Lady Gaga has snagged a piece of pop music history in landing the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 this week with her new single “Born This Way.”

Even more significant than posting the highest first-week digital sales by a female artist, with 448,000 downloads of the song, according to Nielsen SoundScan, Gaga scored the 1,000th No. 1 single on the Billboard chart since its inception in 1958.

In recognition of the milestone among chart watchers, Billboard has posted a chronological listing of all 1,000 chart-topping songs.

The first? Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool,” which beat all comers on that first Hot 100 chart dated Aug. 4, 1958. With that in mind, some might consider it a shame that America’s latest teen idol, Justin Bieber, didn’t land the No. 1 slot this week to bookend the half-century-plus period that began with pop music’s original teen idol. (Life magazine is credited with coining the phrase in a feature story on Nelson’s rise to stardom.)

Pop & Hiss thought we’d take the opportunity to scan through the years for some of the chart’s other high- and lowlights.

 
Bob Dylan reportedly has signed a six-book deal with Simon & Schuster for two more volumes of his acclaimed “Chronicles, Vol. 1” autobiography, which was tied to his “Theme Time Radio Hour” program that ran for three years on Sirius XM radio and additional works, according to Crain’s New York Business.

A spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster, the publisher of the first installment in the projected multi-volume autobiography, said Thursday that the company had no comment on the report.

Crain’s credited the information to “several industry insiders” and said the deal was put together by Dylan's literary agent, Andrew Wylie. No monetary figure was specified in the report, nor any proposed release dates of new books from Dylan.

“Chronicles” drew praise from critics, fans and peers for its impressionistic, time-hopping structure. “Theme Time Radio Hour” tapped Dylan’s deep knowledge of an array of pop music genres as well as his droll sense of humor during 100 episodes recorded over the show’s run.

Updated Jan. 21 at 11:07 a.m.: In response to an inquiry from Pop & Hiss, a source close to Dylan says there is "nothing to announce. [There is] a grain of truth in the Internet rumors, in that a variety of book projects are always being discussed, but no deal like that has been made."

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Bob Dylan at last summer's Hop Farm Festival in England. Credit: Gareth Fuller / Associated Press

Continuing their efforts to reward music fans who still patronize independent record stores, a coalition of small retailers will be offering exclusive releases on Nov. 26 from rock, pop, R&B and country artists including U2, Metallica, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix and many others.

The special releases are part of indie retailers' "Back to Black Friday" promotion for the day after Thanksgiving, typically the heaviest shopping day of the year.

Many are being released on vinyl, which gives rise to the "back to black" theme. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Cee-Lo, Iron & Wine and Drive-By Truckers are among the other acts participating.

"These exclusive pieces not only create nice sales, but a lasting memory and connection between the customer, the store, the employee and the artist, whose importance can't be overstated," Mike Batt, who owns Silver Platters, a Seattle indie music store, said in a statement Thursday.

The store owners also seek to increase awareness of existing retailers each spring with National Record Store Day, which also has become something of a cause celebre among pop and rock stars.

"Many of the great indies have disappeared in recent years, but Record Store Day is giving us yet another chance to show appreciation to this wonderful endangered slice of Americana," Patterson Hood of Drive-By Truckers said in the same statement.

Among exclusive high-profile reissues coming to the indie stores for the holiday season are a special edition of Harrison's 1970 solo triple-album "All Things Must Pass" and a Hendrix holiday EP, "Merry Christmas & A Happy New Year."

-- Randy Lewis

The history of music, it seems, is replete with rocky transitions.

Jac Holzman, who founded Elektra Records 60 years ago and is now back in the swing of things as senior advisor to Warner Music Group's Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman on the company's digital strategy, has seen quite a few.

For Holzman, one of the most memorable occured in 1965 and involved Bob Dylan. The place was the Newport Folk Festival, and Dylan was headlining the event. Described by Time magazine as one of the top 10 music festival moments, the broad details are well-known.

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

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Songwriting can be viewed as a sort of alchemy, a process through which a musician creates something rare and valuable -- whether personally, artistically or commercially -- out of the base materials of everyday life.

Jakob Dylan’s forthcoming album, “Women and Country,” is a glittering example, something that began with only the slightest shred of raw material, in this case, one unrecorded song he’d written, not for himself, but with Glen Campbell in mind. After Dylan played it for producer and longtime family friend T Bone Burnett, Burnett challenged him to write more in the same vein, and what Dylan came back with immediately struck Burnett as something like gold ore.

“I do believe it’s absolutely the best batch of songs he’s ever brought to me to listen to,” Burnett said earlier this week. “I felt when he played me that first song that he had taken a giant step.… These aesthetic moments are undefinable, but  the song reached me... It just rang that bell.

