Bruce Springsteen’s 1978 album, “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” is the focal point of an expansive reissue package coming Nov. 16, spanning three CDs and three DVDs containing several hours of audio and video  recorded during and shortly after the making of the album.

“The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story” includes two hours of audio and six hours of film footage shot in the recording studio, a live performance in Houston during the Darkness tour and his 2009 performance of the album in its entirety in New Jersey. There’s also  a new 90-minute documentary by director Thom Zimny on the creation of the album Springsteen made in the wake of his breakthrough success with 1975's "Born to Run."

" 'Darkness' was my 'samurai' record, stripped to the frame and ready to rumble," the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer writes in materials that will accompany the set. "But the music that got left behind was substantial."

That includes 21 songs that will be released in official form for the first time. One of those, “Save My Love,” is streaming starting today on Springsteen's website.

The deluxe package also will include an 80-page notebook with facsimiles of Springsteen’s personal notes. A smaller edition will include just the audio component and will be released on two CDs or four LPs, and the deluxe version alternately will be available with three CDs and three Blu-ray discs.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Bruce Springsteen in 1978. Credit: Columbia Records

Nearly every decade since Neil Young launched a solo career in 1968, the Canadian rocker has put out a watershed album with which he’s upped the ante for himself.  In 1969, it was his sophomore effort, which first paired him with Crazy Horse, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.” In 1979, punk rock was powerfully on his mind in “Rust Never Sleeps,” while 1989 brought “Freedom,” in which he fully assumed his latter-day role as  a state-of-the-union messenger about what’s right, and wrong, in America.

“Silver & Gold,” which was recorded in 1999 but didn’t surface until four months into the following year, didn’t quite hit the same level of accomplishment, but with “Le Noise,” which will be released Sept. 28, Young's peaking in yet another decade, and just a few months behind schedule for keeping his streak going for years ending in 9.

The title is a wink to his collaborator, musician-songwriter-producer Daniel Lanois, who premiered the album Tuesday night for a few dozen friends, music journalists, bloggers and L.A. music world denizens at his home overlooking Silver Lake.

The assembled group packed into the living room of the early 20th century mansion on the hillside, a voluntarily captive audience for Young’s subtly subversive method of forcing listeners to hear it for the first time the way he intended: on a first-class sound system, in the dark, no distractions.

What’s striking about “Le Noise” is the way it both summarizes and distills Young’s singular approach to music, predominantly just Neil and a guitar: his big, white hollow-body Gretsch electric slashing and burning for most of the tracks, a couple built around picked and strummed acoustic instruments. Both are recorded and amplified -- literally and metaphorically -- by Lanois’ signature soundscapes that  loop vocals, and enhance the guitars’ bass notes through distortion boxes, synthesizers and other electronics.

Columbia Records is wrapping up a trove of early Bob Dylan recordings that will surface in time for the holidays, among them 47 early demo recordings by the fabled singer-songwriter that previously had never been officially released. The other major component of the two-pronged release slated for Oct. 19 is  “Bob Dylan – The Original Mono Recordings,” consisting of the monaural mixes of his first eight studio albums, from “Bob Dylan” through 1967’s “John Wesley Harding.”

Recordings known as “The Witmark Demos,” recorded from 1962-64 for Dylan’s first two music publishers, will make up Volume 9 in the ongoing “Bootleg Series” of archival releases.  They feature Dylan alone playing guitar and harmonica, and some piano, on such watershed songs as “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” as well as 15 numbers that never subsequently surfaced on his studio albums, including “Ballad for a Friend,” “Long Ago, Far Away” and “The Ballad of Emmett Till."

The mono box set, akin to “The Beatles in Mono” released last year, is being issued because those early albums were originally intended by Dylan to be released in that format, which was the dominant medium at a time when stereo recording was still young. Critic and author Greil Marcus writes the essay accompanying the box set, which also includes “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’," “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” “Bringing It All Back Home,” “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde.”

-- Randy Lewis

Album cover credit: Columbia Records

The publishing company that control the rights to the Beach Boys’ 1966 hit “California Girls” isn’t suing Katy Perry and rapper Snoop Dogg over her recent, similarly minded chart-topper “California Gurls,” as has been reported in stories circulating on the Internet.

