The strangest thing about the new, official release of Bob Dylan's Gaslight Tapes isn't that they are being sold exclusively at Starbucks for the next couple of months, but that this collection only includes 10 of the 17 tracks that commonly make up the best bootleg versions of this material.

The Gaslight Tapes were recorded, according to the best guess of those who might know, at the Gaslight Cafe in October 1962 at two shows Dylan played there during the down time while working on his second album, The Freewheeling Bob Dylan. As such, they show how Dylan was developing both as a performer and as a songwriter between the time of his post-pubescent debut and its infinitely more assured followup. What the now-official version of Live at the Gaslight 1962 doesn't do is offer the complete picture of those performances. The 10 tracks on the official release omit Dylan's recordings of "No More Auction Block," "Black Cross," "Motherless Children," "Kindhearted Woman Blues," "See That My Grave is Kept Clean," "Ain't No More Cane" and his own "Ballad of Hollis Brown."

There seems to be no rhyme or reason for the selection. The earliest known takes of "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" and "Don't Think Twice" are obvious keepers, of course, but why omit the nearly-as-powerful "Hollis Brown?" And the official tracklist includes Dylan's interpretations of standards like "Moonshiner" and "Barbara Allen," so why skip his takes of tunes by Leadbelly, Robert Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson? My bootleg version includes all 17 tracks, and does so with room to spare on one CD. A side-by-side comparison of "Hard Rain" and "Don't Think Twice" finds that while the Sony version might have slightly better noise reduction and a tiny bit of reverb might have been added to Dylan's vocal (though even that is hard to tell), there is little appreciable difference between the two, and certainly no flaws that would render the omitted tracks unsuitable for release.

Perhaps in the end it must be chalked up to the whims of the ever enigmatic Dylan, who has always chosen when and how to officially unearth treasures. From the first Bootleg entry (on which the version of "No More Auction Block" from these recordings already has seen official release) through to the concurrent release of the new Bootleg collection which serves as the soundtrack to the Martin Scorsese film No Direction Home, Bob puts out what Bob wants to when Bob wants to... inscrutable as always. Would we have him any other way?

Watching the MTV Video Music Awards was an odd thing this year. My tastes have long fallen well outside the mainstream, but my general interest in music coupled with my job as an A&E writer for a daily newspaper contributed to keeping me at least somewhat in the loop. I can't remember the last time I listened to the radio (other than NPR), and, as we all know, MTV doesn't show videos much anymore (except during award shows, oddly enough), so it has been hard to stay up on what's hip. In the year since I left the daily newspaper and with it my last good reason to pay attention to things that don't really interest me, I find I have lost almost complete touch with popular music. Of those featured, only Green Day, who was the big winners last night, can be found in my collection these days (I have a burn of that Killers disc, but can't say I listen to it much). Until last night, I feared I might be missing out on something.

Instead, the event seemed to validate my blindered approach to popular music. Much of what passed for the cream of the crop last night was hopelessly middling. My Chemical Romance? A resurrected Mariah Carey? Another tribute to the Notorious B.I.G.? This is the best there is to offer? Well, no, of course not. This is MTV, where style almost always trumps substance. Sure, Kanye West is interesting, Green Day well worth honoring and, um... did I mention Kanye West? But overall, the show held true to form. Only this time, I felt like a Dad behind his TV tray watching the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan" wondering what these crazy looking kids were going on about. It doesn't take long these days for your knowledge to lose almost all relevance. It's like studying for a test for which the questions constantly change. Coldplay seemed to be the only bone thrown to people who aren't 16, and they were flat.

One good thing: I was able to hear, for the first time in its entirety, Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone," a song so hip even Ted Leo has taken a crack at it. Somehow I evaded this ubiquitous track (see comment about the radio above and couple it with a self-imposed Reality TV blackout at Chez Kenyon) for several months. Verdict? It's OK for Top 40 fodder, but nowhere near what expected after seeing it referred to as sounding like "Evanescence's Amy Lee singing over an Interpol outtake" (thanks for that bit of wisdom, Pitchfork). It's not as if guitars are completely absent from the Top 40, which would be the only way to explain such over-compensating, euphoric rhetoric from otherwise sober... well, OK, it was Pitchfork.

