The Allman Brothers Band - One More Ride (Edited Song) (1970)

Here's something I'm pretty psyched about. I feel like I've created a "new classic Allman Brothers Band song from their heyday! Maybe not, but I'd be curious what you think.

I don't know anything about this song except that it was co-written in 1970 by band members Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts. It first appeared as an instrumental just under three minutes long on the 1988 box set "Dreams." Then an instrumental "remix" just under four minutes long appeared as a bonus track on a "super deluxe" edition of the "Idlewild South" album in 2015.

Yet there's another version of the song available only as a bootleg that's seven minutes long, and it has vocals by Gregg Allman, with perfectly good lyrics! So it's not really meant to be an instrumental after all. If you listen to the instrumental versions, there are long stretches where not much is happening, for instance no soloing. Clearly, those are the parts where the vocals were supposed to go.

Normally, I would just put the superior version with vocals on one of my stray tracks compilations. But unfortunately, the sound quality for that version sucks. It sounds really muddy and muffled. That's probably why that version is hard to find even on bootleg. So I decided to try to merge the two versions together.

First, I used a sound editing program to try to reduce the muddiness of the vocal version. I only had limited success, since I'm far from an expert in this kind of thing, and there's usually only so much even experts can do. But I think it helped some. Then I patched the vocal parts into the longer of the two instrumental versions. I had a hard time getting the timing just right, because there were slight changes in the speed of the song as it went along, in both versions, since they were recorded by fallible human beings many years before most recordings became computerized and the variability of drumming was lost in favor of metronome-like consistency (and soullessness). Still, after a lot of tinkering, I think I got pretty close on the timing.

I also had to put an instrumental version of the verse at the start of the song, because otherwise the vocals came in when the intro drumming bit was still going on, and it didn't sound good. I think this change works out fine, because there's a little guitar riff going on that keeps the instrumental version of the song interesting.

The end result doesn't sound perfect by any means, but hopefully it's close enough for horseshoes. One can clearly hear the change in sound quality each time the vocals come in. But I feel it's better to have it like that than have the whole song in poor sound quality.

By the way, the unreleased version is longer than the others in part because it has a drum solo in the middle that lasts for about two minutes. I don't think it's a big loss missing that, since most people aren't fans of drum solos (including myself). In fact, I think the song works a lot better here at four minutes long. It could and should have been played on the radio.

I've put the song on a stray tracks album for the band. Here's the link:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/09/the-allman-brothers-band-stormy-monday.html

I really like the vocal version of this song. I could totally imagine it being a regular concert staple for the band. I am baffled why the vocal version has been left officially unreleased until now. Surely the professionals could do a good job (better than mine!) improving the sound quality of that version, if there's a problem with it. But I think it's much more likely that there's no problem if one works from the master recordings, and it's the usual bootleg copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy problem that created the poor sound. So I don't see any excuse.

As mentioned above, a "super deluxe" version of "Idlewild South" has been released in recent years and the vocal version wasn't included on that, A box set of Duane Allman's guitar playing, "Skydog," was also released in recent years, and it wasn't included on that either, even though it features a very nice Duane Allman guitar solo. So I think the odds are low that that version will ever be officially released.

It's very baffling that this song slipped through the cracks, especially since the Allman Brothers Band were not prolific songwriters. It's not like the lyrics are objectionable, or it sounds too much like some other song, or it's a poor performance, etc... And I don't think the song was ever played live, either with vocals or as an instrumental. But at least there's this.

I put this together while I was working on posting another album of Allman Brothers Band stray tracks soon. I imagine I'll include this edit on that once I have that ready, unless I get feedback that I screwed this up somehow.

Badfinger - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: In Concert, Golders Green Hippodrome, London, Britain, 8-10-1973

This is essentially a continuation of my last post (Badfinger's "In Concert at the Paris Theatre"). As I said in that, there's only one good official live Badfinger album, called "BBC In Concert." But it's taken from two concerts, and I think it works better as two albums. So here's the second part, taken from a concert professionally recorded by the BBC at the Hippodrome in London in 1973.

But it's not that simple. The actual Hippodrome part is only 29 minutes long, which is rather short for an album. I wanted to use this (and the other live Badfinger album I just posted) to gather all the remaining live Badfinger in excellent sound quality that I didn't post already or are repeats of songs. So I've fleshed this out with four songs recorded for a short-lived British TV show called "Set of Six," plus another song played on the TV show "The Midnight Special" in 1973.

I haven't changed the songs at all, but I've edited the crowd noise after the extra songs to make it sound like they all came from the same concert. Some of those extra songs had no audience noise at all, or only a few seconds before the recording came to a sudden halt. So I reused crowd noise from other songs, but edited them to remove specific noises making it obvious that it was a repeat.

The end result is an album that's 46 minutes long. One benefit of splitting the BBC album in two is that it's okay to have some repeats between this album and the Paris Theatre one I just posted.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any good live Badfinger recordings after 1973, until the band fell apart in 1975.  There is a popular bootleg recorded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1974. But the audio quality was too poor to interest me, even as bonus tracks.

By the way, the recording of "Day After Day" was missing about the first 30 seconds. So I found a different version of that song and patched that in. You can probably hear the transition if you listen for it, but I figured it was better to do it that way than just having the start of the song missing.

01 Day After Day (Badfinger)
02 Sweet Tuesday Morning (Badfinger)
03 Take It All (Badfinger)
04 Better Days (Badfinger)
05 No Matter What (Badfinger)
06 Love Is Easy (Badfinger)
07 Blind Owl (Badfinger)
08 Constitution (Badfinger)
09 Icicles (Badfinger)
10 Matted Spam (Badfinger)
11 Suitcase (Badfinger)
12 I Can't Take It (Badfinger)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15124388/Badfngr_1973_BBSessionsVolume3InConcrtGoldersGreenHippodrome__8-10-1973_atse.zip.html

I made the cover art using a photo of the band playing on the British TV show "Top of the Pops" in 1973. (I assume the recording of that performance is either lost or was a lip-sync to a record.)

Badfinger - BBC Sessions, Volume 2: In Concert, Paris Theatre, London, Britain, 6-8-1972

I'm trying to improve the problem of Badfinger live recordings. There are only two official live albums of the band in their early 1970s prime, and one ("Day After Day") is best forgotten. (It was a bad recording to begin with, and horrible 1980s drums were added to it, among other problems.) The one good live album, "BBC In Concert," has its own issues, but I'm going to try to fix them with this post and the next one.

"BBC In Concert" is largely based on two concerts recorded in front of audiences for the BBC, one at the Paris Theatre (which is located in London, not Paris, by the way) in 1972, and the other at the Hippodrome (also in London) in 1973. The songs all sound great, since these two shows were professionally recorded and played on the radio by the BBC. The only real problem is that it should be two albums, not one. So I've split them up. Here's the first one.

The vast majority of live Badfinger bootleg material sounds poor to awful. I've already posted two albums here, one of a soundboard quality concert in 1970, and the other of actual performances in the BBC studios with no audiences.

Aside from those, and the live BBC album, it's pretty slim pickings in terms of sound quality. But by splitting the BBC album in two, I ended up with two rather short live albums that had room for some bonus tracks. So Ive added the few unreleased live songs recorded in high quality that aren't repeats. I've added two songs to the start of this album, from another 1972 concert.

The result is an album that's 44 minutes long. The album I've made of the rest of "BBC In Concert" ends up being about the same length.

01 No Matter What (Badfinger)
02 Sometimes (Badfinger)
03 Better Days (Badfinger)
04 Only You Know and I Know (Badfinger)
05 We're for the Dark (Badfinger)
06 Sweet Tuesday Morning (Badfinger)
07 Feelin' Alright (Badfinger)
08 Take It All (Badfinger)
09 Suitcase (Badfinger)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15124311/Badfngr_1972_BBSessionsVolume2InConcert_ParisTheatre__6-8-1972_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I found some photos of Badfinger playing at the BBC in early 1972. I think it was one of the times they lip-synced to their songs, not this show. The photos happened to include four good close-ups of each band member, so I've put four photos together for the cover.

The Who - Acoustic Duo, 2005-2014

I'm able to post a lot of albums here in a relatively short period of time because I spent decades collecting this music and organizing it before I ever started this blog. But sometimes I come across new stuff, and today was one of those days. In double checking that I have all the good stuff for the Pete Townshend album I just posted, I came across some material by the Who, and I'm so pleased with it that I want to post it straight away.

