There will be no column next week.

I have to go back east for a funeral – my best friend Mike’s father, Albert Ferrier, died this week after a long illness. I’ve known Mr. Ferrier since I was a kid, and a kinder, gentler, more supportive man you’re not likely to meet. His loss leaves a hole in the world. I still don’t quite know what to say yet, but I’m sure I’ll have more when I get back.

Rest in peace, Mr. Ferrier.

* * * * *

It’s snowing as I write this, and it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

Last year was something of a renaissance year for holiday music, I thought. I bought three Christmas records last year, which is kind of an all-time high, and I ended up really enjoying two of them – Aimee Mann’s One More Drifter in the Snow, and Sufjan Stevens’ massive, amazing Songs for Christmas. I usually find myself grumbling about the cash-grab nature of Christmas records (Barenaked Ladies, anyone?), but these were wonderful works of art.

This year, not so much. I know everyone’s loving the Josh Groban holiday collection, but not me. As it turns out, I’m only buying one Christmas record this year, and it’s by the Lost Dogs. They’ve called it We Like to Have Christmas, and it’s apparently inspired by those trashy two-dollar X-Mas collections you find in bargain bins and in Hallmark stores all across the country. It includes Lost Dogs-y versions of some of Terry Taylor’s original Christmas tunes, including “Fruitcake from Hell,” and it kicks off with “The Chipmunk Song,” which I simply must hear.

You can get We Like to Have Christmas, along with a new live EP by the extraordinary 77s, here.

You can tell it’s Christmas because there’s no new music on the shelves. ‘Tis the season for reissues, repackagings, and most of all, live sets – CDs that require little money to put together, but yield high returns for the record labels. Now, me, I love live music, so I can’t complain about the abundance of it at the end of the year. I have four new records on tap this week that demonstrate three different kinds of year-end live sets – new ones, old ones, and classic ones.

First up is Genesis, a band many people can’t believe I like. I’m forever making the distinction between the Phil Collins pop crap of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and the classic progressive rock the band turned out in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. That’s the stuff I like. So when I heard Genesis was reuniting its “classic” lineup for a world tour this year, I foolishly imagined they might ring up Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett and really make a show of it.

Alas, by “classic,” the band clearly meant “most popular” – it’s the billion-selling trio version of the band that went out on the road this year, including Collins on the mic, Tony Banks on keyboards and Mike Rutherford on guitar. They tapped their longtime touring rhythm section of bassist Daryl Stuermer and drummer Chester Thompson to head out with them – basically, another version of their 1991 and 1992 live band.

True to form, Live Over Europe 2007 is a two-CD document of the show, mixing older and newer material and giving equally good reasons to love and hate this band. Collins’ voice is the same as it ever was, and if it gave you hives before, you won’t hear anything different here. And Tony Banks is still a brilliant keyboardist, the spine of this band, which is why it’s difficult to listen to him slog through sappy, simple crap like “Tonight Tonight Tonight.”

Genesis jumps from prog to pop from song to song here so completely that you’ll be amazed that it’s the same group of musicians all the way through. The concert starts with “Duke’s Intro,” a compilation of themes from the sterling Duke album, then slams into “Turn It On Again,” one of the best of the latter-day tunes. But from there you get “No Son of Mine,” a minimal snooze-fest from their last album with Collins. The band does a fantastic medley of old tunes, including “In the Cage” and “The Cinema Show,” and two songs later they’re playing “Hold On My Heart.”

It’s like that all the way through. Highlights include “Ripples,” “I Know What I Like” and the great “Los Endos.” But you also get “Invisible Touch,” “Throwing It All Away” and the absolute nadir of Collins-era Genesis “I Can’t Dance.” The album actually concludes with the head-scratching duo of “I Can’t Dance” and the great “Carpet Crawlers,” from the band’s 1974 masterpiece The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. It’s an odd choice to put the good material in such sharp relief by featuring it with the worst of the worst, but there you have it.

I have no idea if Genesis has really reunited, or if this was a one-time, money-minded tour. Either way, Live Over Europe 2007 shows the many personalities of the band, and highlights just how low their quality control had fallen by the end of the Collins years. But it also shows just how good a drummer Phil Collins is, in a duel with Chester Thompson called “Conversation with Two Stools.” Amidst all the cheesy pop the man and the band have foisted on us through the years, it’s easy to forget that Collins and his Genesis mates are actually very good musicians. The best parts of this album are a fine reminder of that.

But Genesis was never about the live show. Phish, on the other hand, was one of the best live bands on the planet while they were touring, and while they haven’t played together for years now, live Phish albums are always welcome additions to my collection. We have two of them this time, one of them just a run-of-the-mill superb Phish show, the other a treasure trove of legendary recordings from the band’s early days.

We’ll start with that one, called Colorado ’88. The Vermont quartet had been around for a couple of years at the time of these shows, their first forays away from the east coast, but these three discs still catch them forming their sound and their stage presence. And man, they’re amazing. Far from the lazy jams built around lazier songs that the band tossed off in its waning years, Colorado ’88 is full of progressive rock suites and Zappa-esque humor, and is a dazzling display of musicianship.

These sets were recorded by a fan off the soundboard, onto old cassette tapes, and given that, the sound quality is surprisingly high. Trey Anastasio banters with the audience more on these three discs than I think I’ve ever heard him do, and the overall intimate, friendly atmosphere is just wonderful. The set contains many of the songs from The Man Who Stepped into Yesterday, Anastasio’s senior thesis project while at Goddard College, and you can practically figure out the complex story of Colonel Forbin and King Wilson in the land of Gamehenge just from these recordings. (There’s an early version of “Wilson” here, and it’s odd to hear it without the audience screaming back the title – they just didn’t know what to do yet.)

But more than just the song selection is the incredible sense of energy and fun throughout this collection. Here’s Phish in their early days, playing the best music they possibly can with everything they can muster, and having a hell of a time doing it. They slip in my favorite section from “The Divided Sky” twice, once in the middle of a jokey number called “No Dogs Allowed,” and they cover “Sneaking Sally Through the Alley” and “Light Up or Leave Me Alone.” Best of all, there’s interplay, not just soloing – few of the extended sections here could rightly be called jams.

Eight years later, Phish played the show captured on Vegas ’96, and the difference is remarkable. The band is still tons of fun, and the show is fantastic, but they’ve really streamlined the sound in the intervening years. Billy Breathes had come out only a couple of months before, and that was the album on which Phish committed to smaller, simpler songs. They hadn’t hit their lazy funk period yet, though, and this set catches them at just the right time in their evolution.

Vegas ’96 kicks off with “Wilson,” but by now, the audience knows their part – “Ba dum, ba dum! Wiiiilsooon!” They hit high gear pretty quickly, with a cover of Zappa’s “Peaches en Regalia” and a slam through “Poor Heart,” but the highlight of the first set is a 25-minute “You Enjoy Myself,” capped off with the traditional a cappella section. The songs from Hoist are excellent live, especially “Down With Disease” and the great “Julius.” And “Mike’s Song” appears fully formed, especially revelatory after the sketchy version on Colorado ’88.