Ultimately, last night found me missing the fun of stupid pop culture at the same time I realized I wasn't missing much. I wouldn't spend a lot of time listening to any of what I heard last night even if still paid to do so, but in a weird inverse of "you don't know what you've got until it's gone," I found that I can't fully appreciate skipping out on pop music until I know what I'm missing.

Last night I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's latest novel No Country For Old Men, and it was not only the quickest McCarthy read I've ever experienced, but also the one that left me most undecided in my reaction to the book.

That partly stems from intense discussions on the web about the book that I read before I'd even seen the book. There was much debate about whether the book was a thriller, and if so, if it was up to McCarthy's usual standards. Debates about genre are tiresome, and as an avid mystery fan I find them insulting. A smart thriller is better than a stuffy bit of literary pretension any day. My mixed feelings about this book, then, stem from the fact that it is slight and even a bit disjointed in its plotting, and provides more of a visceral rush than an intellectual one. The book follows three characters for the most part -- Llewelyn Moss, a welder who happens across the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad and makes off with $2 million in cash; Anton Chigurh, a bounty hunter of sorts who tracks Moss and takes out anyone in his path; and Sheriff Bell, who feels increasingly helpless in the face of the rising violence brought by the border drug trade between his rural Texas and Mexico.

It seems as if the story is set in the present day, and even the jacket flap text says that the book is "set in our own time along the bloody frontier between Texas and Mexico." The only giveway is mention of a coin that is used to decide the fate of a peripheral character. Chigurh makes a convenience store clerk study the coin, which, by landing heads up, saved him from being shot. He asks the clerk to read the date on the coin, and is told it is from 1958. Chigurh says the coin traveled 22 years to reach the clerk to play that pivotal role at that moment. That sounds like a book set in 1980 to me. The point is, McCarthy writes of such rural, rustic people, places and themes, that his books seem essentially timeless. Without that marker -- and references to "mobiles" that could be phones or walkie talkies -- it would be hard to pin the book to a time any more specifically than "the latter half of the 20th century."

In Bookforum, Madison Smartt Bell offers what may be the most even-handed review yet filed about the book. "Dostoevsky was, on one level, a writer of thrillers, and Nabokov was wrong to sneer at him for it. No Country for Old Men offers much more hard-driving suspense than any of McCarthy's previous works; in fact the plot's motor is so overdriven that one tends to read too fast to savor the writerly nuances," he writes.

James Wood in the New Yorker is particularly pointed in noting the flaws he sees in the book, saying that the rote nature of a thriller "is the perfect vehicle for McCarthy's deterministic mythmaking, matching his metaphysical cheapness with a slickness unto death all its own."

That review sparked heated debate online, particularly at the Reading Experience blog, where Wood and blogger Daniel Green go back and forth about morality and the value of character depth in fiction. It's a fascinating discussion, if for no other reason than that you rarely get to see a writer stick up for his work in so dynamic a fashion.

In the end, the book was definitely entertaining and thought-provoking. If it wasn't as satisfying as All the Pretty Horses or earlier work like Blood Meridian, it is certainly a worthy addition to McCarthy's significant body of work.

Neil Young's forthcoming disc, Prairie Wind, is conjuring thoughts of his 1972 masterpiece, Harvest. It's a country-themed disc that features Harvest vets Spooner Oldham and Ben Keith, and he even debuted some of the material at the historic Ryman Auditorium this weekend. I'll wait to hear it before I buy into the hype, thank you. He's still coasting on the accolades of his now decade-old comeback, and patience is wearing thin. After the back-to-back greatness of Freedom, Ragged Glory, Harvest Moon (OK, that's definitely the weakest link here) and Sleeps with Angels, his output hasn't been terribly inspiring. He has released a lot of average live material since, as well as four middling studio albums that range from the truly awful Are You Passionate? (With a nod to J.D. Considine, master of the shorttake review: About this? No. You clearly weren't either.) to the much better but still flawed Greendale.

