Dana Gillespie - Light Up - Non-Album Tracks (1965-1971)

I'm very delighted to post this album. For one thing, I think Dana Gillespie's 1960s  musical career is very underrated, and I hope to turn more people onto her stuff. For another, I've found a bunch of very nice unreleased songs that haven't ever even been bootlegged before, so I'm particularly happy to share those here.

First, let me explain who Gillespie is, in case you don't know. She started out as a folk singer in the mid-1960s when she was only in her mid teens. She stuck out for both her beauty and musical talent. She put out a folk pop album in 1968, "Foolish Seasons," that had her backed by the likes of Donovan, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones. She put out a similar album in 1969, "Box of Surprises," in which she wrote all the songs, and was backed by Savoy Brown. I recommend both.

Apparently, she was David Bowie's first girlfriend, when he was 16 and she was only 14. They stayed friends, and he wrote the song "Andy Warhol" for her. He also produced some of her 1973 album "Weren't Born a Man." After that album, which was mostly rocking, plus another one in 1974, she didn't put out any music for quite a while. Then she reemerged in the 1980s singing the blues. She's put out dozens of blues albums since then, and is still going at 71 years old (as I write this in 2020). She also speaks several languages, including Sanskrit, of all things, and she's put out over a dozen albums of religious music sung in Sanskrit!

Here's her Wikipedia page, if you want to know more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Gillespie

I've never gotten into her blues music (at least not yet). But, as I said above, I especially like her two 1960s albums. This is meant as a stray tracks complement to them. 

This album is musically divided into three different parts. The first six songs are A- and B-sides to three early singles that don't appear on any of her albums. She wrote the B-sides but not the A-sides.

The next seven songs are all unreleased. In 2018, someone posted a bunch of previously unknown acetates on YouTube, including some from Gillespie. But unfortunately, this person wanted to make money selling the acetates at an auction, so only a portion of each song was played, typically about a minute and a half. Every single song got cut off before it was finished. 

I thought the Gillespie songs were pretty good, and very much in keeping with the style of her 1968 and 1969 albums. She's said in interviews that she wrote many songs at the time, but only two were allowed on her first album. It was her first album, and she was shy to push hard for her own songs at the time. So I strongly suspect that most or all of these acetate songs are the originals that she wanted to put on that album. The timing certainly fits. 

But there's the problem of the songs being incomplete. So I did my best to complete them. Luckily, in most cases, the person who posted them to YouTube let them play through a verse, a chorus, and then a second verse. So usually I repeated the chorus once or twice to fill it out and bring it to an end. But each song was a different case. In a couple of instances, I only had one verse and chorus to work with, so I just repeated the verse and chorus again. But I also did things like repeating an instrumental section for a fade out.

I don't actually know how any of these songs really end. But hopefully I've filled them out enough to make them a satisfying listen. Maybe someday the full versions will finally emerge. Somebody bought them, so the full versions are out there somewhere.

But there was another problem. Acetates aren't like regular records. Typically, they're made of cheaper material and are much more disposable. If they get played a lot, the sound quality degrades rapidly. That was the case here. All of the songs had lots of pops and scratches, especially at the beginnings of the songs. I used by very limited sound editing skill set to reduce those noises. Then I turned the songs over to my musical associate MZ. He did a much better job of noise reduction. However, you can still hear the damage on the starts of a few of the songs.

The third and final section of this album consists of two songs ("Melting Pot" and "That Same Old Feeling"). They need a bit of explanation. Around this time (1970) in Britain, many albums full of copycat versions of current hit songs were released, in order to get around the high copyright fees of using the hit versions. Just like Elton John and David Byron (lead singer of Uriah Heep) and others, she made some extra money singing lead vocals on some of these records. I only found two (one of which is a duet with David Byron), but she did others.

Wait, there's one more song. At the last minute, I decided to add her demo version of "Andy Warhol" to the end of the album. I would like to make another stray tracks album dealing with her early 1970s recordings, which are also excellent. I don't want two versions of "Andy Warhol" on that, so I'm putting the earlier one here. As mentioned above, this is a song Bowie originally wrote for her. But he liked it so much that he decided to do his own version too. He's singing backing vocals on this demo, though it's hard to tell that it's him.

There's a lot of different stuff here. Clearly, Gillespie dabbled in a lot of different musical projects. And that's not even considering her simultaneous careers in plays and in movies, which was happening at the same time. Oh, and by the way, she played the drums quite well and almost became a professional drummer instead, and also was the junior water skiing champion in Britain when she was a teenager!

This album totals 36 minutes. Although ii's a diverse bunch of styles, one thing that ties it all together is Gillespie's voice. Yes, if you look at the cover art, you can see she was unusually beautiful. But she also was a talented songwriter and a singer. She really should have been a big star. The fact that she sang on those copycat hit song versions is proof of her vocal talent, because that was done totally anonymously, with nobody buying the records knowing what she looked like. This is good music, and evocative of the 1960s era. I hope you check it out, and her two 1960s albums.

01 Donna Donna (Dana Gillespie)
02 It's No Use Saying If (Dana Gillespie)
03 Thank You Boy (Dana Gillespie)
04 You're a Heartbreak Man (Dana Gillespie)
05 Pay You Back with Interest (Dana Gillespie)
06 Adam Can You Beat That (Dana Gillespie)
07 Save Me a Piece - That’s Enough [Edit] (Dana Gillespie)
08 Love, Slow Down [Edit] (Dana Gillespie)
09 I Know the Feeling [Edit] (Dana Gillespie)
10 Classical Example [Edit] (Dana Gillespie)
11 Let's Pick Bluebells, Roses and Weeds [Edit] (Dana Gillespie)
12 Where Is My Life Going To [Edit] (Dana Gillespie)
13 Light Up [Edit] (Dana Gillespie)
14 Melting Pot (Dana Gillespie & David Byron)
15 That Same Old Feeling (Dana Gillespie)
16 Andy Warhol [Demo Version] (Dana Gillespie with David Bowie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15119213/DnaGillespie_1965-1971_LghtUp_atse.zip.html

If I recall correctly, the cover art photo of Gillespie comes from the artwork to one of her 1960s albums. But it was from a gatefold or something like that, not the actual cover, so I figured it was okay to use it here.