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 a big deal? Now we...

“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 best performances” from those shows,...

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 is being reissued in May,...

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 to find or prohibitively priced....