FOR EVERMORE

Among the new titles in Continuum's 33 1/3 series, Erik Davis's treatment of Led Zep's ZOSO walks the line Xgau called "genius dumb":

Of all the guitar heroes from the 1960s, Jimi Hendrix took this transformative potential the furthest, both onsteage and in his obsessive and almost extraterrestrial studio work. Still, it seems important to note that Page had Roger Mayer build him a fuzz box in 1964, years before Hendrix pushed Mayer's gear into the purple haze. Mayer's excellent machines also give us a different perspective on page's "guitar army," because when mayer started building his fuzz boxes for guitarists like Jeff Beck and Page, he worked for the British Admiralty researching acoustics. IN other words, his intimacy with sonic circuitry ran parallel to his work on underwater warfare...

The other standouts in this series are James Brown's Live at the Apollo, by Douglas Wolk, and Dusty Springfield's Dusty in Memphis, by Warren Zanes.