Follow these fearless alterna-rockers on their path from Eighties weird to pop bliss few would have thought in the late Eighties that the Flaming Lips, a crazed and beautiful psychedelic band from Oklahoma City, would survive the fall of alternative rock, then actually flourish in the Nineties. These two recollections of previously out-of-print Lips music document how guitarist Wayne Coyne and bassist Michael Ivins did it. They started strong: Their early lysergic tracks reveal a band bent on reinventing the raging, surreal moves of the Dream Syndicate and Sonic Youth. But The Day They Shot a Hole in the Jesus Egg captures the moment when the band came into its own by reconciling its impulse to shriek with its ability to shine. It came with the Lips' 1990 album In a Priest Driven Ambulance — included here in its entirety — on songs such as "Unconsciously Screamin'," where Coyne learned to float his high, pretty and pretty strange vocals over waves of jagged distorto-riffs. The second CD of this set, subtitled "The Mushroom Tapes," documents the delirious but limited path the Lips wisely chose not to take. Or as Coyne himself writes, in the passionately spacy liner notes, the Flaming Lips learned to be honest, even though they had initially been "convinced that to 'shock' or 'teach' listeners was more important than being real. . . . What fools we were."

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."