Bob Dylan has always been incredibly prolific, only releasing a fraction of what he records. Such a policy has made him a prime target for bootleggers over the years, finally prompting this sanctioned 1991 triple-disc dive into the Dylan vaults. It consists of rare tracks, unreleased outtakes, early versions of classics ("Times They Are a-Changin'," "Like a Rolling Stone," "I Shall Be Released"), and alternate versions that sometimes cut the originals ("Idiot Wind"). A measure of Dylan's depth is his list of discarded songs ("She's Your Lover Now," "Blind Willie McTell," "Series of Dreams") that would be the crown jewels of most catalogs. These 58 tracks serve as a shadow history of one of our most important artists. --Ben Edmonds
Dylan's outstanding second album is a tremendous jump from its predecessor. Whereas the debut established him as a peerless interpreter of folk and country-blues classics, and a singer like none before, this followup features some of the most pungent original songs of the '60s. "Blowin' in the Wind," "Masters of War," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "I Shall Be Free": if this sounds like the lineup for a greatest-hits collection, you've got the idea. Nat Hentoff's liner notes are charmingly dated, but Dylan's idiosyncratic singing, unexpected lyrics, and inimitable guitar and harmonica playing are as immediate and relevant as whatever you heard on the radio today. (As great as this is, there's much more: a handful of top-rank outtakes from Freewheelin' appear on the Bootleg Series box set.) --Jimmy Guterman
Inevitably, when critics praise a new Dylan album, they label it the "best since Blood on the Tracks," and with good reason. Inspired by a crumbled marriage, and recorded after a tour with the Band had apparently re-ignited his creativity, Blood is among Dylan's masterpieces. The album's epic songs are well known, but its real high points are the shorter numbers--"You're a Big Girl Now," the flawless blues "Meet Me in the Morning," and the sweetly devastating "Buckets of Rain." These are songs of "images and distorted facts," each expressed through tangled points of view, and all of them blue. --David Cantwell
Dylan was virtually gushing great songs when this masterpiece arrived in the summer of 1965. From the epochal opening of "Like a Rolling Stone" through the absurdly apocalyptic closer, "Desolation Row," his command of surrealistic language was daring and amazing. As a vocalist, he was rewriting the rules of the game. Jimi Hendrix made note of Mr. Z's technically suspect pitch and decided that he too was a singer. And the backing, though ragged, is precisely right. Is this the essential Dylan album? It's certainly one of them. --Steven Stolder
"You sound like you're having a good old time," a purist Dylan fan is spotted telling the artist in the documentary Don't Look Back just after the release of this, his first (half-)electric album. He certainly does. Updating Chicago blues forms with hilarious, tough lyrics--in fact, all but stealing the meter of Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" for "Subterranean Homesick Blues"--on one side, dropping some of his most devastating solo acoustic science ("It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," "Mr. Tambourine Man") on the other, the first of Dylan's two 1965 long-players broke it right down with style, substance, and elegance. --Rickey Wright
Bob Dylan "The Essential Bob Dylan (Rm) (2CD)"
$11.98
Two discs of music don't exactly provide for a thorough overview of four decades of recording, particularly if the subject of the retrospective is one of the most important and prolific performers of his time. So The Essential Bob Dylan definitely skates over the leagues-deep oeuvre of Dylan, summarizing his monumental first half-dozen years in disc one and skirting over the following 34 years in disc two. Delving into Columbia's three Dylan greatest-hits packages (though curiously purging "I Want You," a genuine hit single in its day), Essential offers only a few surprises, opting for The Basement Tapes version of "Quinn the Eskimo" over the Self Portrait remake that made it onto Greatest Hits Volume II and tossing in "Things Have Changed" from the Wonder Boys soundtrack for completists. But this 30-track overview is designed with newcomers, not Dylanologists, in mind. --Steven Stolder
Then a holding action while Dylan unloaded his head after his May 1966 motorcycle crash, now a nostalgia merit badge for boomers and a course in Dylan 101 for '90s newcomers, Greatest Hits stands up remarkably well as a listening experience. Smartly programmed to ride all over any residual worries about acoustic-vs.-electric authenticity--in fact, blowing a raspberry in their face by opening with the Salvation-Army-band blast of "Rainy Day Women #12 and 35"--this best-of stacks AM smashes and protest anthems together in celebration of a pop star like no other before. --Rickey Wright
Bob Dylan "Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2"
$13.02
This time selected and programmed by the man himself, the two-disc second installment in Dylan's Greatest Hits series comes off as much more idiosyncratic than its brother, famed songs ("Lay Lady Lay," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall") notwithstanding. An even richer cut-by-cut listen than the earlier best-of, this 1971 set masterfully casts the classics into new light and adds previously non-LP singles (the smashing "Watching the River Flow," with the Amazon.com fave line "People disagreein' just about everywhere you look / Makes you wanna stop and read a book; let's have lunch, Bob"), a then-unheard live 1963 "Tomorrow Is a Long Time," and new, stunning, off-the-cuff takes of "I Shall Be Released," "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere," and "Down in the Flood." --Rickey Wright