But Rondor Music International has sent a warning to Perry, Snoop — a.k.a. Calvin Broadus — and their co-writers and publishers arguing that Beach Boys founding members Brian Wilson and Mike Love should receive co-writing credits because Perry’s record lifts the phrase “I wish they all could be California girls” from the original record.

“Using the words or melody in a new song taken from an original work is not appropriate under any circumstances, particularly from one as well known and iconic as 'California Girls',” Rondor said in a statement issued Wednesday. “Rondor Music, who publishes the works of Brian Wilson and Mike Love, is committed to protecting the rights of its artists and songwriters, and with the support of the writers, that is exactly what we are doing.”

Wilson and Love each told The Times recently that they are fans of Perry’s song, which spent six weeks in the No. 1 slot on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart. In the version that includes a rap from Snoop Dogg, the Long Beach rapper speaks the line near the end of the record, the first single from her new album, "Teenage Dream," set for Aug. 24 release.

"The melody is infectious, and I'm flattered that Snoop Dogg used our lyric on the tag," Wilson said. In a separate interview, Love asked, “What’s not to like?”

Publishers, however, have different agendas than musicians, hence Rondor’s letter of notice to Perry’s camp. “We have established diminutive claim,” Rondor’s statement said. “It is up to the six writers and various publishers of ‘California Gurls’ to decide whether they honor the claim or not.”

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Perry and Snoop Dogg at the MTV Movie Awards in June in Los Angeles. Credit: Mario Anzuoni / Reuters

  
The announcement last fall that Beach Boys mastermind Brian Wilson would pay tribute to the music of George and Ira Gershwin, including completing songs left unfinished at George’s untimely death in 1937 at age 38, gave reason for both anticipation and consternation.

Anticipation at the prospect for a meeting of kindred but disparate spirits across time: one the quintessential musical voice of the Jazz Age in New York, the other the prime architect of the rock era’s California myth of hot rods, bikini-clad girls and fun in the sun.

Consternation because much of the beauty of Wilson’s once-wondrous voice had been ravaged for nearly 30 years by personal and professional traumas, from which he’s been charting a steady recovery in the last decade. But the question looms of what the creator of “Good Vibrations” and “California Girls” could bring to the revered canon of one of America’s cornerstone teams from the Great American Songbook.

At a listening session Wednesday night in West Hollywood, an audience of about 100 invited guests, including record company executives, journalists and others, got a listen to the result, “Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin,” the album scheduled for release Aug. 17.

 
Many concert-goers came away from Dick Dale’s show Saturday night at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano impressed by the 73-year-old surf guitar hero’s performance under adverse conditions, and at least one e-mailed friends afterward worried that “I attended what may have been Dick’s final performance.”

So I called Dale to check on how he’s doing, and after 90 minutes on the phone, I concluded that reports of his imminent retirement are exaggerated. The man who once famously wrestled the pet tiger he kept at his Balboa Peninsula mansion is, however, now wrestling with some even more aggressive health matters.

Adhering to “the show must go on tradition,” Dale went through with Saturday’s concert despite having just emerged from of a nine-day stay at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where doctors have been searching for the source of an intestinal leak that’s caused an infection the veteran guitarist didn’t know he had.

Ben Keith, the veteran steel guitarist who played on Patsy Cline’s 1961 hit “I Fall to Pieces” before befriending Neil Young and going on to play on more than a dozen of the Canadian rocker's albums, has died. He was 73.

He died of a heart attack, director Jonathan Demme said Tuesday. Demme, who directed Young’s concert films “Neil Young Trunk Show” from earlier this year and 2006’s “Heart of Gold,” said Keith had been staying at Young’s ranch in Northern California, working on new projects with his longtime collaborator.

Keith was featured prominently in both. In “Neil Young Trunk Show,” shot in Pennsylvania at a stop on Young’s 2007-2008 concert tour, Young said a key reason he chose to tour with Keith, bassist Rick Rosas and Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina, rather than convening the full, hard-rocking Crazy Horse trio, was that “I can do more variety this way, because Ben plays so many instruments.”

Demme called Keith “an elegant, beautiful dude, and obviously a genius. He could play every instrument. He was literally the bandleader on any of that stuff… Neil has all the confidence in the world, but with Ben on board, there were no limits. Neil has a fair measure of the greatness of his music, but he knew he was even better when Ben was there.”

Most recently, Keith had been touring with Young’s wife, Pegi, in support of her second solo album, “Foul Deeds,” for a handful of West Coast performances in June. He also had played earlier this year with Neil Young on his first totally acoustic tour in several years.

