Author: Jeff Burger

The Grateful Dead or perhaps Bob Dylan may hold the record for most releases from the vaults, but the Beach Boys aren’t far behind. Over the years, we’ve seen the group’s studio albums reissued as twofers, with a wealth of bonus tracks. Greatly expanded versions of Beach Boys Party and the Beach Boys’ Christmas Album...

Triplicate—a three-CD, 30-song set—represents Bob Dylan’s third exploration of the Great American Songbook, following 2014’s Shadows in the Night and 2016’s Fallen Angels. Like those albums, it was produced by Jack Frost (aka Robert Zimmerman, Blind Boy Grunt, and you know who). Like its predecessors, also, it focuses on songs that have been recorded by...

The rap on the Grateful Dead’s eponymous 1967 debut album—which the group mostly recorded in just four days—is that they didn’t yet understand the studio and failed to accurately represent what they could accomplish in concert. There’s some truth in that. Then again, as a bonus disc included with this 50th anniversary reissue makes clear,...

Talk about a Bobfest! This beautifully packaged new 36-CD box collects every known recording from Dylan’s 1966 shows on three continents—and no, 36 is not a typo. Throughout, Dylan is backed by an outfit that includes Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson of the Hawks (later the Band). The drummer is Mickey...

If ever there was a case of the media building up and then knocking down a band, it was the one involving Fleetwood Mac in the late-’70s and early-’80s. The critics cheered when the group—newly energized by the addition of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks—delivered its chart-topping eponymous album in 1975 and the even better...

The “supergroup” label—which critics and fans first applied to such late 1960s outfits as Cream, Blind Faith, and Crosby, Stills & Nash—has arguably since been overused. But if ever an outfit deserved the supergroup tag, it’s the Traveling Wilburys, whose members’ reputations loom so large that it’s difficult to believe their collaboration actually took place....

Bob Dylan’s Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), which contain covers of old folk and blues tunes, should have come as no surprise to anyone who’d paid attention to his career. Way back on his eponymous 1962 debut, after all, he had headed pretty much in the same direction....

Though Tusk received generally positive reviews when it appeared in 1979, the prevailing view seems to be that it paled alongside its huge-selling immediate predecessors, 1975’s Fleetwood Mac and 1977’s Rumours. The consensus was that Lindsey Buckingham had taken over the group and buried its shimmering pop under layers of less-accessible experimental music. Fleetwood Mac’s...

Until now, there have arguably been four essential box sets for Sinatra fans: The Song Is You, covering his early work with Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra; The Best of the Columbia Years, which documents his first great period as a soloist from 1943 to 1952; The Capitol Years, which showcases his superb work with...

Folksinger Richard Farina recorded three auspicious albums with his wife Mimi (Joan Baez’s sister) in the mid 1960s and, in 1966, issued one much-talked-about novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. At the time, it looked like up for Farina himself—until two days after the book’s publication, when he died in...