Young seems to have set a pattern during that time, however, creating CD-DVD packages and/or live performance films for nearly each release along the way. Following on 1997's live film Year of the Horse will come a feature directed by Jonathan Demme filmed during this weekend's Ryman shows. In addition, the Prairie Wind set will feature a DVD that captures the entire recording process for the disc. As Young says on his web site: "The DVD shows us recording the whole record. Every note you hear, you see!" Gee, thanks. That will be interesting for about five minutes. Anyone who has ever spent any time in a recording studio can attest to the fact that it doesn't take long to be bored by the process, even if you're actually getting paid or making music. I'm all for artists pulling back the curtain, and Young is to be applauded for trying new things like the Greendale movie and all of his other oddball projects over the years. But no one comes to Neil for his filmmaking skills. They come to hear the music, and it would be nice if he would work as hard on writing and recording a batch of songs on par with his best work as he does in cooking up all of these bells and whistles. If he needs these things to keep up his own interest, he should take a moment to imagine what it must be like to be a fan.

Tuesday saw the release of reissues from the Stooges, and if there are other 35-year-old discs out there anywhere with the same energy, menace and freshness of these two titles, well, their name is Kick Out the Jams. Other than that, who else was making music like this in 1969? Plenty of acts came and went that traded in the fuzzed out garage rock that was a few years old already by that time, but no one being taken seriously, save for the Stooges' Detroit brethren in the MC5 were doing this.

The Stooges' self-titled debut is a revelation. "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "No Fun" are the obvious standouts, but the entire disc is a marvel. Consider the other albums that were released that year. Abbey Road, Five Leaves Left, Arthur and three from Creedence Clearwater Revival were among the best. Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, Gilded Palace of Sin, Nashville Skyline, the Band and Let It Bleed showed a clear folk-country leaning, while the Soft Parade and Trout Mask Replica represented to two poles in "out there" music. Led Zeppelin and it's successor hinted at the heavy guitar rock to come.

But the Stooges only true peer was the MC5, and that band veered from the in-your-face approach after that explosive debut. The Stooges, meanwhile, refined it, offering the much better Fun House and Raw Power. The latter disc was remastered by Iggy Pop and reissued in 1998. Now, with these two expanded reissues from Rhino, the band's trio of studio discs is back in shops and in sparkling high fidelity.

These reissues join a new two-CD best-of set from Iggy Pop that includes much of the best material from the Stooges three discs. He sat for a fascinating and entertaining interview on Fresh Air back in July in which Terry Gross asked about the his status as "the Godfather of Grunge." Were the Stooges ahead of their time?

"I would have to say the rest of the world was behind its f'in time," he said. Amen.

A new CD from Michael Penn is always cause for celebration, but the party is a bit muted this time out because Mr. Hollywood Jr. 1947, while good, is a bit slight considering the five-year wait since his last, MP4: Days Since a Lost Time Accident. The disc is ostensibly a concept album dealing with, you guessed it, Hollywood in 1947. But as with most concept records, the story isn't really clear and the energy spent on trying to figure it out only distracts from the songs. Explaining the disc to fans on his e-mail list, Penn talked of what 1947 means to him, complete with its post-war progress and the seeds for future turmoil. "The point is, this isn't what the record's about," he writes, "but it's the sepia world it occupies."

The music here is strong, with the opening trio of tunes the equal of any he's recorded (and it seems, from taking a recent listen to Free-for-All and Resigned, in particular, that his discs have a tendency to open strong before fading into mid-tempo sameness), though save for references to Walter Reed Hospital and Denton Road, it would be hard to realize without help that there is an overarching story being told. The disappointing thing is that the disc really only includes nine songs (10 if you count the unlisted bonus track. How does that fit the story, one wonders?) Three tracks are bridging instrumentals that are about one minute long, and don't really add much, even when the disc is heard from front to back in one sitting. So, after a five-year wait, we're given a disc that is as thin as can be and still be considered an LP. I say all of this as a frustrated fan who has watched Penn deal with indifferent record companies over his 16-year career (a good reason why this is only his fifth album). Now on his own -- or rather, allied with like-minded folks such as his wife, Aimee Mann, under the United Musicians banner -- he finally can offer whatever the market will support. Believe me, Michael, it will support more than this.

Oh well. Those misgivings aside, the disc contains some of the best music of Penn's career and is well worth a listen. That it contains some of his most disposable work as well is a continuing problem that no concept can address. It's clear that Penn is a gifted songwriter; it would be nice to hear more of his better work on a more regular basis.

