Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo - Jane Street Theater, New York City, 8-25-2000

I just posted a Ray Davies stray tracks album, and that got me thinking about this concert. I gave it another listen today and decided to post it here, because it's a fantastic concert. The sound is very good, the performance is solid, but what I most like about it is that it's kind of a dream concert for serious Kinks fans, because Davies didn't play many of his overplayed hits, and instead played lots of new songs and rarely played obscure gems.

Davies' solo career got off to a good start in 1998 with "Storyteller," a live acoustic album with lots of new songs. By 2000, he had enough songs for a solid new album, but apparently he had trouble getting a record contract. (He alludes to his lack of a record contract in this concert, in comments made before "The Deal".) Davies didn't have a band at the time, but he got together with Yo La Tengo, who are huge Kinks fans, so he could try out his new songs in front of an audience. They only played three shows together, all at Jane Street Theater in New York City. This is the final night.

All total, I count 10 then-unreleased songs, for a total of nearly one hour out of the two hours in this recording. This is the only time I know of when Davies ever played so many unreleased songs in concert, since he usually doesn't play any at all. Most of the songs would find their way onto his next solo album, "Other People's Lives," which strangely wouldn't get released until six years later. But one, "The Deal," wouldn't get released until the "Americana" album in 2017.Two more, "Americana (Hey Big Fat Cowboy)" and "Otis Riffs," still haven't been released. (Note that "Americana (Hey Big Fat Cowboy)" is not to be confused with "Americana," a song on the "Americana" album.)

Yo La Tengo pushed Davies to play some of their favorite obscure Kinks songs as well. Thus, he played great songs he'd rarely or never done in concert before, like "This Is Where I Belong," "No Return," "Animal Farm," "I Go to Sleep," and "Two Sisters." At one point, he joked that playing such songs was the price he had to pay the band in order for them to agree to back him.

Note that this recording is only an audience bootleg, not a soundboard. But sometimes audience recordings sound as good as or even better than a soundboard. This is one of those times. Admittedly, the recording had lots of volume problems, but I managed to fix them. For instance, the clapping at the end of each song was way too loud, so I lowered that. Also, the talking between songs was way too quiet, so I boosted that. The acoustic songs were too quiet compared to the full-band ones, so I boosted those as well. I made a number of other tweaks, including losing some tuning and other dead air between songs while keeping all of Davie's talking. The end result is one that sounds really good, in my opinion.

By the way, the first two songs aren't actually from the same concert, but they are from the same three night series with Yo La Tengo. "Village Green" is from two nights earlier, and "Two Sisters" is from one night earlier. The setlists were almost exactly the same all three nights, but these were the rare cases when different songs were played.

"Low Budget" was the last song played, but the recording got cut off only a minute or two into the song, so I didn't include that.

01 Village Green (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
02 Two Sisters (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
03 To the Bone (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
04 Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
05 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
06 Animal (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
07 My Next Door Neighbour (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
08 Creatures of Little Faith (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
09 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
10 Animal Farm (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
11 No Return (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
12 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
13 Things Are Gonna Change [The Morning After] (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
14 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
15 The Deal (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
16 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
17 Americana [Hey Big Fat Cowboy] (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
18 Empty Room (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
19 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
20 Stand Up Comic (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
21 All Day and All of the Night (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
22 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
23 Celluloid Heroes (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
24 I Go to Sleep (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
25 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
26 My Diary (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
27 I'm Not Like Everybody Else (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
28 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
29 This Strange Effect (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
30 Otis Riffs (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
31 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
32 Vietnam Cowboy (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
33 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
34 This Is Where I Belong (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
35 Where Have All the Good Times Gone (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
36 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
37 Thanksgiving Day (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
38 You Really Got Me (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
39 talk (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
40 I Need You (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)
41 Till the End of the Day (Ray Davies with Yo La Tengo)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/CTfiK9xV 

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Lgis5b0vsN0XtDw/file

I'm happy to say that although the photo used for the cover art isn't from the concert in question, it's close. It's from just two nights earlier, August 23rd, at the same location and with the same band. The first song actually comes from that show. I used the Krea AI program to sharpen the image a bit.

Ray Davies - Sane - Non-Album Tracks (2002-2012)

If you've been following this blog, you may have noticed that the Kinks are one of my favorites bands and I've been posting a lot of stuff from them. Not surprisingly, my interest extends to the solo career of Ray Davies, the band's main singer and songwriter. I'm going to make an effort to post more from his post-Kinks solo career too.

