Eric Clapton - Smile - Live Rarities (1974)

I just posted an album of Eric Clapton stray tracks from 1974. I mentioned that I had two albums' worth of stray tracks from 1974. This is the second album.

There are major differences between the album I just posted ("Walkin' Down the Road") and this one. That one is entirely made of studio recordings, and all but one of them have been officially released. For this album, all the songs were recorded live in concert, and all of them are officially unreleased. It's a lucky break for me that I managed to find exactly an album's worth of music of these two types.

The reason this album exists is because in 1974 Clapton was essentially starting his solo career after many years of being in bands. (He put out a solo album in 1970, just called "Eric Clapton," but he didn't do any touring for it, and joined Derek and the Dominos to make the classic "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs" album with them later that same year.) In 1974, not only did Clapton put out his first album since 1970 ("461 Ocean Boulevard"), but he started playing concerts around the time the album came out, and stayed busy touring for the rest of the year (and beyond).

While he was playing all those concerts, apparently he was still trying to figure out which songs he liked playing the best and which ones worked well with audiences. As a result, there are a lot of songs he played only a few times that year and never played again, and even some that he only played once.

Most of these songs are blues classics. One exception is "Smile," which was written by the famous comedian Charlie Chaplin, believe it or not. Clapton played it in most of his 1974 concerts, but never put it on a live or studio album at the time. (Eventually, a live version was included on some archival releases, but I chose a bootleg version due to it having good sound plus almost no crowd noise overlapping with the music.)

I've also included "Mean Old World." This is another blues classic. But the reason I mention it is because it was done by Derek and the Dominos in both acoustic and full-band versions. However, neither version was included on the famous "Layla" album. But the reason I included it here is because, in my opinion, this version is arranged and performed in a significantly different way than either Derek and the Dominos version.

Sometimes, I arrange songs by my feelings on a musical flow. But in this case, I decided to put them in the chronological order of the concerts they're from, since they're mostly blues songs and thus all fit together reasonably well anyway.

Luckily, Clapton's solo career was very successful from the very start, due to all his great reputation from his 1960s work, plus his number one 1974 hit "I Shot the Sheriff." As a result, there are lots of bootlegs of his 1974 concerts, including a surprising number of excellent sounding bootlegs. That means the sound is excellent for most of these songs, though some of them do some from audience bootlegs.

01 Don't Have to Hurt Nobody (Eric Clapton)
02 Bright Lights, Big City (Eric Clapton)
03 Smile (Eric Clapton)
04 Mean Old World (Eric Clapton)
05 You Don't Love Me (Eric Clapton)
06 Every Night about This Time (Eric Clapton)
07 Honey Bee (Eric Clapton)
08 Little Queenie (Eric Clapton)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/omAiJG5n

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/i1wcsMpWMOoRvws/file

Since this is a live album, it makes sense to have an album cover of Clapton playing guitar in concert. But because I decided to name this album "Smile," I figured it would be even more fitting to use a photo of Clapton smiling. Luckily, I was able to find a good one of him doing that from 1974.

Eric Clapton - Walkin' Down the Road - Non-Album Tracks (1974)

I've found two albums of Eric Clapton stray tracks material from 1974 alone. Here's the first one.

These days, it's popular to make fun of Clapton as safe and bland "dad rock." I'll agree that some parts of his solo career has been disappointing. Sometimes, he's lacked inspiration, and veered in an "adult contemporary" direction. But it's interesting that when it comes to his stray tracks, while are extremely extensive (I have about 20 albums' worth!), that's usually not the case. Maybe when he puts out official albums, he feels obliged to do what he thinks is popular, and what the record company wants. Whereas with his stray tracks, which are mostly officially unreleased (though less so on this album), he more does just want he wants and want he feels inspired about. Generally speaking, most of it is blues, more so than his typical solo albums.

To understand this album, we have to look at where Clapton was at in his life in 1974. He'd had a very successful career in the 1960s, culminating in the 1970 Derek and the Dominos album "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs." But after that came out, he developed a heroin addiction so bad that he effectively stopped making music for three years. (Pete Townshend tried to lure him out of retirement by helping him stage a concert at the Rainbow Theatre in London in 1973, but I'm not sure how much that helped, since he didn't do much for another year after that.)

