0093624988014. Pre-owned: Good condition. CD. Unlike other labels subjected to exhaustive multi-disc retrospectives like this whopping ten-disc Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records -- The First Fifty Years, Warner Brothers never embodied a scene or sound: they've always embodied what a major label should be -- a dominant force that chronicles and dictates the sound of the mainstream. Coming out at the tail-end of 2008, when the influence of major labels is on a slow steady decline, Revolutions in Sound can be seen as a portrait of a time that's beginning to recede into the past: a time when there was such a thing as mass entertainment, when the pop audience all shared a common bond of hit records they either loved or rallied against. Perhaps the greatest things about this monumental box set is that it captures that colossus while also illustrating that for a while, majors did take risks. Of course, Warner was the riskiest of all the majors, never held back by an anti-rock & roll sourpuss like Mitch Miller, who struggled to keep CBS out of the tumult of the '60s (this with no less than Bob Dylan as the label's flagship rock artist). Instead, Warner embraced the underground, recording some of the strangest to shake out of the '60s, and that adventure fits a label that turned to rock & roll to help establish themselves as a real player at the turn of the '60s. The label had started as an outgrowth of Warner's film division, releasing singles by heartthrob Tab Hunter and other Hollywood-related ephemera -- all chronicled in the first tracks of the 199-track box set (the set is a gargantuan 320 tracks in its USB drive edition; the extra 121 songs fill out the details), which includes the theme for "77 Sunset Strip" and Edd Byrnes' "Kookie, Kookie (Lend Me Your Comb)" -- but in 1960, the label started to shift as they paid out a million dollars -- the largest record contract at that point in time -- to the Everly Brothers, giving them the one rock & roll act that was still actively recording and having hits as the '50s gave way to the '60s. The Everlys weren't the only act to help establish Warner in 1960: there also was Bob Newhart, whose Button-Down Mind was a blockbuster that year, giving the label two hits to build a house upon.That process wasn't quite as simple as it sounds, as Warner spent the first stretch of the '60s with Kennedy-era comedy, novelties, and folk, never quite dipping head-first into rock & roll, outside of some surf and Bob Luman's "Let's Think About Living," (where he shook like Elvis). Warner didn't start to spread its wings until the back half of the '60s, after acquiring Frank Sinatra's Reprise -- the first of many purchases or distribution deals with smaller labels, almost all of which are included even if the contract later lapsed -- and starting to dig into the weird outgrowth of psychedelia. Warner had sunshine pop and Reprise signed Jimi Hendrix but they also got really, truly weird, taking risks on the acid-drenched Grateful Dead, underground rebels the Fugs, Hollywood eccentric Van Dyke Parks, and a host of other weirdos brought in via Frank Zappa's Straight, all represented proudly by Captain Beefheart. Warner wasn't all rock -- they still had Reprise running through the rat pack and they touched upon L.A. soul and funk, contributions that sometimes get overlooked thanks to the underground rock riches of the late '60s and '70s.These were Warner's golden years and they stretched into the mid-'70s, as t
