Various Artists - Covered: Doc Pomus & Mort Shuman, Volume 1: 1950-1962

A few days ago, I posted my first "Covered" series, which is made of three albums of songs written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. I plan to post a bunch more of these to highlight the works of great songwriters. Here's the next one.

I don't think the songwriting team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman is as famous as Leiber and Stoller. But I'd argue they were just as commercially successful and just as talented. I don't want to go into great detail about their personal histories, since these write-ups I write are probably too wordy already. Here are the relevant Wikipedia entries:

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

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

But I will say they were unusually colorful characters, especially Pomus. There's a fascinating documentary film about his life called "A.k.a. Doc Pomus," which I recommend you watch. He had an extremely eventful and interesting life. *By the way, both he and Shuman died in 1991.)

Pomus was hit with polio when a child, and it afflicted him the rest of his life to the point that he spent most of his life in a wheelchair. He also was a white Jewish guy. Yet as soon as he became an adult, he started a career as a blues singer. He wasn't that good a singer, to be honest, but he was able to make a modest living out of it doing concerts, probably due to the novelty factor of being a white Jewish guy singing the blues, and handicapped to boot. I have two songs here from his solo career, which petered out after a few years.

By about 1956, he switched his musical efforts to songwriting. He'd had some success with that already, especially the song "Chains of Love," which was a hit for Big Joe Turner. (Note that he's not credited for writing it through, because he sold his songwriting share for a small amount of money.) Starting around 1957, he began having a lot more success.

Around 1958, Pomus met Shuman through a family connection. Pomus was in his thirties and Shuman was only 18 and had no songwriting experience at all. But Pomus saw something in him, and figured it would be good to get a teenager's perspective since his songs were mainly aimed at teenagers. Shuman quickly learned the art of songwriting and they became a very successful team. Typically, Pomus wrote the lyrics and Shuman wrote the melody. But this wasn't always the case. This can be seen by the fact that both had hits writing songs all by themselves as well.

I've chosen the songs for this series mainly because I like listening to them. But I also have tried to include all the significant hits. Luckily, the hits are usually the best songs, so it's typically easy to include them.

For this album, the only major hit I'm missing is "Young Blood," a hit for the Coasters in 1957. The reason I didn't include it is because Pomus wrote it with none other than Leiber and Stoller, before he began working with Shuman, and I've included the Coasters version in my Leiber and Stoller collection. Instead, I'm including a different version of "Young Blood" here, but it goes on a later album. (Bad Company had a hit with the song in 1976.)

I've made three albums of Pomus and/or Shuman songs. Each one of them is about 45 to 50 minutes long.

01 Send for the Doctor (Doc Pomus)
02 Chains of Love (Big Joe Turner)
03 Heartlessly (Doc Pomus)
04 Lonely Avenue (Ray Charles)
05 Boogie Woogie Country Girl (Big Joe Turner)
06 Love Roller Coaster (Big Joe Turner)
07 A Teenager in Love (Dion & the Belmonts)
08 Hushabye (Mystics)
09 Turn Me Loose (Fabian)
10 A Mess of Blues (Elvis Presley)
11 Save the Last Dance for Me (Drifters)
12 This Magic Moment (Drifters)
13 Surrender (Elvis Presley)
14 I Count the Tears (Drifters)
15 [Marie's The Name] His Latest Flame (Elvis Presley)
16 Young Boy Blues (Ben E. King)
17 Little Sister (Elvis Presley)
18 First Taste of Love (Ben E. King)
19 Gonna Get Back Home Somehow (Elvis Presley)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/AcNAXLLd

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/JbTS97qATJ1ozc6/file

I suspect the reason more people don't know about Pomus and Shuman is because they kept a very low public profile. One result of that is that I had a hard time finding any photos of them together. All the photos I could find are black in white. So I've colorized them to help distinguish them from each other. I'm not sure what year this photo was taken, but I'd guess it's from around 1960, give or take a couple of years.

UPDATE: On September 30, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

Cream - Grande Ballroom, Detroit, MI, 10-15-1967

Ginger Baker, former drummer for Cream, died a few days ago (as I write this in October 2019). By all accounts, he was a jerk. (The interesting documentary "Beware of Mr. Baker" shows this in spades.) And yet, he was a towering musical talent on the drums. To mark his passing, I wanted to post something from Cream, and this live show came to mind.

In short, if you want one live concert from Cream, this is definitely it. This show is often on the list of best concert bootlegs of all time, for any musical act. It's the only soundboard from 1967, and when it comes to Cream concerts, the earlier the date, the better. As time passed during the band's short existence from 1966 to 1968, personality clashes, too much fame too soon, and other problems slowly killed the band's creative fire. Pretty much all the excellent sounding live recordings date from 1968 (except for this one!), including all the officially released material. But by that time, while they were still able to run circles around most bands of the time, they had lost a lot from what they had been in 1966 and 1967.

So the content here is stellar. But even though the sound quality is the best from 1967, it had some problems. I say "had" because I believe I've pretty much fixed them. The bootleg I own has some liner notes that note the vocals sometimes aren't heard well, and that was true. But luckily it turns out there's a lot of stereo separation on the recording, and one of the stereo tracks has nearly all the vocals. That enabled me to do some tinkering. For instance, for songs where the vocals were noticeably low, I painstakingly increased the volume for the vocals, doing so line by line.

I also fixed some obvious flaws. For instance, the first few seconds of the intro to one of the songs was cut off. But luckily, it was a riff that was repeated a few seconds later, so I was able to patch in a fix. Another song had a big sound glitch where a couple of seconds were missing, but it was another case of a repeated intro riff, so I was able to fix that too. Additionally, the band members didn't speak much before songs, but when they did the volume was so low as to be almost inaudible. I upped the volume so their words could be easily heard. I also cut out some dead air between songs, such as guitar tuning time. On top of that, the audience was nearly inaudible too, due to the recording being a soundboard that picked up mainly what was happening on stage. I markedly increased the cheering after each song, so it wouldn't seem like the band was playing to a nearly empty room.

But wait, there's more! ;) I believe the recording captured the entire show. But I was disappointed they didn't play "Sunshine of Your Love." The album that's from, "Disraeli Gears," would be released a couple of weeks after this concert. But the band had been playing the song at almost every concert since January, so it's surprising it wasn't played this time too. I "fixed" that by adding two songs - "Sunshine of Your Love" and "Lawdy Mama" - at the end from another concert earlier in 1967 (at the Ricky Tick in London in April). The sound quality of these two songs are nearly good as the rest, especially because I made some edits to make the vocals more audible in that case as well, especially for "Lawdy Mama."

As usual, Cream really stretched things out with their soloing. So the concert is nearly two hours long, if you include the two extra songs. The only downside is that the bass is a bit low in the mix sometimes. But if want to listen to live Cream, I'd say this is better than anything else I've heard, including the officially released live tracks.

01 Tales of Brave Ulysses (Cream)
02 N.S.U. (Cream)
03 Sitting On Top of the World (Cream)
04 Sweet Wine (Cream)
05 Rollin' and Tumblin' (Cream)
06 Spoonful (Cream)
07 Steppin' Out [Instrumental] (Cream)
08 Traintime (Cream)
09 Toad [Instrumental] (Cream)
10 I'm So Glad (Cream)
11 Lawdy Mama (Cream)
12 Sunshine of Your Love (Cream)

https://www.imagenetz.de/dZp9i

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/21kqGrwi

second alternate:

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

For the cover art, I was unable to find any photos from the concert in question. However, I got lucky and found the concert poster for that very show, and it's a nice one. I used that for the album cover, except for the central photo of the band. I also had to squish the art horizontally to get it to fit. Also, I completely changed the color scheme, because the original used some colors that didn't work well together, in my opinion. I removed all the text from the bottom and replaced it with new text, since the old text didn't say what I wanted to be said.

For the central photo, I found a color photo of the band in concert at the Fillmore in August 1967. It was just about the only good color photo I could find of the band playing live in 1967 at all. I'm surprised such a well known band wasn't photographed on stage more often. If anyone knows of a better one, please let me know.

Looking for Songs

In putting together music for this blog, I have to track down a lot of hard-to-find songs. There are some songs I've been looking for for at least a year, sometimes much longer, and I've never been able to find. This blog is totally free; I don't ask for any sort of compensation (although feedback comments are very much appreciated!). However, if you can help find any of these songs, it would be very appreciated.