Secret Machines, one of the most exciting new bands out there, will be featured tonight on NPR's All Songs Considered Live Concerts series. The show will be tonight at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C., and will be webcast live. The shows then are archived for future listening. Past shows available for streaming include Lucinda Williams, the Decemberists, Interpol and Wilco. All of the shows are at the 9:30 Club.

Also on tonight's bill is Kings of Leon, a band that seems to have fizzled a bit. After the breathtaking debut, Youth and Young Manhood, the band stumbled considerably on its flat follow up Aha Shake Heartbreak. TV appearances around the time of that first disc showed a band not in full mastery of its instruments. Here's hoping tonight shows signs of practice.

Inexplicably, Secret Machines is opening the show, scheduled to go on about 8:45 p.m. CDT, followed by Kings of Leon an hour later.

Pitchfork has an interview with Silver Jews leader David Berman that, if you're able to get through the questions asked to show that the writer is suitably hip, is illuminating in many respects. Kudos to Ashford Tucker for asking Berman about fellow rocker/poets Jeff Tweedy and Billy Corgan ("These guys are professional musicians. It's kind of like football players in the 70s who started endorsing ballet lessons. Who am I to argue against sharpening agility?"), but questions about whether his dog lacks discipline or wondering about his take on Scientology don't yield interesting answers nor do they seem to be germane to the topic at hand. Tucker asks so many questions, in fact, that at the end of the Q&A (a lazy format that really exposes the weaknesses of the questioner in this case), Berman demurs when asked to take part in a further real-time chat: "Why drag this out any longer? You already got more detail out of me than a grand jury."

What is interesting, however, is Berman's rather frank discussion of his finances. When asked how he can afford to not perform much, he lays out what he makes and from where. He reports that he made about $16,000 last year from his four Drag City records that are in print, while his poetry book, Actual Air, brings in about $1,000 each year. "Multiple" readings at colleges each year bring in an additional $1,000 a pop, while BMI checks and foreign licensees bring in a few thousand more each year. Assuming that "multiple" means at least five, and that the BMI and other licensing checks total at least $5,000, that means he's living on between $25,000 and $30,000 annually. Not great, but, when coupled with whatever his wife might bring in, it'’s probably enough. This year he likely can splurge a bit, because he reports that the year of his last record --– 2001's subpar Bright Flight --– he made about $45,000 from Drag City alone. The advance hype for his forthcoming disc, Tanglewood Numbers, would seem to indicate that sales for it might be even better.

Let'’s hope it'’s enough. Berman'’s music and poetry are both worth supporting. The Silver Jews disc American Water was a revelation. The band occasionally features Pavement'’s Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich, and this 1998 disc offered the right music at the right time for Pavement fans who felt that band was going off the rails. The disc more fully explores the folk-country leanings Pavement hinted at but never adequately mined, while Berman's lyrics were more focused than what Malkmus was writing at the time. As for Berman's poetry, Actual Air is stellar, and his subsequent work --– "The Believer" featured a Berman poem each month for several issues over the past year --– is equally captivating.

More to the point, the more popular Berman gets, the more I'll be able to get someday for my mint copy of the Silver Jews Dime Map of the Reef 7"” (currently selling for $20+ on eBay). The second Drag City announces an odds and sods collection from the band, it's going up.

Richard Thompson's latest CD, Front Parlour Ballads, is out today. The disc finds Thompson relying on his acoustic guitar for the first time in years (1996's You? Me? Us? included one acoustic disc -- dubbed "Nude" -- and one electric disc -- "Voltage Enhanced"). The result is a top-notch collection of songs that highlights another side of Thompson's prodigious talent on guitar. There are plenty of ballads here, of course, but he doesn't restrict himself to slow tempos. And the fretwork, while less, well, electrifying, is no less jaw-droppingly good.

The disc comes in the middle of a prolific time for Thompson. A live CD and DVD culled from his appearance on "Austin City Limits" were released earlier this year, and a 5-CD box set is in the works. That collection will include thematic discs with: Songs based on real people, places and events; epic guitar workouts; unreleased songs; cover versions and sessions; and essential RT. That is exciting news.

