Various Artists: Nuggets (Elektra)

I LEARNED ABOUT golden oldie collections the hard way. I was all of eleven, and had finally managed to figure out what that noise coming over the radio meant. I'd bought my first single, (Bobby Rydell's 'I Wanna Thank You' which made no sense to my parents, even though it seems perfectly impotent in retrospect), but it wasn't enough. One small circle of plastic, and all you could do was play the song over and over again until you became sick of it. Albums didn't particularly make it, either. They cost four times as much as a single, and only gave you a couple of hits and a lot of dead air in return.