listening to the 25th anniversary reissue of R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant didn’t spark the kind of nostalgia I perhaps expected, and if I think about it, that’s not a surprise.

Nostalgia comes from remembering the past. But with Lifes Rich Pageant, I’ve never allowed it to gather dust, to fall out of rotation. It might go a couple of months here or there, but it’s the R.E.M. album I come back to most often. That stems in part from the fact that it was the first I heard around the time of its release.  A stash of records left home one summer by a friend’s older college brother coupled with my box of Maxell XLIIs  meant that I discovered R.E.M. and a lot of other great music midway through high school, and never looked back.

One reason I return to this album again and again is that it is the most fun the band ever had. I love the three albums that precede it, and will readily admit that all three are artistically superior. But this one, particularly coming after the dour Fables of the Reconstruction, lets it all hang out.

So, with no real revelations to be had from the album itself, I looked instead to the disc of demos that accompanied it. There, one realizes that the album could have been very different.

I’ve always been a fan of the band’s earliest, pre-Chronic Town music. One of my favorite R.E.M. albums has always been the bootleg So Much Younger Then, which collects a dozen songs from an early set at Tyrone’s in Athens. I’ve since digitally collected several bootlegs that capture the same handful of shows, always hoping to discover one more early gem.

The band has let some of these songs leak out previously. “All the Right Friends” ended up on the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s “Vanilla Sky,” “Mystery to Me” was on the band’s double-disc IRS Years best-of, and “Permanent Vacation” was on a live iTunes collection a few years back. But with this demo disc, the best contemporaneous collection of these songs is now available. Early staples like “Wait” and “Mystery to Me” can now be added to the official canon.

These songs were demoed for Lifes Rich Pageant but ultimately left by the wayside. Can’t say I blame the band. I could do without “Underneath the Bunker,” but that’s the only thing I’d ever think of leaving off the finished album.  I have advocated for the band to get Bill Berry back in the saddle and spend an afternoon cutting a fanclub-only release of those early tracks, but I’m confident the drips and drabs of these archival releases is the closest I’ll get to that.

So, in the forward march that is the revision of history, R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction is now a classic, not the disappointment that the band and other declared at the time of its release 25 years ago.

That’s all relative, of course. I came to R.E.M. later than some (and well before most), jumping aboard with the band’s fourth album, Lifes Rich Pageant in 1986. Falling in love, I quickly went back and picked up its debut, Murmur, and the third album, Fables (in a fit of Puritan delayed gratification that would never again govern my purchasing decisions, I held off on Reckoning in a bid to save a great R.E.M. record for later. I didn’t get it until my freshman year of college in 1988, after the disappointment that was Green). To me, Fables was another masterpiece. A bit more difficult than Pageant, but no less satisfying.

I later read (in books!) that the band was not satisfied with the album. I read about the difficult recording process during and English winter with producer Joe Boyd. I foolishly developed an antipathy toward Boyd (then learned of all that he had done that made such a stance ridiculous at best). None of this affected my enjoyment of the album, which continued unabated for two decades.

Now comes the 25th anniversary remastered/expanded version of the album, which sheds even more light on the process. Plenty has been written elsewhere that ought to be read by anyone even casually interested in the subject — the true value of most reissues is not the remastering or bonus tracks, but the renewed analysis that is broader and deeper than any contemporaneous efforts simply because of the benefit of critical distance.

My point to add to this conversation is this: What Boyd brought to the project was a subtle nudge that pushed the band’s evolution a couple of steps further than it might have taken otherwise. That might sound slight, but the impact was huge. Hearing demos for Fables’ songs, I’m struck by how much many of them sound like a direct extension of the sound of Reckoning. “Green Grow the Rushes,” for example, would have fit comfortably on that preceding album. Yes, the dissonance of “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” was new, as was the frenetic claustrophobia of “Life and How to Live It.” But hearing those demos, I can imagine a very different Fables that would like have pleased listeners at the time, but that would have been seen as a troubling holding pattern in the rearview.

The other point brought up by the demos, however, is that the band, contrary to guitarist Peter Buck’s liner notes that mention feeling unprepared for the pending recording session, show songs that nearly identical to their finished versions. The various parts are in place, the arrangements, for the most part, are set. On first listen, I wondered why the band felt the need to go to such lengths to record the album — literally by flying across the ocean, and figuratively by leaving the comfort of friends and using someone like Boyd.

