Reference Tracks

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of 1987’s mega-multimillion-selling Whitesnake — the album that spawned such massive FM hits as “Here I Go Again” “Is This Love,” and Still of the Night” — Rhino has uncoiled an exhaustive 4-CD/1-DVD box set featuring a disc of demos titled 87 Evolutions, properly mastered live bootlegs, and four of-era videos remastered in surround sound on DVD. Singer/frontman David Coverdale discusses a critical change in his vocals, how Tina Turner came thisclose to singing “Is This Love,” and why those core Whitesnake songs retain such universal appeal.

“His guitar speaks for itself.” It’s a phrase that could be applied to many a dominant and influential guitar player of the rock era, but it’s no accident it was also stickered on the front of albums bearing the name of Bay Area guitar legend Ronnie Montrose. Montrose initially made his mark laying down indelible riffs for the likes of Van Morrison (“Wild Night”) and The Edgar Winter Group (“Free Ride,” “Frankenstein”), but when he joined forces with a then-unknown Sammy Hagar to form Montrose in 1973, he shepherded a band immediately described as America’s answer to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Deep Purple, all rolled into one. (“Rock the Nation,” indeed.)

Believe it or not, even Little Steven—Bruce Springsteen’s longtime guitar foil and songwriting soundboard in The E Street Band, and the decorated Godfather of the Underground Garage and Outlaw Country radio formats—feels the need to recharge the creative batteries every now and then. “This record turned out to be a really wonderful reset, reintroduction, and rebirth of myself,” Little Steven admits about his first solo album in 18 years, Soulfire (Wicked Cool/UMe). “It was a wonderful opportunity to start again, and really show my roots in a way I had never done before. I mean, I never put a blues song on a record before, I never did a doo-wop song before, and I never did a cover of anybody before I did this thing!”

As iconic as it remains a full half-century later, when Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back was being shot by director D.A. Pennebaker during the Bard’s whirlwind acoustic tour of England in May 1965, there were literally no rules to follow. “It’s the idea of the home movie, the kind of movie that was always made by one person,” says Pennebaker, still as sharp as ever at age 90. “I had gotten the notion in my head not to make a pure music film. I decided to make it about him, right at the time he was trying to figure out who he was.”

Pete Townshend was on a spiritual mission, determined to produce a rock opera that would reflect his own path to enlightenment. His band mates in The Who were initially wary, but once they understood the multifaceted story of a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who sure played a mean pinball, there was no turning back from climbing the mountain. The epic sprawl of 1969’s Tommy catapulted The Who forever into the rock ’n’ roll stratosphere. And now Tommy gets a fuller archival due on this four-disc 45th anniversary Super Deluxe box set, achieving yet another new-vibration milestone on Blu-ray. (More on that disc’s groundbreaking surround mix in a moment.)