Clearly, the Who are a rocking band, and I like them that way. But many of their songs sound good in solo acoustic format, as Pete Townshend has shown with various acoustic performances over the years. I knew the Who played in a stripped down format for the Bridge School Benefit in 1999 and some other occasions, but that included a bass player and drummer. What I didn't know until today is that Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey have played just as an acoustic duo on some very rare occasions in the last fifteen years or so.

They've only done a couple of songs here and there, seemingly for promotional appearances when the rest of the band wasn't available. So I searched out all the acoustic duo performances I could find and compiled them into this album. Luckily, it turns out that all of these performances have very good sound, usually professionally recorded sound. As a result, in my opinion, it sounds like one longer concert instead of a bunch of short ones.

In 2006, the Who put out an album of new songs called "Endless Wire." Four of the songs here are from that album. But, in my opinion, they sound better stripped down to the acoustic basics. All the other songs are Who classics from the 1960s and 70s, plus a cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire."

Speaking of that cover, that performance plus "Who Are You" actually only feature Daltrey. But you'd be hard pressed to hear that, because Daltrey plays acoustic guitar as he sings in a very impressive Townshend-esque style. I didn't know he had it in him to play guitar that well!

I included those two Daltrey solo tracks but not any Townshend solo tracks because I have tons of versions of Townshend playing Who songs in solo acoustic format. I don't really collect Daltrey solo stuff, but I figure those two Daltrey solo acoustic songs must be very unusual for him. Besides, including them here keeps the focus on Daltrey singing lead for the vast majority of the time on these songs.

The Who has raised some waves earlier in 2019 for acoustic performances of "Won't Get Fooled Again." I see one version has three million views on YouTube. So I'm glad to say I have an acoustic version of that song here, from 2014, when Daltrey's voice was in better shape. But also, if you liked hearing that in an acoustic version, check out the rest of these songs, because they all sound interesting that way.

On a minor note, Daltrey really screwed up the lyrics to "Bargain." He mostly sang the right lines, but in a mixed up order. So I carefully did some audio cutting and pasting to fix his most obvious errors.

I like it when I can put together albums that are between 35 and 50 minutes - long enough to set a mood and make a statement but not being too long to outstay its welcome. By chance, this is 47 minutes long, which is right in that sweet spot.

01 talk (Who)
02 Real Good Looking Boy (Who)
03 Man in a Purple Dress (Who)
04 Behind Blue Eyes (Who)
05 talk (Who)
06 Mike Post Theme (Who)
07 Tea and Theatre (Who)
08 Who Are You (Roger Daltrey)
09 Ring of Fire (Roger Daltrey)
10 Pinball Wizard (Who)
11 talk (Who)
12 Substitute (Who)
13 Bargain (Who)
14 The Kids Are Alright (Who)
15 talk (Who)
16 Won't Get Fooled Again (Who)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/eHoV1BLQ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/JamiUNMZ4EFGesi/file

The last four songs come from a performance at Ronnie Scott's, a club in London, in 2014. The cover photo comes from that show. Daltrey and Townshend were situated rather far from each other on stage, so I cut out some of the space between them so I could show both of them with decent size.

Pete Townshend - It Must Be Done - Non-Album Tracks (2004-2015)

I've posted a long series of albums of Pete Townshend stray tracks. This is the last one, at least until more songs come to light. I must admit I don't think his stray tracks from the 1990s were consistently strong when compared to his earlier work. But, in my opinion, he does better here. Yes, it covers a decade of time, but this makes for a consistently solid listen.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think I count five cover versions: "Stone (Evolution)" by Ronnie Lane, "No Face, No Name, No Number" by Traffic, "Three Steps to Heaven" by Eddie Cochran, "Corrina, Corrina," a traditional song famously done by Bob Dylan, and "Chameleon" done by and with Des Horsfall's Kuschty Rye.

The latter, by the way, is a band that is extremely influenced by Ronnie Lane's music, naming themselves after one of his songs and including some members of his band. So "Chameleon" sounds uncannily (in a good way) like a Townshend-Lane collaboration that could have been found on their 1977 album together, "Rough Mix."

Two of the original songs, "In the Ether" and "Endless Wire," are solo versions of songs from the 2006 Who album "Endless Wire." They sound very different (and in my opinion better) in stripped down versions here, without any Roger Daltrey. Note that the era of this album overlaps with the "in the Attic" recordings Townshend did from 2005 to 2007. I haven't included any performances here that are on that, though a couple of the song are the same, but different versions.

Here's the link to the "In the Attic" album. If you've a Townshend or Who fan at all, you really should give it a listen:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/04/pete-townshend-in-attic-2005-2007.html

One of the most recent songs here, "Guantanamo," is going to be on a new Who album coming out at the end of 2019, which will simply be called "Who." This version of the song came out on a 2015 Pete Townshend greatest hits album. But the Who version is going to be called "Ball and Chain," even though the lyrics indicate it's the same song. So I've included that new name as a subtitle.

Six of the songs are officially unreleased. For a few of those, the sound quality is a little less than the others, notably "Three Steps to Heaven." But it's nothing too bad.

I haven't found anything worthy of inclusion from after 2015, so this should be the last album in this stray tracks series, as I mentioned above.

This album is 48 minutes long.

01 Stone [Evolution] (Pete Townshend & Slim Chance)
02 Heart to Hang On To (Pete Townshend & Sam Brown)
03 In the Ether (Pete Townshend)
04 Endless Wire (Pete Townshend)
05 No Face, No Name, No Number (Pete Townshend)
06 Three Steps to Heaven (Eric Clapton & Friends with Pete Townshend)
07 Corrina, Corrina (Pete Townshend)
08 Guitar Instrumental (Pete Townshend)
09 It Must Be Done (Pete Townshend & Nathan Barr)
10 You Stand by Me (Pete Townshend & Eddie Vedder)
11 Chameleon (Pete Townshend & Des Horsfall's Kuschty Rye)
12 How Can I Help You (Pete Townshend)
13 Guantanamo [Ball and Chain] (Pete Townshend)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/45MVHUvt

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/sGSilD0qbyHmuJE/file

For the album cover, I used a photo of Townshend from a 2014 awards ceremony.

Rockpile - Fool Too Long - Non-Album Tracks (1978)

Some days ago, I posted an album of stray tracks from Rockpile, the band where Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds joined forces from 1977 to 1980. During those years, Lowe and Edmunds generally put out solo albums every year or two, and they usually were backed by all four members of Rockpile for those albums. The challenge I've given myself in this series of albums is to not use any of the performances from those albums, since I listen a lot to those albums anyway.

Instead, I'm using versions of songs from those albums as well as other songs Rockpile did that didn't make it onto any of those albums. The vast majority of these performances come from concerts, since there is very little studio material available from the band other than those albums, yet they toured frequently while they were together. I believe three of the songs were not recorded in different versions on any of those solo albums: "Fool Too Long," "Let's Eat," "Stuck in the Fog,"

Two of those exclusive songs - "Let's Eat" and "Stuck in the Fog" - have been officially released. All these rest come from concert bootlegs. Luckily, there are enough bootlegs for me to find versions of these songs with good sound quality, even though some of them are from audience recordings, not soundboards. As I often do, I removed the audience noise to make these all consistently sound like studio tracks.

01 So It Goes (Rockpile)
02 Goodbye Mr. Good Guy (Rockpile)
03 I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass (Rockpile)
04 It's My Own Business (Rockpile)
05 Fool Too Long (Rockpile)
06 Trouble Boys (Rockpile)
07 Never Been in Love (Rockpile)
08 Let's Eat (Nick Lowe & Rockpile)
09 Stuck in the Fog (Billy Bremner)
10 Here Comes the Weekend (Rockpile)
11 Love So Fine (Rockpile)
12 Deborah (Rockpile)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16697074/ROCKPLE1978_FolTooLng_atse.zip.html

I couldn't find any good photos from 1978. This one was taken in Toronto, Canada, in 1980. I used Photoshop to move the two band members at the bottom higher up.

Ray Davies - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: Sold on Song, BBC Studios, London, Britain, 4-1-2006

I love Ray Davies of the Kinks, and I love acoustic music, so it's kind of a mystery to me why I haven't posted this concert already. If you like the Kinks at all, you should listen to this.

