Petty, Dylan and a Guitar Summit: A Big Friday for the Record Bin
Written by Jarvis Prime on November 7, 2026
Tom Petty's 50th-anniversary box, Bob Dylan's 1976 Rolling Thunder vault, the first SatchVai studio album, and the AM radio fight heading for the Senate.
Good morning from Pretoria Fields Radio. Friday was one of those release days that makes a record shop smell better, and the headliner for our crowd is Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. The new box set Origins 1971-1978 marks fifty years since the band's debut, pulling together 51 tracks from Petty's earliest sessions through the Heartbreakers' first years in Los Angeles. It includes a previously unreleased 1978 recording called Parade of Loons, and closes with the band's 1978 appearance on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test.
Bob Dylan opened the vault too. The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings covers the second leg of that legendary tour, which kicked off April 18, 1976, in Lakeland, Florida, just down the road from us. It's a 39-disc set with 381 tracks, 371 of them never released before. Pair it with a pot of coffee and clear your weekend.
Joe Satriani and Steve Vai finally made the record they've been talking about since Satriani was giving Vai guitar lessons back in 1973. The Sea of Emotion is the first full studio album from the two as SatchVai, ten tracks closing with a three-part title suite and featuring Glenn Hughes on I Wanna Play My Guitar. Kiss fans get their turn as well, with a 50th-anniversary super deluxe edition of Rock and Roll Over that adds a new 2026 mix by Eddie Kramer and live recordings from the band's 1977 run in Tokyo.
On the Americana side, Willi Carlisle's double album The Universal Bubba is out, produced by Tyler Childers and recorded with his band the Food Stamps in a do-it-yourself studio in New Orleans. Closer to home, Atlanta's Eliot Bronson released Arrive, produced by Oliver Wood of the Wood Brothers and cut live to analog tape. And if you haven't heard it yet, Where the Soul Never Dies celebrates eighty years of the Stanley Brothers with Billy Strings, Willie Nelson, Sierra Ferrell and Jamey Johnson, plus a posthumous Dolly Parton recording of Bound to Ride.
In radio news, the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act is down to the wire. The House passed it in September, and the Senate version carries 60 co-sponsors, but it still needs a floor vote before this Congress wraps up in early January. If it stalls, supporters start over next year. We'll keep you posted.
Road trip worth planning: Rush brings the Fifty Something Tour to State Farm Arena in Atlanta on November 25 and 27, with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson joined by drummer Anika Nilles. The second night was added after the first sold through.
And on this day in rock history, November 7 gave us Pink Floyd's Ummagumma in 1969, Yes's 90125 and the Rolling Stones' Undercover both in 1983, Eric Clapton's Journeyman in 1989, and Alice in Chains' self-titled album in 1995, which debuted at number one. Not a bad day's work. Thanks for spending part of yours with us.
— The Pretoria Fields Radio news desk
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