Other independent acts had made inroads by then, sure. The wonderful Los Angeles punk band X shocked the music industry by shifting 80,000 or so units of their essential 1981 album “Wild Gift” on the low-rent Slash imprint, and R.E.M.’s fellow Athenians the B-52s had already made a much-ballyhooed appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” slaying the studio audience (and much of late-night America) with a deeply weird rendition of their party-startin’ classic “Rock Lobster.” A slew of adventurous British acts had broken through by then, too.

But R.E.M. were different. They were less a band, it seemed at the time, than a phenomenon. A subcultural force with the aesthetic equivalent of gravitational pull, the group brought a far-flung sonic universe into a kind of rough orbit. It helped that in interviews with fanzines and more widely circulated publications such as the late, great Trouser Press, the band members (guitarist Pete Buck, bassist Mike Mills, drummer Bill Berry and frontman Stipe) dropped a gazillion names, groups their acolytes quickly filed for future reference: Hüsker Dü. The Replacements. The Minutemen. Meat Puppets. Love Tractor. Pylon. For aspiring hipsters — and certainly for all record-store geeks — articles about R.E.M. were basically required reading: They were veritable Cliffs Notes of coolness.

So it’s hardly surprising that a movement of admirers and imitators quickly coalesced. In Orlando, Fla., where I was living at the time, the best record store in town was dubbed Murmur, and not one but two bands on the local scene lifted their names from R.E.M. tunes. (One even began life as a straight-up cover band.) Another outfit, a group that was more likely to cover “Cruel to Be Kind” than “Radio Free Europe” whenever they played live, felt obliged to make a pilgrimage to Winston-Salem, N.C., to record their debut disc with Mitch Easter, leader of contemporary jangle rockers Let’s Active and producer extraordinaire of “Chronic Town” as well as R.E.M.’s next two (and still-amazing) albums, 1983′s “Murmur” and 1984′s “Reckoning.”

So Michael Stipe ate a Whopper indeed.

Still, oversaturation and adoring music nerds aside, it was virtually impossible not to be charmed to the point of seduction by R.E.M. With ample assistance from Easter, the band made lush and sensuous music, cranking out records fueled in large part by Buck’s Byrds-like arpeggios and Stipe’s incoherent (but lovely) mumbling. That latter trait in particular was one of the group’s huge hooks: Southern-accented phonemes hung on melodies so large they basically dared you to write your own damn poem.

The other thing that made R.E.M. so special was that the group played its peculiar folk-rock variant with the same spastic passion that hardcore punk acts were bringing to bear on their mosh-pit screeds around the same time. In concert during R.E.M.’s early days, Mills seemed ready to catapult off the stage and onto your lap. Stipe, meanwhile, hunched over his microphone behind thick locks of long, curly hair (yes, hair), lurching frenetically from side to side in some sort of weird approximation of a guy having a seizure and a guy contending with ants in his pants.

But a funny thing happened on the way to R.E.M. becoming a thing of beauty and a joy forever for you and your music-obsessed buddies: superstardom. And that’s where the group’s new career retrospective, “In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003,” picks up the story. The 18-track collection tracks the arc of mega-success that followed R.E.M.’s departure from IRS (a major label that was run like an indie) and their arrival at Warner Bros. Songs culled from the band’s best effort for the label, “Automatic for the People,” bookend the disc (the Andy Kaufman tribute “Man on the Moon” and the gorgeous “Nightswimming”), but sandwiched in between are all manner of fits, starts and a certain career-jolting rocket booster.

The latter, of course, is “Losing My Religion,” which liner-note scribe Buck regards as a pivotal song in the band’s oeuvre. At a time when hip-hop and grunge seemed set to take over the world, R.E.M. reasserted their shaky claim to pop music’s throne with a hyperemotive little ditty powered by … a mandolin. Tarsem Singh’s canvas-popping Technicolor video (basically a homoerotic mélange of mythology, Bollywood cinema, and Stipe in seriously prime posing form) didn’t hurt matters a bit, either.

Always fan friendly, R.E.M. sweeten the tried-and-true best-of deal with a pair of newish tunes. “Bad Day” upends the manic glee of the earlier “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” with Stipe tapping into the same strain of stream-of-consciousness logorrhea that made the earlier track so infectious as the band rustles up a twangy pop tune. “Animal,” meanwhile, finds the group ricocheting gamely between tuneful psychedelia and crusty garage rock.

