No CD included

The fact that raw, rude, rebellious rock 'n' roll reinvents or attempts to reinvent itself roughly every ten years is borne out by a timeline survey starting with the roots.

Though "That's Alright Mama" and "Baby Let's Play House" sound tame in retrospect, Elvis was a scandal in 1955. His greasy appearance, threatening sexuality, and black singing mannerisms, however, were the perfect antidote to the conservative, conformist fifties. In 1965, the Kinks were even badder than the Rolling Stones with the proto-punk ravings of "You Really Got Me" and "All the Day and All of the Night," as most of the British Invasion bands tended towards melodic pop rock. In the mid-seventies, the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, recoiling in disgust from the homogenized rock of bands like Fleetwood Mac and proclaiming that the sixties' guitar heroes were getting self-indulgent and too old to rock, hammered the point home with simple crunchy block chords on "I Wanna Be Sedated" and "God Save the Queen," respectively. Significantly, both groups also dished (and spewed) wry and biting social commentary along with their wall of distortion. The Wall Street era of corporate greed in the eighties arrived as rock was further fracturing into genres based on demographics. Instead of retreating into basic bashing again, though, anger and dissatisfaction with the status quo was expressed by some Generation X-ers in death-obsessed heavy metal bands like Metallica with Master of Puppets. To a lesser degree and in a different way, a blues revival, jacked up into the mainstream by Stevie Ray Vaughan, provided the perennial outsider's view with Texas Flood and an attempt to make extended soloing cool again.