Unfortunately, he hasn't released as much material as one would expect. For instance, he went from 1998 to 2006 without releasing an album, apparently because he couldn't get a record deal on terms that he was happy with. This is a collection of stray tracks, but there aren't that many tracks, relatively speaking. He almost never plays unreleased songs in concert, and bootlegs of solo studio recordings haven't leaked. I had to stretch out over an entire decade to find enough songs to make up an album.

But, happily, what's lacking in quantity is made up for with quality. All these songs are solid. In fact, I'd say this is just as good a listen as his albums from around the same time. For instance, I'd consider "Thanksgiving Day" to be one of his very best solo songs, but it only was released as a bonus track for one of his albums.

I've kind of cheated a bit in that two of the songs here - "Vietnam Cowboys" and "The Voodoo Walk" - appear on one of those albums. But these are demo versions that were released as bonus tracks. I figure they're different enough to merit inclusion.

The last four songs are officially unreleased. One, "Sane," is a studio recording that somehow got released on the Internet, but never actually appeared on record. The other three are rare examples of unreleased songs that got played in concert. In his introduction to "Depressed I Am Not," he mentioned that song was one of many songs he wrote for Frank Sinatra (!) that remain unreleased. I suspect he has a large number of unreleased songs in the vaults. I hope he'll share more with us someday.

01 Yours Sincerely, Confused N10 (Ray Davies with Jools Holland)
02 Thanksgiving Day (Ray Davies)
03 Angola [Wrong Side of the Law] (Ray Davies)
04 I, The Victim (Ray Davies)
05 Vietnam Cowboys [Demo] (Ray Davies)
06 The Voodoo Walk [Demo] (Ray Davies)
07 Postcard from London (Ray Davies & Chrissie Hynde)
08 Depressed I Am Not (Ray Davies & the Leisure Society)
09 Be Happy (Ray Davies & The Leisure Society)
10 Sane (Ray Davies)
11 A Better Thing (Ray Davies)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/Dv9cRHfi

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/gUtfk6hVIF1iTf5/file

The covert art photo is of Davies in 2006.

Various Artists - Covered: Otis Blackwell: 1955-1983

Who the heck is Otis Blackwell, you ask? He's not exactly a household name. But he's written some of the greatest songs of all time, including "Don't Be Cruel," "Return to Sender," "Fever," and "Great Balls of Fire." I'm continuing my "Covered" series with my personal favorites of the songs he wrote.

I don't want to recount his entire life story, so here's the Wikipedia link on him if you want to learn more:

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

I've only made one album's worth of songs from him because although he wrote many songs over the years, in my opinion only a relatively small number were special. But boy were they special! It's estimated that over 150 million records sold have his name in the songwriting credits.

Blackwell tried being a professional singer before turning all of his attention to songwriting. The first song here is sung (and written) by him. He put out a bunch of singles from 1953 to 1958, but he had very little success despite being a good singer. In fact, he recorded demos for the songs Elvis Presley turned into hits. On a rare later song from 1970, "It's All Over Me," you can see he sounds very Elvis-esque.

As with the case with many other songwriting who found success in the 1950s, that success came to a drastic half around 1964, when the Beatles and Bob Dylan drastically changed the music industry. It seems he had almost no new songs after about that time, though I've included one, "Back Trail," that was first recorded by him in 1977.

As a general rule for this Covered series, I don't like to include two versions of the same song. But I couldn't resist in this case. I put a version of "Breathless" by X at the very end of the album even though I included the original version by Jerry Lee Lewis, because I love the X version so very much.

Blackwell died in 2002 after a long life. I hope putting this album together and presenting it here will help him get a tiny bit more recognition, which he very much deserves.

This album is 48 minutes long.

UPDATE: On May 20, 2025, I added a song, "My Pidgeon's Gone." I found it while investigating another Black songwriter from this era, Jesse Stone. Though written by Blackwell (under an alias), it's actually performed by Stone under an alias, Charles Calhoun.

01 Let the Daddy Hold You (Otis Blackwell)
02 Don't Be Cruel (Elvis Presley)
03 My Pidgeon's Gone (Charles Calhoun [Jesse Stone])
04 Paralyzed (Elvis Presley)
05 Great Balls of Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis)
06 All Shook Up (Elvis Presley)
07 Fever (Peggy Lee)
08 Breathless (Jerry Lee Lewis)
09 Hey Little Girl (Dee Clark)
10 Please Mister Mayor (Roy Clark)
11 Let's Talk about Us (Jerry Lee Lewis)
12 Brace Yourself (Ben E. King)
13 Handy Man (Jimmy Jones)
14 Livin' Lovin' Wreck (Jerry Lee Lewis)
15 Return to Sender (Elvis Presley)
16 Home in Your Heart (Solomon Burke)
17 Daddy Rolling Stone (Who)
18 It's All Over Me (Otis Blackwell)
19 Back Trail (Lonnie Brooks)
20 Breathless (X)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/fwfd4urC

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/LO5aYbzFLbroDuj/file

UPDATE: On May 12, 2026, I replaced the original picture. I don't know the details for this one. The original was in black and white, but I colorized it with the help of the Kolorize program. 

