I purchased this set for my boyfriend for his birthday. He hasn't had much experience with Dylan, and it was a great introduction to some of the best of Dylan. It was also an excellent reminder to me of some Dylan classics I haven't listened to in awhile. I would highly reccomend it.

This is a great "goodies" album that you can reach up and play without looking through all his albums for your favorites. I am enjoying it!! Great listening in the car, too.

I largely agree with many of the other reviewers who say that the 3-CD "Dylan" compilation is nothing new, so I won't re-hash those comments here. Unlike some of those reviewers, however, I give this collection five stars because the music is simply great throughout -- some of the greatest of the past 50 years.

But the folks who put it together weren't very careful. The booklet lists "You Ain't Going Nowhere" as being from the Basement Tapes album (the 1975 partial release of Dylan's 1967 recordings with The Band), which would make it the first remastering of this version of the song, as far as I know. That isn't the version that's included here, however.

The one included in this set isn't the 1967 version as listed, but instead, the early-70s version by Dylan and Happy Traum that appeared on Greatest Hits Vol. II. This later rendition is a great one, but it's already available in remastered form on the aforementioned GH Vol. II. How hard should it have been for the Sony/Columbia folks to include the right version of this song in the collection? You don't have to be an expert knowledgeable in Dylan esoterica to know the difference -- you just need a basic familiarity with his released albums.

What this says to me is that more care could have been taken with this set. The two versions of this song are not easy to confuse, as they sound very different -- it's not as though they simply confused two takes of the same song from the same recording session, which might have been understandable. Mistaking a 1967 demo recording with The Band for a much later studio recording should have been easily avoided. And when the collection is in more-or-less chronological order, as this one is, it upsets the overall organization of the set to substitute a recording that was made years later than the one that was supposed to be included.

Anyway, this is a good, if not particularly adventurous, collection. Yes, Biograph is much more interesting, covering both major releases and much previously unreleased material. And the ongoing Bootleg Series has given us many hours of great music that never saw the light of day before. So this new "Dylan" collection doesn't contain any new unreleased stuff -- I guess that just isn't the movie they were making here, so to speak. The music is still great, and it's nice to have it in one place. I just wish they had been more careful, and maybe had included a few of the less predictable songs that are just as great as these, most of which have already been anthologized.

(And how about putting out The Basement Tapes in fuller form as the next Bootleg Series release???)

The songs were written in America, not Tin Pan Alley; the marketing, however, was planned in the bleachers along Highway 61. Bob still unrolls the bedroll with Beethoven, but Columbia's trying to sell us 40 red, white, and blue shoe strings. If you're a new fan, start with Blonde on Blonde, not this. Buy the great albums and buy the singles from the iffy periods (shouldn'ta ever played with the awful Dead).

Though I own most of these songs this is a good place to start for newcomers. With someone like Dylan, there is no way you can sum up his career if you tried ten cd's. So for people who want to know what Dylan's all about, this would be the perfect place to start.