God bless the BBC for dusting off its rock archives and releasing them all on CD. This latest batch of goodies is a collection of performances by the Kinks, which were recorded for various BBC radio programs during the band's creative peak. The thirty-five tracks take a broad sweep across the band's history up until the release of Sleepwalker in 1977: The early breakout hits — "You Really Got Me," "All Day and All of the Night," "Tired of Waiting for You" — are chrome-wheeled and fuel-injected, while sublime Ray Davies cultural manifestoes like "Waterloo Sunset" and "The Village Green Preservation Society" rumble with drummer Mick Avory's four-square furor. For initiates, this is an excellent primer; for supplicants who have endured the band's desultory live albums in recent years, it's an embarrassment of riches.

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.