Live set by former Velvet Underground member and the ringmaster of the avant-garde, Mr. John Cale. The album is virtually a career retrospective, recorded live on John's 2006 European tour. Cale felt like he'd finally found the personnel to interpret his songs with new twists, new dimensions and new emotions. None more so evident than the track 'Gun', originally appearing on 1974's Eno & Manzanera produced Fear but now sounding akin to a heavy arsenal of crunching weaponry. Inspired, Cale recorded the dates and the band began to tear up a 40 year musical history book, challenging and breathing new life into Cale's work. In full, confident stride they take in everything from 'Femme Fatale', the Warhol tribute 'Style It Takes', a capricious 'Pablo Picasso', the sweet groove of 'Hanky Panky Nohow' from 'Paris 1919', 'Look Horizon' & 'Zen' from 2003's 'Hobosapiens', the Neptunes inspired funk of 'Outta The Bag' and 'Hush' from 'black:Acetate', an impassioned take of Presley's 'Heartbreak Hotel' and the viola swathed VU masterpiece 'Venus In Furs'.

When the New York Dolls released their debut album in 1973, they managed to be named both "Best New Band" and "Worst Band" in Creem Magazine's annual reader's poll, and it usually takes something special to polarize an audience like that. And the Dolls were inarguably special – decades after its release, New York Dolls still sounds thoroughly unique, a gritty, big-city amalgam of Stones-style R&B, hard rock guitars, lyrics that merge pulp storytelling with girl group attitude, and a sloppy but brilliant attack that would inspire punk rock (without the punks ever getting its joyous slop quite right)…

Most reviewers of this well-packaged, 57-track, three-disc set can’t help but comment on the overwrought essay by clinton walker who starts with superlatives, then works up to a screech. He sets up the customary and needless rock-crit comparisons (vu more street-damaged than the beatles. So?) To advance the case that the velvets were the most important band ever in rock – maybe even, like, in the cosmos. It’s hysterical stuff for the most part (although it levels out into an insightful essay after he runs out of hyperbole and huff) and would be hysterically funny if it wasn’t almost true.

The apocryphal tale of the Stooges performance at the Goose Lake festival has been told countless times over the past five decades. Bassist Dave Alexander, due to nerves or overindulgence or whatever you choose to fill in the blank, absolutely spaces in front of 200,000 attendees. He does not play a single note on stage. He is summarily fired by Iggy Pop immediately following the gig. Here starts the beginning of the end of the Stooges.