But Boyd’s gift, at least in this case, was the ability to simultaneously protect what the band had already created while pushing it ever so subtly toward something a bit more challenging and new. The result is the one R.E.M. album I gravitate toward when I want to my music to confront me just a bit, to force me to work for my comfort. It would be more than a decade before the band would veer so far from the obvious with late-stage curve balls New Adventures in Hi Fi and Up. Like no album before or since in the band’s catalog, it is the one where the level of challenge yields the greatest reward.

After years of listening to a Maxell XLII cassette recorded from the vinyl album, I am amazed at how good the new CD reissue of the Jayhawks debut album sounds. “The Bunkhouse album” is 24 years old, and while it sounds dated (musically and sonically), it is crisp and crackles with energy and promise.

The most amazing thing is that it exists at all. Long rumored (including last year when I interviewed Gary Louris), it finally sees the light of day as part of a miniature Jayhawks revival. It began last year with the reuniting of Louris and Mark Olson as a performing and recording duo, and continued with the two-CD best of/rarities set, Music from the North Country. Now, deluxe reissues of Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow the Green Grass are promised, and the band will play more shows.

But what about the new/old album? It sounds exactly like what it is: the first work of a young band still searching for an identity. There are flashes of the brilliance that would show up on The Blue Earth and come to full flower on Hollywood Town Hall, and well as genre pastiche that sounds more like a talented cover band than an original act.

“We must have been into old stuff,” writes Olson in the liner notes. “And I say this as a cautionary tale to those who want to wrap old clothes around their lives. It is other people’s stuff. Call the county and have them deliver a disposal container and rid yourselves of the junk. The only thing that you want to keep is the philosophy behind it…”

Of course, that’s exactly what the Jayhawks did. They kept the instrumental dexterity and the heavenly harmonies, and jettisoned the rest as they began to write Jayhawks songs rather than country songs. A lot of this would sound fine on The Blue Earth, and some of The Blue Earth would fit here. But by the time of Hollywood Town Hall, trifles like “Behind Bars,” “Cherry Pie” and “The Liquor Store Came First” would fall out of the setlist because they were derivative.

That doesn’t mean they weren’t fun. For what it is, the album is a romp from a band that would go on to do much, much better.

Richard Hell’s sophomore album, Destiny Street, is being resurrected 27 years after its initial release, but some of Hell’s fans aren’t happy about the Frankenstein’s monster he promises to unleash under the name.

Hell announced recently that he plans to re-release the album, but in a very different format. “At the time of the original recording I was so debilitated by despair and drug-need that I was useless,” he said. “The record ended up being a high-pitched sludge of guitar noise. It was a shame because the songs were clean, simple, and well-constructed, but those values were sabotaged by the inappropriate arrangements and production.”

He acquired rights to the album in 2004, then let it go out of print. In 2006, he came across a two-track tape of the original rhythm parts and decided to use that as the basis for a re-recording. “I couldn’t resist trying to use them to fill and patch up the sinking feeling that the thought of the record had always produced in me,” he said.

Hell recorded new vocals and enlisted the help of guitarists Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell and original Voidoid Ivan Julian to redo the guitars. That move has rankled some fans, who wonder why the work of legendary Robert Quine, who died in 2004, needed to be erased. “No one appreciates Quine more than me — in fact for many years I was just about the only one who fully appreciated him (with possible exception of Lester Bangs),” Hell responded on his message board. “But even Quine needed an appropriate showcase and he didn’t get that on the original Destiny Street. My problem with that record wasn’t Quine per se, but rather how he was used… If he were still around, he’d be a prominent soloist on this new record, but he isn’t around.”

Others questioned the wisdom of significantly changing an artifact that endeared itself to fans for nearly three decades. Hell said he isn’t trying to permanently suppress the album, though he does say “I did intend to replace it for most purposes with this new one.”

While the idea of Frisell and Ribot being let loose on music so different from their own is appealling, Hell does take a risk by tampering with the album. Though it pales in prominence when judged against its predecessor, Blank Generation, the debut of Hell and the Voidoids, it was well regarded and continues to draw fans. Robert Christgau in The Village Voice wrote at the time of its release that “this is no lowest-common-denominator job: it’s fuller and jazzier than Blank Generation without any loss of concision,” while All Music Guide more recently opined that “Destiny Street sounds looser and more spontaneous than Hell’s debut, but it’s just as smart and every bit as powerful, and it’s a more than worthy follow-up.”