Aimee Mann - "Swanee River" (a bonus track to the Mental Illness album)
Camera Obscura - "Not Got a Title Yet"
Camera Obscura - "Ultimate Summer Preview" (both songs from the 1997 Camera Obscura EP)
Kim Weston - "Title Song from Motion Picture 'Changes'" (A-side from 1969)
Imelda May - "Rock Around with Ollie Vee" (bonus track to "Listen to Me: Buddy Holly" tribute album)
The Pretenders - "Day Tripper" (unreleased, played live in 1981)

That's it, for now. My "want list" is constantly changing, but these all have been bothering me for a while. Most of them are officially released, so they should exist somewhere. Again, any help would be appreciated. If you have one or more of these and want to share, just leave a comment.

The Grateful Dead - Bird Song - Non-Album Tracks (1970-1971)

Robert Hunter, who wrote most of the lyrics for the Grateful Dead, died last week. In tribute to his legacy, I'm posting more from the Dead.

From about 1970 to 1972, the Grateful Dead had a tremendous burst of creativity. Yet the band only released two studio albums during that time, both in 1970: "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty." They should have put out a lot more. Instead, the band's two main singer-songwriters, Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, each put out solo albums in 1971 that were filled with songs that would become standards for the band. Plus, a lot of new songs were put on live albums, especially "Skulls and Roses" and "Europe '72."

I've given myself the goal of compiling all those original songs onto studio albums in a similar vein to "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty." Like those albums, I've tried to create albums that are about 40 minutes long each, with short versions of songs compared to the band's usual live standards.

On the downside, there are very few publicly available studio outtakes. Also, I've avoided using the recordings from the two solo albums unless there's no other option, because I figure most Dead fans should have those albums already. But on the upside, there are mountains of officially released live recordings from that time in pristine sound quality. They can easily be made to sound like studio takes by removing the crowd noise. Besides, the Dead were played better live anyway, which is why they favored live albums at the time.

I've come up with so much original material from 1970 to 1972 that I was able to make four stray tracks albums! This is the first one. Well, almost all original material. For each of those four albums, I've allowed myself to include one cover song, if it's a song so closely identified with the band that many people assume they wrote it. In this case, it's "Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad."

Note that in addition to all those new originals, the band also played a ton of cover songs in those years. I plan to do something with the best of those later. Furthermore, the band played even more interesting songs in an acoustic format, mostly in 1970. I have plans for that too. But I want to deal with the original stray tracks first.

In order to figure out which songs to put on which of these four albums I'm making from that era, I consulted a list detailing the exact dates each song was played live for the first time. Then I divided those into four groups, one for each album. However, in some cases I moved a song from one group to another in order to have a good balance of songs sung by Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Ron 'Pigpen' McKennan.

Note that two of the recordings - "Deal" and "Greatest Story Ever Told" - date from 1972. But that's just a matter of finding the best live recordings. Both songs had their debuts in February 1971.

By the way, "Tastebud" is a very little known and rarely played original song by McKennan. It was first done in 1966, and I had a version of it on a stray tracks album covering that time period. But it was only played live a few times, and no version of it was released at the time. The band then brought it out of mothballs and tried it again in the studio in early 1970 with the idea of putting it on "Workingman's Dead," only to leave it unreleased again. I've included that version.

01 Bird Song (Grateful Dead)
02 Mason's Children (Grateful Dead)
03 Tastebud (Grateful Dead)
04 To Lay Me Down (Grateful Dead)
05 Greatest Story Ever Told (Grateful Dead)
06 Deal (Grateful Dead)
07 Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad (Grateful Dead)
08 Playing in the Band (Grateful Dead)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/H9bg9jhx

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/aCjmO7k8yyamCEx/file

For the cover art, I used some nice fan art. Unfortunately, it's been a while since I found it, and I don't remember who did it or where it came from. I do remember that I added the wood in the background, in imitation of the look of the "American Beauty" cover.

Various Artists - Covered: Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, Volume 3: 1962-1978

Here's the third and last of three "Covered" volumes containing the best songs from the songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

If you look at the mp3 tags, the first nine songs are from 1962 or 1963. The last eight songs cover a much greater time range, 1964 to 1978. What happened? For one thing, the Beatles hit it big in early 1964, totally changing the music scene. But also, most successful songwriters tend to have a "golden age" or a decade or two, followed by a long, slow decline. This follows that pattern.

In putting this series together, I haven't limited myself to songs co-written by Leiber and Stoller. If either of them were credited, or if there were others as well, I figure those songs are fair game too. One example of that is the country classic "Jackson," which was co-written by Leiber, but not Stoller.

An unusual song from a songwriting point of view is another all-time classic, "On Broadway." It was originally written by the great team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. However, they showed it to Leiber and Stoller, and they made major changes, so all four of them were credited. I'll post a "Covered" series for Mann and Weil later, and I would prefer not to put the exact same version of the same song on both. So I'm putting the Drifters' version on the Mann and Weil series, and I'm putting George Benson's version on this one. Both artists had big hits with the song. The same exact thing happened with "Only in America," so I'm putting different versions on this volume and the Mann and Weil series.

01 Ruby Baby (Dion)
02 I [Who Have Nothing] (Ben E. King)
03 Bossa Nova Baby (Elvis Presley)
04 My Heart Said [The Bossa Nova] (Irene Reid)
05 Searchin' (Hollies)
06 I'm a Woman (Peggy Lee)
07 Only in America (Drifters)
08 Poison Ivy (Rolling Stones)
09 Drip Drop (Dion)
10 Down Home Girl (Alvin Robinson)
11 Past, Present and Future (Shangri-Las)
12 Jackson (Johnny Cash & June Carter)
13 D. W. Washburn (Monkees)
14 Is That All There Is (Peggy Lee)
15 Some Cats Know (Peggy Lee)
16 Pearl's a Singer (Elkie Brooks)
17 On Broadway (George Benson)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/jRpL4FHX

alternate link:

https://bestfile.io/en/9BpohlROYvHYGpL/file

As I did with Volume 2, in order to use a good color photo, I had to resort to a photo that's outside the time period in question. I believe this photo is from 1987. Leiber is on the right.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

Various Artists - Covered: Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, Volume 2: 1959-1962

I've put together three albums of the best of the songwriting team Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. I feel like posting all three at once, so here's the second one in the "Covered" series.

This volume covers the years of their commercial and creative peak. So it only deals with four years, a lot less than for the other two volumes. The first volume was dominated by Elvis Presley songs, with nine. There are only two songs performed by him this time.

There are five song by the Coasters. There would have been one more, but I went with a version of "Three Cool Cats" by the Beatles. The Coasters had a minor hit with the song, while the Beatles were nobodies at the time. In fact, their recording comes from an early audition to try to win a record contract. But of course, they're the Beatles. ;)

01 Kansas City (Wilbert Harrison)
02 Along Came Jones (Coasters)
03 Dance with Me (Drifters)
04 That Is Rock and Roll (Coasters)
05 Love Potion No. 9 (Clovers)
06 There Goes My Baby (Drifters)
07 Charlie Brown (Coasters)
08 Smokey Joe's Cafe (Buddy Holly)
09 Saved (LaVern Baker)
10 Dirty, Dirty Feeling (Elvis Presley)
11 Shoppin' for Clothes (Coasters)
12 Stand by Me (Ben E. King)
13 Don Juan (LaVern Baker)
14 Little Egypt [Ying-Yang] (Coasters)
15 Spanish Harlem (Ben E. King)
16 Your Old Lady (Isley Brothers)
17 Some Other Guy (Richie Barrett)
18 She's Not You (Elvis Presley)
19 I Keep Forgettin' (Chuck Jackson)
20 Three Cool Cats (Beatles)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/sifCTkB1

alternate link:

https://bestfile.io/en/mv3DhjRTLea2O2O/file

As I mentioned in my write-up for volume 1, I don't like using black and white photos for the cover art. Luckily, I figured out a way to colorize such photos, so that's what I did for this one.

UPDATE: On May 15, 2026, I made a change to the picture. Leiber (the one with the clean shaven face) had his head down in the original. I found another photo taken in the same photo session that had his head up. I used Photoshop to swap the heads.

Various Artists - Covered: Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller, Volume 1: 1952-1958

So far with this blog, I'm been prioritizing posting stray tracks compilation albums for individual artists, since those usually can't be found elsewhere. But there are other things I want to post, and one major category is various artists compilations. So far, I've posted a little bit of that, especially my series of "Nuggets" compilations sorted by country. I still plan on posting the US and Britain compilations in that series, but I have to figure out how to organize it into manageable pieces. In the meantime, I'm going to start this new series, which I call "Covered."

