Entertainment For Lively Minds
Now, where did I put that master tape?
In recent years I have bought three seemingly 'lost' albums (or in one case, 'a collection of recorded material', rather than an album). All of them, in my opinion, range from at least very good to excellent, so surely the artists deserved more recognition in their own time. Have record companies/music-industry types always been so blind?
Remarkable stories envelop each album and their eventual release. I'll not go into great detail as these tales are told elsewhere far more eloquently than I could ever tell them. Let's just say fires, lost masters and lost artists are involved somewhere and somehow.
The three albums are The Dragons - 'BFI', Rodriguez - 'Cold Fact', and Pisces - 'A Lovely Sight'.
My question is simply, does anyone know of other 'lost' albums that were eventually released years after being recorded? Or maybe even some that still haven't seen the light of day?
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Rodriguez's...
...album was fully released , even outside of America ( if perhaps not the UK ) at the time it was recorded , wasn't it ?????????
Of course , I see you've put quote marks around " lost " , so...
Myself , from all I've read about it , I'd like to hear it , ut I haven't yet . The owner of another board I'm on is from the Detroit area ( grew up there proper , lives in the suburbs now ) , I've meant to ask if anyone there has heard of it...
At a torrent near you
This probably isn't exactly what you're referring to but:
Ryan Adams - Destroyer, the album that followed Heartbreaker. Worth checking up on if only for the great version of Time (the Revelator) produced in collaboration with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings.
Lucinda Williams's original, Gurf Morlix produced version of Car Wheels On A Gravel Road which has more of a country feel than the final version.
Patty Griffin - Silver Bell. Some songs eventually turned up on 1,000 Kisses and Impossible Dream.
More Adams
There's a few more unreleased Ryan Adams albums from this period, the "Demolition" album was essential a best-of compiled from several unreleased LPs including 48 Hours and The Suicide Handbook.
Not really
The only track that Destroyer shares with either of those two albums is Born Yesterday. Suicide Handbook was an early template for some of Gold.
Some confusion...
I was saying that "Demolition" includes songs from those 2 albums, not "Destroyer".
Sorry
I should read more slowly and take things in.
Again , depending on how you...
...define " lost "...I guess the most " notable " might be Bob Dylan/The Band " The Basement Tapes " .
It got a legitimate release 7-or-so years after its' recording , though I believe that there are still tracks from those sessions considered to be classics that have not recieved a legit release even in 2009 .
Basically , the modern era of Reissue/Heritage/" Classic Classic Classic Classic Classic " Rock can make one a bit cynical about an " unreleased classic " album , these days it appears that such an album with a repuation of that kind can be more commercially promising than a totally new one...
I recall the Cult album which had " Love Removal Machine " on it , which was produced by Rick Rubin , being a complete re-recording of a Take 1 version by the Cult's earlier producer and that the tracks from the first version first came out on B-sides and soundtracks and then , eventually , the whole Take 1 version came out as a stand-alone album...
How many years have the Beach Boys and EMI been playing a " Oooh ! Here's ANOTHER little peek of it !!!!! " striptease/" Tease-o-Rama " with the BBs' 1967 " Smile " recordings ? Have they ever issued any sort of " This is , more or less , anyways , the ' complete ' what-was-intended-back-in-'67 ' SMILE ' ? " ? I tend to think not . ( This is as distict , of course , from the 21st-Century new recording of it which Brian Wilso did a couple of years ago . )
There is a book called " The Greatest Music Never Sold " which I've skimmed which deals with unreleased albums , mostly around the Nineties and Oughties , I'm not sure , beyond Bowie , Ray Davies , Brain W. and I suppose the Style Council , how " WORD massive-friendly " the artists covered in it are.........
Cold Fact
is one album that every saffer knows inside out. Its been a big big seller here since about 1972. I think it was also a big seller in NZ.
Colf Fact
Yes indeed, Cold Fact received several official releases, in USA and South Africa. Also sold very well in Australia when thousands of copies were shipped there from a New York warehouse.
I could ramble on for hours about it, but there's lots of good stuff on this Cold Fact page of the "official" but fan-run Rodriguez site, http://www.sugarman.org/coldfact.html
In my defence...
...I thought that Cold Fact was only available on bootleg until recently. I read somewhere that in South Africa cassettes were passed around and it became a token for the changes happening in the late eighties. That said, I should've done my homework.
I also recall reading that Shack's 'Waterpistol' was lost for a time. The master went missing but a copy was left in a hire car in the States, and was eventually found by a record industry executive (see, they do have their uses).
Thanks to the interweb
Some of these lost albums do appear - not really lost but in many cases blocked from release because of record company politics i.e. artist buggered off to another label, supergroup recording where record companies can't agree who should release product, etc.
I'm still waiting for the David Bowie compilation of recordings made for the cheap cover version LPs in the 60's and 70's, before he was famous, in the style of Elton's Reg Dwight Plays Pop offering. Long mooted but never materialised.
The Sisters Of Mercy
there's a wealth of unreleased tunes but Mr. E being such a curmudgeon it's dubious we'll ever hear them.
well
at least until the legal wrangles are sorted and he needs a new Merc.
and whether anyone would really actually want to hear them is another matter entirely
(on the other hand co-incidently I was simultaneously fantasising about a non-existent-lost-original-line-up sisters album over on another thread)
show me
da thread! :D
Lost masters - a different view
Once an album has been mastered and gone off to the pressing plant, the masters are returned to the owner.
In many cases the owner is the record company and, in general, the masters will disappear into the vaults where they are often (if not always) stored in appropriate conditions. Makes it nice and easy to find them again when needed (cf Lewisohn's Complete Recording Sessions)
Where the musician owns the masters, the result is often very different. There have been countless tales of valuable masters ending up under the bed, in the back of a wardrobe and in a skip after a house clearance.
There's a fine clip on the Classic Albums for Apostrophe where the camera is walked around Zappas archive - every reel of tape carefully catalogued and stored in climate controlled conditions - that's the way to do it.