These new songs are fine, better by far, in fact, than listless and click-tracked ditties such as “Pop Song 89″ (from “Green,” the group’s 1988 Warner’s debut) and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” (a funny-once joke from 1994′s “return-to-rock” contrivance, “Monster”). “Stand,” “Everybody Hurts” and the ironically martial “Orange Crush” are here in all their not-so-ragged glory, too, as is “At My Most Beautiful,” a sun-kissed souvenir from the group’s 1998 hey-at-least-we’re-tryin’ foray into vaguely ambient terrain, “Up.” A couple of soundtrack toss-offs (“All the Right Friends” from “Vanilla Sky” and “The Great Beyond” from “Man on the Moon”) round out the collection.

A few choice semi-hits, however, are missing in action. There’s no “Shiny Happy People,” for instance, and while hardly anyone is likely to complain much about that sin of omission, the disc also leaves out “Near Wild Heaven,” a swirling keeper from “Out of Time” that harks back to R.E.M.’s early work in a way that the group would only rarely attempt after making the leap to Warner — particularly after drummer Berry opted for country-life retirement in 1997.

And that’s the thing, of course. Once a rock group’s career path marches toward the masses (not to mention toward a scary-huge conglomerate like Warner), it’s almost inevitable that at least a measure of what made them unique will get lost in translation. R.E.M. has fared far better than most. Even if they haven’t aged as imaginatively as, say, U2, they have managed to negotiate pop music’s mainstream without selling their souls. One can only imagine the amount of money they’ve probably been offered by advertisers for just a snippet of big dumb pop song like “Stand,” let alone “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).”

For my money, though, that’s way too low a standard for a band of R.E.M.’s caliber, a group that basically conjured a scene into existence before they had enough money to make a down payment on a tour bus. So here’s hoping that when the band sets up shop in Athens early next year to begin work on its 13th studio album, R.E.M. finally gets around to uncorking that whacked-out two-disc country set you just know they’ve got in them. That, or maybe a hardcore record. Either would be cool by me.

Maybe that’s appropriate. Strummer would no doubt hate the idea of a reified Clash canon, a cherry-picked collection of greatest (or at least nearest) hits that leaves out the marginalia and glorious failures. Anyone who’s spent quality time with Side 6 (Side 6!) of the masterly “Sandinista!” knows exactly what I’m talking about. Twenty years after the core Clash lineup’s untimely demise, the band’s weirdest tracks — “Bankrobber” or “Shepherds Delight” or “Ghetto Defendant” — still provide the backdrop of wild and woolly experimentation that makes the relative pop tunes — like “Stay Free” or “Train in Vain” or “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” — sound thrilling whenever they rise to the surface of your iPod.

As a post-Clash artist, Strummer never quite found a way to deal with the legacy of the “only band that matters” while trying to forge new musical ground. Early on, he made a stab at soundtrack work (“Permanent Record,” “Walker”), coughed up a spotty solo LP (“Earthquake Weather”), and even twiddled the studio dials for ex-songwriting partner/Clash-nemesis Mick Jones on Big Audio Dynamite’s fair-to-middling “No. 10, Upping Street.” And the less said about the Jones-free outfit Strummer assembled and made a record with under the Clash brand name the better, of course.

All these efforts felt fitful, a series of false moves that, in retrospect, seem like the detritus of a genuine luminary casting about for that ever-elusive second act. Strummer himself seemed to think so, too. After “Earthquake Weather,” the man took a long hiatus, surfacing only occasionally to perform musical odd jobs such as filling in for Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan when MacGowan himself wasn’t up to the task.

When Strummer reappeared in 1999, it was with a new band, the Mescaleros, in tow. A group of relative youngsters, the Mescaleros gave Strummer the adrenaline shot he needed and, remarkably, proved capable of couching their leader’s barking-seal vocal attack in a heady brew of punk and world beat: The band was especially deft at juxtaposing the occasional three-chord foot stomper with songs powered mainly by exotic polyrhythms.

