Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have been a hard core Bob Dylan fan ever since I belatedly discovered his music during the television broadcast of the concert film "Hard Rain," when I was a freshman at Oberlin in the fall of 1976. (At Oberlin, at that time, Dylan was one of the two most-requested artists on the campus radio station; Joan Baez was the other.) As a serious fan, I have owned multiple copies of every Dylan album on various formats over the intervening decades, and have seen the man himself in concert many times, so Dylan's music has been a large part of the fabric of my life. I hailed the appearance of first volumes of the "Bootleg Series" in 1997 as a chance to finally own "legitimate" versions, with improved sound quality, of songs I first heard on vinyl bootleg albums I bought from a basement record store in Greenwich Village in the late 1970s. However welcome they were at the time of their release, though, previous volumes of the series have provided little more than fascinating glimpses into the artist's creative process, much in the manner of the "Beatles Anthology" discs, wherein we belatedly learned that even Lennon and McCartney were not infallible. I approached Dylan's "Another Self Portrait" cautiously, especially in view of the fact that I am among the legions of fans who, notwithstanding their overall admiration for Dylan, were unimpressed by the original 1970 release, which did have some good tracks, but which was, on the whole, chaotic and unfocused. Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered "Another Self Portrait," a genuine, if long-neglected, masterpiece which far surpasses the vastly inferior album released in its stead more than forty years ago. What Dylan was thinking when he passed over this consistently splendid material in compiling the original release, I can't begin to imagine. "Another Self Portrait" is the album that ought to have followed "Nashville Skyline;" had it done so, Dylan's star would never have waned. I will not trouble you here with a track-by-track analysis, as others have done; suffice it to say that I--genuinely--loved them all. I will leave you with this thought, however. More than any other release to date in "The Bootleg Series," "Another Self Portrait" is an album I will actually listen to, again and again, in the coming years. Far more than an interesting historical document, ASP is a collection of vibrant, beautiful music, fully realized, which will bring lasting pleasure to Dylan's many fans, and perhaps even win over a few of the not-yet-converted. From the first chord to the last, the entire set is a treat.