Still, there’s no reason to get this over any other Phish live record, until you get to the third disc. It contains the encore, a 37-minute take on “Harpua” intermingled with some surprising covers, and featuring some special guests – Les Claypool and Larry LaLonde of Primus, John McEuen of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, some yodelers and four Elvis impersonators. I’m telling you, this disc is worth the price of admission.

Phish would quickly take a turn for the worse shortly after this show, and would never really regain their footing. The live material from the last five or six years of the band’s existence is still good, but not nearly to this level, and the studio material became flat and boring. But with these two releases, you get to hear the band in their exciting early days, and in their live prime, and they’re both thrilling.

The idea of pushing the boundaries on stage and sending your songs into new dimensions is not a new one, of course. And that leads us to the final of our live albums, a classic show repackaged and re-released for a new audience – Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same.

For my money, while you get a good sense of Led Zep from their studio albums, the live show really defined them. I’d only heard The Song Remains the Same, recorded in 1973 but not released until 1976, on cassette before picking up this beautifully packaged new release, and the difference is, as you might imagine, pretty significant. But the power and brilliance of the performance, that remains the same, and I’d put this up there with the best live albums ever released.

You all know what’s here – one of the finest four-piece rock bands of all time slamming through songs you know by heart. There are six more tunes from the show included here, previously unreleased, so now we get a complete Zeppelin concert on two CDs. It launches with “Rock and Roll,” the simplest statement of purpose the band could have written, but before long the quartet is bluesing it up with “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” creeping it out with “No Quarter,” and heading into blissful territory with “The Rain Song.”

The second disc contains the most stretched-out numbers, with the legendary 29-minute take on “Dazed and Confused,” complete with Jimmy Page’s violin bow solo, followed in short order by John Bonham’s 11-minute drum showpiece “Moby Dick.” But it’s the great “Whole Lotta Love” that ends the show, here in a 13-minute incarnation that includes blues licks from a dozen other tunes. And it’s this song that defines Led Zep for me – one simple riff, built on and exploded by four terrific musicians.

With the complete remastering of Led Zeppelin’s catalog and the awesome three-disc live document How the West was Won coming out over the past few years, The Song Remains the Same was the one last missing piece of the puzzle. You don’t need me to recommend this album – either you have it, or you need it. ‘Nuff said.

* * * * *

The Phillip Hinchcliffe-Robert Holmes run of Doctor Who came to an end on April 2, 1977, the final day of the program’s 14th season.

It’s no secret that many fans consider the 12th through 14th seasons the best era of the show’s 26-year original run. The 14th season, especially, is held in very high regard among Who fandom, and it’s pretty easy to see why. I mentioned last time this era’s triple threat – Hinchcliffe, the producer with the darkest and most adult-oriented sensibility in the show’s history; Holmes, perhaps the best and most imaginative writer Who ever had; and Tom Baker, the most popular Doctor of them all.

But that wasn’t all. Everything just seemed to come together in the 14th season. The stories were sharp, the budget was reasonably high, the actors all gave fine performances, and the vision of the show thoroughly coalesced. Nowhere is that more notable than in the final two stories of the Hichcliffe-Holmes era, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. (Yes, they’re silly, pulpy names. You should be used to that by now.)

The Robots of Death is a sci-fi mystery movie. The Doctor and his new companion, Leela, find themselves in a mining trawler scouring the surface of an unnamed planet. The ship is crewed mostly by robots, each given identical, dispassionate faces and numbers instead of names. Just as the Doctor and Leela arrive, human crew members start dying, and our heroes become the prime suspects. But over the four episodes, they sniff out the real culprit, and find that the robot crew is not nearly as harmless as they thought. (Didn’t they read the story title? They’re the robots of death! Geez!)

Everything works in this one. It’s a tight little locked-room mystery with some memorable performances from a larger-than-normal guest cast, each with a motive and opportunity. It’s like Agatha Christie in space, with a little action-adventure thrown in – just a superbly plotted tale. And the dialogue by writer Chris Boucher is pretty great, too.

This is the second story to star Louise Jameson as Leela, a savage warrior from a primitive planet, and Hinchcliffe and Holmes did well by taking her out of her element completely for her first few trips off of her home world. Leela is almost the perfect stereotypical companion, and Jameson’s casting was definitely something for the dads in the audience – she’s hot, she wears a skimpy leather leotard, and she asks a lot of questions, enabling the Doctor to answer them and let the viewers know what’s going on.

But Jameson brings a lot to the role, more than was probably written for her. She plays Leela as charming and straightforward, always willing to jump in and defend the Doctor – violently, if necessary. And she’s an action hero in a way that no companion before her was, brandishing weapons and sometimes actually killing people. We never really get to know her, and she only stays for nine stories, but so far, I like her.

The Robots of Death is, for all its captivating qualities, just a little story, though. For one of the biggest and best epics Doctor Who ever produced, you need to see the finale of the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era, The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

I vividly remember this story from my youth, but I’m not sure I understood what I was watching, and I’m sure I didn’t get what the producers were doing with it. This is Robert Holmes’ masterpiece, an insanely good story that plays with the ever-malleable format of Doctor Who at every turn. At 142 minutes, it remains very tightly plotted, and yet feels like it has room to breathe – we get to know all of these characters, and get to experience some of the best acting performances in the show’s history.

It’s also a bugfuck insane tale. You don’t really find out what’s going on until the end, and it turns out (SPOILER) to be the story of a 51st century tyrant who flung himself back in time to Victorian London, lost his time machine, and posed as an ancient Chinese god to entice a famous stage magician and a walking ventriloquist dummy with the brain of a pig to find his device and retrieve it. Meanwhile, this tyrant’s body is collapsing due to the vagaries of time travel, and his minions are stealing girls from the streets of London so he can eat them. Oh, and the sewers are full of giant rats.

See? It’s nuts. But it’s brilliantly paced and plotted, and you don’t even realize what a crazy story you’re watching until you think about it later.

The central character of The Talons of Weng-Chiang is magician Li H’sen Chang, and I found myself having a very complex reaction to him. On the one hand, he’s a terrific character, complicated and conflicted, and in the end, he finds loss and redemption. He has a great little arc. But on the other, the producers made the decision to cast white British actor John Bennett to play Chang, and made him up to look Asian. Bennett is very good as Chang, but I find myself feeling queasy at the racial undertones.

I know what they were going for – Chang looks just like Christopher Lee in the Fu Manchu movies, and Bennett adopts the accent as well. It’s an homage to a more politically incorrect era in movie history, and as such, it fits right in with what Holmes and director David Maloney are doing with this story. But it still leaves me with an uneasy feeling.

Li H’sen Chang isn’t the only homage – in fact, The Talons of Weng-Chiang is basically Quentin Tarantino’s Doctor Who, 15 years before Reservoir Dogs. There’s a hundred things all wrapped up in this tale, from The Phantom of the Opera to Jack the Ripper to Sherlock Holmes to schlocky horror flicks to every kung fu movie ever made. It’s all set on puree, and all carried off perfectly, with only the giant rat proving to be a disappointment.

Amongst all that, Holmes also gives us one of the funniest and most memorable pairs of secondary characters in the program’s history with Professor Litefoot and Henry Gordon Jago. Played with bluster and wit by Trevor Baxter and Christopher Benjamin, respectively, Litefoot and Jago steal almost every scene they’re in. (There’s a particularly funny one with a dumb waiter in episode six.)