Strummer was hardly infallible with the Mescaleros, but when the tunes on the group’s first two records (1999′s “Rock Art and the X-Ray Style” and 2001′s “Global a Go-Go”) worked, it was thrilling. When they didn’t, you still loved Strummer for enlisting a new crew and giving it another whirl anyway. On the best track the band ever committed to tape (“Digging the New”), Strummer seemed to acknowledge the mercurial nature of his artistry, chalking it up to an imagination fired more by playing with contemporary sounds than cranking out reliable rock epics. If you want to hear “London Calling,” the attitude seemed to be, go right ahead and slap it on the turntable. I’m on to something else.

That said, “Streetcore,” Strummer and the Mescaleros’ third and final album, opens with one surefire rocker. “Coma Girl” is a knockout punch so effortlessly great, you’re tempted to wonder why the group never managed an album full of them. The track is a chiming and sophisticated mix of pop-rock crunch, reggae lilt and the rollicking pub music Strummer cut his teeth on as the leader of the 101′ers, his pre-Clash outfit.

The rest of the disc, it’s true, has a hard time competing with that opener; in most respects, it doesn’t even try. Because Strummer died before the album was completed, some of the tracks here are just sophisticated first drafts, rough-hewed demos gussied up with a touch of post-production finish. “All in a Day,” for instance, sounds like a spirited studio jam that went on a little too long, while “Long Shadow,” a loping country-folk number written with Johnny Cash in mind, comes with clunky words that could stand a closer edit. “The devil may care/ Maybe God he won’t,” Strummer croaks at one point, “But better make sure you check on the dos and the don’ts.”

And heartbreaking though it is to hear him sing “Redemption Song,” Strummer’s reading of the Bob Marley classic doesn’t really bring anything new to the tune. The charm here owes mainly to the live-in-the-bedroom quality of the recording, and the way the words work as a caption for Strummer’s own redemptive back catalog.

But “Streetcore” has its share of keepers, too. “Get Down Moses” taps into the dub-heavy reggae Strummer always loved, with trebly, scratch ‘n’ twang guitars swathed in generous swells of organ, a throbbing bass line and infectiously chanted backing vocals. The sweetly melancholic “Burnin’ Streets” rewinds Strummer’s career with lyrics that conjure the Clash classic “London’s Burning” and provides the perfect setup for the soulfully ambient “Midnight Jam.” That track fast-forwards to Strummer’s stint as host of the BBC radio program “Joe Strummer’s London Calling” — complete with his enthusiastic DJ musings about letting “rip on a whole different tip” and his much-loved “Indestructible Beat of Soweto” records.

That wide-eyed enthusiasm, an indestructible belief in the revolutionary power of music to change the world (as naive as that may sound), was part of Joe Strummer’s DNA. It goes without saying that his career-defining work was with the Clash. Yet even when Strummer worked with subprime material, he never sounded less than 100 percent committed. As a result, “Streetcore” — a decent disc studded with the occasional rough-cut gem — resonates like a goodbye kiss from an old friend.

Now my mom, who by far prefers the earlier Elvis, had no intention of going to the show, and she insisted on bringing some company along for the eight-hour ride and overnight stay. So into our two-door Chrysler Cordoba (with its rich Corinthian leather, natch) piled me, my buddy, my sister, my aunt, my cousin and, oh yes, even my grandmother. Mom also insisted on road-trip soundtrack rights: An 8-track of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5 and Odd Jobs.” The entire way.

I’ve never been the same since.

But that has less to do with the Dolly album (which, like the film it’s loosely based on, ain’t half bad) than with the show Costello put on, which was great. Even more significant is the fact that I actually got to meet the man after the gig. Along with a relatively small contingent of fellow fanatics, my friend and I staked out the hotel where the band was staying and waited impatiently in the lobby for a sighting.

And waited and waited. Just as we were about to give up and head back to the hotel dejected, we spied Jake Riviera, Costello’s famously combustible manager, pitching a fit at the front desk. We thrilled to every syllable of his British-accented invective. Even better, just as Riviera appeared to be simmering down, the members of the band Squeeze — which had opened the show — rounded the corner, heading posthaste, it appeared, for the bar.

Pimply-faced teenagers who looked even younger than our tender years, we knew our chances of making it into the hotel’s swank watering hole were, shall we say, less than zero. So we did what any self-respecting pair of geeky fanboys would do under similar circumstances — headed Squeeze off and proceeded to pepper them with questions about how the band would change now that pop crooner Paul Carrack had replaced spastic Farfisa man Jools Holland. Polite Englishmen all, the band fielded our queries and even signed multiple copies of “East Side Story” with complete graciousness.