Chris Clark - Chris Clark - Selected Best Tracks (1968-1969)

I recently posted two albums of material from Chris Clark. This is the third and last, because she only had a relatively brief recording career, from 1965 to 1969. If you don't know who she is, she was a soul singer for the Motown label. But she didn't have much commercial success despite being very talented. The fact that she was a tall, platinum-haired white woman singing a type of music beloved mainly by black audiences at the time didn't help.

She put out an album in 1967 called "Soul Sounds," and my last post on her was my drastically changed version of that. She put out her second and last album in 1969, called "CC Rides Again." Unfortunately, it was a mess. Most of the songs were predictable covers of the biggest hit songs of the year. She gave good performances as usual, but clearly Motown wasn't giving her good material.

On top of that, many of the songs began with long instrumental passages from famous classical pieces that had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the song. Apparently, it was some kind of failed effort by the producers to appear hip or experimental. For the songs I've chosen from the album, I've lopped all those sections off.

But I didn't do that very much, because it turns out that only four of the 14 songs here come from "CC Rides Again." As I said, that just wasn't a very good album. She was recording much better material but it stayed in the vaults until decades later. Another eight songs are from 1968 or 1969, but not officially released at the time.

The last two songs are strange, because they come from much, much later. After 1969, she basically gave up on her music career, but stayed with Motown Records and moved her way up in the company until she was the head creative director. (She did record a few songs in the later 1970s, but they're disco tracks and not worthy of inclusion here.)

However, her reputation as a soul singer has grown over time, and in the 2000s she began performing some concerts, especially in Britain, where the classic Motown sound is more appreciated by the "Northern Soul" crowd. That led to her recording two new songs in 2011. I've added them at the end. If you didn't read this, you probably wouldn't notice the massive time gap, because they're good songs and they sound exactly as if they were recorded in the late 1960s instead. It's too bad she hasn't recorded more in recent years, because her voice hasn't lost any of its power.

By the way, I couldn't come up with a good name for this album, so I decided to simply call it "Chris Clark."  I was influenced by the cover art I chose, which has her name is massive letters, without really having room for more text.

01 Feelin' Good (Chris Clark)
02 I'm Gonna Be True (Chris Clark)
03 He's Good for Me (Chris Clark)
04 Bad Seed (Chris Clark)
05 Can I See You in the Morning (Chris Clark)
06 If You Let Me Baby (Chris Clark)
07 C. C. Rider (Chris Clark)
08 One (Chris Clark)
09 In the Ghetto (Chris Clark)
10 You've Made Me So Very Happy (Chris Clark)
11 My World Is Empty without You (Chris Clark)
12 The Last Thing on My Mind (Chris Clark)
13 Dream or Cry (Chris Clark)
14 Hang It Up (Chris Clark)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15100216/ChrisCrk_1968-1969_ChrisClrk_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used the cover of an EP as the framework. But the lower half contained the names of four songs with a very tiny photo of Clark. I erased all that and replaced it with a much larger photo of her.  Good color photos of her in her late 1960s heyday are very few and far between. I actually found two different versions of the same photo that had been cropped to show only parts of her head. I stitched them together to show her full head. I'm happy at how that turned out.

Various Artists - Covered: Doc Pomus & Mort Shuman, Volume 3: 1971-2008

Here's the third and last of the albums I've made of my favorite songs by Doc Pomus and/or Mort Shuman.

I'm careful to say "and/or" because the collaboration between Pomus and Shuman ended in the 1960s. All the songs here are by either Pomus or by Shuman, sometimes in collaboration with other songwriters. The only exceptions are songs that were written earlier. I think the only case of that is "Young Blood," which was a hit by the Coasters back in 1957. But I'm using this hit version by Bad Company instead, because I included the Coasters version elsewhere.

The vast majority of the songs on this album are associated with Pomus. Shuman was successful as well, but he spoke French and he increasingly directed his efforts to the French market. One song here, "My Death," is his English translation of a song by Jacques Brel. He had a fairly successful solo career in the 1970s. But the vast majority of the songs he did were in French, and most of his success was in France. I've also included "Sorrow," because it probably is his best known solo song that's sung in English.

