Michael Fremer

Before there was Lady Ga-Ga, there was Bette.

A funny thing happens as you age: time compresses. When I was 20, music from the 1940s seemed old. Robert Johnson was positively pre-historic, and to my ears the sound was equally cobwebbed. Oh, like everyone else, I bought CL 1654 after seeing it on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home and reading one of the breathless cover dissections in a magazine. Back then every cover prop "meant" something. 

Named for a now defunct Northern New Jersey, Route 23 lawn furniture emporium (bought my chaise lounges there!), Fountains of Wayne has been making consistently tuneful and erudite observations about just plain folks since 1996 when they released their eponymous first album on Atlantic Records. The core was then and is now, the delightfully bratty-voiced Chris Collingwood and his multi-instrumental partner Adam Schlesinger.

(Note: this review originally stated that the lacquer cut was from the 3 track master. That was incorrect. The master here was the two track original that hadn't been used since 1980. While the tape had some dropout and other issues, mastering engineer George Marino determined it still sounded superior to any of the copies used for subsequent reissues.)