From 50 years ago, a lot of songs still resonate in the present

In the last couple of years, the music companies have been doing some interesting things in trying to fight back against the dominance of online companies like iTunes.

One that strikes me is a package of "5 Classic Albums" on compact disc for about $20, all by the same group. An awful lot of people buy the greatest hits packages, but it's a lot of fun sometimes to hear the original albums as we heard them back then.

Yesterday I picked up five early Beach Boys albums, although "Pet Sounds" is only an early album based on the fact it was released 48 years ago. It was actually one of their last great albums during their heyday, but it's all a matter of perspective.

The album I really wanted was "All Summer Long," their second album from 1964, which in the pantheon is almost a greatest hits collection in itself.

The collection starts out with the group's first No. 1 hit, "I Get Around," which Music.com rates as the 15th most popular song of the year in its combination of U.S. and U.K. charts.

You may recall that 1964 was a big year for the Beatles, who held the third, sixth and seventh slots on the chart.

They might have done even better except for the fact that "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" topped the 1963 charts due to its December 1963 release date in England.

"All Summer Long" includes "Hushabye," "Little Honda," "Wendy" and "Girls on the Beach" as well as the title song made famous in the 1973 movie "American Graffiti." That's a lot of meat on one bone, and there are six other cuts that are pretty good.

As popular as the Beach Boys were, they actually didn't have that many songs that reached No. 1 -- three in the '60s and one much later. After "I Get Around," only "Help Me Rhonda" and "Good Vibrations" topped the chart in the '60s, and "Kokomo" did the same in 1988.



There's one thing very strange about the way music hangs around these days. Listening to music from 1964 in 2014 is almost the same as listening to music from 1914 in 1964. Of course there's one big difference. Advances in the quality of recordings were much greater from 1914 to 1964 than they have been in the years since.

Burr

Songs that were recorded in 1964 can be made to sound as if they were new last week, although there are very few recordings from 1914 that are even remembered. Someone named Henry Burr had three of the top 10 recordings of the year. Burr, a Canadian, was one of the most prolific recording artists of all time with more than 12,000 recordings to his credit.

His top recording in 1914, which was second behind a comedy recording called "Cohen on the Telephone," was "The Song that Stole My Heart Away," and recordings of it on YouTube are about what you would expect from a hundred year-old recording.

That's progress, I suppose. Still, there's no way I would sit around listening to music from 1914. If there is any irony in all of it, it's that as I've gotten older I have started listening to big-band music from the '30s and '40s, music I never cared for when I was young.

We all grow up, we all get older.

And as we do, if we're fortunate, we discover so many wonderful things we never knew when we were younger.