We were most impressed — but the big Kahuna had yet to appear.

Just after Squeeze made its great escape, I spotted Pete Thomas, the Attractions’ lanky drummer, strolling nonchalantly into the hotel lobby. Next came bassist Bruce Thomas, keyboard maestro Steve Nieve and then, finally, the man himself. Short, sheet-white and bespectacled with the shades he wears on the “Trust” album cover, Elvis sauntered to the center of the lobby escorted by a bevy of beauties and two large bodyguards. At 15, I was already a foot taller than him, but it didn’t matter: I was clearly in the presence of rock ‘n’ roll genius.

“Gr-great show, Elvis,” I managed to stammer while reaching down to shake his slightly pudgy hand.

“Yeah, Elvis. Really great,” said my pal.

We were a smitten pair, hopelessly devoted to this fount of bitter wisdom and pithy melody. And then Elvis Costello — Mr. Revenge and Guilt himself — said the only two words he’s ever addressed to me specifically. I, of course, will never forget them.

“Thank you,” he replied, and then made for the elevator, entourage in tow.

Anticlimactic? Not at all. If anything, the encounter sealed my fate. Later in my career of obsession, I would write a letter to Rolling Stone defending “Punch the Clock” — admittedly not Costello’s finest hour — as a “spirited and soulful classic” after a reviewer gave it a so-so write-up. In what I took as a brazen act of contempt, the magazine published my screed above another complaining about a review of the Doobie Brothers’ “Farewell Tour” LP.

That was then, however. This is now. I still like “Punch the Clock,” but to my ears, Costello hasn’t made a great disc in a long, long time.

As anyone who’s seen him in concert recently can attest, he’s still an engaging live performer. But his albums have become tough to take — mannered and ponderous (as opposed to the short, sharp stab of his early work), lousy with studied and self-impressed crooning, boatloads of over-emoting and, most depressingly, say-nothing words that aren’t even well-crafted. Costello was once the master of the cutting remark, a Dylan-esque wordsmith capable of conjuring and dismissing Winston Churchill, apartheid and the National Front with just a single, improbably well-turned phrase.

Now he’s a navel-gazing romantic who apparently let all those Gershwin comparisons go to his head.

Consider the man’s latest opus, “North.” It’s another of his non-rock excursions into Bacharachian la-la land, an album positively larded with orchestral refinement and Brill Building aspiration. Trouble is, there’s nary a memorable melody among the disc’s 11 tunes. Sure, sure: Tracks such as the disc’s pillowy opener, “You Left Me in the Dark,” and the jazz-inflected “When Did I Stop Dreaming” are technically impressive, subtle and understated showcases for Costello’s octave-scaling range decked out with a supple brass section and Nieve’s gorgeous piano flourishes. But as Costello once understood implicitly, just because you can do something fancy doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. Emotional resonance trumps technical proficiency in just about every realm of art — pop music most of all — and for all their flash and panache, most of the tracks on “North” are just musical Rube Goldberg devices: intricate, fussed-over structures that never lead anywhere worth going.

Costello is a genuine talent, of course, and so there are a handful of exceptions scattered among “North’s” shiny rubble. “You Turned to Me” begins as a somber piano ballad before taking a left turn toward a bright melody that cuts against the track’s vaguely bitter words. The lovely “When Green Eyes Turn Blue,” which glides on a swell of strings, woodwinds and brass, has the feel — if not the tune — of a future standard. And when Costello sits down for a turn at the piano on the relatively unadorned “Let Me Tell You About Her,” he promptly delivers the disc’s most fetching song.

Still, as that track’s words allow, “Some things are too personal/ Too intimate to spill.” And for all his vocal bravado and feats of musical derring-do, Costello seems to be holding a lot back on “North.” The whole thing is humorless, too — a hallmark of his non-rock work. It’s almost as if Costello himself fears that he’s just a talented poseur in this idiom and that flashing any of the incisive wit that marks his best records would give the game away. Even the liner notes seem like so much résumé puffery, duly noting that Costello “arranged and conducted” most of the disc’s worked-to-death tracks. This from a man who once listed himself (on the credits for the mighty “King of America”) as “The Little Hands of Concrete.”