The Talons of Weng-Chiang is so good that even at six episodes, it never drags. And even when you’re in the lair of the melodramatic, bellowing bad guy in the final episode, there’s still enough to keep you watching, such as that walking ventriloquist’s dummy shooting laser beams at our heroes through the eyes of a giant golden dragon statue. The story is absolutely insane, in the best possible way, and if you can get past the Fu Manchu makeup and the cuddly rat creature, it’s one of the high points of the series. No other television show could have produced it, and no other team could have pulled it off this well.

Next, I will probably skip ahead to season 16, and The Key to Time.

* * * * *

Again, no column next week. Be here in two weeks for the start of my year-end stuff, leading into the top 10 list and the third installment of Fifty Second Week.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

So you may have heard that Norman Mailer died recently.

Now, I know the man won two Pulitzers and countless other awards, and was a very well-respected author, playwright and thinker. But this is just the way my mind works – upon hearing of his death, the first thing that ran through my mind was “I’ve been Norman Mailered, Maxwell Taylored…” Which is the first line of Simon and Garfunkel’s “A Simple Desultory Phillipic,” a semi-obscure number tucked away on their best album, 1966’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.

The song is a bit of a thumbed nose to Bob Dylan’s style and following, and consists mainly of a list of then-contemporary and classic references, with very little connecting them except the sense of faux-scholarly importance they carry. It starts off alternating between writers and military officials, but soon moves into musical figures and comedians, even ending with references to Garfunkel and Roy Halee, who engineered or co-produced every album the duo made.

Mailer’s death got me thinking – just how many of the people referenced in “A Simple Desultory Phillipic” are still alive? So I checked. There are 17 references in the song, if you count both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as entities in their own right, and of those 17, nine are dead and eight are alive. Among the dead: Norman Mailer, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, John O’Hara, the Beatles, Ayn Rand, Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler, Lenny Bruce, Dylan Thomas and Andy Warhol.

Still with us: former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the Rolling Stones, producers Phil Spector and Lou Adler, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Halee and Garfunkel.

What does this mean? Nothing at all, really. The passage of time just fascinates me – what were up-to-date references in 1966 now firmly date the song, and one day every one of its lyrical nods will be on that former list. But the song will live on, a marker of a specific era. I’m sure, given time and ambition, I could weave that into a metaphor of some sort, but honestly? I just think it’s neat.

* * * * *

Welcome to the end of the year. As usual, there’s absolutely nothing of note coming out between now and New Year’s Day, which I’ve always found a bit odd – you’d think the labels would want to capitalize on the holiday shopping craze. Which they do, of course, with a metric ton of special products, best-ofs and box sets. (The best one this year is the 16-CD Pink Floyd box, with every album in beautiful-looking vinyl replica sleeves.) But new stuff? We got nothing.

No, it’s the time of year when artists and labels scour the hidden corners of their cupboards, looking for leftovers they can whip into some kind of acceptable casserole for the holiday dinner. It’s b-sides and rarities and remixes, oh my, but even so, there’s some interesting stuff hidden amidst the money-grubbing dross.

For instance, there’s Nine Inch Nails’ new remix album. It’s a tradition as sacrosanct as egg nog and stockings by the fireplace – every time Trent Reznor makes an album, he’s bound to issue a disc of remixes soon afterwards. This year’s NIN meisterwerk was called Year Zero, and was, no lie, a terrific slab of post-apocalyptic, beat-crazy, nihilism pop. And if you want to hear another take on it, here is (I am not making this title up) Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D. Or, you know, Year Zero Remixed.

Slight digression – I saw a t-shirt the other day with this slogan: “Remixing a song is like admitting you were wrong.” But I’ve always seen remixing as a very generous art. The two remix albums I’ve enjoyed the most this year, this one and Joy Electric’s Their Variables, are really collections of other artists’ work. Both Reznor and Ronnie Martin gave their original tracks to artists they admire, and let them go to town. It takes a sincere lack of ego to allow others to have their way with your music, and to admit that collaboration can lead to some interesting places.

In the case of NIN, remixers usually remove the human element from the songs. Reznor’s music has always been about the war between the organic and the mechanical, with real instruments and melodies fighting against the sonic manipulations and computer terrorism he inflicts on them. That’s why his original albums are ordinarily more tense and powerful than his remixes – the end result of the remix is less humanity, more machine.

That holds true on this album, but Year Zero is Reznor’s most mechanical work to begin with, so the remixers merely sprint further down that path. Epworth Phones makes a seven-minute beats-and-samples march out of “Capital G,” while Ladytron merely fills out “The Beginning of the End” with more synths and ethereal voices. Bill Laswell strips “Vessel” down to synthetic bass, drums and noise, keeping the basic core of the song intact. And The Faint gives “Meet Your Master” the same kitschy electro-pop sheen they bring to their own work.

The most interesting things here are the most bizarre. Olof Dreijer basically ignores the bulk of “Me, I’m Not” to turn in a 14-minute ambient piece of his own devising, while Enrique Gonzalez Muller enlists the Kronos Quartet to orchestrate and spookify the instrumental “Another Version of the Truth.” This is the only song on the remix album that attempts that electric-organic tension, and as such, it’s my favorite thing here.

Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D ends the same way Year Zero did, with the grand “In This Twilight” (noised up a bit by Fennesz) and the memorable “Zero Sum” (kept intact, but given some air and atmosphere, by Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert). In the end, it’s a remix album – you know what you’re going to get, and if you’re not interested in hearing the same songs reinterpreted, stick with Year Zero itself. But as remix albums go, this one is quite good.

* * * * *

I’m glad Copeland has released Dressed Up and In Line in time for this column, and not the least of the reasons why is that it gives me a chance to rectify a prior review.

Last year, I gave this talented Florida quartet a hard time for not immediately pleasing me with their third full-length, Eat, Sleep, Repeat. I called it wispy and forgettable, and chided the band for incorporating a Radiohead influence on some of the tracks. And then I filed the disc, and didn’t touch it for about six months.

When I pulled it out again this summer, I found that most of my criticisms were really petty things. The album is a grower, and only a month or two later, I fell in love with it. It’s definitely smaller in scale than their others, and doesn’t reach for greatness as blatantly. And yes, Aaron Marsh’s lyrics this time out are not the best they’ve ever been. But the whole thing has a sorrowful, lovely tone that creeps up on you. Some of the songs (“Careful Now,” “Love Affair,” “By My Side”) are pretty much perfect. I think I was upset at the lack of a powerhouse song like “Sleep” or “Pin Your Wings,” and I missed the fact that the album is meant to be digested whole.

So I’m sorry, and please check out Eat, Sleep, Repeat. And while you’re in the store, you may as well pick up Dressed Up and In Line, a winning collection of rarities and b-sides from the band’s seven-year career. It’s the usual assortment of acoustic versions and demos and covers, but the selection highlights the main strengths of Copeland – their sense of melody, and the wonderful voice of Aaron Marsh.

The band does a great job of including tracks from every part of their career thus far, showing their progression. (A year ago, I would have said regression, but Eat, Sleep, Repeat is definitely a destination point, not a stumble backwards.) They include one acoustic take from each of their three albums, the best of which is “Careful Now,” here augmented with strings. They cover “Black Hole Sun” and “Every Breath You Take” with the same grace as the covers on their EP Know Nothing Stays the Same.

