Starting a record company at any time is a damned fool notion and in 1950 it couldn’t have seemed crazier. Columbia, Decca, RCA and Capitol totally dominated the American recorded music scene. They owned pressing plants, distribution systems and provided almost all the music heard on AM radio and the newly allocated FM band. How would an independent get heard over this din of commonplace music backed by the big money of the major labels?”

—Jac Holzman from the foreword of Forever Changing: The Golden Age of Elektra Records 1963-1973

Jac Holzman was nothing more than 19-year-old college student dreamer who in 1950 cobbled together the princely sum of $300, an amount matched by business partner Paul Rickholt, and there he was running his own record label. He knew that was his only way to bring together the two things he loved: folk music and audio engineering.

Over 23 years, he ushered Elektra from a tiny dorm room startup to one of the most significant imprints in the history of popular music.

Significance, however, is measured in many different ways. On one hand, Elektra’s significance can be weighed in the sales of millions of records, which it realized with a stable of stylistically across-the-boards acts, from wide-eyed folkie Judy Collins to dark, psych-blues prophets the Doors and soft-rock stalwarts Bread. Significance can also be surveyed in the expansive crater that is Elektra’s cultural impact, having brought to the world much of the cream of the 1960s folk scene, the fractured orchestral psychedelics of Love and the politico bombast of MC5. (And yes, the Doors belong on this side of the fence, too.)

If Holzman’s raison d’etre was a million miles away from the all-powerful major labels of the day, the funny lesson here is how time can really change things.

In the 50-plus years since Holzman started, his label became one of the monolithic majors he was competing against. Elektra became a part of Warner in the early 1970s, and became even more powerful after merging with Asylum a few years later.

More interesting still is that Holzman’s model for Elektra became the blueprint for the sea of indies in the decades that followed. In 2007, many indie labels are currently thriving with the embrace of new technology matched by a brand of passion like that Holzman displayed. Conversely, the once big, bad majors are collapsing beneath profit losses in a marketplace where their way of doing business is transforming them into dinosaurs. Capitol Records, mentioned by Holzman in his foreword, packed up the tent and folded into Virgin Music just last week.

Box sets usually celebrate the achievements of the artists, and there are some great acts and very important records here, but Forever Changing: The Golden Age of Elektra Records 1963-1973 (Rhino) speaks more to the power of one man’s ideal.

It captures Holzman’s passion, bottling the 10 years from when the 1960s spirit took shape through to the year when Holzman stepped away from the label he created to take a vice presidency at the label’s parent, Warner. This set clearly celebrates Elektra’s art over its commerce, signaled by the borrowing of its title from Love’s Forever Changes, a qualified masterpiece of the 1960s that never made a real dent commercially.

Starting this Elektra story in 1963 makes sense. It was a significant year in American history, with a bubbling-over effect triggered by the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement and the beginning of the coming of age of the baby boomers.

For Holzman, the musical landscape was changing and what rankled him was what his folk label didn’t have: someone like the queen of the scene Joan Baez or the latest ascendant star, one Bob Dylan. He signed from all sides of folk’s fringes: unabashed leftist troubadour Phil Ochs, bluegrass brothers the Dillards, the unorthodox outfit Holy Modal Rounders and Chicago’s integrated electric blues outfit, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

Still, Holzman believed that he had missed out on securing key artists, from Dylan on down, on the East Coast. So he opened an LA office in 1962 believing the West to be ripe for the picking. The LA office seemed like a failure until the Sunset Strip scene starting taking off. Holzman secured deals with the Doors, who’d been turned down by Columbia, and with Love, led by enigmatic singer Arthur Lee.

What helped Holzman’s vision along was having the right team around him. He keenly trusted Joe Boyd, an American in England who secured for Elektra Scottish folk innovators the Incredible String Band and later on discovered Nick Drake. And then there was Danny Fields.

Fields was the label’s publicist and sometimes A&R man, and without him Iggy Pop and the Stooges would have likely languished in Ann Arbor instead of shifting the course of rock and roll. On a trip to Detroit to sign the MC5, Fields was coaxed into checking them out. Despite their lack of real songs, Fields was hypnotized by their wild and in-your-face, free-form rock.

Part of the fun in Forever Changing is having the likes of Love, the Doors, MC5 and the Stooges on one collection, raising the debate of who was the greatest rock band on the imprint. Maybe it was none of the above and instead it’s a latter Holzman-era signing, Queen, represented on this collection by the explosive salvo “Keep Yourself Alive” from their eponymous debut. Enjoy the debate.

Forever Changing additionally brings to light some long-languishing nuggets from the label’s rich catalog. There’s a wealth to be found here, from Mississippi-born bluesman Maxwell Street Jimmy Davis to the gritty blue-eyed soul of Lonnie Mack, whose soloing on the Doors’ “Roadhouse Blues” earns him a shout-out from Morrison. Go back and listen for that. Speaking of which, Crabby Appleton’s sublime rock single “Go Back” is here and proves about as perfectly crafted as anything you will ever hear. And there’s even Jobriath, an uber-hyped, Bowie-esque glam rocker whose career quickly bombed but who goes into the history books as the first openly gay rock artist.

Post 1973, Elektra had many successful and heralded artists, including Tom Waits, AC/DC, the Cure, the Pixies, Metallica, the Sugarcubes, X and even Western New York’s 10,000 Maniacs. By 2004, however, Elektra was relegated to a sub-label of Atlantic, itself within the Warner cluster, and nothing has been issued on Elektra proper since. It was never really the same after Jac, anyway.