TOMORROW ON THE MORNING JOLT: REISSUES!

Need any last minute gifts for the discerning rock fan in your life?  Well, tune in to SiriusXM OutQ's Morning Jolt with Larry Flick tomorrow at 9 am; we'll be discussing some great reissues that have come out in the past few months that will make great gifts.  (Don't have a SiriusXM subscription?  Go here to learn how to try SiriusXM on a trial basis).

First off is the newly released Jimi Hendrix box set, Winterland. I wrote about this a few months ago: the box set is drawn from six concerts Jimi played at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom over three nights in October of 1968. It's certainly not where I'd recommend a new fan starts, but it is an incredible collection nonetheless.  There's also a single CD version for those not looking to go the 4 CD box set route.

We're also going to talk about recently reissued Pink Floyd catalog. You can get the entire catalog as a box set for about $180, or get the albums individually.  There's also expanded versions of two of their greatest albums, Dark Side Of The Moon and Wish You Were Here.

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band recently reissued their two classic live albums, Live Bullet and Nine Tonight. I recently kind of "discovered" the greatness of Bob Seger and I wrote about it earlier tonight.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the first five Queen albums which had recently been reissued. The rest of their albums have since been reissued and I'll talk about those also.

By the way, I'll be in the studio next week as well, talking about my favorite albums of 2011.  It wasn't a great year for music, but it was a good one, and I'm having a hard time narrowing it down.

TOO MUCH HENDRIX? NO SUCH THING. WINTERLAND ROCKS!

A couple of months ago, I was driving a friend home in my car and playing the then-recently released Jimi Hendrix collection Valleys Of Neptune. I explained that it was a brand new release with (sort of) previously unreleased recordings.  He asked, "where do they keep finding this stuff?"  It's a good point -- for a guy whose career lasted about four years, there are a hell of a lot of Jimi Hendrix releases out there. And given the fact that in the past two decades, the catalog has resided at Warner Brothers, MCA, Universal and now Sony (with some live stuff licensed to Rykodisc, and the Band Of Gypsys album on Capitol), things can get confusing.

That said, the recently released Winterland box set is something you should have if you're interested in hearing some amazing live performances by The Jimi Hendrix Experience.  Recorded during a six show stand at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom in October of 1968, this was the Experience at the peak of their powers.  There's such swagger to their performance, Jimi sounds really into it, and it sounds as if he is not yet tired of playing any of these songs.  Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell are tight as hell. The band is incredible, and they all know it.  Playing distorted guitar at that point in time was still a relatively new thing, and it was probably even considered a political act, an act of liberation.  There's a lot of improvisation going on, and that was still probably relatively new in rock and roll and popular music.

The box set is 4 CDs. The first three feature full shows, and the fourth has spare tracks from some of the other shows, plus a cool interview with Jimi.  And you may wonder if you really need four more live versions of "Purple Haze."  You may, you may not.  But some of his songs that show up multiple times on the box - like "Are You Experienced?" and "Red House" have varying lengths at the different shows, and it's interesting to hear his different takes on the same song from one day to the next.  The "Are You Experienced?" versions are definite highlights here - on one, he has a flautist (Virgo Gonslaves from opening act The Buddy Miles Express) as he does on the album version. The other has no flute. "Little Wing" is amazing.  "Manic Depression" kicks ass, as does "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)."  The instrumental cover of Cream's "Sunshine Of Your Love"  is great, as is the cover of of Nordic rockers Hansson and Carlsson's "Tax Free."

For those of you who want a taste of this without having to go all in on a box set, there is a single CD version of this, but I'm a box set fan, and Sony Legacy (who provided me with a review copy) did a great job with this box, I would definitely have purchased it, and I recommend it highly.