They take a long look back with all three songs from their first EP, nestled in the back third of this disc – the songs are louder and more average than anything they’ve done since. And they look ahead with a demo of “Chin Up,” a song they plan to record for their fourth album. The tune is a winner, based around a hook line that knocks me out: “Everyone knows you break your neck to keep your chin up.”

It’s taken a while for me to catch up to Copeland, and to accept that they’re not what I thought they were. Turns out, they’re better – the band has developed a dreamy, floating style that’s emphasized on this collection of slower, lovelier tunes. I was excited to hear Eat, Sleep, Repeat before it came out, and now that I’m on board with the direction Marsh is taking his band, I’m even more excited to hear whatever they do next. Until then, Dressed Up and In Line will do – it’s a fine record in its own right.

* * * * *

Which brings us to Sigur Ros, and the best collection of leftovers I’ve heard this year.

This Icelandic quartet is quite unlike any band on the planet right now, and they’ve always been content to let the music do the talking. You may have seen their cringe-inducing interview on NPR’s The Bryant Park Project (and if you haven’t, here is is) – this is less about the lousy questions the interviewer asked and more about the band’s belief that the music is the music, and doesn’t need to be talked about.

My bet is they don’t do a lot of talking in Heima, their about-to-be-released concert film, either. They’re right, of course – their music speaks for itself, especially since it serves as something of a thesis on not saddling your melody or your sound with specificity. Jonsi Birgisson sings in Icelandic, but he also often sings in gibberish – he essentially forms syllables that go along with the melodies his band produces, and they mean nothing. They also mean everything.

Sigur Ros’ music is grand, massive, and crushingly beautiful. It’s no good trying to describe it. The melodies are immense, the orchestration bigger than life, the dynamics breathtaking, the singing otherworldly. It is unlike anything I have heard before, and seems to have sprung up fully formed, with no antecedents whatsoever. It is music for the movies they play in heaven, and it’s always seemed odd to me that such sounds, such music, is made by four regular people, not, for example, aliens from some distant moon.

So Heima is going to be a shock for me. But I’ve been prepared somewhat by listening to Hvarf/Heim, the band’s new two-CD set. Hvarf is a collection of five rarities, all of which have that astonishing Sigur Ros sound. Of them, my favorite is “Hjomalind,” formerly known as “The Rock Song” among the band members. This song takes everything that’s great about Sigur Ros and condenses it to a five-minute singalong. It’s fantastic, as are the longer songs here, especially “Hafsol,” previously released as a b-side.

But it’s Heim, the second disc, that is the biggest surprise. Here are six acoustic versions of songs taken from each of the group’s four albums, played live with a string quartet, and they’re revelatory. Stripped of their studio wizardry, Heim’s selections reveal Sigur Ros as a warm, human band obsessed with beauty. The songs stand up marvelously, and Birgisson has never sounded more like a down-to-earth lead singer than he does here.

You’d think that would take away some of this band’s magic, but you’d be wrong. Just listen to the slower, acoustic-led version of “Agaetis Byrjun” here. It’s pianos and six-strings (with audible fret noises) and brush drums and a single, sweet voice – it is, undeniably, music made by people in a room. But it’s still soul-crushingly gorgeous stuff, made somehow more magical by pulling the curtain back. I love every note of this too-brief disc, one of the true gems of the latter half of the year, and I can hardly wait to see Heima. Far from ruining the mystique, this intimate glimpse into Sigur Ros makes their music sound even more remarkable to me. I can’t recommend their work highly enough.

* * * * *

I’m now in the era of Doctor Who that many fans consider the high point of the entire series. Far be it from me to disagree – the 1975 and 1976 seasons have a lot going for them. First, there’s Tom Baker, everyone’s favorite Doctor, at the height of his powers. Baker hit his stride pretty early, and only refined his quirky, alien, morally authoritative performance as the years went on.

Then we have Phillip Hinchcliffe in the producer’s chair. Hinchcliffe saw it as his mission to bring a more adult sensibility to what is still wrongly thought of as a children’s show – he figured the kids would be watching anyway, let’s give the parents some reason to tune in, too. The Hinchcliffe-era stories are on the whole darker and more complex than those many of his predecessors (and any of his successors) brought to the program.

Finally, we have Robert Holmes serving as script editor. By 1975, Holmes had contributed more than his fair share of cracking stories, including one of my favorite Jon Pertwee tales, Carnival of Monsters. He’d introduced the Autons and the Sontarans to the program, and would go on to be arguably the show’s most influential writer, up until his untimely death in 1986. As script editor, Holmes routinely cleaned up and improved screenplays, tightening dialogue and plot, and adding his own touches as he went along. The Hinchcliffe-Holmes era is very distinctive, very adult, and holds a revered spot in the hearts of Who fans.

So why didn’t I like the first Hinchcliffe-Holmes story available on DVD, Pyramids of Mars?

It’s hard to say. Repeated viewings have certainly improved this story, but on first run-through, I found it a bit of a mess. It’s hard to follow, it’s cheap-looking, and its villain is one of those cackling bad guys with no apparent motivation other than pure evil. Its first three episodes consist of a lot of running around an old manor, the Doc and Sarah Jane chased and menaced by flimsy-looking mummy-robots (really). Its fourth is a disaster of bad effects, the Doctor working to keep the Egyptian god Sutekh locked away in his prison on Mars – a prison that seems to be made of Atari-quality graphics and curtains.

Anyway, here’s the plot. Sutekh, one of the original Big Bads of ancient Egypt, is apparently a real guy, with a really menacing helmet. He’s been trapped in a jail cell on Mars for centuries, even though he seems to have been imprisoned with everything he needs to get out. He’s taken over the mind of a modern-day archeologist, Marcus Scarman, and is using him and his palatial estate to set up an escape plan that involves building a big rocket to blow up Sutekh’s prison.

And the Doctor must stop him. Which he does, barely – this is one of those stories that earned Hinchcliffe his reputation as a master of darkness, since everyone who isn’t the Doctor or Sarah Jane dies by the end.

That sounds solid enough for a Doctor Who story. So what didn’t I like? Well, there’s no real explanation for what’s going on, which is unfortunate. My big question – Egyptian gods are real? How come? – was never addressed. The viewer gets to piece this thing together, and we never get a big-picture look at things. Halfway through the second episode, we get a new character that’s not properly introduced, and that ends up being pretty confusing. And the whole thing is melodramatic and serious, despite the budget’s inability to prop up the story.

And then there’s the toilet paper men. At least, that’s what my friend Mike and I called them when we were younger. I used to make fun of the idea of a monster that could barely move, lest it rip the layers of Charmin it was wrapped in. Turns out, that’s still funny, and it’s hard to take the lumbering mummy-bots seriously at all.

There are some good things about Pyramids of Mars, but I wouldn’t call it a triumph for this era. It does contain one of Tom Baker’s best straight-drama performances, and the scene where Sutekh tortures the Doctor is pretty effective. But the story as a whole is too much of a mess to really connect, so I find myself disagreeing with its status as a stone cold classic.

