dismisses this album's sequencing, which was changed without the band's consent before its 1965 release. (He resequenced it, adding two bonus tracks, for ' excellent reissue in 1999.) Indeed, the weird bifurcated structure, placing all of the traditionally styled fiddle tunes on side one and all of the more stylistically varied numbers on side two, rather misses the point. Like the musicians collected on 's , mixed music and the artifacts of their particular circumstances (in their case, life among the junkies and freaks in post-Beat, pre-hippie Greenwich Village) into a unique and idiosyncratic blend that could have only come from these two people at this particular time. Mixing up the revered traditional song with the trippy was the whole idea! That quibble aside, however, this collection of outside material along the lines of ' and with songs (there's only one original, 's fragmentary ) is nearly as successful as the duo's even weirder 1964 debut, showing that strangeness and mystery, along with raucous good humor, is at the heart of American music. Still, the 1999 CD is the best way of hearing this music. ~ Stewart Mason