Holiday Gifts for Music Lovers

This year witnessed the release of several noteworthy archival box sets plus a ton of fine new albums and a superb Bob Dylan book. Here are some sure-to-please choices for the music fans on your holiday gift list.

                                                 BOX SETS AND MORE

Blues and More Blues

Germany’s Bear Family label is renowned for its gargantuan, obsessively researched, and thoroughly documented anthologies. To see why, look no further than its latest offering, Memphis Blues Box ($400), which packs in 534 tracks on 20 CDs and has a playing time of more than 25 hours. Culled from rare and long-out-of-print 78- and 45-rpm records released between 1914 and 1969, the box traces the evolution of the genre in Memphis, which is widely known as “the home of the blues.”

The collection features all the big names you’d expect—B.B. King, Bukka White, Albert King, Memphis Slim, and more—plus hundreds of lesser-known acts that deserve a spotlight. Dozens of researchers and writers contributed to the accompanying 360-page hardcover book, which is as impressive as the discs and includes detailed discographic information about every track, biographies of every performer, and a wealth of previously unseen photos.

It would be difficult to imagine a more exciting gift for a blues fan on your list.

The Complete Del Shannon

An eight-CD 2005 anthology from early rocker Del Shannon seemed massive until it was supplanted by this year’s 12-CD Stranger in Town box set ($72), which features all his albums, plus non-LP singles, rare tracks, and demos. A fantastic singer with a wide range and memorable falsetto who was also an accomplished songwriter, Shannon fully deserves this expansive treatment.

Highlights include “Runaway,” the 1961 chart-topper, and such other hits as “Hats Off to Larry,” “Keep Searchin’ (We’ll Follow the Sun),” and “Little Town Flirt.” It’s no wonder Shannon’s longtime fans have included the late Tom Petty, who produced a comeback album for him, and the Beatles, whose “From Me to You” appeared on U.S. charts in Shannon’s version six months before any Fab Four recordings made those lists.

Costello Meets Bacharach

A pairing of rocker Elvis Costello and pop songwriter Burt Bacharach might seem improbable but the two worked together with great results for nearly three decades, until Bacharach’s death last February. Songs of Bacharach & Costello ($38), a four-CD, two-LP box set, collects all those collaborations, including 19 previously unreleased tracks and three recently recorded numbers.

Highlights abound and not only among the songs they wrote together, such as those in 1998’s Painted from Memory. Also here are Costello’s terrific concert and studio renditions of famous songs that Bacharach wrote with his other main collaborators, Hal David and Bob Hilliard, including “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” “Baby, It’s You,” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.” The set comes with two large booklets, one with lyrics and discographic information, the other with a 10,000-word essay by Costello.

Shining New Light on the Dark Side

Pink Floyd’s members went from being cult favorites to international superstars with the group’s eighth studio album, 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which managed to combine the adventurous spirit of its earlier releases with tightly constructed material that rendered its music accessible to a wide audience. The album has sold around 50 million copies, making it one of the four or five most commercially successful LPs of the entire rock era.

It has since been repackaged and expanded multiple times, but never more impressively than for its new 50^th-anniversary edition ($225), which includes remastered versions of the original record on CD and vinyl, a London concert performance of Dark Side, a hardcover book, and two Blu-rays and a DVD that both feature a spectacular surround-sound mix.

A Massive Dose of the Dead

The Grateful Dead has recently released several excellent archival albums but the one that’s most likely to put a smile on your favorite Deadhead’s face is the mammoth Here Comes Sunshine 1973, which delivers five superlative four- to five-hour concerts from that year. A 17-disc, 10,000-copy CD edition has already sold out, but digital copies ($100) remain available on the band’s website. The concerts offer a well-rounded Dead portrait and embrace fan favorites, early rock covers, nods to country music, and extended jams that show off Jerry Garcia’s guitar wizardry.

Joni Mitchell, Then and Now

For a while, health issues seemed to have ended the music career of the great Joni Mitchell, who was rarely even seen in public in recent years. But then came a surprise appearance at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival, where she beautifully delivered some of the best material from her catalog accompanied by singer/songwriter Brandi Carlisle and other admirers. That set, which has since been released as At Newport ($13), is just one of several new options for the Joni fans on your gift list.

Another is The Asylum Albums (1972–1975) ($31), which features remastered copies of For the Roses, Court & Spark, and The Hissing of Summer Lawns, plus the live Miles of Aisles. And for those who want to dig deeper, there’s the five-CD Joni Mitchell Archives—Volume 3: The Asylum Years (1972–1975) ($70), which collects previously unavailable demos, alternate versions, concert performances, and more from the same period.

