"I can't die now/ 'Cause I got another show to do," hollers Patterson Hood on "The Living Bubba"—all parched road-dog desperation and two-step twang. That the band's de facto anthem was written about a fellow Southern rocker dying of AIDS says a lot about these unflinching realists. This compilation, like the 15-year catalog it samples, is as much short-story collection as it is song set; it's the perfect introduction to the band's Lynyrd Skynyrd-style triple-guitar brawls. If country music is, as Harlan Howard put it, "three chords and the truth," these guys are some kinda sweat-stained saints.

Listen to "Ronnie and Neil":

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“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.