album actually appeared after their second U.S. LP, mostly owing to the fact that the British rock & roll audience wasn't focused on the long-player as a medium (singles and EPs were the driving force of the business in England then). It uses the same David Bailey cover shot that had graced the U.S.-issued 12 X 5 album two and a half months earlier, but only four songs -- "Under the Boardwalk," "Suzie Q," "Grown Up Wrong," and "Time Is on My Side" -- overlap on the two albums. Rather, Rolling Stones No. 2 offered seven songs that weren't to make it out in America until four months later on The Rolling Stones Now!, and they're all solid numbers: "Off the Hook," "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," "Down Home Girl," "You Can't Catch Me," "What a Shame," "Pain in My Heart," and "Down the Road Apiece," plus one of the group's best blues covers, their version of Muddy Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied," which wasn't released in America until 1973 and features some killer slide playing by Brian Jones. The U.K. LP also had the advantage of only being released in mono, so there are no "rechanneled stereo" copies with which to concern oneself. © Bruce Eder /TiVo

Although their third American album was patched together (in the usual British Invasion tradition) from a variety of sources, it's their best early R&B-oriented effort. Most of the Stones' early albums suffer from three or four very weak cuts; Now! is almost uniformly strong start-to-finish, the emphasis on some of their blackest material. The covers of "Down Home Girl," Bo Diddley's vibrating "Mona," Otis Redding's "Pain in My Heart," and Barbara Lynn's "Oh Baby" are all among the group's best R&B interpretations. The best gem is "Little Red Rooster," a pure blues with wonderful slide guitar from Brian Jones (and a number one single in Britain, although it was only an album track in the U.S.). As songwriters, Jagger and Richards are still struggling, but they come up with one of their first winners (and an American Top 20 hit) with the yearning, soulful "Heart of Stone." © Richie Unterberger /TiVo

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If the final installment of ABKCO's series of box sets containing CD replicas of the Rolling Stones' original singles for Decca and London during the '60s seems not quite as impressive as the first two, there's a reason for it: it's not. But that has little to do with either the music -- some of the Stones' very best is here, including "Street Fighting Man," "Honky Tonk Women," and "Jumpin' Jack Flash," all viable contenders for the greatest rock & roll single ever -- or the packaging, which is every bit as lavish and loving as the first two installments. Instead, the problem is that the nine singles collected here are a bit of a hodgepodge. The aforementioned trio are the group's last singles of the '60s, with the latter two being the last two singles the band conceived as stand-alone 45s. After that, there were two singles pulled from the 1971 album Sticky Fingers -- "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses," both backed by album tracks (the former had a live version of Chuck Berry's "Let It Rock" on a U.K. pressing, but that's not available here) -- and that LP is more commonly associated with the Stones' '70s albums for their own label, not their '60s work, so even if historically they were part of the London years, they don't quite feel like the end of this chapter; rather, they feel like the beginning of the next. That accounts for half of Singles 1968-1971. The remaining five discs contain Mick Jagger's excellent solo single of "Memo from Turner" from the film Performance, two singles from the 1975 '60s rarities compilation Metamorphosis ("I Don't Know Why"/"Jiving Sister Fanny" and "I Don't Know Why"/"Try a Little Harder"), the "Sympathy for the Devil" single -- which was released in the U.K. in 1976, but is presented in its 2003 form containing contemporary dance remixes by the Neptunes and Fatboy Slim, variations that are, needless to say, rather incongruous in this setting -- and, finally, a welcome bonus DVD containing the Stones playing "Time Is On My Side" on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, a live version of "Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" from 1967, and the classic promo video for "Jumpin' Jack Flash" from 1968, as well as an out-of-place 2003 video for the Neptunes' remix of "Sympathy for the Devil." While all these odds and ends are nice to have, since they tie up any loose ends from this era, the end result doesn't have the narrative flow or the rarities of the previous installments. That said, Singles 1968-1971 is a wonderful set for collectors, and it retains the high standard of the rest of the series.© Stephen Thomas Erlewine /TiVo

Hot Rocks covers most of the monster hits from the Stones' first decade that remained in radio rotation for decades to come. More Hot Rocks goes for the somewhat smaller hits, some of the better album tracks, and a whole LP side's worth of rarities that hadn't yet been available in the United States when this compilation was released in 1972. The material isn't as famous as what's on Hot Rocks, but the music is almost as excellent, including such vital cuts as "Not Fade Away," "It's All Over Now," "The Last Time," "Lady Jane," the psychedelic "Dandelion," "She's a Rainbow," "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadow?," "Out of Time," "Tell Me," and "We Love You." The eight rarities are pretty good as well, including their 1963 debut single "Come On," early R&B covers of "Fortune Teller" and "Bye Bye Johnnie," great slide guitar on Muddy Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied," and the soulful 1966 U.K. B-side "Long Long While."© Richie Unterberger /TiVo

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