In 2005 and 2006, the BBC had a series much like VH1's "Storytellers." Famous musicians were invited to tell stories about their songs as well as playing them, usually in an acoustic format. I've already posted Paul McCartney's appearance on the show (I actually combined it with another similarly formatted show he did one day apart). You can get that here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/07/paul-mccartney-chaos-and-creation-at.html

Anyway, Davies decided to go the full acoustic route, playing with just his acoustic guitar plus another acoustic guitarist. He talked a lot between songs, telling interesting stories with a focus on the songwriting process. But best of all, he played an interesting set of songs, mixing songs from the 1960s and early 1970s with songs from his 2006 solo album "Other People's Lives." Happily, he avoided overplayed hits like "You Really Got Me" and "Lola."

The concert is 56 minutes long, with about ten minutes of those talking. I put the talking on separate tracks.

One really great thing about this is the sound quality. Although he played in front of a small audience and there is clapping, the BBC professionally recorded the show for TV and it sounds fantastic. (Davies played live as an acoustic duo for about ten years, but unfortunately virtually none of the bootlegs of him were recorded with soundboard quality.)

I've added a bonus track of sorts. When he played the song "All She Wrote," he stopped twice in mid-song to make some interesting comments about the song's lyrics. While interesting, those comments broke up the flow of the song. So the bonus track is the exact same performance of the song, but I edited out the talking parts.

UPDATE: On February 11, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. The music is exactly the same, but i changed the name of the album to "BBC Sessions, Volume 1" after finding a 2007 BBC concert I'd missed, plus realizing a 2010 Glastonbury Festival concert he did was another BBC concert.

01 Intro (Ray Davies)
02 Dead End Street (Ray Davies)
03 talk (Ray Davies)
04 20th Century Man (Ray Davies)
05 talk (Ray Davies)
06 The Village Green Preservation Society (Ray Davies)
07 Picture Book (Ray Davies)
08 Big Sky (Ray Davies)
09 Do You Remember Walter (Ray Davies)
10 talk (Ray Davies)
11 Sunny Afternoon (Ray Davies)
12 talk (Ray Davies)
13 I Go to Sleep (Ray Davies)
14 talk (Ray Davies)
15 All She Wrote (Ray Davies)
16 talk (Ray Davies)
17 Other Peoples' Lives (Ray Davies)
18 Muswell Hillbilly (Ray Davies)
19 talk (Ray Davies)
20 Oklahoma U.S.A. (Ray Davies)
21 talk (Ray Davies)
22 The Getaway [Lonesome Train] (Ray Davies)
23 After the Fall (Ray Davies)
24 Harry Rag (Ray Davies)
25 Outro (Ray Davies)

All She Wrote [Dialogue Free Version] (Ray Davies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/85AyPt7H

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/RxYjtzsxNI169z8/file

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good photos of Davies at the actual "Sold On Song" performance. However, this is his playing an acoustic guitar from the same year.

Paul Weller - Wild Wood Demos (1993)

Paul Weller's 1993 album "Wild Wood" is still my favorite out of his many solo albums, though some others are close. So here's a somewhat different way to listen to that great album.

A deluxe version of "Wild Wood" was eventually released with an entire second disc of extra material. Most of that was demos. Generally speaking, these aren't solo acoustic demos. Instead, they're band performances, but usually simple and stripped down arrangements.

I took a few of the songs from the deluxe edition extra disc and put them on different albums, usually when they were songs he never did anywhere else and not just alternate versions of "Wild Wood" songs. That leaves the first eight songs here as demos of "Wild Wood" songs, following the song order on the album. The last three songs are demos of other songs from the time that ultimately made it onto the "More Wood" album instead. Add them up and you get 47 minutes of music, which makes a nice album length.

01 Sunflower [Demo] (Paul Weller)
02 Wild Wood [Demo] (Paul Weller)
03 All the Pictures on the Wall [Demo] (Paul Weller)
04 Country [Demo] (Paul Weller)
05 5th Season [Demo] (Paul Weller)
06 The Weaver [Demo] (Paul Weller)
07 Shadow of the Sun [Demo] (Paul Weller)
08 Moon on Your Pyjamas [Demo] (Paul Weller)
09 Ends of the Earth [Demo] (Paul Weller)
10 The Loved [Demo] (Paul Weller)
11 Everything Has a Price to Pay [Demo] (Paul Weller)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16696787/PALWLLR1993_WldWodDmos_atse.zip.html

I got lucky with this album cover. The photo I used actually shows Weller in the studio in the spring of 1993, working on the demos for the "Wild Wood" album. It was black and white, so I added the sepia tone.

Raspberries - Palace Theatre, New York City, 11-7-1973

I have to admit I'm not much of a Raspberries fan. (And by the way, they're known as just "Raspberries," not "The Raspberries.") I consider them a greatest hits type band. They had some really fantastic songs, but not a deep catalog.

So I don't have a lot of their stuff, and I wasn't planning on posting anything by them. But I recently came across a concert bootleg of theirs that seems to be very little known. They never released a live album when they were together in the 1970s (there's a reunion live album from decades later). They should just release this. It's got a great setlist, including some interesting covers ("Roll Over Beethoven" and "Be My Baby"), and it includes most of their best songs (though "Overnight Sensation" came a year too later to fit).

Most importantly, it has fantastic sound. It's definitely a soundboard, and sounds as good as any official live album you'd expect from that era. Apparently, the concert was professionally recorded in order for it to be shown on the TV show "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert," but only a few of the songs actually were shown on TV. From what I can tell, this bootleg is miles better than most other of the relatively few bootlegs by them, due to the sound quality issue.

Since the concert is a bit on the short side, I added "Let's Pretend" to the end. It's from a 1973 TV performance. That makes the whole thing 41 minutes long.

Although I said above I'm not a big Raspberries fan, I do think they get unfairly overlooked. They were marketed as a bubblegum-type band, wearing very uncool matching white suits most of the time, and they only lasted a few years. It doesn't help that lead singer Eric Carmen pretty much gave up on rock and roll after leaving the band, and went in the dreaded "adult contemporary" direction. But if you forget the image and just listen to the music, they should be counted with Big Star and Badfinger as the founders of power pop.

01 Tonight (Raspberries)
02 Making It Easy (Raspberries)
03 Roll Over Beethoven (Raspberries)
04 Last Dance (Raspberries)
05 I Wanna Be with You (Raspberries)
06 I Can Remember (Raspberries)
07 Be My Baby (Raspberries)
08 Drivin' Around (Raspberries)
09 Go All the Way (Raspberries)
10 Let's Pretend (Raspberries)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701019/TRASPBRRIS1973_PalceThetreNwYrkC__11-7-1973_atse.zip.html

I don't know where or when the cover art photo comes from. But it does show Raspberries in concert in their early 1970s heyday. Too bad it only shows three of the four band members.

The Pretenders - Windows of the World - Non-Album Tracks (1986-1988)

Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders released a new solo album earlier this month, called "Value Bone Woe." I really like it. It's different than her usual stuff, going in a kind of jazzy chanteuse direction. I suggest you check it out.

Here's another album of stray tracks from the Pretenders in honor of her new release. From this point on, I'll be treating the Pretenders and Chrissie Hynde as essentially one and the same, because all the original members of the Pretenders were gone from the band, and it became Hynde plus a group of backing musicians. Also from this point on, she did a fair amount of recordings and performances under her own name.

The first three Pretenders albums are undeniable classics, in my book. This album deals with the time of the band's fourth album, 1986's "Get Close." That album was widely considered a step down, being seen as overproduced and not rocking enough. I have to agree with that critique, even though it still has a lot of good songs on it. Happily, the stray tracks from this time don't suffer those same problems.

This is around the time Hynde starting appearing in concert billed as herself instead of part of the Pretenders. She only performed a few songs here and there, but she played some unexpected songs instead of the usual Pretenders numbers. Four of the songs here come from her appearance at a benefit concert in early 1986. Another three are acoustic duets she did in concert with Elvis Costello. For all the live performances, I removed the audience noise to make them fit in with the other songs. Generally speaking, all the live songs are the only officially unreleased ones, but they sound very good.

I think all the songs but one are covers. The one exception is "Worlds Within Worlds." That was a bonus track for the "Get Close" album. "Reconsider Me" sounds a lot like a Hynde original, but it actually was written by Warren Zevon.

This is a very electric album, ranging from a cover of the proto punk rock song "1969" to the acoustic duets with Costello, plus a fair amount of reggae. Personally, I like this as much or more as "Get Close," because it doesn't suffer from the usual 1980s production issues.

Oh, by the way, this includes two versions of "Windows of the World," the classic anti-war song written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Normally, I'm loathe to include two versions of the same song on one album, but I'm making an exception here because the two versions are quite different. One is a full band, album-ready version, and the other is one of the acoustic duets in concert with Costello.

