Today is Bob Dylan Day

Today, the iTunes Music Store offers Bob Dylan: The Collection, 774 songs and a 135-page digital booklet, containing all of Bob Dylan’s albums, both studio and live. What a deal: $199 for all that music! Included in this set is Dylan’s latest album, Modern Times, also released today, though you don’t get the videos that come with a purchase of the album alone.

I’ve long been a mild Dylan fan, knowing many of his classic songs, as well as the cover versions performed by the Grateful Dead and the Jerry Garcia band, but I only ever bought a few of his albums. So this is the perfect deal for me, since there is only a little bit of overlap with my CD collection.What this shows, however, is that all this music can be sold for such a low price. I can think of plenty of other artists whose “complete works” could be sold in sets at comparable prices. And when you compare with, say, the Complete U2 that the iTMS sold for $150, the Dylan set is much cheaper per song. (However, there are probably more doubles in the Dylan set, with several best-of albums.)

In addition, the “digital booklet” is excellent. It’s a PDF with clickable links to each album, including original liner notes for many of the albums. There’s also a list of songs at the end of the file–click any of them to jump to the album containing it. This is an excellent use of the PDF format, providing much more than simple text and pictures.

Note that, if you purchase this set, you’ll need to block out some time: it took me a bit less than four hours to download the entire set (a total of 3.2 GB; if you have an iPod nano, it won’t leave much room for anything else), and that’s with a 6 mbps DSL connection. (No modems need apply.) However, there were a few glitches; at first, about 500 songs downloaded, then I got an error message. I had to check for purchases (Advanced > Check for Purchases…) to get the rest of the downloads to start. But eventually, everything made it.

To celebrate Bob Dylan Day, the following is a text from mystery author Peter Robinson, who contributed this to my book, iPod & iTunes Garage in 2005. Peter is a serious Dylan fan; in fact, he told me that he has almost all the albums, so he won’t be buying this digital box set. But here’s why he thinks that Bob Dylan’s music fits the “Essential Music” moniker.

Essential Music: Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks

Much as I love all kinds of instrumental and orchestral music, at the end of the day I’m a word guy, and if you’re a word guy, Dylan’s your man. We were spoiled by an embarrassment of riches until the infamous motorcycle accident in July 1966, and after the stark surprise of 1968’s John Wesley Harding, we seemed to be stranded in a wasteland of ersatz Americana. There were great songs, of course, “Lay, Lady, Lay” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” for example, and Planet Waves has many fine moments, but nothing could quite match the shock and pleasure of that moment in early 1975 when I set the needle gently on Blood on the Tracks for the first time and heard “Tangled Up in Blue.” Even better, it wasn’t a fluke. Next came “Simple Twist of Fate,” “You’re a Big Girl Now,” and “Idiot Wind,” his most vicious song since 1965’s “Positively 4th Street.” The only disappointment is an overlong “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” which never quite seemed to fit, to my mind, but that’s a minor quibble, especially as it’s followed by the incomparable melancholy of “If You See Her, Say Hello” and the eerily redemptive “Shelter from the Storm.” There may be other contenders, but Blood on the Tracks surely remains the classic adult break-up album of all time.

–Peter Robinson writes mystery novels and is the author of the popular Inspector Banks series, with 16 titles published so far. Inspector Banks (like Robinson) is an eclectic music fan, and in these books, Banks’ selection of music—from Hendrix to Britten, from jazz to rock—occasionally annoys his fellow police officers in drives through the English countryside. Peter Robinson’s latest novel is Piece of My Heart, which revolves, in part, around a rock festival in England in 1969.