Rock N Roll Rebel: The Early Work

Rock N Roll Rebel: The Early Work is a box set collection by Little Steven (Steven Van Zandt), released on December 6, 2019. The set contains Van Zandt's first five studio albums remastered from the original master tapes for the first time ever. The box set also features 51 bonus tracks, including demos, studio outtakes, b-sides, remixes, and live tracks, many of which are previously unreleased. The set also includes the 1985 album Sun City by Van Zandt's protest supergroup Artists United Against Apartheid.

The initial release of the set contains seven vinyl LPs of the studio albums along with four CDs containing the 51 bonus tracks. The set was reissued on July 31, 2020 on CD format containing 10 CDs and 3 DVDs. Each DVD contains a concert from a different live tour between 1982 and 1987.

Bonus tracks

In 2021, Steven Van Zandt said of the box set, "I'd gone 25 years without remastering anything. So I had to really say, "Hold on — wait a minute! Lets' take care of all of this old business here and get everything remastered, and maybe we'll find some extra tracks." And we found over 50." Among the tracks found were songs that "were not quite finished, but finished enough to put on the album", Van Zandt said, like "Time" and "Rock N Roll Rebel". The latter was originally slated to be the title track of his second album before it became Voice of America. The set also includes a 1973 audience tape recording of the Little Walter song "Who Told You" by Southside Johnny and the Kid (Van Zandt), who performed as a blues duo for a couple of months. In the late 1970s, Van Zandt acted as songwriter and producer for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, and seven rehearsal recordings plus a live recording, all featuring Van Zandt, are included in the box set.

"Inside of Me" was recorded live on French TV in 1983. Van Zandt wrote in the box set liner notes, "I was doing a TV interview in Paris and the cat says, "we have a piano here, why don't you do a song?" So I did. Never did a solo performance before, haven't done one since." Having written "It's Been a Long Time" for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes' 1991 album Better Days, Van Zandt wanted to end the box set with the song, as it summed up his early years. "But every version we looked at had some approval complication or something wrong somewhere, and I really hate asking anybody for anything," he wrote in the liner notes, "so I borrowed a guitar and just did it."