“With Jakob, it’s been like the sculptor who knocks away everything that didn’t need to be there.  I think Jakob knocked away everything that was unnecessary and got to the core of what he does,” Burnett said. “It’s exciting, it was fast to work on, we did it all live, he was singing and playing, he wrote the songs in two to three weeks. That explosion of creativity, you can feel it.”

Burnett suggested  female harmonies were called for on several of the songs, and turned to Neko Case, who’d never worked with Dylan before, and Kelly Hogan, who ended up singing with Dylan on several of the tracks. They just appeared with him at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas,  and will be backing him on a tour that reaches the Wiltern on May 13.

“I was definitely a fan of Wallflowers,” Case said in a separate interview. “I always liked Jakob’s voice,  and he’s a very good songwriter without being showy. He wasn’t coming out the gate all crazy. He has such beautiful control over what he’s doing, and I enjoyed a lot of the sounds in Wallflowers music, because it had stuff in common with music I was doing at the time, which was super unpopular.

“T Bone asked me to do it and then he sent me the music. The first song I heard was ‘Down on Our Own Shield,’ and I was so drawn to it, I was so in love with that song. I was finally able to listen to the rest of them, but it took some time, because what I do when I hear something I like, I just repeat it and repeat and repeat it. Then I realized the rest were really awesome too."

The album features Burnett’s stable of players, including guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Dennis Crouch, steel guitarist Greg Leisz and  drummer Jay Bellerose. Many of them also played on the multiple Grammy-winning Robert Plant-Alison Krauss collaboration “Raising Sand,” with which Dylan’s album shares something of the same sense of mystery and deep spirituality drenched in rootsy rock-folk-country atmospherics. (Burnett recently said there won’t be a sequel to “Raising Sand”: “They just hit a wall somewhere, and that’s about it,” he said by way of explanation.)

“I think our band has really come into its own in the last two or three years,” Burnett said. “That’s not to say we haven’t done great work before. We’ve been working together for 25 years, but it feels like lately it’s just turned into the Stax band, the Motown band and some of those others in the '60s: You go in, they play and it sounds good, period. I think the ‘Raising Sand’ record was one of the first ones where we got into that deep world of sound that we’re looking for…. Right now, we’re hitting on all cylinders.”

And even with all that in the background, Burnett feels the Dylan album is something special.

“I don’t know why it’s taken him this much time to get to this place,” Burnett said, “because it’s where he’s been all along, really…. I think his dad will really dig this one.”

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Jakob Dylan outside a rehearsal studio in Hollywood. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

Among the myriad other disruptions that massive snowstorms are causing on the East Coast, a Black History Month concert at the White House delineating the role music played in the civil-rights movement has been hastily bumped up a day, to Tuesday. It originally was scheduled for Wednesday.

“They’re expecting another 20 inches of snow, and the federal government probably will be shut down tomorrow,” the Grammy Museum's executive director, Robert Santelli, said Tuesday morning from Washington, D.C., where he was caught up fast-forwarding plans both for the concert with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Smokey Robinson, John Legend, Jennifer Hudson and numerous others, as well as an educational program that First Lady Michelle Obama was hosting for about 100 high school students from around the country.

“If we didn’t do it today, it probably would have been canceled,” said Santelli. A planned broadcast of the  concert Thursday on PBS stations is still in place, he said, as well as a live stream of the educational program for the benefit of students around the country starting at noon Pacific time. The telecast is being handled by veteran Grammy Awards show producer Ken Ehrlich, and the concert also will be streamed live Tuesday night on PBS' website.

Because of the schedule change, Santelli said a portion of the program will be recorded and made available at a future date for those who weren’t able to watch it live.

From Bob Dylan tackling 'Here Comes Santa Claus' to the "Avenue Q' puppets doing 'Ave Maria,' there's something for everyone.

It's become an annual ritual -- the flooding of the music market with dozens, if not hundreds, of holiday-themed titles, and this year is no exception. Plenty of artists are releasing festive recordings, and labels are hoping all that good cheer will translate to some sales uplift.

In the mix are offerings from a crystalline-voiced would-be American Idol and from a sandpaper-throated bona fide American icon. Sting does some musical time traveling and one adventurous experimentalist beams the spirit of the season into the vastness of deep space.

What follows is a look at some of the most interesting collections available right now:

David Archuleta, "Christmas From the Heart" (19/Jive): America's favorite elfin pop idol, Archie sounds every bit as spot-on key and invested with holiday reverence and good cheer as humanly possible -- and nearly as predictable. But given that "American Idol" is about meeting popular expectations rather than exceeding (much less defying) them, it's somehow comforting that within the familiar arrangements and production touches are a few intriguing touches such as the musical quotations of Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" into his version of "Angels We Have Heard on High."  * * 1/2 (Two and a half stars)


Andrea Bocelli, "My Christmas" (Decca). There's always an audience for yuletide music sung in a romantic tenor voice, and this year, Bocelli's under the tree. He's brought along several vocal partners including Natalie Cole, Mary J. Blige and Reba McEntire -- even the Muppets and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. As usual with operatic singers for whom English is a second language, Bocelli tends to succeed better with carols than with pop tunes.  * * 1/2 (Two and a half stars)

Vocalist Michael Bublé maintains his grip on the top of the pop charts, withstanding a challenge from the international phenom that is teen soap opera "The Twilight Saga." Bublé's Oprah Winfrey-endorsed "Crazy Love" sold 203,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, to once again lead the pop chart. In about 10 days of release -- "Crazy Love" was released off-cycle on a Friday rather than the typical Tuesday -- the album has racked up 350,000 sales.

