** THE '60s: ORIGINAL NBC MOTION-PICTURE SOUNDTRACK

(Mercury)

One marvels at the hubris of trying to sum up on a 15-song CD the decade in which rock exploded into a thousand fragments. Granted, everyone's own soundtrack to the '60s would be different, but whose would have omitted such no-brainers as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, the Doors, the Velvet Underground, and (duh!) the freakin' Beatles and Rolling Stones? Not that the artists included here aren't worthy, though the song choices are largely predictable (the Band's "The Weight," the Beach Boys' "Don't Worry Baby," Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody To Love," the Temptations' "My Girl," Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love," James Brown's "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud") and occasionally bizarre (the Byrds' lazy anti-war anthem "Draft Morning," the Animals' trippy music-history lesson "Winds of Change"). Who is this record's audience? Maybe Bob Dylan completists, the only ones who'll be interested in the enervated remake of 1964's "Chimes of Freedom" featuring a 35-years-wheezier Dylan, his old organist Al Kooper, and stiffly reverent latter-day folk-rocker Joan Osborne. It's certainly not self-respecting boomers, who must already own these tunes (maybe on the Big Chill or Forrest Gump soundtracks), and not self-respecting Gen-Xers, who'd find this anthology of once-revolutionary music dusty and quaint.

-- Gary Susman