01 Reconsider Me (Pretenders)
02 Worlds within Worlds (Pretenders)
03 Little Latin Lupe Lu (Chrissie Hynde)
04 In My Life (Chrissie Hynde)
05 Property of Jesus (Chrissie Hynde)
06 Give It Up (Annie Lennox & Chrissie Hynde)
07 Where Has Everybody Gone (Pretenders)
08 Windows of the World (Pretenders)
09 1969 (Pretenders)
10 Steppin' Razor (Chrissie Hynde with Coati Mundi, Sly & Robbie)
11 Breakfast in Bed (UB40 & Chrissie Hynde)
12 Days (Elvis Costello & Chrissie Hynde)
13 There's a Place (Elvis Costello & Chrissie Hynde)
14 Windows of the World [Live Acoustic] (Elvis Costello & Chrissie Hynde)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700870/TPRETNDRS1986-1988_WindwsoWrld_atse.zip.html

For the album cover photo, I used a photo of Hynde in concert with the Pretenders in 1987.

The Cars - Take Me Now - Non-Album Tracks (1977-1981)

Sadly, Ric Ocasek, lead singer for the Cars, died yesterday at the age of 75. In his honor, I've put a stray tracks album together from the band's early years.

When the Car's first album, simply called "The Cars," was released in 1978, it was a big success. Just about every song on it got played on the radio, even until today. The band members semi-jokingly called it their "greatest hits" album, because it was that good.

Why was it so good? Well, it turns out that the band had a lot more original material at that time, but chose only their very best songs for their first album. Then they pretty much forgot about all those other songs, even though most of them were also very good (if not their very best). The bulk of this album is made up of songs that could be considered outtakes from their first album. Only the last three songs after from later, and this would be a full-sized album even without those.

Now, clearly, this album considered as a whole isn't on par with the Car's first album. But few albums are. But if compared with other albums from that era, even some later Cars albums, I think this is pretty solid. The songs certainly don't deserve their obscurity. (They came out many years later on archival releases.) I believe all the songs are originals except for the last two.

Two of the songs here are from a live album (a very obscure one, "Live at the Agora," that only had a limited release in 2017). But those sound as good as studio tracks, especially since I removed all traces of audience noise. For one of those songs, "Take What You Want," I had a choice between this live version or a studio version. But I went with the live version because I felt it was a more energetic performance.

Slip Away" a song written by Ocasek, actually was a top forty hit for Ian Lloyd in 1979.

01 Leave or Stay (Cars)
02 Ta Ta Wayo Wayo (Cars)
03 Cool Fool (Cars)
04 Take Me Now (Cars)
05 They Won't See You (Cars)
06 Wake Me Up (Cars)
07 You Just Can't Push Me (Cars)
08 Hotel Queenie (Cars)
09 Take What You Want (Cars)
10 Night Spots (Cars)
11 Slip Away (Cars)
12 Don't Go to Pieces (Cars)
13 The Little Black Egg (Cars)
14 Funtime (Cars)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17362743/TCARZ1977-1981TkeMeNw_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/5TkUezgD

For the cover art, at first, I was going to use a photo of the band circa 1978. But before I did that, I asked myself, "What would the ultimate Cars album cover look like?" I decided it would be a drawing of a woman by Alberto Vargas sitting on the hood of a car. (They used Vargas pin-ups for a couple of their album covers.) So I found a drawing by Vargas that I liked, and a color pencil drawing of a car by the name of Willie E. Sims. I put the woman on the car and made some adjustments, including adding a shadow underneath her and some grass in the background. I'm pleased with the result. :)

Derek & the Dominos - Fillmore East, New York City, 10-24-1970, Late Show

See my post for the Derek and Dominos concert at the Fillmore East on October 23rd, 1970 late show for a full explanation of what this is about. Note that this is a recording of the late show from the following night, October 24, 1970.

As I said with that previous post, these two late shows are considered the best of all live Derek and the Dominos recordings, due to the flawless sound quality. In my opinion, they are one of the pinnacles of Eric Clapton's career.

The two shows have very similar setlists (though there are some differences). But you should listen to both shows anyway due to the large differences in the performances, especially Clapton's guitar soloing. He played with an energy and passion during his Derek and the Dominos days that he rarely showed in all the years since. If you want even more like this, also check out my post of the October 23rd early show, even though half of it is missing and half of what's there is not of stellar soundboard quality.

I only have a few more things to say specific to this show that I didn't say in the previous post. The song order for the October 23rd late show has generally been accurate for bootlegs, but for the October 24th late show, nearly all bootlegs have messed it up, including having the encore in the middle of the show. This version fixes that.

There have been some persistent problems with some of the performances. One example is the recording of "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out." A version of this has been officially released, but it missed about half a minute of Clapton's guitar soloing, for some strange reason. The bootlegs come from the same source material as the official recordings, so they also have been missing that same part of that song. I don't know how, but one bootleg has the full, unedited version. I've managed to track that down and I'm using it. So in that instance I'm going with a bootlegged recording for the whole song instead of the official one.

Another problem with bootlegs has been the song "Bottle of Red Wine." This was played on both nights, and the October 23rd version has been officially released. However, it seems that most bootlegs just used the October 23rd version played at a slower speed for the October 24th version. Happily though, just in the last year or so, the correct October 24th version has emerged, and the sound quality is great, so I've used that. (I carefully checked to make sure they actually were different performances.)

01 talk (Derek & the Dominos)
02 Got to Get Better in a Little While (Derek & the Dominos)
03 Tell the Truth (Derek & the Dominos)
04 Nobody Knows When You're Down and Out (Derek & the Dominos)
05 Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad (Derek & the Dominos)
06 Presence of the Lord (Derek & the Dominos)
07 Blues Power (Derek & the Dominos)
08 Have You Ever Loved a Woman (Derek & the Dominos)
09 Key to the Highway (Derek & the Dominos)
10 Bottle of Red Wine (Derek & the Dominos)
11 Roll It Over (Derek & the Dominos)
12 Let It Rain - Drum Solo - Let It Rain (Derek & the Dominos)
13 Little Wing (Derek & the Dominos)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/bn6srhR7

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/sxj0Nztsa6c5voH/file

Regarding the cover art photo, see my comments for the cover of the October 23rd early show. I know the photo comes from a different concert, but I'm using it anyway because I don't have a better one from the actual photo. 

However, in May 2025, I replaced the photo, due to that one being blurry and low-res. The replacement is from the same concert and taken by the same photographer.

Derek & the Dominos - Fillmore East, New York City, 10-23-1970, Late Show

I just posted an album of Derek and the Dominos playing the early show at the Fillmore East in New York City, on October 23rd, 1970. You might not want to download that, because it only contains half of the set and only half of that is recorded in soundboard quality. However, if you like this band at all, you really need to get this one, the late show from that same night, as well as the late show from October 24th, which I will be posting next.

These two late shows are considered the "crown jewels" of all Derek and the Dominos live recordings, and for good reason. In terms of performance, the band had a very good night, but not one of their very best nights. (Surprisingly, they had no idea they were being recorded.) However, what makes the Fillmore shows so outstanding is the sound quality. Not only are they pristine soundboards that sound about as good as you could ever hope for, but ALL other live recordings from the band are audience bootlegs that sound markedly worse.

The band's Fillmore recordings sound so good that two official live albums have been made out of them. In 1973, the album "In Concert" was released, featuring a double albums' worth of songs for those concerts. In 1994, the album "Live at the Fillmore" was released, featuring even more from those same two concerts.

So, you may ask, why not just get one or both of the official albums instead of this? There are several reasons, but the main one is that some performances can only be found on one of the live albums, other performances are only on the other one, and still more aren't on either of them. Furthermore, the running orders for both official albums are a mess. What I'm presenting here are the complete late shows, in the correct track order, at the highest sound quality.

To be more specific, there are 17 officially released performed songs from both late shows in all (including one from the recently released soundtrack "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bar"). I've discovered an additional seven performed songs from bootlegs of the late shows that are in the same excellent soundboard quality as the officially released stuff. (This doesn't include the October 23rd early show that I just posted, which contains three more songs at soundboard quality and three songs at audience quality.)

I did some research on what die-hard Eric Clapton fan think of the sound qualities of various official and unofficial versions of these shows, so I could use only the best quality sources. Many fans (though not all) thought that the MFSL version of the "In Concert" tracks were superior to the "Live at the Fillmore" versions, so I used those whenever possible. In 2011, the super deluxe 40th anniversary edition of the "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs" album included a remaster of the "In Concert" tracks, but the general opinion is that this remastering is inferior, so I've avoided that.