In my opinion, songwriters are drastically underappreciated. I believe that, in the long run, the quality of the song matters more than the performance. But of course the performer gets nearly all the fame and glory, in the same way that movie stars are usually much better known than directors, producers, or screenwriters. In this series, I want to highlight some of the greatest songwriters, or songwriting teams, of all time. Some in this series, such as Carole King or Smokey Robinson, have been major performing stars as well, but I plan on looking exclusively at songs performed by others.

Sometimes, there have been various artists collections along these lines. For instance, there have been a couple of pretty good box sets dealing with the music of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. But even with the best official efforts, there are licensing problems that mean key songs are left out. On the flip side, there usually are many songs included that aren't that good. I'm making exactly what pleases me. I'm trying to include all the big hits, but if there's one I don't like, I'll probably resort to using a version of that song by someone else, or maybe not include it at all. And there usually are rarities that I do like and weren't hits at all.

The first in this series is the team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, because their success goes way back to the early 1950s. I'm not going to recount their story. If you don't know who they are, check out their Wikipedia entry as a starting point to learn more:

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

In short, they wrote over 70 hits, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, and are undoubtedly one of the best songwriting teams of all time. They produced a great number of hits as well, and ran their own record company. They especially fed a lot of hits to the Coasters and to Elvis Presley. I've usually selected the original hit, but sometimes I went with an alternate, especially because I didn't want to overload this with Coasters and Elvis performances. So, for instance, I went with Big Mama Thornton's version of "Hound Dog" instead of Presley's. Also, my rule is to only include one version of a particular song, even if two or more artists had big hits with it.

As I mentioned above, I try to include the hits, but not if I don't like them. For this album, probably the only controversial choice is that I don't like "Loving You" by Presley. I find it slow, it a boring and overdone manner. But it was a huge hit. So I found a rare fast version that I like much better, and I've included that instead.

I've broken up this collection into three albums of about 50 minutes of music each. This is the first. For all albums in this "Covered" series, the songs are ordered chronologically by year. But I don't go into enough detail to figure out the release order within each year.

01 Hard Times (Charles Brown)
02 Nosey Joe (Bull Moose Jackson)
03 Hound Dog (Big Mama Thornton)
04 Riot in Cell Block No. 9 (Robins)
05 I Smell a Rat (Big Mama Thornton)
06 Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots (Cheers)
07 Down in Mexico (Coasters)
08 Love Me (Elvis Presley)
09 Jailhouse Rock (Elvis Presley)
10 Fools Fall in Love (Drifters)
11 [You're So Square] Baby I Don't Care (Elvis Presley)
12 Lucky Lips (Ruth Brown)
13 Loving You [Fast Version] (Elvis Presley)
14 Santa Claus Is Back in Town (Elvis Presley)
15 Young Blood (Coasters)
16 Treat Me Nice (Elvis Presley)
17 Framed (Ritchie Valens)
18 Trouble (Elvis Presley)
19 King Creole (Elvis Presley)
20 Yakety Yak (Coasters)
21 Don't (Elvis Presley)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/n4AurRn8

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/kHOyhCGjJ3lYClc/file

As usual, I don't like using black and white photos for the cover art. But I couldn't find any color photos of Leiber and Stoller from the 1950s, so I colorized this one. I believe it dates from 1959. Leiber is on the left.

UPDATE: On September 29, 2024, I upgraded the photo with the use of the Krea AI program.

Van Morrison - Real, Real Gone - Non-Album Tracks (1978-1981)

I love all of Van Morrison's music all the way through the end of the 1970s. But that comes to a sudden halt for me with his 1980 album "Common One." He drastically changed his style to more of a jazzy, new age-y mood music. Then he kept to that style for the next ten years or so. Some people really like it, but I only like the occasional song until his 1990 album "Enlightenment," when he got back to more of a rootsy style.

Anyway, this is the last of the stray tracks albums I've made to cover his golden era from the late 1960s through the 1970s. (I should have posted this earlier, but I was trying to find a couple of songs for it, and I finally found them.) The music continues into 1981, but the songs from 1980 and 1981 generally keep to his earlier style.

The first song here, "Real, Real Gone," was one of the highlights of the 1990 album I mentioned above, "Enlightenment." But as can be seen here, it actually dates from much earlier, but he just sat on it for some reason. Perhaps it was due to that shift of styles, especially since he returned to it when his style shifted back.

Three songs - "I'm Ready," "John Brown's Body," and "Sax Instrumental No. 1" - were released as B-sides to various versions of Morrison's "Back on Top." This is odd, because "Back on Top" was released in 1999, and all these songs are from 1978. But it makes more sense if you consider that he had recently released the archival compilation "The Philosopher's Stone," and these songs apparently had just missed making the cut for that.

"Dead Girls of London" is a very strange song for Morrison. He's done soul, jazz, blues, country, folk, and in various combinations, but he's pretty much never done straight rock and roll, at least not since his days with "Them." And yet this song rocks. It was written by Frank Zappa and one of his band members, L. Shankar, but somehow Zappa talked Morrison into singing the lead vocals. (I'm guessing they were recording in the same recording studio at the time.) Zappa wanted to release the Morrison version, but Morrison was on a different record label and that label wouldn't give permission. So a shorter version without Morrison was released instead. The Morrison version didn't come out until a 2011 Zappa archival release.

In my opinion, "Wonderful Remark" is one of the great Morrison songs. It wasn't officially released until 1983, when it showed up on the "King of Comedy" soundtrack. But in fact it was written much earlier. I've included an early version on a 1972 stray tracks album. Even the "King of Comedy" version was actually recorded in 1981, which is why I've included it here.

Also, for sticklers like me, note that Morrison's song "Street Theory," which is from 1980, is almost exactly the same as "Come On Out Child," a song he did in 1975. I didn't realize the similarity until I was listening again to this album before posting it here, and I had a "Hey! That sounds familiar!" moment. "Come On Out Child," is unreleased, but I posted it on my stray tracks album "Not Working for You." "Street Theory" is from the official archival release "The Philosopher's Stone." I've added "Come On Out Child" to the subtitle, since it's the same lyrics and melody.

I've included two songs only as bonus tracks, "Bright Side of the Road" and "Cleaning Windows." That's because both are songs that were officially released on albums in that era, but these are different versions. "Bright Side of the Road" has a very different arrangement, and "Cleaning Windows" has somewhat different lyrics.

01 Real, Real Gone [First Version] (Van Morrison)
02 Stepping Out Queen, Part 2 (Van Morrison)
03 I'm Ready (Van Morrison)
04 John Brown's Body (Van Morrison)
05 Sax Instrumental No. 1 [Affirmation] (Van Morrison)
06 Dead Girls of London (Van Morrison & Frank Zappa)
07 Street Theory [Come On Out Child] (Van Morrison)
08 Down the Road I Go (Van Morrison)
09 Wonderful Remark (Van Morrison)
10 Mona (Van Morrison)

Bright Side of the Road [Alternate Version] (Van Morrison)
Cleaning Windows [Alternate Version] (Van Morrison)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/QhfEAu6y

The cover art photo is of Morrison waiting around back stage in 1980.

In September 2026, I used the Ask Gemini program to improve the image quality. 

Various Artists - Nuggets 8: Other Countries (1965-1971)

If you've been following this blog, you may have noticed that I've been posting a series of various artists "Nuggets' compilations. Basically, I really liked the two Rhino Records "Nuggets" box sets of garage rock from the 1960s and early 1970s, but I figured there was a lot of good music they'd left off for various reasons, and I tried my best to expand on them.

I organized things into eight collections of my own, organized geographically. This is the eighth. Here's how I did it:

1: United States
2: Britain
3: Netherlands
4: Australia & New Zealand
5: Canada
6: Scandinavia
7: European Continent
8: Other Countries

I've posted all of that here, except for the first two. I've been waiting on those because they're huge. The US one has over 400 songs and the British one has over 200. If there's interest, I could try to figure out how to subdivide that into more manageable album-sized chunks, so I could post it here. Frankly, I find the music outside the US and Britain more interesting, because it's just as good yet far less known.

