Bob Dylan - The Essential Bob Dylan
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Bob DylanEdition: Music CD
Format: Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2000-10-31
Music Label: Sony
Soundtracks:
Music CD 1
- Blowin' in the Wind
- Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
- The Times They Are A-Changin'
- It Ain't Me Babe
- Maggie's Farm
- It's All over Now, Baby Blue
- Mr. Tambourine Man
- Subterranean Homesick Blues
- Like a Rolling Stone
- Positively 4th Street
- Just Like a Woman
- Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
- All Along the Watchtower
- The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)
- I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
- Lay Lady Lay
- If Not for You
- I Shall Be Released
- You Ain't Going Nowhere
- Knockin' on Heaven's Door
- Forever Young
- Tangled Up in Blue
- Shelter from the Storm
- The Hurricane
- Gotta Serve Somebody
- Jokerman
- Silvio
- Everything Is Broken
- Not Dark Yet
- Things Have Changed
Free Music Notes for The Essential Bob Dylan
Free Music Review: If you MUST get a Dylan compilation, this is it
Hit: 5 Stars
Bob Dylan has had one of the longest and most prolific careers of anyone in popular music, spanning 40 years and two generations - writing nearly a thousand songs, releasing some unseemly percentage of those, putting out over 40 albums, selling millions, influencing untold multitudes of people, and irrevocably changing the face of popular music. Consequently, it is absolutely impossible to condense one of the greatest, most prolific, and certainly most memorable and important musical careers in our time to a mere two discs. This is especially so, as it was Dylan, after all, who pioneered the concept of an album as an album, and not just a collection of random songs - but instead as one flowing composition with a consistent mood and set of themes. Also, the man has written such an incredible number of songs that you could release an entire boxed set and still not include all of them (indeed, this has been done twice.) Still, if you are absolutely steadfast on the point that you must get into Dylan with a compilation, then this is where you should start (if you're willing to shell out the bucks for it, the 3-CD Biograph boxed set is an overall better introduction - though it does not cover anything past the early 80's. The first two (or three) Greatest Hits albums purchased together would do the job about as well, but this is a more economical and concise package.) The set is laid out in chronological order, and you can see Dylan progress from the early 60's revolutionary acoustic folkie, to rebellious electric troubador, to country gentleman, to maverick rustic singer/songwriter, to the big-band sound of the late 70's, to his "Christian trilogy", to his occasionally uneven years of the 80's, to his creative rebirth in the late 90's. Most of the absolutely essential songs are here - one need only look at the tracklist - and you can get a certain feel of why Dylan is so great, so important, and means so many different things to so many different people from this album - but then again, you'll never be able to tell, from its handful of songs included here, just why Freewheelin' was such a revolutionary album when it was released; how the half-electric Bringing It All Back Home revolutionized popular music and caused Dyaln to receive more than a few death threats; how, from its single included cut, Highway 61 Revisited is (rightfully) considered to be one of the finest rock records ever produced; how Blonde On Blonde, at 70+ minutes, 14 tracks, and 2 records, is the very definition of a magnum opus; Tangled Up In Blue and Shelter From The Storm, great songs though they are, cannot possibly capture the relentless sorrow, heartbreak, and melancholy of Blood On The Tracks; ditto for Bob's dark, depressing 1997 masterpiece, Time Out of Mind. And, as always, "Greatest Hit" albums, by definition, will almost always invariably leave off the stunning album tracks that are really the centerpieces of an artist's catalog: Chimes of Freedom, It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), Desolation Row, Sad-Eyed Lady of The Lowlands, Idiot Wind - these are the true masterpieces of Dylan's catalog, and you'll never get a feel for them through any compilation. Still, for what it is, this compilation works almost invariably well. One can certainly quibble over absent tracks (Hard Rain, I Want You, and Every Grain of Sand come instantly to mind), but what is here is unarguably grand and immaculate. Kudos, also, to Sony for including Things Have Changed (though this was just undoubtedly the "record company incentive" on their part to get the people who already own everything else on here to buy this album), his masterly new track from Wonder Boys, as well as Not Dark Yet from Time Out of Mind (my personal favorite Dylan album) - his recent masterpiece that recently won a poll as Bob's Best Song Ever. Once again, I say, if you're looking to get into Dylan, and your preferred method of entry is a compilation, then start here. But, for Bob's sake, don't let it be your last word on the man. If you do, and thereby miss out on one of the richest and most important catalogs of music of the entire century, then you will have only yourself to blame.
The Essential Bob Dylan Poster
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 StolderClassic Rock Music CDs
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