At first glance, bootleg versions of the late shows essentially sound as good as the official recordings, because they draw from the same source, a mix that was made in 1972 in preparation for the "in Concert" album. However, the bootlegged versions have a lot of hiss for the October 24th late show, and have generally combated that by using a lot of noise reduction. So the official versions are better, since they had more expert means to get rid of the hiss. Thus, I've used the official versions whenever possible.

To make matters more complicated, all the officially released versions have put those songs out of order, and even most bootlegs have the songs out of order. I researched this on the Internet until I got the song order right.

Keep in mind I'm not a total musical purist. I want music that I'll enjoy listening to, and if that means making some edits to fix what I consider flaws, so be it. With these late shows, I didn't make any edits to the music itself, but I did make some edits to the crowd noise before and after songs. One thing I generally do with live recordings is cut out the boring bits between songs, such as long stretches of guitar tuning or relative silence. I did some of that. (By the way, Clapton and the other band members almost never talked between songs, and I didn't cut any of what little talking that exists.)

But I had to do a surprising amount of work of the cheering after the songs ended. Typically, the officially released versions have just a few seconds of crowd noise, which slowly fades out. This isn't good, in my opinion, because it sounds obvious that edits were made. I discovered that the bootleg versions generally kept all the clapping until the audience got quiet again. So, in most cases, I used the official versions for the songs themselves and then pasted in the clapping from the bootlegs instead.

Note that there is no clapping at all after "Blues Power." This is because the band came to a complete stop at the end of the song, but only waited a couple of seconds before starting the next tune, giving the audience no time to react. I was able to confirm this by checking with some inferior sounding audience recordings of the late shows, that have it that exact way.

Also note that the first track, which consists of an MC introducing the band, is an audience recording. No soundboard version of this appears to exist. But if the recordings of the early show are any indication, the audience recording sounds better anyway, since the MC's microphone wasn't picked up by the soundboard.

01 talk (Derek & the Dominos)
02 Got to Get Better in a Little While (Derek & the Dominos)
03 Key to the Highway (Derek & the Dominos)
04 Tell the Truth (Derek & the Dominos)
05 Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad (Derek & the Dominos)
06 Blues Power (Derek & the Dominos)
07 Have You Ever Loved a Woman (Derek & the Dominos)
08 Bottle of Red Wine (Derek & the Dominos)
09 Presence of the Lord (Derek & the Dominos)
10 Little Wing (Derek & the Dominos)
11 Let It Rain - Drum Solo - Let It Rain (Derek & the Dominos)
12 Crossroads (Derek & the Dominos)

https://www.imagenetz.de/ifd3g

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/TELfQL9R

second alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/08GLyIXmZwgiA0j/file 

Regarding the cover art photo, see my comments for the cover of the October 23rd early show. I know the photo comes from a different concert, but I'm using it anyway because I don't have a better one from the actual photo and this one is so good. Actually, I like this photo so much that I made a painting of it when I was a teenager! I think the contrast of blues and reds looks really cool.

Derek & the Dominos - Fillmore East, New York City, 10-23-1970, Early Show

I'm going to start posting more live Derek and the Dominos, the short-lived band that, in my opinion, was the pinnacle of Eric Clapton's long career. When it comes to live music by this group, there are two concerts that tower above all others, due to sound quality: back to back nights at the Fillmore East in New York City, on October 23rd and 24th, 1970. The band only toured for a few months in the latter half of 1970, and these two concerts appear to be the only concerts by them that were professionally recorded as soundboards.

The band played two shows per evening, with each show lasting nearly two hours. Unfortunately, a only few songs from the early show on October 23rd recorded at soundboard quality are known to exist, and a few more songs from it were recorded as an audience bootleg. Even more frustratingly, no recordings of the early show on October 24th are known to exist whatsoever.

This, I'm making three albums out of the Fillmore performances: the October 23rd early show, the October 23rd late show, and the October 24th late show. The two late shows are the crown jewels of all Derek and the Dominos live recordings, with two hours each of the band playing at the highest sound quality.

The October 23rd early show is the runt of the litter by comparison. At slightly less than an hour long, it's only half of the early set, and about half of that is a mere audience recording. But it's also, by far, the least known of the Fillmore recordings, so I'm pleased to make these more available. And even though half of it comes from an audience bootleg, that portion still sounds at least as good as any other live recording of the band from any other concert except for the two Fillmore late shows.

All the officially released live Derek and the Dominos recordings come from those two late shows. I'll go into that in more detail in a subsequent post. But suffice to say here that nothing from the October 23rd early show has been officially released. In fact, nearly all bootlegs of the two Fillmore shows don't include any songs from the early show either.

Three songs here (the first two and the last one) are recorded in soundboard quality. Three more - "Blues Power," "Have You Ever Loved a Woman," and "Tell the Truth" are recorded in audience quality. I've heard that all of "Blues Power" and the first half of "Have You Ever Loved a Woman" do exist in soundboard quality, but I haven't been able to find a recording of that. If you know of one, please let me know.

All the songs through "Tell the Truth" appear in the order they were played in concert that night. But then even the audience recording comes to an end, after part of the song "Presence of the Lord." I haven't included that, since it's only the first couple minutes of the song. Then, somehow, the soundboard recording reemerged with all of "Little Wing," the last song of the early show.

By the way, what bootlegs exist of the early show usually claim to include a soundboard of "Presence of the Lord." However, the recording of that on those bootlegs are exactly the same as the recording of that song from the late show, only played at a slightly slower speed. So I haven't included that either. By the way, no one can remember what songs were played after "Presence of the Lord" and "Little Wing," though apparently it is known there were three of them.

All of the songs played in this early show were played at both of the late shows. But each performance of each song contained unique soloing, and could be very different from other performances. For instance, the version of "Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad" from this early show is seven and a half minutes long, but the version of that song from the late show is 14 and a half minutes long. Given the lack of well recorded live music from this band, this early show has been unjustly forgotten.

By the way, the first track consists of an announcer introducing the band. I found both audience and soundboard recordings of this. But the audience version sounded much better (no doubt since the announcer's microphone wasn't connected to the soundboard), so I've used that.

I noticed the audience-sourced songs were at a slightly different pitch than the soundboard-sourced ones, so I changed the pitch on them to hopefully fix that.

Also, there was a sound problem with "Have You Ever Loved a Woman." The recording of the first verse (about two minutes into the song) was very messed up. There were some glitches there, but the main problem was the volume was so low that it was nearly inaudible. I tried increasing the volume to match the rest, but it sounded so hissy that it was really bad. So instead, I copied and pasted in the first verse from the October 24th late show version of the song. Then I matched the pitch and tempo, and patched that in. It's noticeable that the sound quality suddenly gets better for a little while, but I think that's much preferred to the sound getting horrible for a while. It only affects about thirty seconds of the song.

01 talk (Derek & the Dominos)
02 Got to Get Better in a Little While (Derek & the Dominos)
03 Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad (Derek & the Dominos)
04 Blues Power (Derek & the Dominos)
05 Have You Ever Loved a Woman (Derek & the Dominos)
06 Tell the Truth (Derek & the Dominos)
07 Little Wing (Derek & the Dominos)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/vWwhdUPw

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/q5bRQevzbVAruRZ/file

Photos of Eric Clapton with a beard and wearing a horizontally striped shirt are closely associated with the two Fillmore nights. For instance, the official live album "Live at the Fillmore" uses one such photo for the album cover. But, in fact, it turns out those photos were taken at a concert in Port Chester, New York, over a month later. At the time of the Fillmore shows, Clapton hadn't even grown his beard.

That said, I'm using one of the beard-and-striped-shirt photos for the cover anyway. In part that's because I can't find any good photos that actually come from the Fillmore. But also, I'm posting three albums from the Fillmore shows, and I've found three really nice photos (that actually come from Port Chester), allowing me to have a unified look for all three albums.

In May 2025, I upgraded the image with the use of the Krea AI program.

The Velvet Underground - Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams - Non-Album Tracks (1964-1967)

Here's the first of stray tracks collections for the Velvet Underground (VU).

I'm starting this with some songs from Lou Reed before the VU even formed. Reed started his musical career by working as a professional songwriter in the "Brill Building" factory assembly line style. Most of these songs weren't good, and most of them were sung by others. But even now and then, he'd come up with something that almost could have passed for a future VU song.

