Some of the 20th Century’s Most Memorable Sound-Bites

It sounds like the ultimate expression of the “give us 22 minutes and we’ll give you the world” syndrome: condensing a century’s worth of history onto three CDs.

But if that’s a blatantly impossible task, the results in Rhino/Word Beat’s “Great Moments of the 20th Century” set show it’s more than worth the old college try they’ve given it.

The set surveys many of the biggest historical, social and cultural developments of the last 100 years through audio clips from old recordings, radio-TV broadcasts and newsreels. It also includes some lighter touches that prevent it from turning into a marathon history lecture.

“Great Moments” also, intentionally or not, proves once again Marshall McLuhan’s observation that visual media such as television and film are “cold”--rendering the viewer relatively passive--while aural media such as radio and audio recordings are “hot,” more fully engaging because the listener must supply his or her own mental images.

**** “Great Moments of the 20th Century,” Rhino/Word Beat. The 193 tracks spread over three CDs cover a lot, but anyone can come up with bits they wished the producers--David McLees, Michael Wesley Johnson and Gordon Skene--had included. That’s a given.

But especially with the school year just underway, this set represents a remarkable job of researching and organizing the unfolding of a cataclysmic century. Not surprisingly, it’s also heavy on history of the Western world, and that of the United States in particular.

That means, for instance, we hear Mickey Mantle’s 1969 farewell speech to the New York Yankees, but nothing on the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat, or that in 1984 of Indira Gandhi.

Still, for U.S. listeners, who make up the bulk of the likely audience, there’s an embarrassment of riches here.

They run from the predictable but still compelling (the famous “Oh the humanity!” broadcast of the 1937 Hindenburg airship disaster, Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” address and news of his assassination) to the delightfully unexpected (a 1904 Columbia Gramophone ad touting the wonders of its new double-sided phonograph disc, a Cold War-era ad for the “Nuclear Survival Course Record Album”).

It’s fascinating to hear newscasts of the day telling the story both in what’s said and the way it is said, contributing a sense of time and place that often gets lost in subsequent boil-it-to-the-basics analyses.

Anyone who wasn’t there knows the blitz of London during World War II was horrific, but there’s something fundamentally chilling in hearing newscaster Edward R. Murrow read the laundry list of items parents should pack for their children before sending them out of the city for evacuation.

It’s even more powerful hearing history from the horse’s mouth.

The sound of Adolf Hitler’s voice barking his speeches--here his 1939 address condemning “Polish atrocities” against Germany--to the ecstatic masses never fails to cause one’s blood to run cold.

If juxtapositions occasionally are awkward--the report from the distraught reporter watching the Hindenburg go down in flames before his eyes is followed by a clip of an award being presented to Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney--by and large the sequencing is highly effective, up through the closing snippet from New Year’s Eve 1999 in Times Square.

The set, packaged as a single shelf-sized volume, includes a 100-page book with chapters on each decade, scores of great historical photos and a timeline with highlights covering many events, big and small, not represented on the CDs.

A tremendous resource, as well as an excellent companion to Rhino’s previous “Great Speeches of the 20th Century” boxed set.

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Also available:

*** Brian Wilson, “Brian Wilson,” Rhino/Warner Archives. Beach Boys leader Wilson’s retreat from public performances and his increasingly sporadic visits to the studio with the group during the ‘70s and ‘80s left anyone who ever was immersed in the band’s exquisite vocals and lush pop-rock arrangements feeling absolutely parched. When Wilson resurfaced in 1988 with this solo album, it was like stumbling upon an oasis in the middle of the Sahara. His lyrics were childlike in their simplicity, occasionally to the point of sounding simple-minded (“Little Children,” “Baby Let Your Hair Grow Long”).

But songs such as “Love and Mercy,” “Melt Away,” the wordless vocal workout “One for the Boys” and the 6 1/2-minute epic “Rio Grande” showed Wilson very much still in possession of his melodic, harmonic and production genius. The CD reissue, out last week, includes 15 bonus tracks--some from “Sweet Insanity,” the never-released but widely bootlegged follow-up to “Brian Wilson,” as well as three in which he discusses the creation of three songs. Wilson is now on a limited tour in which he’s fronting a symphony orchestra to re-create the Beach Boys’ celebrated 1966 “Pet Sounds” album live. The tour comes to Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 24.

Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).