Selecting clips that are "covered" by other clips

This used to be super easy to do back in the day in Final Cut Pro 3! It has always bugged me that I cannot simply press a modifier key and lasso over a bunch of clips on my timeline.

Look at the image below. There are no gaps between the clips. So if I wanted to select ONLY the video or audio clips on V1 or A1 I would have to manually click on each clip one by one!!! I cannot simply lasso over the clips that are on the "inner" tracks.

This becomes an incredibly annoying issue when I'm doing audio mixing. For example, if looking at the attached image, there are a few things I would want to do in this case. First, I want to select all the camera audio which is on A1 and disable those. I do not want to delete them, I still need them for later. Well, I can't do that because there is no empty space around those clips. Then I would want to select all the audio on A2 and bump it up. Again, cannot do that. Then, I will want to select all the audio on A3 to match it with the audio on A2. Now, that last part I can do because there is an empty space on A4 that I can click on and then lasso over all the audio clips on track A3. But I cannot do that for the clips that are on audio tracks a1 and a2! Why?

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