nthologies, particularly those of the boxed set variety, can be a funny thing. As a rule, they are lavish, expensive affairs, marketed to the established fan – the kind that eschews greatest hits compilations unless they contain rarities and joins online newsgroups for updates of the most recent gravy train concert tour sponsored by Botox. Of course, there is more than one way to skin a hepcat – the bare-bones Maybe It’s Right To Be Nervous Now anthology by post-punk gods Magazine, featuring no liner notes and an alternate version of their biggest hit, is hardly typical of the usual approach involving too much of, well, everything. But since boxed sets are often regarded as the Definitive Collection and, thus, sold to the masses at the holidays as well, the producers of these collections often strive to achieve a fine balance – sure, indulge on the liner notes, bust out the unreleased B-sides, boys, but just make damn sure all the hits are there.


Finder’s Keepers: The Invictus Anthology, a 3-CD collection of album tracks, singles, B-sides and solo recordings by seventies soul confection, The Chairmen of the Board, will never be called lavish, leaning as it does toward the stripped-down side of things, with a short essay and budget-line packaging. But what it lacks in presentation, it more than makes up for in undeniable music – 64 tracks worth. Beginning with the Chairmen’s biggest and most memorable hit, their first recording, “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” (with its distinctive “brrrr!” tongue-roll) through the progressive funk of Skin I’m In, their swan song, Finder’s Keepers chronicles the sonic adventures of what was intended to me little more than a one-off for Motown tunesmiths, Holland-Dozier-Holland, following the trio’s acrimonious parting of the ways with the label. But rather than the overstuffed box one might expect, what emerges on Finder’s Keepers is akin to the missing link between The Four Tops and P-funk.


Indeed, the group’s early recordings, including “Everything’s Tuesday” and “(You’ve Got Me) Dangling On A String” owe a considerable debt to Berry Gordy and Co., as reflected by a lean, though contemporary, production and the superior craftsmanship of H-D-H (who, for contractual reasons, were credited as “Reggie Dunbar and Edith Wayne”). But after a catchy if somewhat conservative debut, any notion that the group would be content to sit on their hands was dispelled with their second record, In Session. With the stomping fuzz-tone roadhouse of the eponymously-titled “Chairmen of the Board,” and the first signs of a funk fusion percolating on songs like “Hanging On a Memory” and clavinet-tinged gospel of “I Can’t Find Myself,” the Chairmen were clearly headed off in a direction all their own.


But no matter how far the group strayed from its Motown roots, it always boomeranged back the minute Norman “General” Johnson stepped up to the microphone. Johnson’s throat-catching pleadings, featured on songs like “Give Me Just a Little More Time” and “When Will She Tell Me She Needs Me,” would soon make quite an impression on a thousand aspiring soul singers, among them a young Kevin Rowland. But where Rowland pinched Johnson’s distinctive sob, the General’s influence would be felt in less expected—though unmistakable—places, including the tonsils of one Philip Lynott, the swaggering, ill-fated leader of Thin Lizzy, whose Johnson-esque vocals would go on to lend his group’s lean, mean hard rock a soulful yearning it might not have otherwise had.


Wrapping one’s arm such a comparison gives an idea of just how difficult it is to convey the variety and ambition The Chairmen of the Board brought to their four records, though Finder’s Keepers, by including most of the four LPs and a generous help of tracks from solo efforts, does an admirable job of trying. Though Johnson’s vocal stylings would define the group’s sound, he was only one of four singers in the group, each of whom brought the Chairmen in a distinctive direction: Harrison Kennedy, whose bizarrely Gene Clark-ish(!?!) voice took solo songs like “Gimme A Glass of Water” and the I’m-Okay-You’re-Okay of “Closet Queen” from his solo Hypnotic Music in a more singer-songwriterly direction; and Danny Wood, whose R&B chest-beating in songs like “Pay To the Piper” and “Everybody’s Tippin’” would splendidly marry the grit of the Temptations’ Dennis Edwards with the suppleness of Eddie Kendricks’ falsetto acrobatics (the fourth singer, Eddie Custis, would be dismissed shortly after the second record and is only briefly represented here).


As varied and ambitious as the first two-and-a-half discs of Finder’s Keepers are, they don’t remotely prepare the listener for the heavy mindfuck of the group’s final record, represented here in its entirety. With the assistance of P-Funkateers like Eddie Hazel and Bernie Worrell and the production of H-D-H associate, Jeffrey Bowen, Skin I’m In abruptly drops most of the Motown pretenses. Bowen, who would go on to help the first post-Whitfield Temptations record, bathed much of the record in wah-wah guitars and synthesizers, with tracks like the swamp stomp of the title track, the furious “Everybody Party All Night” and the stone-cold funk classic of “Finder’s Keepers” showcasing a sound altogether unlike anything the group had ever recorded.


But it was the nine-and-a-half minute suite of Sly Stone’s otherwise unavailable “Life And Death” that blew the doors off their old sound: awash in fuzz-tone death-bass, Mellotrons, swooping synths, and post-Riot-Goin’-On hedonism of the “If you feel it’s good, it’s alright!” chorus, “Life And Death” creates a cosmos-bound marriage of heavy funk and progressive rock – what Yes might have come up with, had they been blacks hailing from, say, Detroit instead of Birmingham, England. Comprising the centerpiece of the record, it might well be the best damn thing the group ever did were it not so wildly different than everything else they recorded; as it stands, “Life And Death” remains the most ambitious work of their career.


But as has always been the case with these things, by the time Skin I’m In was released in 1974, the record was already two years old. Johnson disowned it, calling the collection “just some old tapes that the company had stored away,” and left the group soon after. Finder’s Keepers, leaving us to wonder which direction the group might have taken had he stayed, includes a few of the decent, if unremarkable, Johnson-less singles that followed.


Shoddy documentation aside, it would be hard to top Finder’s Keepers as the definitive statement from The Chairmen of the Board. Spanning a period in which soul music transformed itself at least three times over—from wide-eyed pop to message music to alien space-funk before the disco beast felled it—the set is almost entirely devoid of filler, revealing The Chairmen of the Board to be among the most important soul or pop groups of the decade. Completists will be enthralled – fans and beginners alike. Hell, for $16.99, it might even make a good Christmas present.