Faring much better, I think, is The Hand of Fear. One season later than Pyramids of Mars, and the team seems to be firing on all cylinders, for the most part. This is the second story of Hinchcliffe’s last season as producer, and it’s considered the weakest of the lot. If that’s true, I’m very much looking forward to seeing the rest of them, because, with the exception of a disastrous final episode, The Hand of Fear works very well.

The Doc and Sarah Jane materialize in a quarry. (Nothing new there, only this time, it’s meant to be a quarry on Earth, not an alien landscape…) They’re caught in an excavation blast, during which Sarah Jane finds a disembodied hand that takes over her mind. She brings the hand to the nearest nuclear reactor, and it absorbs enough radiation to start moving about on its own, regenerating. As it turns out, the hand belongs to Eldrad, exiled criminal from an alien planet, and she’s desperate to get home.

I vividly remember The Hand of Fear, having first seen it at age seven or so, and I remember being creeped out by the hand moving by itself. Now, as a 33-year-old, I find myself more creeped out by Elisabeth Sladen’s performance as the hypnotized Sarah Jane in the first two episodes. She’s unnerving here, despite her red-and-white-striped overalls, and commands the screen. The first two installments of this story are pretty much flawless, and full of suspense.

What helps is that the production team was allowed to shoot inside a real nuclear power plant, giving the story a sense of scale. If they’d stayed there, the story would have remained on the right track, but unfortunately, Eldrad must live, as they say. Eldrad, played by Judith Paris in a skin-tight costume, is a good, complex character, and the audience is uncertain whether to trust her or not. Even when the Doc and Sarah Jane take her back to her home planet, and she tells us the history of the environmental wasteland we see when we get there, we’re not sure if she’s planning something sinister.

Spoiler – she is. In a drastic miscalculation of a fourth episode, Eldrad achieves his “true form,” changing from Judith Paris to Stephen Thorne, in a bulkier, gem-like costume. Thorne is awful here, bellowing and posturing, and his Eldrad is just a megalomaniacal tyrant. He wants to take over his home world and then conquer Earth, for some reason, and I found myself begging for a quick end to spare me from his histrionics.

The sad thing is, there’s a brilliant idea here – Eldrad’s entire race, it turns out, has committed mass suicide, rather than be ruled by him. This should be chilling, soul-shaking stuff, but it isn’t. It’s a man in a funny costume, yelling a lot and then tripping over a scarf. If not for this terrible lapse in judgment, The Hand of Fear could have been one of Tom Baker’s best stories.

Ah, but it does have one thing going for it that no other Tom Baker story has – the departure of Sarah Jane Smith. Elisabeth Sladen played Sarah Jane for more than three years, appearing in 80 episodes with two doctors. She’s one of the longest-running companions, second only to Frazer Hines’ Jamie McCrimmon, who appeared in 113 episodes. (And if you count by seasons, she’s the longest, with three and a third.)

The actual goodbye scene is wonderfully understated – so much so that I found myself wanting more, initially. But on repeat viewings, I think it’s very good. The characters (and the actors) clearly have such affection for each other that nothing more need be said. And the last few moments, where Sarah Jane realizes that the Doctor’s dropped her off in the wrong part of England, are just priceless. A fine finish to a celebrated run.

Anyway, next week, we’ll get into two of the best-loved Hinchcliffe-Holmes stories, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

On a related note, and just to bookend this column with death, I’ve just heard that Verity Lambert passed away this week, at age 71. Lambert was Doctor Who’s first producer, and the woman responsible for a lot of the sensibility of the show even today. Seriously, watch the first episode from 1963 – you’ll be surprised just how many elements of the show were in place right from the start.

It was Lambert who first moved what could have been a silly pantomime children’s program into a serious, dramatic direction, it was Lambert who shepherded the development of the Daleks (back when they were scary), and it was Lambert who pushed for the spooky, iconic theme music still in use today. It would not be an exaggeration to say that she created much of what we call Doctor Who today. Though she didn’t realize it at the time, she was one of the original architects of a show loved by millions through generations, and we fans all owe her immensely. She’ll be missed.

* * * * *

Next week, the yearly barrage of live albums hits. Happy Turkey Day, everyone.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

I’m a journalist in my regular life, so I’m used to being hated. But I’m not used to being the most hated guy in a room full of people, and that’s what happened to me this Friday at Andrea Gibson’s show in Chicago.

Let me start by saying I’ve known Andrea Gibson since 1995, when we met as students at St. Joseph’s College in Maine. Andrea’s from Calais, Maine, which is pretty much the northernmost point of the 48 contiguous United States. We met in Dr. Edward Reilly’s creative writing class, where she took her first tentative steps into poetry.

Me, I wrote a novella called God’s Not Dead, He’s In Bermuda, which I thought was all profound and stuff. And I also criticized everyone else’s work, to the degree that I hoped they would criticize mine. So when Andrea, who I later learned suffered from intense stage fright at the time, brought her poems into class, I would be the one to say, “I don’t think that works.” Only not as nicely.

Yeah, I was a jerk. But Andrea and I got along well, and struck up a fast friendship. She got me into Ani Difranco, and regaled me with tales of her backwoods upbringing in the wilds of the north. She was one of the most freeing people I’d ever been around – on our first “date,” which she arranged, she told me pretty early on that she had been wearing the same clothes for three days, and demanded that I tell her if, at any point during the evening, she had food stuck in her teeth. She just puts people at ease.

We lost touch a bit during the past eight years, but we’ve emailed and called and stayed abreast of each other’s careers. And what a career Andrea’s gone on to have. She’s a professional poet and activist now, performing throughout the country, and she’s written three books and recorded three CDs of her work. It’s awesome stuff, powerful and political and painful at times, and you really have to see her perform it to get the full effect.

Andrea emailed me about two months ago to let me know she’d be in Chicago in November, and asked if we could get together while she was there. I said sure, but then never heard from her, so I decided to crash her show at The Center on Halstead Friday night. I was an hour late, thanks to ridiculous traffic, but by sheer luck, I walked in about five minutes before Andrea took the stage. She was part of a team of poets promoting a new anthology called Word Warriors, compiled by acclaimed poet Alix Olson (who is goddamn brilliant, by the way), and I’d missed the first two performances, sadly.

I caught Andrea’s eye as she waited for her introduction, and she recognized me right off. So what did she do when she strolled to the mike? She opened with a story about that creative writing class in college, and about meeting me:

“There was this one annoying fucker,” she said. “Whenever I’d read a poem that I thought was pretty good, he’d raise his hand and go, ‘Yeah, I don’t know what that means.’ And I would think, you fucker!”

The audience was laughing pretty heartily at this point, but I knew what was coming. She pointed at me and said:

“I haven’t seen him in eight fucking years, but he just walked in. Andre Salles, the fucker from creative writing class!”

Everyone turned, everyone saw it was me. I laughed, and so did everyone else, but beneath the laughter, I could feel the audience saying to me, “How could you? You bastard! We all hate you!” That feeling was confirmed afterwards by a series of not-very-successful conversations with people, their eyes burning into my skull. A couple of them were cool about it, but some, you could tell, just wanted to hit me in the face. One woman even asked me why I showed up at all. It was just no good defending myself. I was the fucker from creative writing class.