Hell long has thought Destiny Street an album that didn’t, well, fulfill its destiny. “Destiny St. could use some improving. (The twisting pitted street, the missing guardrails, blasted landscape, criminally cheap and rushed construction–all serve to waken the admiration of the elect among us. Leer.),” he wrote in the liner notes to a 1992 CD reissue. “I remember everyone’s heroic patience with me (all the principals — Naux, Quine, Fred, and Alan Betrock are good and talented people who deserved better).”

The new version of the album — dubbed Destiny Street Repaired – is getting the lavish reissue treatment. Insound.com steps out for a rare turn as record label, offering a deluxe vinyl package for $29.99 with a poster and a CD with the 10 original tracks and two never before released tracks: “Smitten” and “Funhunt.” These will be in a signed, numbered edition of 1,000. A CD-only version for $16 also will be available that lacks the two extra tracks (which, when you think about it, means each bonus track is $7.50 if all you’re after is the music).

It’s an interesting experiment, and one we’ll likely see more of, particularly from artists like Hell who don’t seem interested in recording new material. Hell certainly stands behind his creation: “It’s a better representation of the material,” he said. “I believe most people will agree with me when they hear it, though doubtless there will be some who won’t. Even I will grant that there are a few qualities of the original that this version couldn’t better, but they are few, and on the whole the new one is clearly superior.”

Big Star has long been like a secret handshake among hardcore music fans. As Paul Westerberg sang, “Never travel far, without a little Big Star.” If you don’t, your tastes are always a little suspect. The band’s Anglophilic mix of Byrdsian chime and R’n'B swagger is oft-imitated but never equaled.

That makes the relative glut of Big Star news and product of late a godsend. First came Bruce Eaton’s book about Radio City, the band’s second album, as part of the 33 1/3 series. Actually, first came Eaton’s great blog, Big Star’s Radio City, which not only documents some of the behind-the-scenes aspects of the book, but also serves as a sort of Big Star news feed. Next has been the requisite press related to the book that has led to another round of re-evaluation and the unearthing of nuggets. Those include this great piece by writer Bud Scoppa about the band. It was written for Revolver magazine just before it shifted to a metal focus, and has been shelved in the years since.

Next comes the biggest news at all: A Big Star boxed set. Blurt reports that a four-disc set is due from Rhino on Sept. 15. The set is reported to cover 1968-1975, which means material from the band members’ pre-Big Star days (such as Chris Bell’s Rock City) and beyond. Live material, outtakes and more are expected.

Add to this that Concord plans a July reissue of the long out-of-print two-fer that introduced most of us to the band in the late 80s and early 90s that joined the band’s debut, #1 Record with that follow up, Radio City. I was lucky enough to get a later edition that had both albums intact; early issues omitted two tracks. This one has two more, which I’d guess are alternate tracks (“In the Street” from #1 Record and “Oh My Soul” from Radio City are each listed twice).

Three out-of-print Richard Buckner albums, including his debut, will be digitally reissued by Merge Records on March 10.

The label will bring out 1995′s Bloomed, 2000′s The Hill and 2002′s Impasse. There are many who will argue that his debut, Bloomed, is his best (I’m not among them, preferring the two MCA albums that followed), while The Hill and Impasse were both brave experimental albums that found him putting poems from Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology to music (The Hill) and creating a libretto of sorts with each song reading like a short story with no verses or chorus to speak of (Impasse).

Merge got Buckner to say a bit about each disc, and the results are predictably bittersweet and funny. About the recording sessions for Bloomed, he says, “We finished four days later and I flew back to San Francisco, dismembered the band and embarked on a tour that would last about 15 years (or a few days, if you count what I actually remember).” The uncompromising The Hill, which was one long track when it was first released, will now come with normal track breaks: “My thought, at the time, was to have the listener read the poems along with the music as one piece, since some of the characters in the book belong next to each other, story-wise. My demands have lowered with age, though, and the digital re-release on Merge is indexed song by song.” He has little to say about Impasse: “Somewhere between tours of the lower 48 and ice hikes to The Black Dog in the Fog, Impasse was finally completed and released in 2002.”

No word on whether the EP Impass-ette will be included with Impasse. That release included acoustic versions of two Impasse tracks and three otherwise unavailable songs.