Meanwhile, Pomus continued to live in New York City. He had given up on songwriting for about a decade after losing the songwriting partnership with Shuman. As the 1970s went on, he slowly returned to songwriting, but he didn't have much success at first because he was seen as someone from an earlier era that had fallen totally out of style.

However, he eventually found a new niche for himself writing for a more mature audience. He focused more on blues, which was his original musical love anyway. He didn't have any more hits, but he gained a lot of critical acclaim for his new style. For instance, he co-wrote all the songs for B. B. King's 1981 album "There Must Be a Better World Somewhere," and King won a Grammy for the album.

Both Pomus and Shuman died of cancer in 1991. The last four songs here date from after that. Either they are versions of songs that were recorded by others earlier, or they are songs that didn't get recorded until later, for whatever reason. Irma Thomas's version of "Be You" is actually the first released version of that song, even though it was done 17 years after Pomus died.

01 Get It While You Can (Janis Joplin)
02 Amsterdam (David Bowie)
03 My Baby (Janis Joplin)
04 Sorrow (Mort Shuman)
05 Young Blood (Bad Company)
06 There Must Be a Better World Somewhere (B. B. King)
07 I Underestimated You (Johnny Adams)
08 Pictures and Paintings (Charlie Rich)
09 I'm on a Roll (Dr. John)
10 Blinded by Love (B. B. King)
11 Imitation of Love (Dr. John)
12 Be You (Irma Thomas)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/qTodsFSL

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Aq2HagHqxqXRfyn/file

As I mentioned with the two previous albums in this series, I've had a heck of a time finding any photos of Pomus and Shuman together. I don't know when or where this one is from, but judging by their appearance it has to be well after their songwriting partnership ended. I would guess it's from the 1970s or even the 1980s. I don't know much about their relationship after their stopped writing songs together, but based on this photo it looks like they stayed friends, even though they usually were separated by the fact they lived on different continents.

This photo was originally in black and white but I've colorized it. 

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

Various Artists - Covered: Doc Pomus & Mort Shuman, Volume 2: 1962-1968

I just posted the first of three albums I've made that collect the best songs written by Doc Pomus and/or Mort Shuman. I'm posting all three at once, so here's the second one.

Pomus and Shuman worked with each other from about 1958 to 1964. That was the time of their greatest success, when they wrote a series of all-time classics. Like the songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller, their peak era pretty much ended in 1964, because that was the year the Beatles basically took over the musical world. One out of four of all records sold in 1964 were by the Beatles, a truly incredible fact that has never been equaled since.

Suddenly, the "British Invasion" was hot and the older type of music Pomus and Shuman was known for was yesterday's news. The biggest threat posed by the Beatles was that they wrote all their own songs, so they obviously didn't need the likes of Pomus and Shuman. Bob Dylan and others were doing the same.

Pomus and Shuman decided to meet this challenge head on. They actually moved to Britain and began writing songs for British Invasion bands. But their songwriting partnership broke up at this point, because Pomus soon returned to the US and Shuman permanently relocated to Europe. Most of the songs here after 1964 are written by Shuman alone, unless they're versions of earlier songs. Before long, Pomus gave up on songwriting and resorted to running gambling games and royalty checks from his earlier hits to get by. Happily, he would return to songwriting, but that's a topic for the next album in this series.

01 Suspicion (Elvis Presley)
02 Seven Day Weekend (Gary 'U. S.' Bonds)
03 Night Rider (Elvis Presley)
04 She's Not You (Elvis Presley)
05 Sweets for My Sweet (Searchers)
06 Can't Get Used to Losing You (Andy Williams)
07 Troubled Mind (Dion)
08 Here I Go Again (Hollies)
09 Little Children (Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas)
10 Viva Las Vegas (Elvis Presley)
11 Sha-La-La-La-Lee (Small Faces)
12 Go Jimmy Go (Bob Marley & the Wailers)
13 Jackie (Scott Walker)
14 What's It Gonna Be (Dusty Springfield)
15 Mighty Cold (Fleetwood Mac)
16 Machines (Lothar & the Hand People)
17 Stop (Howard Tate)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/y5Gv1GHx

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/SOqSg01h3ZtMU5D/file

As I mentioned for the first album in this series, I had trouble finding any photos of Pomus and Shuman together. The photo I've used here is very similar to the one I used for the first album. Clearly, they were taken at the same time, judging by the clothes they are wearing and the background. If anyone knows of other good photos of them together, please let me know because I don't like using two photos that are so similar to each other. However, I colorized this, and when I did so I changed the colors of their suits and also simplified the background, so hopefully that makes them look different enough.

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

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.