So 1974 was a fairly dramatic "reboot" of Clapton's personal life and his music career. The album he put out that year, "461 Ocean Boulevard," set the pattern of the kind of music he'd play for the rest of his solo career, with more emphasis on his singing and less on flashy guitar playing, plus more of a mellow sound overall. Personally, I think that album is his best of his solo career, and a lot of people agree. For instance, "Rolling Stone" magazine has put it on their list of the 500 best albums of all time.

The 1974 stray tracks here are very much in keeping with the sound of "461 Ocean Boulevard." And there are a lot of stray tracks from that year, because he was still working on finding his new sound, and he was doing a lot of experimenting. He's never been a prolific songwriter to begin with, and he only half two and a half songwriting credits on "461." So it's not surprising that most of the songs here are covers. Plus, many are instrumentals. In fact, five of the ten songs are instrumentals, including one instrumental version of a song on "461." (The few originals are basically instrumental jams.)

All but one of the songs here have been officially released. That one, an instrumental version of the Rolling Stones hit "Paint It, Black," sounds just as good as the others. I've edited one song, a version of the blues classic "Meet Me (Down in the Bottom)." The officially released version is seven minutes long, and I've cut it down to three minutes. It's been a long time since I did that, but I guess I just thought it went on way too long without much happening.

In short, if you like the sound of "461 Ocean Boulevard," you'll like this. But it's more bluesy and has a lot more of Clapton's guitar solos, due to all those instrumentals.

By the way, as I mentioned above, one song here is an instrumental version of a song on "461," "Give Me Strength," where Clapton shows off his dobro playing. Another song here, "Please Be with Me," is also a version of a song on "461." But on that album he plays the song with his band, whereas this version is just him and an acoustic guitar. I've put those two at the end of the album. If you eliminate them, you still have a nice album that's 42 minutes long.

01 Boogie Funk [Instrumental] (Eric Clapton & Freddie King)
02 Lonesome Road Blues [Walkin' Down the Road] (Eric Clapton)
03 Ain't That Lovin' You, Baby (Eric Clapton)
04 B Minor Jam [Instrumental] (Eric Clapton)
05 Meet Me [Down at the Bottom] [Edit] (Eric Clapton)
06 Paint It, Black [Instrumental] (Eric Clapton & Leon Russell)
07 Fools like Me (Eric Clapton)
08 Getting Acquainted 2 [Too Late] [Instrumental] (Eric Clapton)
09 Please Be with Me [Acoustic Version] (Eric Clapton)
10 Give Me Strength [Instrumental Version] (Eric Clapton)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/gLYCcTwN

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/Ews2uNhPwuK04jz/file

For the official cover of the "461 Ocean Boulevard" album, Clapton took part in a photo shoot of him posing all over the house at the address near Miami that is the title of that album. The photo I've used as the cover art here is an outtake from that photo session.

The Move - BBC Sessions, Volume 1, 1967

The Move were a fairly important and popular band in Britain in the late 1960s (though they were largely unknown in the US), and the vast majority of the songs on their singles and studio albums were their own originals. So I find it interesting that they kind of had a separate career playing lots of covers in concert and at the BBC. Furthermore, they didn't just play obscure songs from different eras, like, say, the Byrds did. They played lots of songs that were big hits right at that time, by their main competitors.

This album is a good example of that. In it, they do a few of their own songs, mainly their hits ("Night of Fear," "I Can Hear the Grass Grow," and "Flowers in the Rain") and a few original non-hits ("Kilroy Was Here," "Walk upon the Water," and "Cherry Blossom Clinic"). But that's only six out of the 16 songs here. The rest are like a 1967 station playing soul and rock hits, except with all of them played by the Move. Here's who they cover:

You Better Believe It Baby - Joe Tex
Stop and Get a Hold of Myself - Gladys Knight and the Pips
Our Love (Is in the Pocket) - Darrell Banks (and J. J. Barnes)
Tired of Being Lonely- Sharpees
Cherry, Cherry - Neil DIamond
Morning Dew - Bonnie Dobson (and many others)
So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star - Byrds
Stephanie Knows Who - Love
Hey Grandma - Moby Grape
Eight Miles High - Byrds

Note that some of the songs here are fairly obscure danceable soul songs, the type of music that would later be known as "northern soul." The Move played a lot of this kind of music in 1966 and 1967, but moved away from it by 1968, as rock music got more serious, and became less about dancing.