Anyway, what "Other Countries" means is it's a grab bag dealing with all the countries not included in the previous seven compilations. Seven of the 16 songs here come from South Africa, which makes sense because it's a country with a big English speaking population culturally tied to the rock music culture of the US and Britain.

The rest of the selections are generally more strange. There are songs from India, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Japan. (I've included the countries of origin in the "comment" field of the mp3 tags for those who are curious.) I must admit that I have a strong bias in favor of English language songs, so I can understand what they're about. But a couple of songs I enjoyed so much that I included them even though they're in other languages.

A good example of this is "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" by Mohammed Rafi, which is kind of a Beatles knock off, but put through a very Indian filter. I recommend you watch the YouTube video for it. It's a hoot, and understandably has had over five million views. The video was even prominently featured in the 2001 movie "Ghost World."

A couple of the artists here are much more deserving than the song or two included here. That's especially the case for "Os Mutantes," a Brazilian band I adore. There's a ton of great Brazilian music in general, but that's beyond the scope of the "Nuggets" series, as it's mostly different genres of music. I only included one song from them because it was on one of the original Rhino "Nuggets" box sets. Los Shakers are also an interesting band. They were slavish Beatles clones in Uruguay, but they happened to be very good at it, with real songwriting ability (despite a limited grasp of English). I have a best of album from them. But I only put two of their songs here, to give a taste of what they were about.

I'm sure there are tons of great songs out there that I've missed. The further one goes from the US and Britain, the harder it is to pluck "nuggets" from obscurity. For instance, I know almost nothing about garage rock type music from India, but if "Jaan Pehechaan Ho" is any indication, there must be some other gems out there. If anyone has recommendations of songs I should add, please let me know.

This album is 55 minutes long.

01 Hungry for Love (A-Cads)
02 Jaan Pehechaan Ho (Mohammed Rafi)
03 Break It All (Los Shakers)
04 Inside Your Eyes [En Tu Mirada] (Los Vidrios Quebrados)
05 Always You (Los Shakers)
06 Bat Macumba (Os Mutantes)
07 Changing the Colors of Life (Los Chijuas)
08 Daughter of the Sun (Sharon Tandy & Les Fleur de Lys)
09 Hold On (Sharon Tandy & Les Fleur de Lys)
10 I Wish I Was Five (John Kongos & Scrugg)
11 I'm Just a Mops (Mops)
12 Master Jack (Four Jacks & a Jill)
13 Meshkalina (Traffic Sound)
14 It's a Sin to Go Away (We All Together)
15 See the Light (Flame)
16 He's Gonna Step on You Again (John Kongos)

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

A Soulseek Option

Some people have been complaining about difficulties in downloading the Zippyshare files. I know Zippyshare has issues, especially with pop-up ads as well as not working in some countries, especially Britain. I keep telling people to try downloading using different browsers or computers, installing ad blocker plug-ins, and using a VPN (virtual private network). I still recommend that. Having ad blockers and using a VPN is just smart for using the Internet in general, to reduce your hassles and protect your privacy.

I was hoping the Zippyshare problem in Britain (which started after I began this blog) would be resolved eventually, but it's been many months and I haven't heard of any change. Plus, some people outside of Britain are having trouble too. I still don't want to move on from Zippyshare, because it's easy and free for me to use, and most people are satisfied with it. But I now have an alternate way to access some of the music I've been posting here through the file sharing program Soulseek.

If you're not familiar with Soulseek, it's awesome. It's a key way I'm able to find some of the really rare music I post here. Basically, it's a file sharing program, much like how Napster used to be, but even better. It's free and easy to use. Here's the Wikipedia entry on it if you want to know more:

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

I have an account there, under the name "albumsthatshouldexist," and lately I've been posting a lot of the music I share here over there. So if you're having trouble with Zippyshare or just prefer the ease of use of Soulseek, you have a different option. I'm not posting my entire music collection there yet for a variety of reasons. One is that I'm a precise kind of person, and I don't want to offer something until I have it prepared with cover art and a write up and so forth. But if I've posted something here, there's no reason I couldn't make available over there too.

So far, I've shared on Soulseek all the albums I've created and posted here so far for the following artists:

Aretha Franklin
Beck
Belle & Sebastian
Bonnie Raitt
Carole King
CSNY
Derek & the Dominos
Dusty Springfield
Elliott Smith
Indigo Girls
Jackie DeShannon
Kinks
Kirsty MacColl
Larkin Poe
Led Zeppelin
Nick Drake
Nikki Bluhm & the Gramblers
Norah Jones
Paul Weller
Petra Haden
Ray Davies
Rockpile
Van Morrison

The reason I haven't shared more so far is that I want to do some minor tidying up before I share a folder. As just one example, every time I create album art, I made a .PSD file which I put in that album folder. But .PSD files are very big files that only open in Photoshop, and most people don't want them, or even know what to do with them. So I have to move those out and put them somewhere else. And there are a number of other things I want to do first like that.

That said, I'm working on sharing more. If you want any particular album I've posted here and you can't get it through Zippyshare, leave me a note and I'll share it through Soulseek.

By the way, for each album I post here, I keep a .JPG file of the cover art, if I've made one or otherwise have one. But the blog comments I post here are just here, so far. If someone wants to go through the bother of making text files out of each one and sending them to me, I could add those to the folders too, so people could get them through Soulseek as well. But that's another hassle I don't want to do. I recall at least one person left a comment that they saved the blog comments for each album they downloaded, so maybe that person could help out with that.

Chris Clark - Soul Sounds - Alternate Version (1967)

This is the second of three albums I've made of my favorite songs performed by Chris Clark. Clark is a tall, white, platinum blonde who sang soul music for the Motown label. See my previous post to get a run down of her life story.

Clark only released two albums, "Soul Sounds" in 1967 and "CC Rides Again" in 1969. This is only very loosely based on "Soul Sounds." In fact, only four of the songs on this version were released on that 1967 version. (Two more made it on my compilation of her 1965 and 1966 songs, since they predate 1967.)

One reason Clark never got her just due was because Motown didn't really know what to do with her. They released some sub-par stuff (often as part of Motown's strange obsession to entice the Las Vegas-esque "supper club" crowd), and they kept the vast majority of her recordings unreleased until decades later. So all but the four "Soul Sounds" songs mentioned above, plus one B-side and one other from the album, were unreleased at the time.

As with the previous Clark collection I've posted, I've tended to favor more upbeat material over ballads. Clark could sing just about anything soulfully, but I think she excelled more on the upbeat stuff. Any number of these songs should have been hits in a better world, especially the first two.

This album basically ends with four bonus tracks, even though I didn't label them as such.  Last week, when I was getting ready to post my three Clark albums, I did a double check on YouTube to see if I missed anything. I stumbled across an audio recording of Clark in concert, and it turns out it had been posted to YouTube just two hours earlier! On the plus side, the sound quality is surprisingly excellent, as good as any official album of that era. On the minus side, it's only 12 minutes long in total, plus two of the songs are versions of songs presented earlier on this album.

This is the only live Clark from her 1960s prime that I've ever heard of, so I've included it here despite the duplication of the two songs. It shows Clark must have put on an impressive live show. Hopefully, more of her live recordings will someday emerge (in the same way this live recording emerged for the first time mere days ago), and I'll be able to spin that off to an album of its own.

01 From Head to Toe (Chris Clark)
02 I Want to Go Back There Again (Chris Clark)
03 Got to Get You into My Life (Chris Clark)
04 Whisper You Love Me Boy (Chris Clark)
05 Day by Day or Never (Chris Clark)
06 I Love You (Chris Clark)
07 Take Me in Your Arms [Rock Me a Little While] (Chris Clark)
08 You've Got What It Takes (Chris Clark)
09 It Hurts to Be in Love (Chris Clark)
10 Since I Fell for You (Chris Clark)
11 Sweet Lovin' (Chris Clark)
12 I Just Wanna Be Lovin' You (Chris Clark)
13 Sweeter as the Days Go By (Chris Clark)
14 From Head to Toe [Live] (Chris Clark)
15 talk [Live] (Chris Clark)
16 Who Can I Turn To - It's Not Unusual - Yesterday - Feelin' Good - Who Can I Turn To [Live] (Chris Clark)
17 Got to Get You into My Life [Live] (Chris Clark)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15100214/ChrisCrk_1967_SoulSounds_atse.zip.html

At first, I was just going to use the official album cover, even though the music here is mostly different. However, I realized the photo of Clark in the middle of the cover is the exact same one as the one I used for my 1965-1966 Clark album. So I did use the exact official album cover, except I swapped out the center photo for a totally different one. I think that's fitting to show that this album is similar, yet different.

