Bootlegs, outtakes and unreleased material mostly interests completists, scholars and obsessive fans. Usually, the quality and significance declines with each new archival release, but not with Bob Dylan.

The obsessives will be joyous of course, but even casual fans will become caught up in both Volume Nine’s narrative intensity and the astonishing creative power evident in these raw, casual and pure non-performances.

Neil plays, Daniel "La-noise" manipulates. The result is a solo album—a man and his guitar— that takes on gargantuan proportions as it throbs, undulates, oozes, howls, flows, rattles and hums through a series of reminiscences, philosophical discussions, entreaties and proclamations of faith that only an older man could possibly produce and deliver with such rich and fervent authority.

Long lost and once thought destroyed, Sundazed Records’ tape- sleuth-in-chief Bob Irwin recently located the original mono master tape of The Mama’s and the Papas 1966 debut album If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (Dunhill D50006).

Where was it hiding? In “the U.K. vaults” was as much as he’d tell me but he did send back a scan of the tape box.

More than enough has been written about this album for me to attempt to add anything of value to the mix. It's the best selling jazz album ever and continues to sell the way Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon does in the rock world.

If you know and love the record you owe it to yourself to read Ashley Kahn's essential "Kind of Blue-The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece" published in paperback by Granta (www.granta.com).

Analogue Productions'  The Nat King Cole Story box set, originally scheduled to be released Spring of 2010 is finally here. We reviewed the box's sound quality last March based on test pressings but the actual box didn't arrive under early 2011. What's below is that review with additional information about the box and overall presentation quality—Ed.

Gary Wilson inhabits a musical and cultural space somewhere between Donald Fagan, Son of Sam and Frank Zappa. The cult favorite is a creature of the night who obsesses about girls and his hometown of Endicott, NY just outside of Binghamton. He should live in a basement apartment if in fact he doesn’t.

Wilson was creepy enough vocalizing about these obsessions on his original late '70s LP, but today, clearly well into middle age, he’s still consumed by fantasizing and idealizing girls and other adolescent pastimes.