All the songs here were played by the Move on the BBC in 1967. Nearly all of the recordings were released on an official album called "The BBC Sessions," so the sound quality is generally excellent. Two songs are officially unreleased, but they sound pretty good as well.

Thankfully, there are no instances of annoying BBC DJ talking over the starts or ends of songs. However, one song, "You Better Believe It Baby," clearly had the intro of about 10 seconds cut off until the very second the vocals began, probably to get rid of that DJ talking. So I went to the original version of the song by Joe Tex and found out that the intro is repeated exactly halfway through the song. So I copied and pasted that from later in the Move version of the song to make it whole again.

I have three more albums of the Move at the BBC to post.

01 Night of Fear (Move)
02 You Better Believe It Baby (Move)
03 Stop and Get a Hold of Myself (Move)
04 Our Love [Is in the Pocket] (Move)
05 Tired of Being Lonely (Move)
06 Cherry, Cherry (Move)
07 Kilroy Was Here (Move)
08 I Can Hear the Grass Grow (Move)
09 Walk upon the Water (Move)
10 Morning Dew (Move)
11 So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (Move)
12 Flowers in the Rain (Move)
13 Stephanie Knows Who (Move)
14 Hey Grandma (Move)
15 Cherry Blossom Clinic (Move)
16 Eight Miles High (Move)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/3quJKGMZ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/pDf3txMPU7qqoB0/file

For the cover art, I wish I could have found a photo of the Move playing at the BBC, or at least playing in concert in 1967. But I didn't find any really good ones in color. So I went with a publicity photo of that band from that year.

Richard Thompson - Daring Adventures & Amnesia - Acoustic Version (1986-1988)

I've been posting three kinds of Richard Thompson albums. One is the usual stray tracks collection, usually full band performances. Another is acoustic stray tracks. And the third is acoustic versions of his official albums.

Unfortunately, Thompson typically has not played acoustic versions of all of the songs on his albums, either in concert or in the studio. For some albums, he has played all or most, but not these two, "Daring Adventures" from 1986 and "Amnesia" from 1988. So this is like a perfectly split album. I have 28 minutes worth of acoustic versions of "Daring Adventures" songs and 28 minutes of acoustic versions of "Amnesia" songs. I could have made two frustratingly short albums, but instead I've bundled them together.

My main aims here have been to find good performances of the songs at the best sound quality. So I didn't restrict myself to just the year or so each album came out. The performances here range from 1984 to 1992. By widening my search like that, I was able to get excellent sound quality for pretty much all the songs. Six of the 15 songs here were done in the studio. The rest are from concerts, but I think they're all from soundboard recordings. Only one song is officially released.

I'm happy with what I found, with one exception. The version of "Don't Tempt Me" here is very short, exactly one minute long, compared to three and a half minutes for the studio album version. The reason for that is that Thompson didn't like to play that sound just in a solo acoustic format, so he only played part of the song, due to an insistent request. But I figure part of the song is better than none at all.

01 A Bone through Her Nose (Richard Thompson)
02 Valerie (Richard Thompson)
03 Missie How You Let Me Down (Richard Thompson)
04 Nearly in Love (Richard Thompson)
05 Jennie (Richard Thompson)
06 How Will I Ever Be Simple Again (Richard Thompson)
07 Al Bowlly's in Heaven (Richard Thompson)
08 Turning of the Tide (Richard Thompson)
09 Reckless Kind (Richard Thompson)
10 Jerusalem on the Jukebox (Richard Thompson)
11 I Still Dream (Richard Thompson)
12 Don't Tempt Me (Richard Thompson)
13 Can't Win (Richard Thompson)
14 Waltzing's for Dreamers (Richard Thompson)
15 Pharaoh (Richard Thompson)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15852284/RichrdT_1986-1988_DringAdvnturesAmnsiaAcoustc_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I simply used half of the covers of the two studio albums, then added some text at the bottom.

Tom P*tty & the Heartbreakers - Live Cover Versions, 1997-1999

This album is very much a continuation of the last one I posted in my series of live cover versions albums by Tom P*tty and the Heartbreakers.

(Note that I'm not using the full name of this artist due to concerns about copyright issues.)