Ah well. I did get to hang out with Andrea for a bit afterwards. I have to say this, too – she was always a terrific person, but she’s really become amazing. I feel honored to know her. And her performance was riveting. She did “Blue Blanket,” a harrowing statement about rape and its effects, and then she did “For Eli,” a scathing political powerhouse about the collateral damage of war.

Both poems are available to read and listen to at her site. A word of warning – her stuff is not safe for work, or for homophobes, or for Republicans, or for those who think America’s doing just fine. It is, however, compelling and powerful and true to herself. In short, she’s gotten a lot better since that creative writing class. I’m proud to call her my friend.

* * * * *

I love ideas that shouldn’t work.

Here’s a good one – take a harpist with the voice of a drunken six-year-old, let her write 10-minute songs about monkeys and bears, toss in the incongruous production styles of both Steve Albini and Van Dyke Parks, and name the whole shebang after a mythical city in France. That shouldn’t have worked, but the result was Joanna Newsom’s incredible second album, Ys – my favorite record of 2006.

It’s something of a maxim that most great ideas sound pretty daft at first. You don’t get anywhere interesting without taking a few risks, though, and that’s what I have on tap this week – three interesting records that sound, on first blush, like they’d be terrible. It helps that two of them are particular guilty pleasures of mine anyway, dating back to my misspent youth.

The first of those is Red Carpet Massacre, the new album from Duran Duran. The Durans are constant targets, due to their ridiculous image and their history as one of the most successful and most reviled bands of the 1980s. But people seem to forget that these guys are genuinely good musicians, and they’ve proven to have significant staying power, despite their trashy obsessions – Red Carpet Massacre is their 12th full-lengther since 1981, and it features most of their original lineup.

But that lineup is made up of middle-aged British men, and the charts now are populated by teenage sex queens and young American thugs. The Durans have been charmingly out of step with radio-ready pop for some time now, despite the occasional fluke hit like “Ordinary World,” and if they wanted to climb back to the top of that heap – a specious ambition at best – they had to change the molecular makeup of their music.

So they did. Red Carpet Massacre is a Duran Duran album unlike any other. It’s produced by Timbaland and Nate “Danja” Hills, it features rap cameos by Timbaland, and includes a collaboration with Justin Timberlake. Word is they wanted Britney Spears for the record, too, but she was unavailable. This sounds like a desperate attempt by an over-the-hill band to reclaim some of their faded glory, and early bets were that it would be godawful.

But it works. This is a beat-heavy record, to be sure, but it retains that Duran Duran sound, incorporating it into this new style. Opener “The Valley” starts with the thudding of drums, but it has a spectacularly Duran Duran chorus, and the title track is almost club-punk, Simon Le Bon spitting out the chorus at a breakneck speed. The Timbaland-produced “Nite-Runner” is absolutely ridiculous, but tons of fun, and Justin Timberlake actually adds the album’s soul with “Falling Down.” That tune is the latest in a series of epic ballads from the Durans, but this one has a trippy beat that works very well.

The quality remains high all the way through. Timbaland is all over “Skin Divers,” the clubbiest track here, and that’s the only one that sounds like the pendulum swung too far in one direction. Elsewhere, the Durans deliver their first instrumental track in ages, “Tricked Out,” and follow it up with one of the finest songs here, “Zoom In.” And the final trilogy finds Le Bon and his boys melding their style with Hills’ beats beautifully.

Red Carpet Massacre is a disposable hunk of pop trash, to be sure, but it’s an experiment that could have fallen flat, and it turned out to be enjoyable and fun. Duran Duran will never be accused of great artistry, but over the years, they’ve written something of a master class on how to become a long-running, well-respected pop band.

Also showing surprising longevity is Queensryche, another of my ‘80s obsessions. Last year, they released the sequel to their 1988 high water mark, Operation: Mindcrime, and it wasn’t half bad – which is good, since I was expecting it to be all bad. But since Tribe in 2003, they’ve been on a serious roll, returning to their roots as an operatic metal band with a brain.

But now here they are with the strangest idea they’ve ever had – a covers album, called Take Cover, featuring songs from some unexpected sources. Black Sabbath’s “Neon Knights” is the closest they come to a typical choice for a metal band covers record. The others are… well, here are a few of them: “For What It’s Worth,” by Buffalo Springfield. “Innuendo,” by Queen. “Synchronicity II,” by the Police. “Red Rain,” by Peter Gabriel. “Heaven on Their Minds,” from Jesus Christ Superstar. (Really.)

Intrigued yet? This sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Surprise, it’s pretty much awesome.

The album opens with Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine,” which suits Geoff Tate’s still-powerful voice very well. The version here is almost a tribute to Floyd’s original, with ambient keyboards and saxophones, and at this point, you may be worried that the ‘Ryche is going to deliver note-for-note covers. Not a chance. “Heaven on Their Minds” is next, and the Andrew Lloyd Webber tune is almost unrecognizable, drowned in blistering guitars. Tate is typically terrific on this more theatrical material, and this is one of the coolest covers here.

It’s got a lot of competition, though. The band slams through the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” centering it on THAT bass riff, and then they turn out a superb version of Queen’s “Innuendo.” It’s the title track from the last album Freddie Mercury made with the group, and is an overlooked dramatic masterpiece, especially that middle section. “Synchronicity II” sounds fantastic all rocked up, and “Red Rain” substitutes thick guitars for the pianos on Peter Gabriel’s 1986 original, to great effect.

The oddest of oddballs here is “Odiessa,” a segment of an opera by Carlo Marrale and Cheope, sung entirely in Italian. Tate is, of course, excellent, even though the music behind him is a bit cheeseball. But that’s the only low note. The disc ends with a breathtaking 10-minute live cover of U2’s “Bullet the Blue Sky,” with extemporaneous political commentary by Tate, and it’s a tour de force. If Mindcrime II was a mild disappointment, it was only because Queensryche, an atypically smart and adventurous band, didn’t push themselves enough. Take Cover rectifies that, and is a swell little disc to boot.

Here’s another idea that should be awful: a 45-minute song commissioned by Nike to accompany jogging workouts. That’s just gotta be crap, right? But luckily, some genius at Nike’s marketing department tapped James Murphy, better known as LCD Soundsystem, to whip this thing together. And while he could have half-assed it, he didn’t – the resulting track, “45:33,” is excellent, and it’s out now on an album of the same name.

Oddly, “45:33” is actually 46:05, although I understand it was named after the RPM speeds of records, or something like that. The song itself, broken up into six sections on the CD, is an enveloping techno affair that starts out slow, picks up speed, and ends up with a cool-down section, just like a good jog would. But as a piece of music, it goes some fascinating places, especially in its fourth section, colored effectively by live trumpets and trombones.

Murphy has made his name by bringing in bizarre, seemingly jarring influences to his four-on-the-floor dance music, including poetic lyrics and punky guitars and live string sections. His second LCD Soundsystem album, Sound of Silver, is very good, and deserves a review in this space at some point – one of its tracks, “Someone Great,” is taken from a section of “45:33.”

What’s amazing here is his ability to compose a 46-minute song with minimal vocals and make the whole thing enveloping and interesting, especially considering the commercial origins of this piece. It’s another idea that shouldn’t work, but does. The album also comes with three bonus tracks that exemplify Murphy’s style, particularly the horn-inflected “Freak Out/Starry Eyes.” If you’re into imaginative electronic music, Murphy’s a guy to watch. And if you’re into unlikely successes, try either of the other two records from this week.

