Just a few more if I may. Perhaps Greil Marcus' writings will prompt a few of you to pick-up a selection or two.

Van Morrison-Astral Weeks: Belfast: childhood, initiation, sex and death--and Richard Davis's bass.

Graham Parker- Howlin Wind & Heat Treatment: Harbinger of the New Wave, with roots in the hardest soul music and ska of the sixties, Parker burned with anger and romance, class resentment and a sense of fate, all powered by a questing spirit that blew away the fog of the mid-seventies. As for The Rumour (his band), they came up with the drama that made Parker's every gesture seem like a last stand.

Elvis Presley- The Sun Sessions: They ranged far back into the hills, kept the radio tuned to the lastest Memphis blues, and thus, on five singles, Elvis, guitarist Scotty Moore, bassist Bill Black, and producer Sam Phillips performed "the giant weddings ceremony," marrying white culture to black, and invented rock and roll. It was as if all the contradictions of American music had been resolved in a dream, as Nik Cohn has written, it was also the sexiest thing anyone had ever heard.

Bruce Springsteen-Darkness on the Edge of Town: The great romantic of the seventies makes an album about working class defeat-and, leaving most of his innocence hanging in the air, comes away ready for a long, uncertain fight against cynicism.

The Stooges: The sound of Chuck Berry's Airmobile-after thieves stripped it for parts.

Them-Here Comes The Night: Riveting, humorless, no-hope R&B out of Ireland-and, with Mystic Eyes and Gloria, the first signs of Van Morrison's visionary obsessions.

Gene Vincent-Greatest: The most tortured of the early rockers and the dirtiest, almost forgotten in the USA at the time of his death in 1971, he seemed totally committed to the best, to hit and run love, to the most sensual and destructive rockabilly noise.