Richard Thompson - Rumor and Sigh - Acoustic Version (1991)

One thing I've tried to do with Richard Thompson's solo career is to make all-acoustic versions of his albums. He plays enough solo acoustic concerts, and there are enough quality bootlegs, that this is often doable. Unfortunately, he almost never plays every single song from any given album.

In this case, 1991's "Rumor and Sigh" is arguably his most popular album (it reached no. 32 in the charts in Britain, which is high by his standards), so he's played a lot of the songs. I was able to find good acoustic versions of 11 out of the 14 songs from the album, enough for an album that's 42 minutes long.

Three of the songs here were officially released, all of them coming from "The Life and Music Of" box set. Although the rest are from bootlegs, they're pretty much all from excellent sounding soundboards, so the quality is high throughout. In order to find the best versions, I didn't limit myself chronologically. So the performances range from 1989 to 2010.

"Rumor and Sigh" is not only probably Thompson's most popular album in terms of sales, it's arguably his best album too. Many songs on it became standards for him, most especially "1952 Vincent Black Lightning," which is an all-time classic for any artist. Time Magazine even listed it as one of the best 100 songs of the last 100 years. That song already was done in a solo acoustic style, so this version is hardly different. But pretty much all the others were done with a full band, so these versions are quite different and interesting.

01 Read about Love (Richard Thompson)
02 I Feel So Good (Richard Thompson)
03 I Misunderstood (Richard Thompson)
04 Why Must I Plead (Richard Thompson)
05 1952 Vincent Black Lightning (Richard Thompson)
06 Mystery Wind (Richard Thompson)
07 Don't Sit on My Jimmy Shands (Richard Thompson)
08 Keep Your Distance (Richard Thompson)
09 Mother Knows Best (Richard Thompson)
10 God Loves a Drunk (Richard Thompson)
11 Psycho Street (Richard Thompson)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15852278/RichrdT_1991_RumrandSghAcoustc_atse.zip.html

I put some effort into making the cover art for this album. I happened to know that an animated video was made for the song "I Feel So Good." (It's very good; check it out on YouTube.) The video was done in the same style as the album's cover, so I took a still from that, and the stole bits and pieces from the official album artwork to build the rest.

Van Morrison - Acoustic Versions, 1969-1970

I just posted an album of Van Morrison doing acoustic versions of his songs in a recording studio in 1968 and 1969. This is the continuation of that, with songs from 1969 and 1970. It all comes from one batch of recordings, but I like to break things up into album-sized chunks if I can. Both of these albums are about 40 minutes long.

Everything I said about the previous album holds true here. Like that album, the vocals were too loud in relation to the instruments for nearly all the songs, so I edited them to bring them more into balance. As with that album, I could only do so much, but I think these versions sound better than the popular bootlegs the songs come from, such as "Gypsy Soul" and "Van Morrison Gets His Chance to Wail."

Six of the first seven songs were recorded on or around December 1969, after the songs for the classic "Moodance" album were recorded, but before that album was released (in February 1970). So most of the songs were geared towards his next album, "His Band and Street Choir." I also included a fast version of the song "Come Running" that was recorded for "Moondance" in the summer of 1969. I put that on this album instead of the previous one because that has a different version of the same song. The rest of the songs were recorded in 1970 and also were meant for the "His Band and Street Choir," though one song, "When That Evening Sun Goes Down" would appear on the album after that instead, "Tupelo Honey."

I'm only including songs that don't appear on any studio albums from that era. However, I can include four unreleased songs - "I Can't Get It Straight," "Lorna," "Hey Where Are You," and "Bit by Bit" because I had two versions of those, so I was able to put one version on my series of stray tracks albums and the second version here. As I mentioned previously, Morrison wrote more good songs than he knew what to do with in 1968 and 1969, and some of them fell through the cracks and were forgotten, such as those four.

By the way, there was a sonic flaw towards the end of "If I Ever Needed Someone," a kind of crackling sound. I was able to remove most of it by patching in some repeated lyrics from earlier in the song, but a little bit of it wasn't fixable at the end of the last verse, due to lyrics that didn't get repeated.

Also, I did a lot of editing for the tenth track here, which is some dialogue between Morrison and presumably his record producer. On the bootleg I got this from, the vocals were so low as to be almost inaudible, so I moved them to a separate track and increased the volume a lot. It turns out the producer's vocals were much quieter than Morrison's probably because Morrison was right in front of a microphone and the producer wasn't. So I increased the producer's vocals even more. That worked, but the result was a lot of hiss, especially when the producer talked. To fix that, I used noise reduction. Normally, I'm loathe to use that since it degrades the music quality overall, but I think it was okay to use here, since it was done merely for talking and not actual music.

I wish I could continue this acoustic series into 1971 and beyond, but there's no more publicly available relevant source material after this. However, Morrison did play acoustically in concert later in the 1970s (though very rarely), and I plan on posting some of that here soon.

01 Virgo Clowns (Van Morrison)
02 Come Running [Fast Version] (Van Morrison)
03 If I Ever Needed Someone (Van Morrison)
04 I Can't Get It Straight (Van Morrison)
05 Lorna (Van Morrison)
06 Hey, Where Are You (Van Morrison)
07 Bit by Bit (Van Morrison)
08 Domino [Harmony Version] (Van Morrison)
09 When the Evening Sun Goes Down (Van Morrison)
10 talk (Van Morrison)
11 Domino (Van Morrison)
12 I'll Be Your Lover Too (Van Morrison)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/gotUu6WE

The photo for the cover art was taken in Woodstock, New York, in April 1970. As I did with the photo for the other Van Morrison acoustic album I just posted, I tinted the black and white photo with a blend of colors to try to jazz it up.

In September 2026, I used the Ask Gemini program to improve the image quality. At the same time, I used the program to colorize it. But I like the tinted version, so I've included that in the download zip as an option.

Van Morrison - Acoustic Versions, 1968-1969

If you've been following this blog, you should know I have a special fondness for acoustic music. I also really like Van Morrison and have posted lots of his music here. It turns out that Morrison has never released any kind of "Unplugged" album. However, he did play acoustically in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I'm going to post what I have of that. Here's the first such album.

My first priority with putting Van Morrison albums together was to create albums of all his stray tracks, the songs that weren't on any of his albums at the time. It turns out he has a lot of songs from around 1968 to 1970 that he didn't release then, and most of them still haven't been released. Many of them were acoustic performances done in the studio. I used a bunch of them to make the stray tracks albums "Nobody Really Knows" and "You Set My Soul on Fire." Here are links:

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/06/van-morrison-nobody-really-knows.html

https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2018/06/van-morrison-you-set-my-soul-on-fire.html

I got some of those songs from some popular bootlegs of overlapping acoustic material. But those bootlegs also had many acoustic versions of songs that were released on albums at this time. So this is the first of two albums collecting those "leftovers."

On some of these songs, it's just Morrison and his acoustic guitar. But more often, he's joined by a bass player. Sometimes, there are some other instruments, especially a flute, but occasionally some light drums, or backing vocals. Still, these are definitely acoustic versions.

One problem I noticed though was that often Morrison's vocals were so loud compared to the guitar and the other music that it almost was as if they were acappella recordings. Happily, I figured out a way to improve this somewhat. I made some changes in Audacity that brought up the volume of the guitar and other instruments relative to the vocals. I liked the result so much that I did the same for a few tracks on the two albums I linked to above, and I've updated the mp3 download links for those. That said, the mix still isn't ideal, because I can only do so much with my limited editing tools. But at least it's better.

The first five songs were recorded in the summer of 1968, when the classic album "Astral Weeks" was recorded. The next four songs were recorded in the summer of 1969, when the similarly classic album "Moondance" was recorded. A "super deluxe" version of "Moondance" has been released with three albums of outtakes, yet none of these acoustic versions were included. I wonder why. The last song, "Domino," comes from the end of 1969. I included it here because I have three acoustic versions of "Domino," each of which is different and interesting. But I didn't want to put all three on the same album, so I stuck one here and the other two on the following album.

Note that three of the songs - "Bayou Girl," "I Need Your Kind of Loving," and "Wild Night" - are songs that weren't included on either "Astral Weeks" or "Moondance." For the first two songs, that's because I had two versions of still unreleased songs, so I used one version for the stray tracks albums mentioned above, and put the other versions here. A full band version of "Wild Night" ultimately appeared on the 1971 album "Tupelo Honey," but it was actually first recorded in 1968.

