Greater Hits, Volume II: Three Times the Bob

Our first installment of Greater Hits was a rousing success, and the big musical celebration of the day prompts our next installment of the series. Bob Dylan, 70 years old today, has been rhapsodized about all over the Internet. Rolling Stone made him the focus of their newest issue, while other publications have counted down the Bard’s best work (I’m of course partial to Popdose‘s write-up). And PopMarket, Sony’s beloved clearinghouse for box set deals, is offering the three-disc Dylan set from 2007 as the featured sale item through noon tomorrow.

Now, interestingly enough, PopMarket is also offering another three-disc Dylan set – the 1985 box set Biograph – as a standard deal for this week, at the same price tag. With that in mind, what better way to do our second installment of Greater Hits than set the two head-to-head?

The answers, my friend, are blowin’ in the wind…after the jump.

Byrds, Cooke, Corea, Getz “Complete Album Collections” Coming from Legacy

This morning, Sony’s Legacy division kicked off a new catalogue initiative that’s sure to raise a few eyebrows!  The Complete Album Collection box sets bring together an artist’s entire tenure at a label (in these cases, Columbia and RCA Victor) in one tidy box set, with albums in individual mini-LP sleeves.  The first four artists to receive this treatment are The Byrds, Sam Cooke, Stan Getz and Return to Forever, and the boxes are available for pre-order now exclusively through PopMarket.  While many of the titles included have been released on CD in the past, other albums will be making their U.S. CD debuts.  (The Cooke is the most exciting set in this respect, with six of the eight albums new to American CD.  The Getz set has a special surprise, too, in the form of a bonus disc with stray Getz selections.)

We’ll fill in the details later, but in the interest of passing this information to you as quickly as possible, hit the jump for the titles included in each box set and the label-supplied information for each title!  All titles can be pre-ordered now at PopMarket.

Reissue Theory: Bob Dylan, “New Morning: Legacy Edition” Including “Dylan (1973)”

Happy Birthday, Bob!  Welcome to another installment of Reissue Theory, where we focus on notable albums and the reissues they could someday see.  To celebrate Mr. Dylan’s 70th birthday, we’re taking a look at one acclaimed LP and the controversial collection drawn from its outtakes.  Can these albums be reissued and expanded in the proper context?   One answer follows!

Greil Marcus famously asked, “What is this shit?” in his review of Bob Dylan’s 1970 Self-Portrait. Dylan’s tenth album for Columbia Records remains as controversial today as it was then, and Marcus’ question has never been definitively answered. A mix of frankly strange cover versions, instrumentals and originals spread over 2 LPs, Dylan told Cameron Crowe that the intention was to put out “his own bootleg record” consisting of studio warm-ups “just to get things right, and then we’d go on and do what we were going to do.” Prior to the Crowe interview, the singer had asserted that the album was a pointed slap in the face to his own overzealous fans: “I said, ‘well, fuck it. I wish these people would just forget about me. I wanna do something they can’t possibly like, can’t possibly relate to. They’ll see it, and they’ll listen, and they’ll say, ‘Well, let’s get on to the next person. He ain’t sayin’ it no more.'” Whatever the explanation, Self-Portrait mystified its audience but still managed to go gold as listeners wanted to hear what the hell it was all about. Like many of Dylan’s albums, a number of outtakes were generated in the sessions held between April 1969 and March 1970; some might wonder about the quality of the songs left off such a maligned album!

But the reaction to Self-Portrait was nothing compared to that which greeted Dylan (1973). Dylan had made a shocking (and short-lived) exit from Columbia Records for David Geffen’s Asylum label, where he would reunite with The Band for Planet Waves. As was record company fashion in those days, Columbia prepared to compete with Asylum.  The label hastily cobbled together an album of vault material that hardly showed off Dylan at his best. Likely due to the fact that he was not consulted in the making of the LP, Dylan has subsequently all but disowned the album. It has never been released on CD in North America on compact disc, though it has surfaced on cassette and on iTunes. Even when a complete Dylan on Columbia box set has been discussed, there’s been precious little talk of Dylan being included. So, then, what’s the point of this Reissue Theory?

1973’s Dylan consisted of two outtakes from Self-Portrait together with seven outtakes from 1970’s New Morning, its near-immediate follow-up. A standalone reissue is unlikely, but what if Bob Dylan would consent to seeing the material on Dylan released where most of it belongs? These admitted outtakes would find a natural home not as a proper album, but rather as the second disc of an expanded edition of 1970’s acclaimed “comeback,” New Morning.

Intrigued by the story of these two intertwined albums? Help us celebrate the 70th birthday of a true American bard, Bob Dylan, with this special Reissue Theory installment.  We’ll explore a hypothetical Legacy Edition restoring Dylan’s tracks to print on an expanded edition of New Morning. Hit the jump to read more!