Thompson performed at a big outdoor festival here earlier this summer, and he was fantastic as usual. The few new songs sprinkled into the set fit nicely, boding well for the staying power of this disc. It's too soon to know if there is a "Vincent Black Lightning 1952" or "Dimming of the Day" among these 13 tracks, but it's already obvious that Front Parlour Ballads continues Thompson's winning streak that dates back to 1999's Mock Tudor.

I first heard about James Salter from John McNally (whose own books, Troublemakers and the Book of Ralph are highly recommended) who mentioned him in a summer fiction course I took. He recommended A Sport and a Pasttime, which seems to be Salter's go-to book. It is a hyper-sexual, introspective masterpiece that more than lives up to its reputation.

From there, I mostly have stuck with Salter's short fiction. I've heard him read twice; he was invited to the University of Iowa by his friend, the late Frank Conroy, who ran the Writer's Workshop there. He read then-unpublished stories both times, and both times I was blown away.

In his new book, Last Night, Salter offers 10 short stories -- emphasis on short -- that captivate and beguile. These are uncomfortable situations, for the most part, and it is not always easy to find a sympathetic character. The two stories he read in Iowa City are here, as are those people may have read in the New Yorker and other places over the past few years.

Salter's stories often drop you into the middle of a situation; usually a conversation of some sort. It feels like showing up to a dinner party just before dessert is served -- one of the stories here actually is set at such a time -- and it takes a moment to get your bearings. What in less-skilled hands could leave readers feeling confused and ultimately sabotage the story has the opposite effect here; Salter draws you in because the opening sentences of his stories pull you in and make you want to catch up. By the time you do, you're not far from the end. But you never read too quickly; his sentences are to be savored, his descriptions and metaphors sublime.

There are plenty of places out there to read more about Salter, so I'll spare the biography. Suffice to say that he is among the best writers we have today, and anyone who enjoys a taut, near-perfectly constructed short story would be wise to pick up Last Night.

I just finished reading Chuck Klosterman's book, Killing Yourself to Live, which is about his trek across the country to report on the spots where rock stars died. A word of warning: Don't read this if you're interested in knowing more about the spots where rock stars died. I didn't keep count, but it's safe to say about one-tenth of the book deals with that subject. Most of it, instead, deals with his musings on various pop culture items and his numerous failed relationships with women. He writes at one point about his reading habits, saying he reads as fast as he writes, and the evidence is all over the page. This cries out in many spots for an editor, and many passages read like the untouched journal entries they likely are. Trouble is, according to an interview he did to promote his last book, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, he doesn't really get edited: "Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me. So he only really does big picture editing. I'm edited less when I write books than anywhere else." Problem identified.

Klosterman clearly has interesting things to say, and his monthly column for Spin is always worth a read. His take on music is refreshing, as he worries more about whether he likes something than about how others will think of him for liking it. He waxes eloquent about Kiss in the book, likening old girlfriends to various members of the band in the one place where the self-referential writing dovetails quite nicely with his pop cultural sensibilities; he even gets Steve Earle to play a Kiss song on his Air America radio show. That is his strength. Writing about relationships? Not so much.

Overall, the book was a quick, entertaining read. My main criticism is that it doesn't come anywhere close to delivering what is promised. Then again, if it had been accurately billed as a book about Klosterman's lousy dating history, it would still be on the shelf at the library where I found it.

In other news, the Prefix blog has interesting news about the Wrens' back catalog (link courtesy of Chromewaves). The band sprung back into the public consciousness in the past two years thanks to the issue of its dazzling third album, Meadowlands, on Absolutely Kosher records. Label head Cory Brown has been trying for quite some time to get the rights to issue the band's first two albums, Silver and Secaucus from Wind-Up records (home to Creed), but to no avail. Prefix reports that Brown recently offered $100,000 to buy the discs outright, but Wind-up refused. So, until a resolution is found, fans are left to troll eBay in search of overpriced copies (I found Secaucus about a year ago for $20 and considered myself lucky) or, they can participate in the letter-writing campaign suggested at Prefix. How does one convince a company to accept a bundle of cash in exchange for something gathering dust on a shelf? It's not as if the Wrens are going to get much more popular than they are now, so this is likely as good as it gets.