Keith met Young in 1971 in Nashville, where the rocker was working on what would become his commercial breakthrough album, “Harvest.” Keith came to the recording studio at the invitation of bassist Tim Drummond, whom Young had asked to find a steel player for the sessions. When Keith arrived, “I didn’t know who anyone was, so I asked, ‘Who’s that guy over there?’ ” and was told “That’s Neil Young.”

Rolling Stone quotes former Beach Boy Al Jardine saying that the surviving original members of the group will reunite for at least one concert in 2011 to mark the 50th anniversary of the band’s first release, “Surfin’.”

But that’s news both to Mike Love, the founding member who controls rights to the Beach Boys name, and to Brian Wilson, the group’s creative mastermind who has pursued a variety of ambitious solo projects and tours over the last decade.

Wilson’s manager, Jean Sievers, told The Times this week that he has no plans for Beach Boys reunion activities -- and Rolling Stone quotes her to that effect -- and that he is focusing his attention on his forthcoming solo album “Brian Wilson Reimagines George Gershwin,” in which he has recorded his versions of several Gershwin classics and completed two song fragments left behind by the composer at his death in 1937.

Love also issued a statement recently regarding Beach Boys' 50th anniversary reunion rumors, stating:

The Beach Boys continue to tour approximately 150 shows a year in multiple countries. At this time there are no plans for my cousin Brian to rejoin the tour.  He has new solo projects on the horizon and I wish him love and success.  We have had some discussions of writing and possibly recording together, but nothing has been planned.

--Randy Lewis

Photo of the Beach Boys -- Al Jardine, left, Mike Love, Carl Wilson and Brian Wilson, front; drummer Dennis Wilson, rear -- performing in 1964 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium for "The T.A.M.I. Show." Credit: Dick Clark Productions

 
Taylor Swift’s third studio album, “Speak Now,” will be released Oct. 25, the singer and songwriter announced this week on a Web chat. She talked about how she’s worked on it steadily, once again co-producing with Nathan Chapman, in the two years since the release of “Fearless,” which became the biggest selling album of 2009.

The first single, “Mine,” is scheduled to hit radio and other outlets Aug. 16, which she said reflects the notion that “I’m never ever going to go past hoping that love can work out. I’m always hopeful.”

The runaway hit single of the still-young summer of 2010 is Katy Perry's bubbly "California Gurls." More than just a bouncy ode to sun and fun in the Southland, it's something of a long-delayed female take on the same theme famously celebrated 45 years ago in the Beach Boys' "California Girls."

Perry bypasses the region-hopping comparisons that the Beach Boys founders Brian Wilson and Mike Love engaged in for their song, but both salute the ongoing appeal of the sight of beautiful women in bikinis on a beach near the surf.

So I put the question out to Wilson: What do you think of this variation on your theme, and are you flattered or infuriated by it?

"I love her vocal," the Beach Boys' creative mastermind said Monday through his manager. "She sounds very clear and energetic."

UPDATE on July 21 at 4:17 p.m.: Mike Love also has become a Perry fan.

“I think she’s really clever,” Love said Wednesday, reached at his hotel in Medford, Ore., where the Beach Boys were performing that night. “We have a lot in common now: We both have done songs called ‘California Girls’ and we’ve both kissed girls and liked it.”

Perry’s song, he said, “obviously brings to mind our ‘California Girls,’ it’s just in a different vernacular, a different way of appreciating the same things. The Beach Boys have always accentuated the positive, and hers is a positive message about California Girls, so what’s not to like?”

Wilson also liked the version that includes a guest rap by Snoop Dogg that makes a nod to the original.

"The melody is infectious, and I'm flattered that Snoop Dogg used our lyric on the tag," Wilson noted. "I wish them well with this cut."

Little wishing appears to be necessary. "California Gurls" just completed a run of six weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and has sold more than 2.6 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, with the vast majority being digital downloads.

Perry's musical homage has done so well that the obvious follow-up for the Santa Barbara-born singer might just have to be "Gud Vibrations."

-- Randy Lewis

Left photo: Brian Wilson poolside at his home in 2008: Credit: Karen Tapia-Andersen / Los Angeles Times

Right photo: Katy Perry and Snoop Dogg. Credit: Mario Anzuoni / Reuters