My review of John Lennon's Imagine: The Ultimate Collection and the Blu Ray reissue of two documentary films, Imagine by John and Yoko and Gimme Some Truth, today at All About Jazz.
While hardly a new idea, with so many classic artists and recordings now hitting forty and fifty-year milestones, there's been a proliferation of deluxe and super deluxe editions of major albums from the '60s and '70s in recent years. While some are better (and better value for money) than others, the market for surround sound mixes (and, as a consequence, new stereo mixes) and remasters have become a go-to approach for labels and artists looking to encourage fans to invest in hard media and high resolution digital downloads.
And while it's hardly new to find releases including outtakes, alternate mixes, demos and other parts of the process in taking a song from its germinal state to the finished version fans know and love, it's also becoming more common to find "anniversary celebration" releases including not just a handful but a large number of such early and interim versions. For those who love the process of how a song came to be, these releases are like manna from heaven. For those who don't? Well, in almost every case, these deluxe/super deluxe editions also come with smaller (and more reasonably priced) versions (on CD and, increasingly, vinyl) that usually include the new stereo mix/master along with, if at all, a second disc's worth of "process" versions.
Bob Dylan and Sony Legacy set a whole new standard, however, with 2015's The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series, Vol.12 (Deluxe Edition). Culling, across six CDs, earlier takes from music that would ultimately find its way onto three career milestones--Bringing It All Back Home (Columbia, 1965), Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia, 1965) and the double-LP Blonde on Blonde (Columbia, 1966)--The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 (Deluxe) even includes an entire disc featuring twenty takes, running over 66 minutes, of a single song: "Like a Rolling Stone." While it might sound like overkill on paper, hearing "Like a Rolling Stone" begin as a very different waltz-time song and slowly, over many takes, finally assume the finished version that's become one of Dylan's most cherished songs.
If that weren't enough for process fans, those with even deeper pockets could find the even more massive, very limited 18-CD The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series, Vol.12 (Super Deluxe Edition), which sheds even more light on how so many songs that were to become undisputed classics came to be.
Celebrating John Lennon''s second post-Beatles album, Imagine (Apple, 1971)--which would go on to become the singer/songwriter's most popular album and (referring to the title track) song--Universal Music and Eagle Vision have concurrently released two different views of the album, respectively including newly mixed and/or mastered, variously configured editions of the album and, collected onto a single Blu Ray or DVD, two films inspired by it: 1972's pre-MTV video collage, Imagine by John & Yoko, and Gimme Some Truth, a 2000 film by Andrew Solt that tells the story--through studio footage, some overlap with the other film, interviews and more-of how the album was made. Taken together, the Blu Ray/DVD release and the most exhaustive of the three different versions of the album tell as complete a story of how this album came to be as can be found anywhere (commercially, at least).
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Originally Posted by ronmac
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