Digital release is probably wise. As good as Buckner’s discs are, and as much critical acclaim as he gets, he just doesn’t sell. We talked about that in 1999 (pre-The Hill) when he came through Iowa on tour. “I know I don’t sell that many records, I know that for a fact,” he said. “But I tour so much, and play all these shows, and I just think, ‘Where are all of you coming from? You’re not buying the records.’ “He went on to say that he saw The Hill, originally released on the tiny Chicago label Overcoat Recordings, as an experiment. “So I’ll see how many I sell of this. Can I sell 2,000? I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”

There is word of a possible new album from Buckner next year on Merge: “The negotiations are being held up, though, by our lawyers. Evidently, there are a few kinks based on something called “The BBQ Clause” There is a “use of sauce” stipulation that has yet to be worked out (Porky vs. Supreme Court, 1873).” It would be his first since 2006′s excellent The Meadow.

MP3: “Gauzy Dress” from Bloomed
MP3: “Emily Sparks” from The Hill
MP3: “Born in to Giving” from Impasse

When I was 16, I was part of a mission trip to Los Angeles, one of a dozen lily-white Iowa kids headed to the big city to lend a hand. I can’t honestly say I recall a single thing we did in a mission sort of way, but I can tell you that we visited several record shops. It was like the gates of music heaven had been opened and I had sprouted wings. I carried with me at all times a list of records that I had read about but never seen that I hoped to buy. At the top of the list was Volcano Suns’ All Night Lotus Party. I’m not sure where I heard about it — my guess is Rolling Stone, which was about the only music magazine I read back in those days — but I was convinced I needed to hear it.

I found it in the first store we visited — on vinyl, of course — and guarded it closely throughout the rest of the trip and the flight home. When I put the needle in the groove, the first thing that I heard was a blast of feedback, followed closely by a jackhammer guitar line that made me fear I’d somehow failed to notice the review’s mention that this was a hardcore band. Then the drum beat kicked in, a nicely paced 4/4 that cut the song’s pace by a quarter, and Peter Prescott began to sing: “I’m a collector of stuff that most folks ignore, you know that one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” I was hooked.

I didn’t know that Prescott had been the drummer in Mission of Burma. I hadn’t even heard of Mission of Burma. I didn’t know there was a previous Volcano Suns album. I just knew I loved this album, which was about as far from what I was hearing on the radio in Des Moines as I could imagine.

Not until I got to college a couple of years later did I find a similar vista of great music, allowing me to go back and grab the band’s debut, The Bright Orange Years, and then keep up through Bumper Crop, Farced and the rest.

I wore these albums out — the first three, anyway — hoping one day to see them on CD. Now, 20 years later (!) Merge Records has answered the call, reissuing those first two albums on CD (their first time in the format) with remastering and bonus tracks. For the first time in 20 years, I can hear “White Elephant” without the tiny skip that I’ve heard so many times that I expect it no matter how many times I spin my pristine digital copy.

Most critics prefer the debut, though I’ll always lean toward All Night Lotus Party, if for no other reason than that I’m intimately familiar with its every note. Both discs sound great, the remastering by one-time band member Bob Weston maintaining the rumbling fuzz while bringing a clarity that makes the hooks shine.

It’s enough to have these albums on CD, but Merge has sweetened the deal with 7″ tracks, radio sessions and outtakes. The nine bonus tracks on the debut include the A and B sides to its first single, “Sea Cruise” and “Greasy Spine,” an early comp appearance in “Tree Stomp” and the band’s manic cover of Prince’s “1999.”

The 11 bonus tracks on All Night Lotus Party begin with a medley of the Beatles “Polythene Pam” and the band’s own “Greasy Spine,” which is preceded by Prescott saying, “There isn’t room on this tape.” The Amboy Dukes’ “Journey to the Center of the Mind” and Spinal Tap’s “Jazz Odyssey” also are tackled, all sounding pretty much like what you’d expect. A strange bit of studio trickery, “Walk Around Dub” is also exactly as advertised, while three songs that would eventually appear on the band’s follow-up, Bumper Crop (Here’s hoping these do well enough that Merge will bring it out next) — “Time Off,” “Magic Sky” and “Curse of the Name” — show up in early form. “The Central” and “Local Wise Man,” which appear as bonus tracks on The Bright Orange Years, also showed up on Bumper Crop.

It’s an impressive presentation, one that pops open the time capsule on mid-80s college rock for a much-needed history lesson.

MP3: Jak from The Bright Orange Years
MP3: White Elephant from All Night Lotus Party