Author: Jeff Burger

In June of 1966, Bob Dylan was still putting the finishing touches on the “thin, wild mercury sound” of Blonde on Blonde, a wordy, seemingly drug-fueled rock classic loaded with impressionistic, often abstruse lyrics. The album garnered the rave reviews it deserved; but only about 14 months later—having mostly recovered from a serious motorcycle accident...

What’s left to offer in the retrospective department when you’ve already released Anthology, Best of 1968-1973, Greatest Hits 1974-78, Young Hearts: Complete Greatest Hits, Ultimate Hits, and several other career-spanning compilations? For rock’s Steve Miller Band, the answer is a box set that completely eschews the hit recordings that powered their career in favor of...

Imagine a graph with two lines, one showing the rising net worth of Baby Boomers over the past half century, the other indicating how the size or price of music box sets has risen over the same period. The two lines, one suspects, would be rather parallel. Remember the days when a three-LP collection was...

“Wait a minute,” you might think, after hearing about The Rolling Thunder Review: The 1975 Live Recordings. “Didn’t Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series already devote a volume to that concert tour?” Yup, and the very first paragraph of the liner notes for this new package concedes that the earlier one collected “what we thought were the...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about The Spirit of Radio, a box set of Bob Dylan interviews and performances dating from as long ago as 1962. Those were early days indeed for the former Mr. Zimmerman, but another collection turns the clock back even further: Carnegie Chapter Hall, which originally appeared in 2011 and...

The Spirit of Radio collects three CDs’ worth of Bob Dylan’s seminal early radio performances and interviews. Especially considering that these recordings are more than half a century old, the sound quality is excellent. The CDs, which include informative liner notes, have been available separately and together in the past but have often been difficult...

By the time the Ramones got around to crafting their fourth album, they must have been feeling a little nervous. Several of their contemporaries on the punk/new wave scene— including Blondie, Elvis Costello, and Talking Heads—had begun to break through commercially. They had not. Their first two albums had flopped; and while their third, Rocket to...