Okay, I’m petering out now, so I think I’ll save my take on Pyramids of Mars for next week. We’re at the end of the year now, and there are precious few new records coming out – we have Nine Inch Nails’ remix album, Rufus Wainwright’s Judy Garland tribute, and… um… yeah. Nothing else until January. Next week I’ll talk about Sigur Ros (been saving that for a rainy day) and an early look at the top 10 list. Take care of yourselves until we talk again.

See you in line Tuesday morning.

Those nice boys in Radiohead have just solved the biggest conundrum of my year for me.

As you may have gathered from my glowing review, the venerated British band’s seventh album, In Rainbows, knocked me out. It’s the first Radiohead record in 10 years to bring the hooks, the melody, the honest-to-gosh songwriting to the fore, and in so doing, the band has made its most human album since their early days. While it’s not to the level of OK Computer by any stretch of the imagination, it is a superb album, and in this so-so year, it’s absolutely top 10 list material.

Ah, but therein lies my problem. Under the current rules, In Rainbows isn’t eligible, because technically, it isn’t out. Call me old-fashioned if you like, but I’m hesitant to jump aboard the digital download train. My top 10 list rules are clearly designed to accommodate physical CDs, and even with all this talk about Radiohead’s revolution, I still won’t think of In Rainbows as part of my collection until it can be filed with the other six albums, in packaging that complements the music.

I know, I’m very old. But the band obviously put some value in the physical product, because they’ve just inked a deal to bring In Rainbows into record stores before the end of the year. The expediency of this deal – the CD will be in UK record shops on December 31 – frees me from having to decide whether to include the album in this year’s top 10 list, or wait and see if it makes it in 2008. If you can walk into a record store on New Year’s Eve and buy the thing, it’s a 2007 release, as far as I’m concerned.

Yes, I understand, I’m missing the point. The future is passing me by. The whole point of the In Rainbows experiment was to introduce, with blinding force, the new way of distributing music. Soon there will be no CDs. Believe me, I get it. But I think the physical presence of an album is something worth holding on to, so I will gladly buy the In Rainbows CD, despite having all the music already. They’ll get my money twice, because I want to support the tangible, artistic release of music on CD.

As much as I admire Radiohead for taking a chance and blazing a trail, I much prefer the way Marillion releases their stuff. In 2001, the boys in Marillion gambled on a pre-order, asking their fans to pony up for music that hadn’t been recorded yet, in hopes of funding the actual making of their 12th album. The fans did, in mass quantities, and the result was Anoraknophobia, one of Marillion’s most idiosyncratic and amazing records. They did it again in 2004 with the brilliant double-disc set Marbles, to even better results.

So the traditional release of the underwhelming Somewhere Else this year is starting to look like an anomaly. This month, Marillion announced that their still-untitled 15th album, expected out next year, will be the subject of another pre-order. You can order it now, in fact, at their site.

Here are the details: Album 15 was largely written at the same time as Somewhere Else, and was expected to be the second half of that set. But the band members have found themselves in a creatively fertile period, and they’ve come up with tons of new material. Hence, Album 15 will be another double disc affair, in special super-awesome packaging for the pre-orderers. Send them your cash now, and you get the deluxe edition of the album, with your name printed in the package. The album will also be available in two single-disc packages (part one and part two), for less money, and without your name in the liner notes.

On the surface, this sounds fantastic, and of course I’m going to buy the deluxe set, but I’m actually thinking twice about it – a first for me and this band. For one thing, they’re coming off of one of the weakest albums they’ve ever made. I’ve tried over and over again to like Somewhere Else, but even with the benefit of time, it still ranks near the bottom of my Marillion collection. So I wasn’t looking forward to an album full of also-rans from that record to begin with.

But even more disconcerting is the band’s admission that they’re not quite sure how they’re going to fill two CDs with music. In their pitch for Album 15, the Marillion boys note that they’re considering solo, duo and trio tracks, as well as instrumentals, to pad out the record. Hey, it worked for Yes on Fragile, so it can’t be that bad an idea, but my worry is this – does the band have enough good material to justify this release? Because honestly, after Somewhere Else, I think they need a tight, compact, filler-free collection, not a sprawling two-hour White Album-style mix CD.

I love this band too much to not buy anything they do, but I admit it – I’m worried about this one. But I still think the Marillion method is the way to go. I get to support a band I love, and feel like I’ve contributed to the process of making their new record, and then, I get that new record in a (likely) gorgeous package I can display, with my name in it. That beats downloading context-free music any day of the week to me. I think it’s a winning system, but of course, it’s only as good as the albums the fans get for their money and their faith.

Anyway, that’s it for music musings this week. I’ve been very behind on my Doctor Who reviews (and on my Doctor Who viewing, in fact), so I’ve dedicated the rest of this week’s missive to my thoughts on Tom Baker’s first season. Those of you who are sick of the Doctor can stop here. Next week, a bunch of guilty pleasures, including Duran Duran’s new one with Justin Timberlake, and Queensryche’s covers album. Really.

* * * * *

Like most Americans, I was surprised to find out that anyone besides Tom Baker had ever played the Doctor.

I first saw Doctor Who on Boston’s own Channel 2, our local public broadcasting station, when I was six or seven years old. I started halfway through Tom Baker’s run, but I swear that Channel 2 looped around and played the old ones before airing Logopolis and moving forward. For my entire childhood, Tom Baker was the Doctor, and just about every American I talk to about this had the same experience.

It’s not hard to see why Baker is the man most associated with the role. Starting in 1974, Baker played the Doc for seven years, starring in 41 complete stories (and one pretty famous unreleased one). His run is the longest of any Doctor before or since, even if you look at it in terms of single episodes – Baker was in 172 episodes of the show, beating out William Hartnell in second place, who did 134. Jon Pertwee’s in third with 128, and nobody else even comes close.

Tom Baker’s first season as the Doctor, which was the program’s 12th, made him a superstar in his native Britain. Which is strange, when you think about it. Tom Baker is perhaps the most unlikely, oddball leading man in television history. His face is more interesting than handsome, with its jutting nose and toothy grin. His hair is amazing, a tornado of curls that make him look like a homeless man more often than not. He’s the most alien-looking Doctor ever.

He’s also the most eccentric. Baker’s off-screen antics are well documented elsewhere – he had a reputation as a control freak, and said what was on his mind at all times, no matter where he was. Some of that translated to his on-screen persona. Baker played the Doctor as a man not only one page ahead, but often reading a different book than everyone else. His dialogue, much of it written by Baker on set, was a never-ending logic puzzle, a series of one-ups and quips that basically add up to him saying, “I’m living over here in this reality, and it’s much more fun than yours. Would you like to join me?”

Baker proved captivating for a couple of reasons. First off, he was brilliant in the role. He took the Doctor into new directions, building off of Patrick Troughton’s deceptive buffoonery, and introduced a new level of physical and verbal comedy to the part. Second, there was That Voice, a sonorous, commanding, regal tone that would make women swoon and villains quake – a sharp contrast to the fourth Doctor’s physical appearance and manner.

