While it might be a little dreary to think of a cross-country road trip, a fun guide to rock-and-roll landmarks across North America has me itching to load up, head out, and touch the sacred grounds of infamous debauchery, birthplace homes, and final resting places of rock's greatest legends. Published by the Santa Monica Press, Led Zeppelin Crashed Here is peppered with modern-day photographs and a detective's keen eye for tracking down rock history in its original scandalous settings, and the pages turn like attacking a bag of chips. Travel writer Chris Epting collects more than 300 pages of these famous (and hidden) sites, sure to put a smile on the face of any music nut who finds his new book in a stocking. From directions to the concrete Woodstock marker in the earth outside Bethel, New York, to a deeper understanding of what Joni Mitchell was singing about in "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot," Epting's research makes me want to visit the location of famous album-cover sites for a personal snapshot, like in front of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti brownstone or shaking hands at the Warner Bros. studio lot where Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here cover was created.

Describing the music that he's spent more than half of his 38 years learning to master, blues guitarist Nick Moss states, "There's a lot of nuance that people don't realize," and underscores his point with an unusual - but apt - analogy.

"To me it's like food," says Moss in a recent phone interview.

Listening to Will Destroy You, Driver of the Year's release from earlier this year, the first thing that popped into my head was Flight of the Conchords, the comedy folk duo from New Zealand that scored an HBO series on which the band's fan base never grew much larger than one.

Next week the Yep Roc Records imprint releases the five-disc I Wanna Go Backwards box from Robyn Hitchcock, the first of twin sets that pluck three choice albums from his catalog, slather each with associated outtakes and demos, and ice the layer cake with two CDs of B sides. Selecting three fan-favorite albums of solo work, the offering includes Black Snake Diamond Role from 1981, the pensive I Often Dream of Trains from 1984, and the haunting Eye from 1990. Hitchcock's wit and image associations are socially progressive, brutally honest, and seductively mad. Too timid to slide into the full box set or the eight-LP vinyl version? All three expanded albums are being reissued individually.