(It turns out Morrison wrote a great many songs around 1968 and 1969, and kept many of them for later. There must have been something magical in the air, because others like Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Lou Reed, and Cat Stevens also wrote many songs in those years, and continued to draw on that backlog years later.)

01 The Way Young Lovers Do (Van Morrison)
02 Ballerina (Van Morrison)
03 I Need Your Kind of Loving (Van Morrison)
04 Wild Night (Van Morrison)
05 Bayou Girl (Van Morrison)
06 Caravan (Van Morrison)
07 And It Stoned Me (Van Morrison)
08 These Dreams of You (Van Morrison)
09 Come Running (Van Morrison)
10 Domino [Flute Version] (Van Morrison)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ywE4ihrZ

I find the photo I chose for the cover art fascinating. It was taken at a concert at The Scene in New York City on January 27, 1969. It looks like such a small club that I'll bet only a few dozen people were there. Boy, would that have been an interesting show to attend, given that it was right between the "Astral Weeks" and "Moondance" albums! (Sadly, no bootlegs of him survive from 1969, not even in horrible sound quality.) Even though there's a drum kit in back, other photos from that night show that Morrison was only accompanied by his own acoustic guitar, plus a bassist and flutist, which was the case on many of the recordings on this album.

Since the photo was in black and white, I tried to jazz it up by colorize it with a blend from red to blue.

In September 2026, I used the Ask Gemini program to improve the image quality. I also used that program to finally fully colorize it.

Derek & the Dominos - Cincinnati Music Hall, Cincinnati, OH, 11-26-1970

First things first: I should warn you that the sound quality for this concert is not great. Good, but not great. Basically, when it comes to live Derek and the Dominos, there are the two nights at the Fillmore East, which are excellent soundboards that I posted here recently, and there's everything else. This is probably the best of the rest, the best of the audience bootlegs. But Eric Clapton was at his absolute peak when playing as part of Derek and the Dominos, so I'm willing to put up with less than pristine sound quality.

In addition to the relatively good sound quality, there are a couple of other good reasons why the concert stands out as the best of all live recordings for the band, not counting the Fillmore East shows. The concert took place a month after the Fillmore East shows, and the band got better as they went on. Also, the band played some songs they hardly ever did: "Call It Stormy Monday," a medley of two Chuck Berry songs "Little Queenie" and "Sweet Little Rock and Roller," and "Everyday I Have the Blues." Also, it was rare for them to play "Let It Rain" without a long drum solo in the middle of it.

The show is almost an hour and a half long. Note that, for "Let It Rain" there was a big dropout during the second verse. I tried to fix it by patching in the second verse from a different concert. Unfortunately, the difference is pretty obvious. But I figure that's better than what the patch covered up.

Note that when I originally posted this album, I was under the impression that the band was joined by blues legend B. B. King for the encore. But while "Everyday I Have the Blues" is a song closely associated with King, and the vocals sound a lot like him, I got some comments from people who went to the concert, and claim that King wasn't there. Instead, the vocals on the encore almost certainly belong to Cliff Bennett, the lead singer of Toe Fat, the opening act.

01 talk (Derek & the Dominos)
02 Got to Get Better in a Little While (Derek & the Dominos)
03 talk (Derek & the Dominos)
04 Roll It Over (Derek & the Dominos)
05 Blues Power (Derek & the Dominos)
06 Call It Stormy Monday (Derek & the Dominos)
07 Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad (Derek & the Dominos)
08 Little Queenie - Sweet Little Rock and Roller (Derek & the Dominos)
09 Tell the Truth (Derek & the Dominos)
10 Let It Rain (Derek & the Dominos)
11 Everyday I Have the Blues (Derek & the Dominos & Toe Fat)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/NhUfK9No

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/S2KuxfinpAqEgS2/file

I'm glad to say the photo I used for the cover art actually comes from the concert in question. I used a different photo from this same concert for my "Live and Rare" Derek and the Dominos compilation. (By the way, I had one song on that album that's from this concert, so I'm taking it off.)

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

The Kinks - BBC Sessions, Volume 7: Soap Opera Live - New Victoria Theatre, London, Britain, 6-14-1975

Us Kinks fans are lucky this concert exists. You see, in the early to mid-1970s, Ray Davies, leader of the Kinks, was really into concept albums. He recorded four of them in a row. When touring, he presented them in full, essentially putting on musicals more than typical rock concerts. But out of all his concept albums, only this one was recorded with excellent soundboard quality. That's because one show was recorded for a BBC TV show. This is the audio to that show.

The Kinks played all of their 1975 "Soap Opera" album, and not much else. (There's one medley of three early hits worked into the concept, and one song from the album, "Holiday Romance," wasn't played  since it didn't fit into the story that well.) In order not to alienate audience members who wanted to hear the old songs, the Kinks would play one set of older songs and then finish by playing the "Soap Opera" album. Unfortunately, the BBC only televised the "Soap Opera" part, so that's all there is here.

The "Soap Opera" album is 38 minutes long, and this concert is 57 minutes long. The extra length is mainly due to the dialogue that takes place between songs. Pretty much all the talking takes place between Ray Davies' character and an actress (June Ritchie) playing his wife. I think the dialogue is entertaining and to the point. More importantly, the "Soap Opera" concept doesn't make much sense on the album. But presented this way, it makes a coherent, intelligent story. Once you hear this, you'll be able to appreciate the album much better.

Only three of the songs from this show have been officially released, as bonus tracks to a later version of the "Soap Opera" album. The sound quality of those are the same as the rest of the songs here.

UPDATE: On October 22, 2025, I updated the mp3 download file. The music is exactly the same. But I renumbered the volume number in the title (from 6 to 7), and changed the artwork to match that. 

01 Everybody's a Star [Starmaker] (Kinks)
02 talk (Kinks)
03 Ordinary People (Kinks)
04 talk (Kinks)
05 Rush Hour Blues (Kinks)
06 talk (Kinks)
07 Nine to Five (Kinks)
08 When Work Is Over (Kinks)
09 Have Another Drink (Kinks)
10 talk (Kinks)
11 Underneath the Neon Sign (Kinks)
12 talk (Kinks)
13 You Make It All Worthwhile (Kinks)
14 Ordinary People [Reprise] (Kinks)
15 talk (Kinks)
16 A Well Respected Man - Dedicated Follower of Fashion - Sunny Afternoon (Kinks)
17 talk (Kinks)
18 Ducks on the Wall (Kinks)
19 talk (Kinks)
20 [A] Face in the Crowd (Kinks)
21 talk (Kinks)
22 You Can't Stop the Music (Kinks)
23 Everybody's a Star [Starmaker] [Reprise] (Kinks) 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/UBtkDZ3a

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/HCeAadEC90pIirA/file

The cover art photo doesn't come from this exact show, although you can find YouTube videos of the whole thing. But it does come from the same tour, so they would have been wearing the same outfits. I believe this photo depicts the moment Ray Davies' character is helped into a business suit when he takes on his "Norman" persona.

Chris Clark - Love Gone Bad - Selected Best Tracks (1965-1966)

I'm a very big fan of music from the Motown record label in the 1960s and early 1970s. Their songs were very hit or miss, but when they hit, it was fantastic. But as great as those many Motown hits were, there were many songs, and even entire artists, who were overlooked. Chris Clark is one of those overlooked artists, so I'm going to try to raise her profile here.

In the 1960s, Clark had a remarkable, soulful voice. But she was white. Not only that, but she was white, tall (six feet high), and had platinum blonde hair. This was a problem, because she didn't just want to do "blue-eyed soul" mainly targeted at white audiences, like the Righteous Brothers or Mitch Ryder did, she wanted to do the same type of music as the big Motown stars, and be treated like them. But the 1960s were a decade of great racial tensions. When her songs were played on the radio, listeners would assume that she was black at first. But then her records often would no longer be played when it was eventually discovered she was white, and she sometimes even got booed when she played in front of black audiences. And yet her music was too "soulful" for most white audiences.

On top of all that, it turns out that Clark was romantically linked to Berry Gordy, the head of Motown Records, for a couple of years. This led many people to assume that she probably had no talent and was just given a chance to record some songs due to sleeping with the boss. On top of that, Gordy was black, and interracial romances were controversial back in those days.

