I opened the 82-song Left of the Dial: Dispatches from the '80s Underground and laughed out loud. There, glorified by the headline of Gary Stewart's opening article – "We Cared a Lot" – was a reference to the Bay Area band I liked least during the Reagan years. Not that I ever explained my feeling in careful words; I called it the way I saw it: Faith No More suck.

There's more to my reaction than just a stupid overstatement about a band that – although they did suck, a lot – had as much talent as any outfit around in those days. Were I to explain what holds this amazingly far-flung box set together, I'd say this: Left of the Dial is a collection of music by bands that, for randomly located pockets of fans, didn't suck. To understand the problem, one needs to understand the schizoid Reagan years, a time when the once-luminous path to rock's promised land got hazy. Rock might have been born in the fires of rebellion, but by the time the '80s got rolling, there weren't but a few flickering embers still burning, cheating a couple of agonized generations of their birthright.

Some true believers eventually turned toward rap, but those stuck in the rock trenches, awaiting a call to arms, passed the time exploring a galaxy of niches linked only by this: somewhere, some desperate kid on the verge of ending it all had listened and decided to live. Most shared a lack of popularity, as well – but that formula only works part of the time. R.E.M., for instance, whose "Radio Free Europe" kicks off the compilation, managed to sell a couple of records as the decade dragged on. They belong, however, for no other reason than for lyrics that were so opaque they were incomprehensible. The box has holdout punks like X ("Johnny Hit and Run Pauline") and the Dead Kennedys ("Holiday in Cambodia"), early alt-country bands like Lone Justice ("Ways to Be Wicked"), gloomy English synth pop groups the Cure ("A Forest") and Joy Division ("Love Will Tear Us Apart"), and northern California weirdness like Camper Van Beethoven ("Take the Skinheads Bowling"). There's a little something for everyone, but then that was the era of the trickle-down theory. And that, my friends, is what life in the '80s was all about. (J.H. Tompkins)