The first and foremost example of this is "The Ostrich." This is a great place to start, because it's where the VU begin. That song was a minor hit, the only one from Reed's time hired as a songwriter. The record company wanted Reed to tour to support the song, and he met and began working with John Cale when bringing that band together. The rest is history. "You're Driving Me Insane" and "Cycle Annie" are the other Reed songs from this early era.

I follow that with two songs from Nico, "I'm Not Sayin'" and "The Last Mile." I generally consider Nico's music career separate from the VU's, since she went in a different direction after her brief time as part of the band. But I have a few exceptions, such as these songs. They're the A- and B-sides of her only official release before she joined the VU.

The rest of the songs on this album actually are performed by the VU, during the time Nico was a member. Of course, "There She Goes Again" was on VU's classic first album, but this version has Nico singing lead vocals instead of Reed, and that's such a big difference that I figured it merited inclusion here.

The last two songs come from Nico's 1967 album "Chelsea Girl." Five of the songs from that album were performed by Nico backed by all the members of the VU, and they were written by Cale and/or Reed as well. So those five songs have made it on some VU collections, with good reason. I've included three here. I would have put all five on, but I want this album to have a reasonable length, so the other two will go on the next VU stray tracks album I post here.

I have "I'll It with Mine" as a bonus track. Nico did this song for her "Chelsea Girls" album. But this actually is a live version performed by Nico with the VU. The problem is, Nico's vocals were almost inaudible on the audience bootleg recording. So I took her vocal from her album and added them in, creating a mash-up of sorts. I posted that single song here a while back, and the reaction was mixed, so I'm only including it as a bonus track as a result. But I feel pretty strongly that the issue people have isn't with my mash-up, but with the way the VU played the song in concert. They didn't do it the normal way Nico did it, Dylan did it, and everyone else who covered the song did it. Instead, they added a totally different rock and roll rhythm that doesn't fit the song well. But it is interesting, so I figure it's worthy to have at least as a bonus track.

01 The Ostrich (Lou Reed & the Primitives)
02 You're Driving Me Insane (Lou Reed & the Roughnecks)
03 Cycle Annie (Lou Reed & the Beachnuts)
04 I'm Not Sayin' (Nico)
05 The Last Mile (Nico)
06 Miss Joanie Lee [Edit] (Velvet Underground)
08 There She Goes Again [Nico Vocals] (Velvet Underground)
09 Melody Laughter [Edit] (Velvet Underground)
10 Little Sister (Nico & the Velvet Underground)
11 Winter Song (Nico & the Velvet Underground)
12 Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (Nico & the Velvet Underground)

I'll Keep It with Mine [Edit] (Velvet Underground)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/sJHwjL92

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/EOhiQ3JLw0tNkck/file

The cover art photo is a publicity photo of Nico and the VU around 1966 or 1967. The VU were named after a book by Michael Leigh of the same title. I used the text from that book cover for that band name up top.

Richard Thompson - Put Your Trust in Me - Non-Album Tracks (1990-1994)

I've posted a lot of acoustic Richard Thompson music lately. This, by contrast, is him playing with a full band. It's a grab-bag of stray tracks from many different sources. Thompson is very consistent, so if you like his stuff, you'll like this.

This is a fairly even mix of originals that don't appear anywhere else, cover versions, and new versions of songs from earlier in Thompson's career. The latter are: "Time to Ring Some Changes," "Night Comes In," and "The Sun Never Shines on the Poor" from his years as part of the Richard and Linda Thompson duet, and "Now Be Thankful" from his time with Fairport Convention. All these songs are done differently when done as part of Thompson's solo career.

"Persuasion" is one of the better known songs by Thompson. This is an instrumental version from a movie soundtrack. Years later (I think 2001), Tin Finn from Crowded House wrote lyrics for the song. It's the sung version that has been well known, but the instrumental version is still nice.

Only the last two songs are officially unreleased. However, the sound quality on them is as good as the rest. For the live tracks, officially released or not, I removed the crowd noise, as I often do.

This album is 38 minutes long.

01 Time to Ring Some Changes (Richard Thompson)
02 Oh I Swear (Richard Thompson)
03 Ca Plane pour Moi (Richard Thompson)
04 Night Comes In (Richard Thompson with Fairport Convention)
05 To Hang a Dream On (Richard Thompson)
06 Persuasion [Instrumental] (Richard Thompson)
07 Put Your Trust in Me (Richard Thompson)
08 Now Be Thankful (Richard Thompson)
09 She's Not There (Richard Thompson)
10 The Sun Never Shines on the Poor (Richard Thompson)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15268460/RichrdT_1990-1994_PutYourTrstinMe_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo of Thompson is from 1991.

Crosby, Stills & Nash - Back Home - Non-Album Tracks (2009-2014)

In late 2015, Crosby, Stills and Nash (CSN) broke up. As i write this in 2019, it seems probable that CSN will never make music again, which is a big shame. CSN hadn't put out a studio album since 1999 (with Neil Young). But it's not for a lack of good songs. In the years right before they broke up, they had a real creative renaissance. That's so much the case that I was able to fill up two albums with stray tracks. This is the first of those two.

In 2003, David Crosby and Graham Nash released an album together, and Stephen Stills put out an album in 2004. After that, all three of them were mostly silent for about a decade. CSN made an effort to record an album around 2009 and 2010, but it was going to be an album of all covers. That made it seem that their songwriting had all but petered out. And it does seem that they did write very few songs for most of those years.

But around 2012, it seems that Crosby and Nash in particular got busy writing songs again, and very good songs. Both of them have been on a streak ever since, especially Crosby, who has put out a surprising number of good solo albums in recent years. Stills spent a lot of time with his new band with Kenny Wayne Shepherd, called the Rides. He didn't write many songs, but the few he did write were pretty good.

The songs come from a variety of sources. There were three new songs on a CSN live album from 2012, so I've included those. I've also included the three best songs from Crosby's 2014 solo album, called "Croz." The rest are from various sources, including some unreleased versions of songs played in concert.

The sound quality is generally excellent, including for the unreleased songs. One partial exception is "I'm Here for You," which sounds a bit echoy. But it was good enough to my ears to include.

If you're under the impression that CSN were washed up after the 1960s and 1970s, you should give this a listen. They did go downhill in terms of their career due to bad production, being way out of step with musical trends, ego clashes, and so on, but they never lost their talent for songwriting.

01 Almost Gone [The Ballad of Bradley Manning] (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
02 Radio (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
03 Wrong Thing to Do (Stephen Stills)
04 Exit Zero (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
05 Time I Have (David Crosby)
06 In Your Name (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
07 Set that Baggage Down (David Crosby)
08 Low Barefoot Tolerance (Stephen Stills)
09 I'm Here for You (Crosby, Stills & Nash)
10 What's Broken (David Crosby)
11 Can't Get Enough (Stephen Stills & the Rides)
12 Back Home (Graham Nash)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16408058/CROSBSTLLSNSH2014BckHme_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used an outtake for the cover for CSN's 2012 live album, simply called "CSN 2012." It's very similar to the cover for that album, but I don't mind because it seems very few people got that album. I found the lettering for the band's name from a CSN T-shirt.

Beck - Bad Blood - Non-Album Tracks (2009-2010)

In 2008, Beck put out the album "Modern Guilt." His next album after that was "Morning Phase." That's a gap of six years! That's remarkable, considering how prolific Beck has been in his career. He certainly didn't stop recording songs and playing concerts. It's as if he just lost interest in putting albums together. But I'll try to fill that six-year-gap with what's publicly available. This stray tracks album covers just 2009 and 2010.

One thing Beck did do during this time period was get together with a bunch of his musical friends and record covers of every single song from certain classic albums, doing each album in a single day. I'm only including a small number of songs from these albums. Many of the songs primarily feature Beck's friends instead of him (including on lead vocals). And these covers are often very experimental (such as a rap version of the folky Leonard Cohen song "Master's Song," which I've included here). But I'm not including the experiments that didn't work so well.

Six of the 13 songs here come from these album cover projects, which generally were released only on the Internet with next to no promotion. The rest of the songs come from a wide variety of sources and are mostly originals, though the first song is a Bob Dylan cover.

I made "Paradisco" merely a bonus track due to sound quality issues.