A Bob Dylan Bonanza

This has been a banner year for Bob Dylan fans. January brought Fragments—Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996–1997): The Bootleg Series, Vol. 17 ($72), a deep dive into the sessions that produced one of his best albums. The five-CD deluxe edition comes loaded with revelatory, previously unreleased material. Even more essential is the 14-track Shadow Kingdom ($11), which is available on CD and as a video download. This captures a concert that first surfaced as an online pay-per-view event during the pandemic and finds Dylan brilliantly reimagining classics like “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Forever Young,” and “Queen Jane Approximately.”

Another must for serious fans is The Complete Budokan 1978 ($160), a remixed, remastered, and dramatically expanded version of a concert album that included some missteps but is consistently interesting. The four-CD set comes with an oversized 40-page booklet. Finally, there’s Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine ($70), an absorbing 608-page coffee-table book that draws on the previously unavailable writings, drawings, photos, and handwritten lyrics housed in the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In addition to a wealth of illustrations, the volume makes room for insightful essays from Dylan-connected journalists like Douglas Brinkley, Sean Wilentz, and Greil Marcus.

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Note: prices above are approximate as of press time.

                                                  STOCKING STUFFERS

• American Bandstand US Top 100, 5^th August 1957 showcases songs that appeared on Billboard’s pop chart in the week when Dick Clark’s influential American Bandstand debuted on national TV. Given the theme, it’s not surprising that the four-CD set is wildly uneven and stylistically schizophrenic. It’s never less than fascinating, though, as it offers a snapshot of popular music at a time when it was being rapidly reinvented.
   
• The limited-edition, three-CD Live at the Matrix 1967 captures two complete pre-fame shows by the Doors at a tiny L.A. club. It includes versions of most of the songs that showed up on the group’s first two LPs plus blues and R&B covers.
   
• The Pretenders’ Relentless, the group’s first album in three years, features some personnel changes but Chrissie Hynde, the group’s indispensable prime mover, is still on board, applying her distinctive vocals to a menu of lilting, hook-laden rockers and ballads.
   
• Like the Pretenders, the inimitable Lucinda Williams this year delivered her first new album since 2020. The excellent Stories from a Rock n Roll Heart features several songs about how much music means to her and includes guest appearances by Bruce Springsteen and his wife, singer Patti Scialfa.
   
• Named after a book co-written by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, the Third Mind includes five veteran players, among them singer/songwriter Dave Alvin and Counting Crows guitarist David Immergluck. Like its predecessor, The Third Mind/2 serves up superbly reimagined versions of deep cuts from 1960s acts, including the Electric Flag (“Groovin Is Easy”), Fred Neil (“A Little Bit of Rain,”), and the Jaynets (“Sally Go Round the Roses”).
   
• If you know someone who’s interested in both music and space travel, a perfect gift would be Sputnik!, which collects 29 songs, all originally released between 1954 and 1969, about astronauts, satellites, and the like. Among the contents: “There Goes Sputnik!,” by the Teen-Clefs, an early female rock vocal group; “Rocket Ship” by an R&B outfit called Vernon Green & the Medallions; and the classical “Men into Space” by Buddy Morrow & His Orchestra.
   
• March of the Flower Children—The American Sounds of 1967 delivers a picture of the pop music scene in one of its wildest years. The 85-track, three-CD set includes lots of selections from artists who were pushing the boundaries, such as Love, Velvet Underground, the Seeds, and the Mothers of Invention, plus a smattering of mainstream material and lots of interesting obscurities.
   
• Jazz bandleader Benny Goodman enjoyed so much popularity in his heyday that it takes two large anthologies—The Benny Goodman Hits Collection, Vol. 1: 1931–38 and Vol. 2: 1939–53—just to cover his major chart successes. These sets, which respectively fill four and three discs and together include 162 tracks, are loaded with the magic that earned Goodman his “King of Swing” title. He wasn’t as much of a trailblazer as, say, Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong, but he could get audiences on their feet, and he sure could play his clarinet.
   
• Wilco’s Cousin is the alt-rock group’s first album since 2004 to employ an outside producer, and the results include some of the group’s strongest, most accessible music in years.
   
• More Than a Whisper: Celebrating the Music of Nanci Griffith showcases the late folk singer/songwriter’s compositional prowess via covers by artists such as Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris. The best track, “Love at the Five and Dime,” features another musical giant we lost recently: the inimitable John Prine.

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BJT editor Jeff Burger has written about popular music for many years. His books include Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters, Lennon on Lennon: Conversations with John Lennon, and Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters.