Buffalo Springfield - Stampede - Non-Album Tracks (1965-1968)

"Stampede" by Buffalo Springfield is one of those great lost albums that everyone likes to speculate about. Various people have put together their own versions of what "Stampede" would have sounded like. Soniclovenoize at his Albums that Never Were blog has put together a particularly good one, which you can find here:

https://albumsthatneverwere.blogspot.com/2016/07/buffalo-springfield-stampede.html

However, I wanted to go in a different direction. Had "Stampede" really been released in mid-1967, as planned, it would have consisted of lots of songs that ended up on "Buffalo Springfield Again," plus "For What's It's Worth." I'm not that interested in an album that consists mostly of songs i have elsewhere, just in a different configuration. Instead, my goal here was to gather up all the full band Buffalo Springfield songs that didn't make it onto any of their three albums released in the 1960s. Luckily, there's exactly one album's worth of such material.

Nearly all the songs here come from the great 2001 Buffalo Springfield box set, just called "Buffalo Springfield." But that box set had some surprising omissions, so I had to take a few songs from elsewhere. The version of "Down to the Wire" with Neil Young on vocals surprisingly only appears on Young's "Decade" compilation. (The box set has a version with Stephen Stills doing the lead vocals, but I think Young should sing it since he wrote it.) "Sell Out" and "Slowly Burning" came out on Young's "Archives" box set.

I originally put the instrumental "Slowly Burning" on an album of Young's stray tracks from the late 1960s and early 1970s. But upon further reflection, I'm considering it a Buffalo Springfield song and moving it here instead. It's a tricky case, since it's performed by Young and a bunch of studio musicians, with no other members of Buffalo Springfield on it. But virtually the same group of musicians played on "Expecting to Fly" and "Broken Arrow," and those are considered Buffalo Springfield songs. The truth is, Young started a solo album at that time, but gave up and handed those songs over to Buffalo Springfield instead. So "Slowly Burning" should be treated the same, especially as it was done in 1967, the same as those other two songs.

Finally, "Nobody's Fool" is a Buffalo Springfield song that I'll bet most people overlook. A demo of the song was released on the box set. However, a live version was done by the band in a 1967 concert (at the Teen and Twenty Club in Huntington Beach, California - the best live bootleg of the band, by far). I took that recording and removed the audience clapping to make it a de facto studio track.

If you add up all the songs here, it makes for a 38 minute long album, which is longer than any of the three studio albums released by the band. It's all great, must-have stuff.

On top of that, I've added a three bonus tracks. One is the nine-minute long version of "Bluebird." That was released on a 1973 greatest hits compilation. But one or more of the band members don't like it, so it wasn't included on the box set. It's great though, so I'm including it here to help rescue it from obscurity. It's only a bonus track since it's not a totally unique song, like all the others on this album.

The second bonus track is "In the Midnight Hour." It comes from the same 1967 concert as "Nobody's Fool." However, I'm only adding it as a bonus track for two reasons. One is that it's sung by drummer Dewey Martin, so it doesn't sound much like a song by the band. The other is that it's a generic cover of the big soul hit by Wilson Pickett. Frankly, it's a pretty forgettable version that I don't think adds much to the band's legacy. So you can keep it or not.

The third and last bonus track is "Baby, Don't Scold Me." It was on the original version of the band's self-titled first album released in late 1966, but it was replaced on that album by the big hit "For What It's Worth" on versions of the album starting in early 1967. In my musical collection, I have both of those songs on that album. But just in case you didn't do that, I've included it here so you can add it to that album or to this one.

This includes a very rare unreleased song called "Raga III." It's an instrumental that's really just a long guitar jam, but it's a good one. Apparently it was recorded at a club, but I hear no hint of any audience whatsoever, so I'm guessing it was recorded during a soundcheck or rehearsal.

By the way, you may have noticed that I didn't include any of the many acoustic demos on the box set, even though many of those are also unique songs not done elsewhere. That's because I have two future albums to post here covering those. Between the three albums I plan on posting, I think it makes for a much more logical ordering of the band's songs than the way they were presented on the box set.

01 Down to the Wire (Buffalo Springfield)
02 Neighbor Don't You Worry (Buffalo Springfield)
03 Kahuna Sunset [Instrumental] (Buffalo Springfield)
04 Down, Down, Down (Buffalo Springfield)
05 Buffalo Stomp [Raga] [Instrumental] (Buffalo Springfield)
06 Nobody's Fool (Buffalo Springfield)
07 Sell Out (Buffalo Springfield)
08 We'll See (Buffalo Springfield)
09 Slowly Burning [Instrumental] (Buffalo Springfield)
10 My Kind of Love (Buffalo Springfield)
11 No Sun Today (Buffalo Springfield)
12 Whatever Happened to Saturday Night (Buffalo Springfield)
13 Falcon Lake [Ash on the Floor] [Instrumental] (Buffalo Springfield)
14 What a Day (Buffalo Springfield)
15 Raga III [Instrumental] (Buffalo Springfield)

Baby, Don't Scold Me (Buffalo Springfield)
Bluebird [Extended Version] (Buffalo Springfield)
In the Midnight Hour (Buffalo Springfield)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15833285/BuffaloS_1966-1968_Stmpede_atse.zip.html

Although there never was an officially finalized track list for the "Stampede" album, the band did get together to take a photo for the cover. That cover is shown here. (One band member, Bruce Palmer, wasn't there for the photo since he'd been deported to Canada at the time, so a double stands in for him with a big hat over his head at the bottom of the photo.)