Biograph

The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991	Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 2 CDs with 27 songs in a brilliant box with a 60 page booklet.	The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991 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, unrele...	The Basement Tapes The Basement Tapes can be heard as a manifesto for the '90s' underlying Americana agenda or as the greatest album never intended for commercial release. Homegrown 1967 recordings taped in the Band's fabled Big Pink hermitage in Saugerties, New York, many of the 24 songs resonated...	The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964 - Concert at Philharmonic Hall The brooding Bob Dylan of the 1966 live collection in the Dylan bootleg series gave way to an even more hooded character on the second live bootleg album from 1974. Which makes the jump back to a younger Dylan in this set all the more jarring. Here is Dylan as an eager-to-please ...
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The "Royal Albert Hall Concert" Nineteen ninety-eight: The same year he dances with Soy Bomb at the Grammys, his record label finally issues Bob Dylan's ultimate live document. A classic case of not giving the audience what they want but what they need, Mr. Dylan's oft-bootlegged 1966 gig begins with lovely and...	No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (The Bootleg Series Vol. 7) Book-ended with an embryonic recording made by a high school friend and a live, boisterous take of "Like a Rolling Stone" less than seven years later, the fifth release in the Bob Dylan Bootleg series (and the soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's Dylan documentary of the same name) pr...	Saved	Empire Burlesque	Blood on the Tracks 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...

Worth the Price for the Extra Songs Alone
Over the years a lot of Bob Dylan's studio work got left behind for one reason or another. Sometimes because you can only fit so much on a record and sometimes because Dylan didn't think the song was right for the particular record he was recording at the time. So, to celebrate his 24th year with Columbia, they released "Biograph" which aimed to plug a few holes in his career, or rather to release some of the good stuff that got left by the wayside. It's nice that they did this, but it would have been better if all of the fifty-three tracks would have been new or different recordings. Still there were nine unreleased songs and four very hard to get singles included on the set and that was good. The rest of the set (five records when it originally came out) was a compilation of what they (Bob Dylan and/or Columbia) decided was representative of his career, not necessarily greatest hits. So this is really a good place for someone brand new to Dylan to start. I might have preferred it if they put the stuff on in chronological order like they did with the Bootleg Series, Vol. 1 - 3, but that's just me. My good friend Sophie likes the album the way it is, with a different sounding Bob Dylan on song after song. Anyway, the extra songs alonE make this set a must own and as I said, if you're new to Bob Dylan, you won't be throwing money away here, because you will be playing these CDs over and over again, till you wear them out. Wait, I don't think you can wear out CDs, so you'll be playing this set for a long, long time and enjoying every minute of it.

Biograph Bob Dylan
I sent it back to Amazon for a refund, for personal reasons, not related to the quality of the product.

A Bob Dylan box set? Spanning just three discs?
How to make a Bob Dylan box set...well, you could put out one with about a dozen CDs and still be blamed that somebody's favorite song was missing. But the compilers at Columbia have doen a good job solving this rather impossible task. 1985's "Biograph" wasn't the first ever career-spanning rock box set (the late, great Buddy Holly was honored with that in 1979), but it was the most important by far, establishing the format and sparking new interest in Bob Dylan whose career was in decline at the time. Unlike many box sets, this one actually offers something to both the casual and the dedicated fan. Most of Dylan's best-known songs are here, as well as a generous helping of unreleased songs, B-sides, alternates and demos. And almost everything gels, actually, making "Biograph" an excellent, if not definitive, summary of Bob Dylan's career from 1961-1985. Many great songs are missing, of course, but with an artist as prolific as Bob Dylan that can't be helped. And the songs that are here are excellent (with the exception of a handful that are merely good). This is an immensely varied compilation, very well annotated and boasting magnificent state-of-the-art fidelity. The track list includes early acoustic numbers, electric rock songs, blues-rock, folk-rock, country-rock, and lovely ballads. And the rarities and previously unreleased songs aren't rejects or filler, most of them are in fact excellent, from the acoustic "Up To Me" and the surreal "Quinn The Eskimo" to the quirky, upbeat pop of "On A Night Like This" and "Heart Of Mine", and the gorgeous ballads "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" and "I'll Keep It With Mine". Casual Dylan fans may well find that there are too many unfamiliar songs here, and they should probably start somewhere else...Dylan's original "Greatest Hits" album and the two-disc "More Greatest Hits" (AKA "Greatest Hits vol. 2") still provide the best introduction to Bob Dylan in his prime, much better than the more recent "Essential Bob Dylan". Or start by picking up Dylan's three best band-backed records, "Bringing It All Back Home", "Highway 61 Revisited", and "Blood On The Tracks". There is no such thing as a definitive Bob Dylan-compilation, and three CDs wouldn't contain it if there was. And besides, the wonderful 70s albums "Blood On The Tracks" and "Desire" in particular are being short-changed, which is a shame. But "Biograph" is still 3½ hours of some of Dylan's greatest songs, and the rarities and unreleased tracks makes it a must-have purchase even for the dedicated fan who already has all the hits. 4 3/4 stars.

The best "best of Dylan" available
Putting together a "best of" collection for a musical artist whose work should be heard in the context of the albums on which it originally appeared is a difficult task, but the folks responsible for Bob Dylan's "Biograph" did themselves proud. The sequencing may not make much sense in the CD era, but this was released in 1985 when vinyl records were still the dominant format. By 33 1/3 standards, the sequencing makes perfect sense with each side arranged (loosely) around a theme. The so-called protest songs were relegated to one side, love songs were given another, and difficult to catagorize tracks like "Every Grain of Sand" and "Visions of Johanna" were collected on another side.With that in mind, "Biograph" is hard to beat. As an introduction to THE singer-songwriter of the rock era, "Biograph" makes previous "hits" packages obsolete by providing an exciting and varied overview of Dylan's brilliance as both a composer and performer. Whether protesting society's injustices in "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are A Changin'," chronicalling the course of a love affair in "You're a Big Girl Now," professing a belief in the divine as in "Solid Rock" and "Every Grain of Sand," or just being inscrutably brilliant as in a previously unreleased live rendition of "Visions of Johanna," Dylan's songwriting genius is simply unrivaled in any genre of music. For those who already own most of the official releases from Dylan's Columbia catalogue, the real treat here are the previously unreleased recordings, such as the breathtaking "Up to Me" (an outtake from 1974's "Blood on the Tracks") and the superb "Abandoned Love" (leftover from 1976's "Desire"), all of which prove that the scraps from the man's table are often every bit as tasty as the main meal.

Some of Dylan's Best Left Behind Stuff
I can just imagine the excitement this set must have generated among Dylan fans when this set was released. Biograph was so much more than a retrospective because of all of the unreleased material on it. The set opens with "Visions of Johanna" from the Sixty-six tour and draws you right into the music. Just imagine, Dylan fans had to wait two more decades to finally get a whole Sixty-six show in the legal Bootleg Series. "Quinn the Eskimo" the third song on the record was recorded at Mr. D's Isle of White show in Sixty-nine and curiously enough left off "Self Portrait" where you can find more songs from that show. "You're a Big Girl Now" and "Tangled Up in Blue" are out takes from "Blood on the Tracks." "I Wanna be Your Lover" and "Crawl Out Your Window" are both songs left over from Sixty-six. "Percy's Song" one of the true gems of this set is from the earlier acoustic period. And there is more, so much more. This is one fine five star Bob Dylan set and if you don't own it, you should. Reviewed by Stephanie Sane