Look, I know how this sounds: Some longtime fan prefers the guy’s early records. What a surprise. Believe me, though, no one could be more disappointed than I am. I was inclined to think “The Juliet Letters,” Costello’s pretentious 1993 collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet, was an ambitious one-off, charming for the way it rubbed your face in the man’s outsized ambition. And though it came with a depressingly pompous title, I still think 1996′s “All This Useless Beauty” got the mix of orchestral reach and pop-rock grasp just about exactly right.

But that’s the last Costello disc I can wholeheartedly recommend. Even last year’s much-ballyhooed “return to rock” (“When I Was Cruel”) seems forced and stodgy, as if the man himself wasn’t so interested in that particular batch of tunes.

And why would he be? “North” makes it emphatically clear — even, finally, to the likes of me — that Elvis Costello left the building a long time ago and is now in hot pursuit of boring old songbook respectability.

What a way to make a living.

More famously, on “Werewolves of London” — Zevon’s only bona fide chart hit — the singer-songwriter warned listeners, “Better stay away from him/ He’ll rip your lungs out, Jim,” before quipping that he’d like to meet the creature’s tailor. (In concert, inveterate yuckster that he is, Zevon sometimes tweaked the line so that the werewolf was “looking for James Taylor.”)

But from their titles on down, each of Zevon’s more recent albums has basically forecast the man’s demise. Consider “My Shit’s Fucked Up,” a caustic little gem from 2000′s prophetically titled “Life’ll Kill Ya.” The track finds Zevon in a doctor’s office listening intently to an M.D. who explains, in deep and foreboding tones, that “The shit that used to work/ It won’t work now.” And the title track of 2002′s “My Ride’s Here” is, to paraphrase drummer Anton Fig, the sunniest little song about death you’re ever likely to hear.

“The Wind,” Zevon’s latest album and presumably his last, is also death-obsessed. The disc is darkly comic in places — this is the guy, after all, who remarked after his diagnosis that he’d be bummed if he didn’t make it to the next James Bond flick.

But even the album’s lighter moments are shot through with palpable angst. The stinging rocker “Disorder in the House” finds Zevon alternately “sprawled across the davenport of despair,” lying on “the couch of pain,” and, paycheck in hand, promising to “paint the whole town gray.” During the course of “Rub Me Raw,” Zevon intones nonsense words over the track’s 12-bar blues, managing somehow to make phrases like “pickle-ickle-ickle” and “wang dang doodle” sound vaguely threatening. And just before he strikes up the band on the radio-ready “Numb as a Statue,” Zevon announces, “Let’s do another bad one then, ’cause I like it when the blood drains from Dave’s face.”

“Dave” is David Lindley, the remarkable guitarist who, in the 1970s, placed much-needed wake-up calls to every room in the Hotel California, jolting records by everyone from Linda Ronstadt to Jackson Browne to life with his incisive playing. Lindley is on hand for “The Wind,” too, as are scads of Zevon’s other friends and admirers. Bruce Springsteen holds forth on the disc, most of the Eagles come home to roost, and Tom Petty, Emmylou Harris, Ry Cooder and T-Bone Burnett also turn up. Even Billy Bob Thornton — a relative juvenile delinquent among this crowd of nearing-60-somethings — manages to crash Zevon’s party.

But despite an A-plus guest list that seems torn from the Rolodex of ’70s rock impresario Irving Azoff, the tone of “The Wind” is mainly elegiac, almost redemptive. Disc opener “Dirty Life & Times” echoes the gospel standard “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder,” with Zevon setting the stage by allowing from the outset that, with this one, he’s “winding down my dirty life and times.” The disc also features a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” a choice that, at first blush, seems too obvious for an ironist of Zevon’s caliber. Still, when toward the end of the tune Zevon chants “open up, open up” in his brooding baritone, it’s one of the disc’s most striking moments.

Similarly, the plaintive, piano-fueled “Please Stay” could be just another in a long series of Zevon’s tenderhearted love-gone-wrong songs. But the circumstances surrounding the whisper-gentle ballad imbue it with the gravitas of a dying man’s last wish. It’s almost as if Zevon is asking whether he can stay.