How impressive is that? The hype for Mariah Carey's "Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel" began way back in June, and the superstar release has sold 250,000 copies in three full weeks of release.

Buble also fends off the much-hyped soundtrack to "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," which lands at No. 2 on the strength of 115,000 copies sold. Yet "New Moon" is likely in it for the long haul. The soundtrack to the first film sits at No. 63, having sold just under 2.3 million copies to date.

Additionally, "New Moon" won't be released in theaters until Nov. 20, and expect the soundtrack to still be in the upper echleon of the chart when the film hits theaters. Earlier this year, the soundtrack to "Hannah Montana: The Movie" opened with 146,000 copies sold and fell short of the top spot on the pop 200.

Yet the album was released two weeks in advance of the film and eventually moved into the top spot. Heading into this week, it was the third-bestselling soundtrack of 2009, tallying 1.6 million in sales thus far. Only Michael Jackson's "Number Ones" and Taylor Swift's "Fearless" have sold more in 2009. 

He ignores songs from his new album -- that's nothing new. Neither is his attempt to define himself through his changing set list.

Bob Dylan opened his three-night stand Tuesday at the Hollywood Palladium, essentially in the backyard of his Malibu residence, on the same day his latest studio album was released. How many songs did he play from the new collection for the hometown crowd? Zip. Nada. Zilch.

That's not a huge surprise given that the album happens to be “Christmas in the Heart,” his first holiday collection. Mid-October feels a little early to be dipping into the seasonal songbook -- even assuming Dylan would ever offer up "Must Be Santa," "Here Comes Santa Claus" or other chestnuts from the Christmas set in his live act.

The fact is, he's bypassed other new albums in concert before. Two decades ago he came through town just after "Oh Mercy" was released, but you never would have known it from his concert set list. The salient point being that the word "promotion" seems to be the one entry in the English language missing from his otherwise unabridged dictionary.

Instead, Dylan seems to treat the song selection at each night's performance as something of cabalistic ritual, a mystical exercise in which something transcendent might emerge from the proper sequence and combination of thoughts, sounds, notes and rhythms on a given evening.

Despite some skeptical public reaction to news that Bob Dylan has made a Christmas album -- “Another sign that the end times are near,” a friend wrote in an e-mail linking to the Amazon Web page -- it’s no joke. And judging from half a dozen songs I was able to preview at a listening session Wednesday evening, it is a ton of fun.

“Christmas in the Heart” is due Oct. 13, and Dylan was still finalizing the song selection and sequencing this week, which is one reason a handful of music journalists weren’t able to hear the whole thing. 

But the Currier and Ives-ish cover image is a good clue as to what Dylan is after on this set of traditional carols and recent vintage Christmas chestnuts -- beyond the charity aspect. (All of Dylan’s royalties -- in perpetuity -- will be divvied up among three organizations that help feed the hungry: Feeding America, U.K.-based Crisis and the United Nations’ World Food Program, which made a snarky Reuters story earlier this week about an early-download arrangement between Sony Music and Citibank seem especially misguided.)

Rather than simply a tossed-off session for his kids and grandkids, Dylan seems to be offering up an astute exploration of the roots of holiday music -- Christmas records in particular -- in the same way he has returned in various albums over the years to mine pop music’s foundation in blues, folk, country and gospel.

His version of “Must Be Santa,” with David Hidalgo squeezing reindeer-quick accordion, is directly inspired by the arrangement that Texas rock-polka group Brave Combo created on its 1991 gem of a seasonal album, “It’s Christmas, Man!” Better yet, there's a video on the way, shot here in L.A. Dylan's treatment of “Here Comes Santa Claus” goes straight back to Gene Autry’s 1947 version, with a guitar solo that mirrors the original, melodically and tonally.

Autumn is a glutton's feast for pop fans, full of blockbuster albums, buzzed-about debuts, spectacular arena tours and rare small-venue performances. This year offers the usual mix of veterans aiming for another moment of impact, and young pretenders working to make a mark in an ever-widening field.

That's good news for those with eclectic tastes: no one subculture dominates right now, so the listening is best for people who are a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll -- and a little bit dance and folk and Latin, too. What follows is a look at the best bets for recorded and live music in the coming months, album release dates subject to change, of course.