But it turns out she was more than just a pretty face, or even just a pretty face with a great voice. She had many talents beyond singing. For instance, she actually cowrote many of her songs, though she usually went uncredited. After her singing career petered out at the end of the 1960s, she stayed with Motown and took on a variety of creative roles, eventually becoming "head of creative affairs" for the whole company. She got an Academy Award nomination for cowriting the screenplay to the movie "Lady Sings the Blues." Later in life, she's made a career out of being a painter. In an alternate universe, she could have had a big and long singing career if she'd been able to direct that creative energy towards music.

Ironically, given her romance with Gordy, she actually was treated badly by Gordy and Motown when it came to her musical career. Gordy had a consistent history of pushing the vast majority of his company's resources to promote his favorite artists, especially the Supremes, and all but ignoring many other artists who arguably had more potential. Clark was in the latter category. Motown did release some singles from her, and two albums, one in 1967 and the other in 1969. But she generally got the leftover songs the big Motown stars didn't want, and the vast majority of what she recorded never got released until decades later.

This is the first of three Chris Clark albums I plan on posting. There isn't much overlap between the songs on those three albums and her two studio albums, since most of her best stuff remained in the can at the time.

One song on this album, "Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday," is a case in point. Clark was the very first artist to record this song, in 1966. Her version should have been a hit, but it went unreleased. Stevie Wonder later did a version of it that was closely modeled on Clark's version, and he had a big hit with it in 1969, going all the way to number two with it in Britain.

Clark's recorded output is littered with similar should-have-been hits, including songs that actually were released as singles but went nowhere. For instance, "Love's Gone Bad" is her best known song. It has become better known over the years, thanks to it being included in lots of Motown various artists hit compilations. If you listen to it, it sounds like a sure-fire hit. But actually, it only made it to 105 on the US pop chart, and 41 on the US R&B chart. So even that one wasn't a hit. Perhaps her being a white woman singing soul music at a time of considerable racial tension doomed her chances, but I think more of it had to do with Motown merely going through the motions of promoting her.

Happily, the things that held her back in the 1960s become increasingly moot as time moves on. Today, we can just listen to the music and not worry much about what was unreleased or not promoted, and judge it on its own merits. I think Clark was a great soul singer who would often take B-quality material and make it sound like A-quality material. In a better world (including a color-blind world), she should have been one of the Motown greats, especially if she'd been given better material. I hope you'll listen and agree.

All the songs on this album pre-date her first album, which would come out in 1967, though a couple of the songs would end up on it. Only five of the 13 songs here were released at the time. I haven't come close to including all of her stuff. Gordy had a bad habit of trying to saddle his Motown artists with "supper club" music, cheesy mainstream pop supposed to appeal to white audiences. I've tended to avoid that and favored her more upbeat songs that are truer to the real Motown sound.

This album is only 37 minutes long, but that was typical of Motown albums for that era. In fact, it's probably longer than average. Clark's 1967 album, which I will deal with in my next post about her, was 31 minutes long.

01 Do Right Baby, Do Right (Chris Clark)
02 Don't Be Too Long (Chris Clark)
03 In the Neighbourhood (Chris Clark)
04 I Just Can't Forget Him (Chris Clark)
05 Check Yourself (Chris Clark)
06 Everything Is Good about You (Chris Clark)
07 Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday (Chris Clark)
08 Do I Love You [Indeed I Do] (Chris Clark)
09 Love's Gone Bad (Chris Clark)
10 Mighty Good Lovin' (Chris Clark)
11 Put Yourself in My Place (Chris Clark)
12 Something's Wrong (Chris Clark)
13 Never Trust a Man (Chris Clark)
14 I Still Love You (Chris Clark)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15100181/ChrisCrk_1965-1966_LoveGoneBad_atse.zip.html

I named this album "Love Gone Bad" instead of "Love's Gone Bad," the title of her almost-hit, because of this  cover I found that uses the phrase "Love Gone Bad." (I'm guessing it was some kind of repackaging of her first album.) I made a change by replacing a "mono" logo with a "stereo" one, since most or all of the songs are in stereo.

Kirsty MacColl - BBC Sessions, Volume 4: London Fleadh Festival, London, Britain, 6-10-1995

Kirsty MacColl isn't well known for her live performances. She never released a live album, and there aren't even many popular bootlegs for her. She was a naturally shy person and didn't tour that much. But she also was an excellent vocalist, and she could "bring it" in a live setting, as she did here. The setlist pretty much serves as a "best of" for her career to that point.

It seems most of her shows were less than an hour long, and that's the case here. When I first posted this, I used an excellent soundboard bootleg source. In 2023, it was released as part of a box set, but the sound quality was basically unchanged.

The last song actually wasn't part of MacColl's set. The concert was part of a festival with lots of artists, and one of the other artists was Shane MacGowan and the Popes. Since MacColl had a hit duet with MacGown and the Pogues a few years earlier with the song "Fairytale of New York," it made sense that she would join MacGowan's set for that song, which she did. (MacGowan can also be heard at the very start of this album as the one who introduced MacColl's set.) MacGowan was clearly drunk and barely able to get to his lines sometimes, but that should come as no surprise to those who have followed his career.

I believe all the songs are MacColl originals except for "Miss Otis Regrets" (by Cole Porter), "I Wanna Be Sedated" (by the Ramones), "A New England" (by Billy Bragg), and "Fairytale of New York" (by the Pogues).

This concert is only 47 minutes long. 

UPDATE: On November 26, 2023, I updated the album title and the cover art. I found out this concert was broadcast by the BBC, so I've made it "Volume 4" in my BBC series. However, the music remains the same.

01 Tread Lightly (Kirsty MacColl)
02 Caroline (Kirsty MacColl)
03 They Don't Know (Kirsty MacColl)
04 Innocence (Kirsty MacColl)
05 Free World (Kirsty MacColl)
06 Miss Otis Regrets (Kirsty MacColl)
07 talk (Kirsty MacColl)
08 My Affair (Kirsty MacColl)
09 Don't Come the Cowboy with Me, Sonny Jim (Kirsty MacColl)
10 Walking Down Madison (Kirsty MacColl)
11 A New England (Kirsty MacColl)
12 I Wanna Be Sedated (Kirsty MacColl)
13 Fairytale of New York (Kirsty MacColl & Shane MacGowan & the Popes)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15987508/KirstyMacC_1995c_BBSessonsVolum4LondnFleadhFstivlLondnBrtain__6-10-1995_atse.zip.html

I'm happy to say that the photo of MacColl actually comes from the concert in question. Note that even though she's holding an acoustic guitar, this is a full-band performance, not a solo acoustic one.

Bonnie Raitt - Special Delivery Blues - Non-Album Tracks (1972-1974)

Recently, I posted several albums from early in Bonnie Raitt's career. One, which I titled "Blender Blues," is a stray tracks album covering 1970 to 1972. This is the sequel to that, with more stray tracks from 1972 to 1974. The other albums are complete live concerts from 1971 and 1972. I have many more stray tracks compilations to come, since she's had a long and successful career.

With these stray tracks albums, my goal is to gather all the good songs not on the studio albums of that time. That means that the exact versions of the first four songs here come from one of those concerts I posted in full. I wish I could have used different versions, but there aren't many bootlegs from Raitt's early years, so we're lucky to have these songs at all.

The rest of the songs are not on anything else I've posted. All of them are unreleased versions from concerts. Some of them are exceedingly rare, even for bootlegs. For instance, I've never seen  her version of the Rolling Stones' "Under My Thumb" on any bootleg. Instead, I found it as a free download from an online music magazine. "The Spider and the Fly," another early Rolling Stones song, is similarly rare.

For the first few years of Raitt's career, she didn't make enough money to be able to hire a full band to back her in concerts. As a result, the first few songs here are done acoustically, with just a bassist and some other instrumentation occasionally. But by 1973 she did start performing with a full band, so this album transitions to a fuller sound as it proceeds chronologically.

Although Raitt can and does write very good songs, she's only done so occasionally, and the vast majority of her repertoire is made up of covers. I believe all the songs here are cover versions. 

I've included "Big Road" even though a version of it is on her 1971 album "Bonnie Raitt." That's because this version is very different. Three well known blues musicians joined her in concert for this version, and they all take turns soloing.