Sadder still, you can hear weakness in Zevon’s singing throughout the album. Typically an authoritative instrument that he has often had to rein in for ballads, Zevon’s voice seems tailor-made for them this time: Fine as the rockers are, “The Wind’s” slower tunes are the record’s most affecting. “She’s Too Good for Me” glides gently on softly shaken maracas, a precisely picked acoustic guitar riff, and Zevon’s fragile but always melodious warble. Except for its bittersweet lyric, the stately “El Amor de Mi Vida” could easily become a staple of wedding bands everywhere. And with its sotto-voce backing choir, “Prison Grove,” a dark and funereal blues, conjures “Jungle Work,” a track from Zevon’s still-thrilling 1980 outing, “Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School.”

But the album’s Dylan-esque closer is its finest moment. “Keep Me in Your Heart” is heartbreaking in its modesty, with Zevon hoping, merely, that former friends and lovers — and by extension, his audience — will “keep me in your heart for a while.” As if forgetting him is even a remote possibility. This is the guy, after all, who offered the world “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” the greatest (OK, so it’s the only) rock ‘n’ roll song about playboy colonialism ever written.

Even if the album were crap, of course, it would be impossible to pan: Not even a rock critic could be so heartless. Plus, ever since some high school buddies and I traveled to an Orlando concert hall with a “Werewolves of Florida” sign in tow, I’ve been unable to utter a negative word about the man. That joke, admittedly, doesn’t seem quite as hilarious as it did to me as a kid, but the concert remains one of the best I’ve ever seen. Zevon’s lacerating lyrical skill notwithstanding, he’s the most generous performer this side of Bruce Springsteen — and one of the most joyous, too. As I recall, Zevon was basically beaming throughout the entire show. And so was the audience.

But “The Wind” isn’t crap. It’s heartbreakingly good, in fact, ranking right up there with Zevon’s endlessly amazing early work. Thanks mainly to its rough-hewn production, the album echoes his self-titled 1976 disc in particular. “Warren Zevon’s” most famous tune, “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” was a minor hit for Linda Ronstadt back in 1977. But the album’s best number was “Hasten Down the Wind,” a pretty but ultimately bitter ballad about the mercurial ways of love relationships.

With this “Wind,” Zevon resolves that crisis, bringing his illustrious career full-circle by embracing — or at least coming to grips with — the ephemeral nature of the ties that bind. He’s still singing about death, of course, about the way things sadly and inevitably end. This time, though, there’s gentleness in Zevon’s voice, acceptance without resignation and, at the same time, a genuine lust for life.

“The Wind,” in other words, is funny, sad, smart and touching — a graceful goodbye from one of rock’s sharpest wits.

Two years earlier, Young enlisted Crazy Horse for the proto-grunge of “Re-ac-tor,” a crusty slab of difficult listening that comes complete with a nine-minute epic dubbed “T-Bone.” The track’s only words are “Got mashed potatoes/ Ain’t got no T-bone.” A generous interpretation of the lyric might deem it an angry, class-conscious rant except that, in 1980, Young had checked in with the country-tinged “Hawks & Doves.” An EP-length record that listed at an LP’s price, the disc remains the strangest love letter an aging hippie ever wrote to Ronald Reagan.

So call Young willfully perverse. Still, all of the above — two of which have only recently been issued on CD — are the glorious results of piles of misspent record-label cash. The albums were relative flops when they were originally released and, even among Young obsessives, they’re generally relegated to the ash heap of their hero’s reputation-squandering ’80s output.

But that, I think, is a huge mistake. Young’s oddball outings put the obviously solid stuff (a career-maker like “Harvest,” say, or the mighty “Rust Never Sleeps”) in a context of warped creativity and a heartwarming series of seriously bad business decisions. Indeed, “Fuckin’ Up” (the best track on Young’s much-ballyhooed “Ragged Glory”) is more than a great song; it’s a lifestyle choice. And as Young himself has said, when it comes to his catalog, it’s all one song anyway.

If that’s the case, “Greendale,” Young’s much-anticipated, much-delayed concept album, fits right in: It belongs to the singer/songwriter/ax man’s grand tradition of doing it his own damn way. For starters, Young is calling the disc a “musical novel,” and he’s touring it as a quasi-theatrical production. Meanwhile, the “Greendale” Web site is a nearly unnavigable nightmare of arcane details, half-worked-out plot devices, and primitive graphics that seem inspired, at least in part, by pop madman Daniel Johnston.

