AMERICANWAY

ITINERARY TOP LEFT: MJ KIM (2) 3 6 D EC E M B E R 2 01 4 A A .CO M/A M E R I C A NWAY Do You Hear What I Hear? Holiday shopping for music lovers should be easy, as 2014 yielded a bounty of stellar box sets, covering rock, pop, gospel and beyond. Here's a TRIO OF THE YEAR'S BEST that'll be welcome on any wish list. ELVIS PRESLEY Elvis: That's the Way It Is (Deluxe Edition) (Sony/Legacy, $200) The King's Las Vegas period is the subject of this eight-CD, two- DVD set, built around the classic concert film That's the Way It Is. Touted as "the most ambitious Elvis Presley restoration package ever created," it includes multiple versions of the mov- ie, six full-length concerts, rehearsal highlights and other rarely heard and seen moments from Presley's 1970 stand at the International Hotel. VARIOUS ARTISTS The Soul of Designer Records (Big Legal Mess/Fat Possum, $40) This four-disc col- lection spotlights the work of Style Wooten, an ambi- tious independent label head who put out hundreds of scintillating gospel sides on his Memphis-based Designer Records in the 1960s and '70s. The fervent performances here (by a selection of largely unknown acts, including the Rev. Leon Hammer, Cora Bell Watkins and the Twilight Singers), along with the produc- tion work of legendary Sun Records alumnus Roland Janes, make this a fascinating glimpse into the world of Southern spiritual music. BOB DYLAN and THE BAND The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes (Complete) (Sony/Legacy, $150) The Bootleg Series continues with a set chronicling Dylan's escape to Woodstock in the late '60s and the music he made there with a crew that would become known as The Band. A wonderful mix of originals, classic folk songs and essential Americana, the package, released in a deluxe six-disc edition, offers insight into Dylan's most elusive era. — B O B M EH R { M U S I C } Stage Right Meet LEROY BENNETT, the man who gives superstars like Paul McCartney and Beyoncé a well-lit platform on which to sing. L eRoy Bennett once auditioned to be a singer in a band. He quit after an hour. "I learned very early in my life that I did not want to be onstage," Bennett says. Instead, he started working behind the scenes by innovating light and stage designs for rock shows. Throughout the past 34 years, he's shone a ray of light on Madonna, spotlit Paul McCartney on the long and winding road and conceptualized Bruno Mars' planet-size stage set at the Super Bowl. "It was how I could perform musically, in a very visual sense," says Bennett, the co-founder of Seven Design Works, which creates performance environments. Here, Bennett talks to American Way about his most memorable tour productions: Prince Lovesexy Tour (1988) "We had a three-quarter scale '67 Thunderbird. He wanted it to be very realistic, so it had power windows, not that it mattered, and brake lights. It was on a trolley that goes around the stage. Prince would come out and drive around the stage at the beginning of the show and come to a screeching sideways halt. Then he would get out. It was pretty incredible." Tim McGraw and Faith Hill Soul2Soul Tour II (2006) "That was a fun show because they're a husband-and-wife team. I had two layers of surgical tubes that came down and played around them as they did a little duet. It changed the whole environment so that it wasn't just all lights. It was a very theatrical moment." Nine Inch Nails Lights in the Sky (2008) "We started doing three layers of video: two transparent LED screens and then a high-res one upstage. The transparent screen had a lot of cabling and structure to it, but you could still see the band through it. The idea is always to play with illusions of reality. We started playing with the layers so that you couldn't tell what was in the foreground and what was in the background or middle ground." Lady Gaga ArtRave: The Artpop Ball (2014) "We built three stages. The B-stage was fun because it's where her piano was, and it was also a bar for people with VIP tickets. All the stages were interconnected by a Plexiglas walkway that was over the audience's heads, so if you had general admission tickets on the floor, you could move around to where she was. The most rewarding thing is to make sure the audience gets more than they paid for." —S T EP H EN H U M P H R I E S LeRoy Bennett and Paul McCartney Nine Inch Nails

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