I've only included "I Almost Lost My Mind" as a bonus track because it's mostly a performance by another blues musician, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. The difference with "Big Road" is that Raitt does all the singing for "Big Road," but Crudup dominates on this song, with Raitt, basically reduced to backing vocals.  But still, it's interesting, so it makes it here as a bonus track.

01 Special Delivery Blues (Bonnie Raitt)
02 Can't Find My Way Home (Bonnie Raitt)
03 Do Right Woman, Do Right Man (Bonnie Raitt with Maria Muldaur)
04 Baby What You Want Me to Do (Bonnie Raitt with Maria Muldaur)
05 Under My Thumb (Bonnie Raitt)
06 The Spider and the Fly (Bonnie Raitt)
07 Baby, I Love You (Bonnie Raitt)
08 Big Boy Pete - Function at the Junction (Jackson Browne & Bonnie Raitt)
09 Don't Fight It (Bonnie Raitt)
10 Don't Talk Now (Bonnie Raitt)
11 Big Road (Bonnie Raitt with Junior Wells, Buddy Guy & A. C. Reed)

I Almost Lost My Mind (Arthur 'Big Boy' Crudup & Bonnie Raitt)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/SBdkuKx6 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/82osfwfg26v6JHq/file

I don't remember where I found the cover art photo, but I believe it's from around 1972.

The Allman Brothers Band - Stormy Monday - Non-Album Tracks (1970)

First things first: who had the "brilliant" idea to have the Allman Brothers Band pose completely naked for a photo shoot? (In the photo I've used for the cover art, their private parts are strategically hidden, but that's not the case in some other photos from that shoot.) Somehow, I don't think that would fly today, at least for their type of music. But those definitely were different times. I suspect a lot of mushrooms were consumed. Anyway...

As I do with my stray tracks albums, I've collected all the songs I could find that didn't appear on studio albums at the time. A couple of songs here should be very familiar to fans of the band: "Statesboro Blues" and "Hoochie Coochie Man." Both of those have featured on popular live albums. But I've included them because they never were on any studio albums. "Statesboro Blues" is a studio version. For "Hoochie Coochie Man," I took a lesser known live version and removed the audience noise.

All the other songs are much less known, I'd imagine. "One More Ride" is an original (cowritten by Gregg Allman and Dickey Betts). It was never played live, and only an instrumental version has been officially released. I've edited the song, added the vocals from a muddy sounding bootleg version with vocals to the instrumental version. However, some people might not like what I did, or don't mind the muddy sound. So I've included the muddy version as a bonus track. It's three minutes longer, with a drum solo and then a second guitar solo. But the edited version I've put as the first track features a different guitar solo.

The remaining three songs are cover versions that the band occasionally did in concert. "Call It Stormy Monday" and "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town" are well known blues songs, and I was able to find versions with excellent sound. (I removed the audience noise, as I often do.) "Oh Pretty Woman" is much less known. Note that this is NOT the huge Roy Orbison hit "Oh, Pretty Woman" with a comma after the "Oh." Instead, it's a song by Albert King. Unfortunately, the band played this very rarely (with bassist Berry Oakley on vocals, as he is on "Hoochie Coochie Man), and the best version I could find only has decent sound, from an audience bootleg. But I still think it's worth inclusion, since the band didn't play that many different songs back in 1970.

This album is 38 minutes long, not including the bonus track.

01 One More Ride [Edit] (Allman Brothers Band)
02 Statesboro Blues (Allman Brothers Band)
03 Oh Pretty Woman (Allman Brothers Band)
04 Hoochie Coochie Man (Allman Brothers Band)
05 I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town (Allman Brothers Band)
06 Call It Stormy Monday (Allman Brothers Band)

One More Ride [Long Version] (Allman Brothers Band)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15285353/TAllmanBB_1970_StrmyMondy_atse.zip.html

The naked photo used for the cover art (discussed above) comes from some album art by the band in 1970. But they didn't use it as the cover art, so I figure it's fair game to use here. I stole the text for the band name from the "Beginnings" compilation album.

U2 - Wide Awake in America - Expanded Version (1984-1985)

In 1984, U2 released the acclaimed album "The Unforgettable Fire." In 1985, they weren't ready to put out a new album yet (and in fact they wouldn't do so until 1987), so to fill the gap they released an EP called "Wide Awake in America." One side consisted of two songs that were outtakes from "The Unforgettable Fire" sessions, and the other side contained two live versions of songs from that album.

This album includes the two studio songs from "Wide Awake in America." I've decided to keep that title and cover art, but this has a lot more, adding nine more songs to it into a normal length studio album. Four songs are B-sides. Two more songs would later be released on a deluxe version of "The Unforgettable Fire."

That leaves just three songs at the end. One, "Sweet Jane," is a live Lone Justice cover of the famous Velvet Underground. Although it's essentially a Lone Justice song, from one of their compilation albums, I decided to include it because Bono joined them and sang about half of the lyrics. "Silver and Gold" is a U2 song released on a 1985 various artists album. Finally, "Driving to Midnight Mass, Dublin, Christmas Eve" is a poem that Bono recites (though he didn't write it).

The eleven songs here (not counting the bonus tracks discussed below) total 43 minutes, which makes for a nice album length. U2 was into creating moody soundscapes during this time period, so four of the songs are instrumentals. Maybe that's why they felt they didn't have enough material for another album in 1985.

I've added three bonus tracks. One is a cover of U2 doing the Bruce Springsteen song "My Hometown." Springsteen had a hit with it just the year before. It seems odd at first that U2 would cover it, especially since U2 hardly did any covers at all at the time. But consider the lyrics of the song, and consider that the band played the song in Dublin, their hometown, with members of their families in the audience. I'm only including it as a bonus track due to the sound quality. It comes from an audience bootleg. The sound is okay, but not up to the level of all the other songs, which are officially released.

The other two bonus tracks are the two live songs from the "Wide Awake in America" EP. Personally, I put these elsewhere in my music collection, with other live U2 songs from that era. But you may well organize things differently, so I'm including them here to give you options.

01 Boomerang I [Instrumental] (U2)
02 Love Comes Tumbling (U2)
03 The Three Sunrises (U2)
04 60 Seconds in Kingdom Come [Instrumental] (U2)
05 Boomerang II (U2)
06 Bass Trap [Instrumental] (U2)
07 Disappearing Act (U2)
08 Yoshino Blossom [Instrumental] (U2)
09 Sweet Jane (Lone Justice & Bono)
10 Silver and Gold [Sun City Version] (U2)
11 Driving to Midnight Mass, Dublin, Christmas Eve (Bono)

A Sort of Homecoming [Live] (U2)
Bad [Live] (U2)
My Hometown (U2)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/wNY6zh5M

The cover art is just the official cover of the EP.

The Pretty Things - Wild and Free - Non-Album Tracks (1970-1971)

Sigh. I feel bad for the Pretty Things. I've already posted four albums by them, showing that the material they released in the 1960s was only about half of what they should have made widely available, both in terms of quality and quantity. It turns out their problems continued into the 1970s, as this post shows.

In June 1970, the Pretty Things released the album "Parachute," which was widely acclaimed but didn't sell well. They didn't release their next album, "Freeway Madness," until the end of 1972. By the time they did, their style had changed, going in more of a glam rock or hard rock direction. It turns out they had enough material to release a quality album in 1971. This is that album.

What they did instead was release six songs exclusively as A- and B-sides to singles in 1970. Then, in 1971, they recorded three more good songs that didn't get released until decades later. Plus, they played two songs at the BBC not appearing anywhere else that also didn't get released until decades later. If you add it all up, it makes for an album that's 42 minutes long, which would have been an ideal album length back in those days.

I like all these songs, but I'm not a big fan of the musical direction the band pursued from 1972 onwards. So I don't plan to post any more another albums of studio stray tracks from this band. However, I do have some albums of them playing at the BBC in the 1960s and early 1970s that I plan on posting later.

01 Blue Serge Blues (Pretty Things)
02 October 26 (Pretty Things)
03 Cold Stone (Pretty Things)
04 Stone-Hearted Mama (Pretty Things)
05 Summertime (Pretty Things)
06 Circus Mind (Pretty Things)
07 I’d Love Her If I Knew What to Do (Pretty Things)
08 Everything You Do Is Fine (Pretty Things)
09 Wild and Free (Pretty Things)
10 Slow Beginnings (Pretty Things)
11 Sweet Orphan Lady [Spider Woman] (Pretty Things)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16700877/TPRETTYTHGS1970-1971_WldndFree_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo is of the band in 1971.