In other words, it’s genius.

This much is at least kind of, sort of clear: The story concerns a family named Green who reside in the fictional Northern California town of Greendale. Earl Green is a Vietnam vet who paints psychedelic pictures that, at least until the devil cleans his glasses, no one wants to buy. Earl’s wife, Edith, is a free spirit who loves to dance, and their daughter, Sun, is an 18-year-old high-school cheerleader with artistic ambitions of her own. Her current work in progress is an open-air antiwar sculpture made out of bales of hay.

There’s a crime-story overlay, too. This part of the tale features Jed Green and Officer Carmichael, a policeman Jed kills when, during a routine pullover, Carmichael discovers a glove box full of cocaine and a trunk-load of marijuana. Green family patriarch Grandpa also figures in the drama. When the inevitable horde of journalists descends on Greendale to work the local-tragedy angle, Grandpa promptly has a heart attack and dies.

A forthcoming DVD may make it all clearer, but the story, in truth, is a big, rambling mess. Still, “Greendale” does provide a convenient excuse for Young to take potshots at contemporary culture, especially our mass media. And though the tale itself is pretty predictable — this is the Fox News era, after all — Young does get off the occasionally winning zinger. “It ain’t an honor to be on TV,” he chides in the voice of Grandpa during “Grandpa’s Interview.” “And it ain’t a duty either.”

As sloganeering goes, those words aren’t as catchy or sardonic as, say, “Welfare mothers make better lovers,” particularly when they’re threaded through a 13-minute tune that mostly relies on the Stones’ “Waiting on a Friend” for its main hook. But coming from an artist who recently turned AARP age, the sentiment is admirably caustic. Young, in fact, now has no peers when it comes to being rock’s Angry Old Man: He’s clearly the crankiest of them all. Only Randy Newman is within spitting distance.

But if the story Young tells this time around is essentially a stitched-together pastiche, his new music is more incisive. True, some of the tunes, such as “Double E,” “Devil’s Sidewalk” and “Leave the Driving,” are just simple — even simplistic — variations on the 12-bar blues, time-marking placeholders that give Young-the-storyteller all the space he needs to provide exposition, such as it is.

The album’s best tracks, however, are genuinely mesmerizing. “Greendale” opens with “Falling From Above,” a song that conjures the spirit of the great “Powderfinger,” right down to that tune’s lilting, elegiac chord changes and tragic sense of failed defiance. “Carmichael” is moving, too, a languid guitar-bass-and-drums workout that leans on the Buffalo Springfield-era “Mr. Soul” and manages to evoke a warmblooded and empathetic character even before Young opens his mouth to sing. Sun Green’s theme song (“Sun Green,” natch) is a bit of a long-winded dud, admittedly. But the disc’s set-closer, “Be the Rain,” is an Age of Aquarius-style production number, complete with an epic chord progression, a girl-group choir and Young’s own version of a blue-light special: “Attention shoppers!” our sarcastic master of ceremonies shouts through a megaphone. “Buy with a conscience and save!”

None of “Greendale” can compete with the most sublime moments of Young’s career. There’s no completely unexpected invocation of Johnny Rotten, for example, and certainly no lyric that imagines the singer and Pocahontas talking with Marlon Brando about Hollywood, the Astrodome and the first tepee. Those are once-in-a-career phenomena anyway, and Young, bizarrely, has somehow managed to uncork entire albums full of them. By comparison, “Greendale” is just another one of Young’s career-defying left turns, a screw-it-all foray into the man’s wacky, fractured imagination.

But the disc is still a keeper. Young has been at it for so long — and we’ve been listening to the geezer for so long — that it’s frequently difficult to hear the man’s music through all the mythology and repetition. Even a jaw-dropper like “Like a Hurricane,” you have to admit, loses some of its gale-force ferocity when you’ve heard it five days in a row during drive time on your local classic-rock radio station.

But nothing dispels rock mythology like a genuine goof, and fortunately, Young’s canon is littered with some truly twisted marginalia. Ornery, difficult, but still weirdly satisfying, “Greendale” makes a worthy addition.