OK, I'll add some constructive criticism to that last post. What, exactly, should Pollard do when faced with a box full of old tapes and a rabid fan base that will buy anything he releases? First, some quality control would be nice. Second, why not cull through those tapes in search of good songs to re-record? Who knows if there are actual good songs lurking somewhere amid the hiss on that Hazzard Hotrods disc? Rather than release the whole thing as is, he could mine that tape (and the many others he surely must have cued up for the Fading Captain series) to create better, more listenable compilations. He's halfway there with the Suitcase collections that serve to skim the cream off the top, but he should go all the way and re-record the best of the bunch.

Thinking on this reminded me of R.E.M., particularly the song "All the Right Friends," which showed up a few years back on the soundtrack to the film Vanilla Sky. The movie was an odd misstep from Cameron Crowe, but the soundtrack was compelling, buoyed by that R.E.M. chestnut. The song is familiar to those of us with bootlegs of the first recorded R.E.M. shows. The band had a set of bar-ready material that was fast, fun and simpler than what the foursome would create for its debut disc less than two years later. Thing is, those songs were good, and it always seemed a shame that, other than the occasional appearance on early bootlegs, they seemed lost forever. It was great to see the band rescue one for the soundtrack. Another of those early favorites, "Permanent Vacation," saw official release with a live version around Christmas 2004 through an iTunes Originals collection that gathered some R.E.M. hits, live performances and interview material. It's clear they have a fondness for the stuff and actually remember how to play it. I've long said the band would do well to go into the studio for a couple of days to knock out a quick 10-song disc featuring the best of that early set. They could do it as a fanclub-only release so as not to confuse the marketplace. Heck, bring Bill Berry back for the weekend while you're at it. "Lisa Says," "Scheherazade," "Narrator," "Baby I," "Body Count," "Mystery to Me," "Dangerous Times," "Action"... I'd buy that in a heartbeat.

It takes quite a lot for me to feel completely ripped off by Robert Pollard, but consider it done. His latest release, a re-release, actually, of the Hazzard Hotrods album Big Trouble (dubbed Bigger Trouble for this expanded CD re-issue), is horrible. I have heard a lot of demo tapes from a lot of friends' bands over the years, and they have many things in common with this disc: they are the tossed off, inside-joke filled creations of a bunch of guys having fun. The one thing they don't share? None but Pollard deemed them worthy of release.

The music here was recorded on a boombox at the back of a Dayton video store in 1990, well before anyone outside of a handful of locals and hipsters had even heard of Pollard's main gig, Guided by Voices. The one-off group featured GBV stalwarts Tobin Sprout and Mitch Mitchell, so there was reason to expect that the music, while likely rough, lo-fi and primitive, would still hold some interest. Add to that historical pull the fact that the initial release of the music was on a 10-song vinyl-only album in a limited edition of 500. That scarcity, coupled with the rabid nature of Pollard collectors (present company included), meant this became a must-have.

If only I had done my homework. Three of the best (I use that term loosely) songs here showed up on the Suitcase 4-CD box set from a few years back, so I already owned the cream of the crop and hadn't found myself compelled to pull that set out much to listen to them. Hearing the rest, I'm amazed that Pollard saw fit to release this. Yes, he has a reputation for clearing his closets, releasing any bit of sound caught on tape. In his 35-releases-and-counting Fading Captain series, there are only two outright duds before this. The Howling Wolf Orchestra's Speed Traps for the Bee Kingdom and the Nightwalker disc In Shop We Build Electric Chairs. Both were more collage art than rock music, and while I'm sure there are those who find them interesting, they certainly hold none of the off-kilter psych-influenced rock that most people expect from Pollard's pen.

The Hazzard Hotrods disc is another matter all together. The fidelity is atrocious, the songs half-baked (it has been suggested that the lyrics were made up on the spot as Pollard drew inspiration from the titles of movies on the videotapes surrounding the band) and the whole thing simply not worthy of release. Yes, I'm free to skip Fading Captain releases as I see fit, and it's understood that they will include some marginal juvenilia that won't appeal to everyone; that's part of the game. But it seems that Pollard has an unwritten compact with his fans -- he combs the recesses of his archives in search of releasable music, and we dig through what he releases in search of the gems. That assumes there will be some gems to find. That's not the case here.