01 Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Beck)
02 Green Light (Beck)
03 Black Angel's Death Song (Beck)
04 Lawrence of Euphoria (Beck)
05 Little Hands (Beck)
06 Master's Song (Beck, MGMT & Devendra Banhart)
07 Sunday Morning (Beck)
08 Fresh Hex (Tobacco with Beck)
09 Ramona (Beck)
10 Bad Blood (Beck)
11 The Loved One (Beck)
12 Let's Get Lost (Beck & Bat for Lashes)

Paradisco (Beck)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/zVfeJ1w6

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/3nyuILB2lCjT66e/file

The cover art photo is from a 2010 Beck concert.

The Zombies - BBC Sessions (1964-1967)

I've already posted five stray tracks albums of the Zombies in the 1960s. In making those, I used songs they played at the BBC that weren't otherwise recorded anywhere. This contains all the other BBC performances the Zombies did from 1964 to 1967. In other words, BBC versions of songs that were on their singles and albums.

All but one of the songs here were officially released, and were on the great "Zombie Heaven" box set. The BBC performances sound great. Admittedly, the Zombies weren't exactly the Allman Brothers Band, doing long solos and playing their studio material differently in concert. These performances hew pretty close to the studio versions. But it's nice to see how tight and on they are, even with their harmonies, and they do show off soloing prowess within the confines of songs that weren't supposed to go over three minutes.

Note that none of the songs from their fantastic "Odessey and Oracle" album are here, except for one, "Friends of Mine." That's because the band broke up by the time that album came out in 1968, so there were no BBC or other live performances. "Friends of Mine" was recorded in 1967, just before the band called it quits.

It's been a long time since I edited these songs. But I recall very few to no instances of BBC DJs talking over the starts and ends of songs. As a result, I made few to no edits. I'm not sure why the Zombies got so lucky, since other BBC recordings from that time period have the DJs talking over a majority of the songs.

Unfortunately, I've discovered next to no live concert recordings of the Zombies in the 1960s. They did appear on TV a fair amount, but they often lip-synced to their records. One song here from "Zombie Heaven" actually was from a concert, "Just a Little Bit," and the one unreleased song, "Summertime," is also from a concert. And that's all I could find to fit here.

01 She's Not There (Zombies)
02 Road Runner (Zombies)
03 You Make Me Feel Good (Zombies)
04 Tell Her No (Zombies)
05 What More Can I Do (Zombies)
06 I'm Going Home (Zombies)
07 Tell Her No [Acoustic Piano Version] (Zombies)
08 Can't Nobody Love You (Zombies)
09 She's Coming Home (Zombies)
10 I Must Move (Zombies)
11 Just Out of Reach (Zombies)
12 If It Don't Work Out (Zombies)
13 Whenever You're Ready (Zombies)
14 Summertime (Zombies)
15 Just a Little Bit (Zombies)
16 Gotta Get a Hold of Myself (Zombies)
17 Goin' Out of My Head (Zombies)
18 Friends of Mine (Zombies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/orT7AX5w 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/fmE0ZXNJBp4lnhD/file

The cover art photo features the Zombies playing the "Top of the Pops" TV show in September 1965. I found the "Zombies" lettering from somewhere else and pasted it on top.

Bonnie Raitt - Sigma Sound Studios, Philadelphia, PA, 2-22-1972

This is a great sounding soundboard from very early in Bonnie Raitt's career. It's one of my all-time favorite things from her, as well as her 1971 show at the Jabberwocky Club and the Sprague Hall show. All three are similar, but there are enough differences in the setlists and performances to warrant getting all three. And she talks a lot between songs in all three shows, which is fun.

There's not much else to say except that the last song here is actually from another concert. But it was a show from that same month, also done acoustically, so it fits right in.

This album is 59 minutes long.

01 Mighty Tight Woman (Bonnie Raitt)
02 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
03 Going Down to Louisiana - Rollin' and Tumblin' (Bonnie Raitt)
04 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
05 Any Day Woman (Bonnie Raitt)
06 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
07 Women Be Wise (Bonnie Raitt)
08 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
09 Thank You (Bonnie Raitt)
10 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
11 Bluebird (Bonnie Raitt)
12 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
13 Finest Lovin' Man (Bonnie Raitt)
14 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
15 Big Road (Bonnie Raitt)
16 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
17 Stayed Too Long at the Fair (Bonnie Raitt)
18 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
19 Under the Falling Sky (Bonnie Raitt)
20 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
21 Walking Blues (Bonnie Raitt)
22 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
23 Can't Find My Way Home (Bonnie Raitt)
24 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
25 Richland Woman Blues (Bonnie Raitt)
26 talk (Bonnie Raitt)
27 Blender Blues (Bonnie Raitt)
28 Since I Fell for You (Bonnie Raitt)
29 I Gave My Love a Candle (Bonnie Raitt)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/AtoqgxHx

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/LgATgqxQSIbf60W/file

The cover art photo isn't from this exact concert, but it's close. It's from a concert at the Troubadour in Los Angeles earlier in the month, on February 13th. The last song comes from that some location, but from a show that was two days earlier. Originally, this was a black and white photo, but many months after I first posted this album, I colorized it.

In 2025, I took another look at the colorization, didn't like it, and redid it. This time, I used the MyHeritage program, which I think does a better job.

Elliott Smith - Live Cover Versions, 1998-2003

I've posted a lot of acoustic music by Elliott Smith, but not much featuring him fronting a band. This is all Smith with a full band, performing cover versions in concert.

Unfortunately, there aren't that many songs compared to his acoustic stuff, so I only have one album's worth to present. I think that's because it's relatively easy for someone like Smith to play a song with just his acoustic guitar. But when there's a full band, there has to be a lot of practice to get things right. Take for instance his cover of "Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult (the song of "More cowbell!" fame). I'm amazed he did the song at all, because it has a rocking yet intricate arrangement.

Also unfortunately, the sound quality is not that great for many songs here. All the songs here are officially unreleased. Smith only played some of these songs once or twice in concert, and we're lucky to have any bootlegs of them at all. At least the sound quality is clear for all the songs. But most of them are from audience recordings, and on some of them you can clearly hear people talking through the song. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is an example of this. However, the performance is so compelling that I think it's more than worth putting up with that.

Here are who did the originals:

01 I'm So Tired - Beatles
02 Stroke It Noel - Big Star
03 Ballad of a Thin Man - Bob Dylan
04 When I Paint My Masterpiece - Bob Dylan
05 I Me Mine - Beatles
06 Care of Cell 44 - Zombies
07 Don't Fear the Reaper - Blue Oyster Cult
08 Yer Blues - Beatles
09 My Sweet Lord - George Harrison
10 Supersonic - Oasis
11 Car - Built to Spill
12 Do It Again - Kinks
13 Dead End Street - Kinks
14 Big Sky - Kinks

As you can see, Smith largely plays songs from the musical giants that came before him. It's interesting that he does an Oasis cover though. He got a lot of flack for playing that song in concert several times, even getting booed some. But I applaud him for seeing Oasis' talent, despite a certain hipster segment of his fan base thinking that's "uncool."

01 I'm So Tired (Elliott Smith)
02 Stroke It Noel (Elliott Smith)
03 Ballad of a Thin Man (Elliott Smith)
04 When I Paint My Masterpiece (Elliott Smith)
05 I Me Mine (Elliott Smith)
06 Care of Cell 44 (Elliott Smith)
07 Don't Fear the Reaper (Elliott Smith)
08 Yer Blues (Elliott Smith)
09 My Sweet Lord (Elliott Smith with Grandaddy)
10 Supersonic (Elliott Smith)
11 Car (Elliott Smith)
12 Do It Again (Elliott Smith)
13 Dead End Street (Elliott Smith)
14 Big Sky (Elliott Smith)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15835440/EllittS_1998-2003_LiveCovrVrsions_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo is of Smith playing at the Leeds Festival in 1998.

Various Artists - Nuggets 7: European Continent (1965-1972)

Every now and then, I've been posting various artists compilation albums that extend the concept of the two great "Nuggets" Rhino Records box sets. (If you don't know, a "nugget" is song from the mid- to late-1960s era that's influenced by garage rock and is generally done by lesser known bands.)

I've come up with my own songs that I think the "Nuggets" box sets should have included, and I've organized them geographically. Volume 3 covered the Netherlands, and volume 5 covered Scandinavia. Britain is a very big can of worms that makes up my Volume 2, which I haven't posted here yet. (Volume 1 is the US, in case you're curious.)

This volume is a kind of grab bag for all the other countries in Europe. (The following volume deals with all the other countries in the world outside of Europe, the US, and Canada.) Unfortunately, I have to admit that I'm not a "nuggets expert." I haven't listened to zillions of obscure compilations of obscure European bands. So I'm sure there are plenty of excellent songs that I've missed. If you know of any, please let me know and I'll consider adding them in. However, I have come across some songs here and there that I really like that fit the "nuggets" description, so here they are.

