Excellent boxsets coming our way via the Brattleboro tower, including VT's most franchise jam-band, Phish! Twenty albums from the Live Phish series spanning their career until rather recently (they're still broken up, right?). The cds are so heavy with funk-noodling we've had to reserve their right inside a school-binder kept under the counter...so to speak.

It's always been hard to get enough Soul in our bins, which is why we have two timeless sets, Hi Times (the best Al Green & Willie Mitchell years) and The Complete Stax Years Vol. 9 (no one knew how to write pop choruses better than Stax: five guys in a 12x12 basement seeking paradise in sound).

Doors fans will be spotted hovering near our display case-- never a shortage of Lizard King memorabilia here, as with the several Elvis boxsets and Bruce Springsteen collections we have in back-to-back order.

For Jazz archivists, Sonny Stitt's Studio Sessions off the Mosaic label is a thunderous 9 cd set of lush saxophone in no return. Also, The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions has found itself a home, that, in my opinion, is worth the blue metallic packaging, never mind the hours of Miles Davis' swooning trumpet fusion. Be sure to check out our 15-cd Boogie Box with the likes of Big Joe Turner and Snooky Pryor on your way out. Some of these recordings were lyrically more controversial in their day than a modern rap song, using the power of an innuendo instead of a blunt phrase to explain the subversive.

Other fantastic sets go no farther than The Velvet Underground-- studio albums, alternative tracks, demos, "Candy Says", you know the drill...And lastly, All Good Things: The Jerry Garcia Sessions. An unlimited run of post-Dead/reunion-time albums that Rhino put out a few years back when all things were still considered Grateful ideology. In full Jerry reverb, each album consists of alt. studio jams and synth out-takes that made these records rich with their blues, folk-rock roots.

Until the new sound hits...cwa