And finally, Tom Baker could be the most charming man alive when he wanted to be, and he used that power to beguile audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Baker’s Doctor was the first one to wink at you nearly all the time, like you were sharing a secret with him. I find that off-putting now – Baker’s stories so far are the first ones I find it difficult to get lost in, just because of the ironic wall he puts up – but as a kid, I can remember loving Baker’s antics. He was my tour guide to this strange world, taking my six-year-old hand and telling me with his eyes and his quick wit that the monsters were just guys in rubber masks.

Tom Baker couldn’t have had a weaker, weirder start. His first story is called Robot, and it’s about – yes – a killer robot. It’s also about Baker’s Doc regenerating, of course, and after five years of the more sedate, serious Jon Pertwee, Baker’s clowning around in Robot is jarring. But it’s great fun, too. This is a story about a killer robot. I’m not sure how seriously anyone should have taken it, and Baker puts in just the right amount of ironic eyebrow-raising.

The robot itself is pretty well-designed, for 1974 British television, except for the claw-like hands that just hang there, attached by thin cables. Its first appearances are actually pretty scary, but by the end of the third episode, when UNIT soldiers have surrounded the robot and are shooting at it, it looks a bit ridiculous. And the fourth episode is a glorious, trashy implosion. The script calls for the robot to grow to 50 feet tall, and the production team tries mightily to pull it off, but it’s a laugh-out-loud failure.

But hell, Robot is a romp. It’s fun, it’s stupid, it includes Tom Baker tripping people with his trademark 30-foot scarf, and it makes me laugh. But it’s with the next batch of stories that new producer Phillip Hinchcliffe and script editor Bob Holmes really got ambitious. The next 16 episodes of the show form a single, interconnected story, one that brings back three of the Doctor’s most famous foes, and when the 12th season finished up on May 10, 1975, Tom Baker was a star.

The story kicks off with The Ark in Space. While Jon Pertwee’s Doc kept close to Earth for most of his five-year run, Tom Baker’s Doctor couldn’t leave fast enough. At the end of Robot, he piles Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan into the Tardis and sets off for who-knows-where. (No pun intended, of course.) They end up on an orbiting space station called the Nerva Beacon, hundreds of years in the future, and soon discover the station’s precious cargo: the hibernating remnants of the human race.

This one really works. The frozen survivors of an unexplained apocalypse are slowly awakened, and they discover that they’ve been sleeping for centuries longer than they’d intended. They’re under attack by a monster called a Wirrn, which has used the sleeping humans to lay eggs in. Creepy, creepy story, undercut by the cheapness of the monster costumes. When the captain of the Beacon starts transforming into a Wirrn, we can clearly see that his monster parts are made of green bubble wrap. It was new then, but not so much now.

That aside, The Ark in Space is a successful bit of imaginative horror, and Baker keeps his quipping to a minimum. (He has one killer line, when one of the awakened humans asks for medical help: “Well, my doctorate is purely honorary, and Harry’s only qualified to work on sailors…”) At the end of the tale, the Doctor defeats the Wirrn (Oh, crap, I gave it away!) and beams down to Earth to see if it’s still suitable for the revived human race to inhabit.

And that leads right into the two-episode The Sontaran Experiment, featuring the first of our trio of old villains. The Sontarans first appeared in the Jon Pertwee story The Time Warrior, and they’re a warlike race of tacticians. In just about all of their appearances on the show, the Sontarans are planning one invasion or another, and here, they’ve sent a scout to test the resilience of humans. In short order, our three heroes are separated, Sarah is captured and tortured, and the Doctor has to save her. It’s an okay story, but even at only 50 minutes, it nearly wears out its welcome.

Not so the next story, the unabashed classic Genesis of the Daleks, even at two and a half hours long.

Yes, I just used the words “classic” and “Daleks” in the same sentence. Now, I hate the Daleks. Always have. They’re rolling pepper shakers with no opposable thumbs, and they can’t go up stairs or turn their heads all the way around. And yet, all the other characters are afraid of them, and talk about them like they’re the most dangerous beings in the universe. Here’s why: they’re popular, and always have been. The Daleks first appeared in the second ever Doctor Who story, back in 1963, and became a British phenomenon. So the producers like to use them whenever they can – witness the seven Dalek episodes of the new series so far.

It’s the rare story that can make me enjoy the Daleks as villains, and Genesis is one of those stories. At the end of The Sontaran Experiment, the Doctor and his crew beam back up to the Nerva Beacon, but their transmat is intercepted by the Time Lords, the Doctor’s people from the planet Gallifrey. The Time Lords assign the Doc a mission: go back in time to the origin of the Daleks and prevent them from being created. They dump him, Sarah and Harry on war-torn Skaro, hundreds of years in the past, and tell them not to come back until they’ve accomplished their mission.

This is one of the darkest Doctor Who stories. Skaro is a bleak wasteland, devastated by centuries of war between the Kaleds and the Thals – hinted at but not shown in 1963’s The Daleks. Both sides are dedicated to the eradication of the other, for reasons they can’t remember. And both are mutating into something else, as a result of all the radiation they’ve dumped on each other.

It is here that we meet Davros, a crippled, burned scientist who has seen the future of the Kaleds, and is preparing for it. He’s devised a war machine that can hold the final mutated form of the Kaleds – a tentacled blob-like thing – and ensure their survival and dominance. When we meet him, Davros is testing these machines, and building himself an army of them. He calls them Daleks, and for only the second time in the show’s history, the rolling pepperpots are actually kind of scary.

The story is about that age-old question – could you kill Hitler as a child? Does anyone have the right to wipe out an entire race, even if that race will go on to enslave much of the universe? How does that make the heroes any better than the villains? There are some terrific scenes in this story, and Michael Wisher’s Davros is much less over-the-top and histrionic than I remember. (I could, of course, be remembering Terry Malloy’s Davros from the later stories…) And Baker is terrific, showing how powerful he can be when he tempers his silliness.

The story’s finale is actually perfect – the Daleks turn on their creator, killing him for trying to control them, while the Doc escapes. Not much is resolved in Genesis of the Daleks, but much insight is gained into these creatures and why they do what they do.

Sadly, the last story of season 12, Revenge of the Cybermen, is not yet on DVD, so I haven’t seen it since I was six or so. But I do know this – the Doctor is returned to the Nerva Beacon, coming full circle, only to find that the Cybermen, last seen in Patrick Troughton’s time, are using it as a staging point to conquer another planet. I have no idea if it’s any good, but I like that the four stories that make up the bulk of the season are connected so thoroughly. The classic show would try that trick again with The Key to Time and Trial of a Time Lord, and the new series has done it every season, to some degree.

Tom Baker’s tenure is considered by many to be the high point of the show, and even though he’ll have to go a long way to eclipse the greatness of Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee, I’m excited to keep following his evolution. And of course, six-year-old me is delighted to see these old stories again, the ones starring the Doctor I grew up with. Teeth, curls, hat, scarf, a wink and a grin. That’s my Doctor.

Next week, Pyramids of Mars. And some of that music stuff, too.

A quick note – two people wrote to tell me that Pushing Daisies is actually doing pretty well. It’s winning its time slot, and has been picked up for a full season. That’s great news for me, even though it goes against all the laws of nature as I understand them. Thanks to Mike Lachance and Josh Patterson for setting me straight. And watch Pushing Daisies. It’s great.

See you in line Tuesday morning.