I have to admit that, as someone who speaks English but no other European languages, I have a bias in favor of English language songs. But there are a few here in other languages that I think can be appreciated even if you don't know the words.

Speaking of knowing the words, one song you definitely should listen to here is the last one, "Prisencolinensinaiciusol." As you may guess from the title, it's very strange. It's done by a famous Italian musician, Adriano Celentano, but it's not in Italian. As you listen to it, you'll think at first it's in English, but nothing is intelligible. Apparently, the song is some kind of commentary about how many young people in mainland Europe at the time were listening mostly to English songs on the radio without speaking English. So the vocals are made of English sounding noises without it actually being English!

Oh, and by the way, you should check out the video of the song on YouTube. It has over 2 million views, which is a heck of a lot for a song from Italy in 1972. There's something strangely entertaining about it, especially the way the singer dances and moves.

You'll probably recognize "Black Is Black," the one song here that was plucked from obscurity to be a big international hit. But in my opinion, in a better world, a bunch of these songs should have been big international hits. The fact that these bands were based on other countries meant they were almost certainly doomed not to make it in the US or Britain, because the world was much less connected in those days.

You may also recognize the instrumental "Psyche Rock," since the theme to the TV show "Futurama" is very heavily based on it.

This album is an hour and 11 minutes long.

01 But You'll Never Do It Babe (Boots)
02 Baluba Shake (Brunetta)
03 Black Is Black (Los Bravos)
04 El Muerto Vivo (Peret)
05 Gaby (Boots)
06 Going Nowhere (Los Bravos)
07 It's My Fault (Rattles)
08 Piangi con Me (Rokes)
09 Slaves Time (Slaves)
10 An Unknown Quantity (Bill Ramsey & the Jay Five)
11 Get on Your Knees (Los Canarios)
12 Peppermint Frappe (Los Canarios)
13 Psyche Rock (Les Yper Sound [Pierre Henry])
14 Animal on Est Mal (Gérard Manset)
15 Bring a Little Lovin' (Los Bravos)
16 Get Down from the Tree (Matadors)
17 Rain and Tears (Aphrodite's Child)
18 A Song of Joy (Miguel Rios)
19 Daydream (Wallace Collection)
20 Sad Soul (Ronnie Bird)
21 The Witch (Rattles)
22 Mamy Blue (Los Pop Tops)
23 Woman (Barrabas)
24 Prisencolinensinaiciusol (Adriano Celentano)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701220/VA-Nggts7_EurpeanCntnent_atse.zip.html

Morning - Struck like Silver (1972)

Back in April 2018, not long after I started this blog, I posted the 1970 album "Morning" by the band Morning. I don't usually post a studio album without any changes, but I did in that case in part because that album is long out of print, but also because I think it's a really great, five-star album. It's strongly reminiscent of bands from that era like Crosby, Stills and Nash, the Eagles, and America, and it should have sold millions like those artists did. Instead, it's remained totally obscure.

You can find that here:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/04/morning-morning-1970.html

Morning actually put out two albums in their short career. Yesterday, I got a request from someone who asked me to post their other album, "Struck like Silver" from 1972. It's also long out of print, and possibly even more obscure. I think that's a reasonable request, so here it is.

However, I need to say that the reason I didn't post it until now is that I consider it a merely good album, not a great one. The band members themselves were disappointed in that album, and split up shortly thereafter. Still, if you enjoy the early 1970s country rock sound, this is right up your alley.

This album is 39 minutes long.

01 I Ain't Gonna Leave (Morning)
02 In a Better Frame of Mind (Morning)
03 Only to Say Goodnight (Morning)
04 [He Played Real Good] For Free (Morning)
05 Struck like Silver (Morning)
06 Understand My Ways (Morning)
07 Comin' in Love (Morning)
08 Jay's Movie Song (Morning)
09 And Now I Lay Me Down (Morning)
10 Never Been to Spain (Morning)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15252819/Mrning_1972_StrcklikeSilvr_atse.zip.html

The album cover is just the exact cover from the released album.

Norah Jones - Easy - Non-Album Tracks (2007-2008)

First off, note that when I first posted this album, I called it "Any Other Day." But I've made some major changes after finding a bunch of her songs that I'd overlooked, and the song "Any Other Day" was moved to a different album. Thus, I now have named it after another song, "Easy."

This is the tenth Norah Jones album I've posted, with many more to come  By now, I should probably have a kind of boilerplate notice for those who missed it on my earlier posts: don't judge Jones by what you've heard on the radio, or even by her studio albums. Her stray tracks are way more interesting and diverse.

I should note that, starting around this time, Jones began putting out side project albums that also have been more interesting and diverse than her usual studio albums. This album has fours song from her country group the Little Willies. I'm really glad that she keeps branching out and trying new things with side groups, but I also feel inevitably that the best things these groups do are the songs sung by Jones. There's just something about her voice that's special. So I'm only including the Jones-sung songs from those groups.

This album is 41 minutes long.

01 Roly Poly (Little Willies featuring Norah Jones)
02 Love Me (Little Willies featuring Norah Jones)
03 What Time You Comin' Home (Little Willies featuring Norah Jones)
04 The Story (Norah Jones)
05 Court and Spark (Herbie Hancock with Norah Jones)
06 My Blue Heaven (Norah Jones)
07 2 Men (Norah Jones)
08 American Anthem (Norah Jones)
09 Easy (Anoushka Shankar & Karsh Kale with Norah Jones)
10 Lovesick Blues (Little Willies featuring Norah Jones)
11 Blue Bayou (M. Ward & Norah Jones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15848823/NorahJ_2006-2007_Esy_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo comes from a 2008 series of promo photos.

Carole King - Beautiful - More Legendary Demos, Volume 3 (1970-1973)

This is the third and likely final volume in my series of Carole King demo albums. (I wish I could do more, but my source material runs out after this.) In practice, it largely plays out as a solo acoustic version of her classic 1971 album "Tapestry." So if you like that album, you should enjoy this.

This contains versions of all the songs from "Tapestry" except for "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," which was on the previous album in this series, and "Where You Lead." On top of that, there are six other performances of songs originally done on other albums. "Song of Long Ago" and "Carry Your Load" come from her other 1971 album "Music." "Eventually" is from her 1968 album "Now That Everything's Been Said." "No Easy Way Down" and "Up on the Roof" are from her 1970 album "Writer." Finally, there's an interesting live duet of King and Barry Mann on Mann's (and song "You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling," which was a massive hit for the Righteous Brothers.

The first five songs are from the official album "The Legendary Demos," and the last two are from an official live album. The other nine are unreleased. However, most or all of them come from soundboard bootlegs, so the sound quality is high throughout.

I kind of "faked" much of this album in that I didn't actually have that many real demos to work with this time, so I used solo acoustic versions of songs played in concert instead. Unfortunately, I couldn't use this method to keep going past 1971, because King seems to have stopped playing solo acoustic in concert after that time. (The two songs from 1973 here are exceptions, but they're "Tapestry" songs. I just chose the 1973 versions because they sounded the best.) That's a shame, because she went into a relative commercial decline after "Tapestry," and I think a lot of that had to do with the production of her albums (which wasn't that bad on a per song basis, but tended to make all the songs sound the same). I think it would be a revelation to hear those songs in solo acoustic format.

If you enjoy this album, definitely check out the other two albums in this series. I find it weird how millions of people bought the "Tapestry" album, but don't know about her earlier songs, the best of which were just as good as the "Tapestry" ones.

This album is 55 minutes long.

01 You've Got a Friend (Carole King)
02 It's Too Late (Carole King)
03 Beautiful (Carole King)
04 Tapestry (Carole King)
05 Way Over Yonder (Carole King)
06 Up on the Roof (Carole King with James Taylor)
07 I Feel the Earth Move (Carole King)
08 So Far Away (Carole King)
09 Will You Love Me Tomorrow (Carole King)
10 Song of Long Ago (Carole King)
11 Carry Your Load (Carole King)
12 Eventually (Carole King)
13 No Easy Way Down (Carole King)
14 You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin' (Barry Mann & Carole King)
15 Smackwater Jack (Carole King)
16 Home Again (Carole King)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16687664/CARLKNG1970-1973_Beautifl_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I once again used the template from the first album in this series. I just changed the basic background color. Plus, the photo of King is from 1971.