As I said with that one, P*tty and his band played 20 shows in a row at the Fillmore, in San Francisco. All of that album came from those shows, and half of the album before that. Plus, all but one song in this album are from those shows. The last one instead is from a second series of shows the band did at the Fillmore in 1999.

In terms of the music, nearly all of the songs here are covers of famous songs from the 1960s, with a couple from the 1950s sprinkled in. Note especially the cover of "Gloria," which is ten minutes long instead of three minutes or so like the original, because P*tty tells a story in the middle of it that's very entertaining.

The sound quality is generally excellent. Only two of the songs are officially released, the first and the last. (The last one, by the way, features Bo Diddley as a guest star.) Despite the fact that the rest are unreleased, you'd never know it when it comes to sound quality. All of them come from one concert, on February 7, 1997, that was played live on the radio at the time, and was recorded as well as a typical live album for the era.

Anyway, if you like P*tty doing covers at all, definitely get this one.

This album is 43 minutes long.

I'm not including the track list due to copyright issues. But you can find it in the mp3 download file. 

https://pixeldrain.com/u/kBMhz3VT 

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/yjInm9EAmIj6Iu4/file

As I mentioned in the last album in this series, four matching concert posters were made for the 1997 series of Fillmore concerts. Here's another one. As usual, I had to make some drastic cropping to get it to fit into the square album cover shape.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers - Soul to Squeeze - Non-Album Tracks (1987-1991)

I was not impressed by the first few albums by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Admittedly, they were working on an interesting mixture of funk, rap, and rock, but I like songs with melodies. By their own later admissions, they didn't really know how to write good, proper songs until guitarist John Frusciante joined the band in time from the 1989 album "Mother's Milk." That's pretty much where my interest in the band begins.

So this stray tracks album reflects that. I only have one song here from before Frusciante joined the band, and that's kind of an anomaly, because it's a cover of the 1965 Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues," thus getting around their songwriting issues from their early years. The version here is a slowed down and unreleased one that I like much better than the better one they put on album in 1987. And by the way, their radically different cover of this song is further proof that Dylan pretty much invented the rap genre all the way back in 1965! ;)

The band really made me sit up and take notice with their 1991 hit song "Under the Bridge." Not only is it a great song, it showed to me that the band had depth and wasn't just a bunch of party funksters. It's an acoustic-based song. But I've included here what I think is the only completely acoustic version of it, recorded with just lead singer Anthony Keidis and Frusciante in 1991. This version is unreleased, done (I think) for a Dutch TV station.

Most of the rest of the songs here are B-sides or bonus tracks (with the exception of "Cosmic Slop," an unreleased cover of a Parliament-Funkadelic song). Jimi Hendrix clearly is a big influence on the band, because they play three Hendrix covers here ("Crosstown Traffic," "Little Miss Lover," and "Castles Made of Sand."). I believe the rest of the songs are originals, except for a cover of "Search and Destroy," originally done by the Stooges.

You may be surprised to find the hit song "Soul to Squeeze" included here. I was, because I thought that song was from 1993, which is beyond the reach of this album. (I wanted it to end when Frusciante left the band for the first time in mid-1992.) It certainly was all over the radio in 1993. But it turns out it was an obscure B-side in 1991. Then, in 1993, it was put on the soundtrack to the "Coneheads" movie, becoming a belated hit. And that was a lucky thing for the band, because they didn't know how to cope with the departure of Frusciante, so they didn't release any more truly new music until 1995.

I'll deal with that next stage of their career in the next stray tracks album for them.

01 Subterranean Homesick Blues [Slow Version] (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
02 Knock Me Down [Long Version] (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
03 Crosstown Traffic (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
04 Millionaires Against Hunger (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
05 Show Me Your Soul (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
06 Cosmic Slop (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
07 Search and Destroy (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
08 Little Miss Lover (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
09 Castles Made of Sand (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
10 Sikamikanico (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
11 Under the Bridge [Acoustic Duo Version] (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
12 Soul to Squeeze (Red Hot Chili Peppers)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15259269/TRedHChilP_1987-1991_SoultoSquze_atse.zip.html

The cover art is simply the cover to a "Soul to Squeeze" EP, but with the word "EP" removed from the bottom of it.

Los Lobos - Teresa - Non-Album Tracks (2000-2001)

I love Los Lobos' original songs in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, I think their 1992 album "Kiko" is a five-star album, and my favorite of theirs. I don't know why, but starting in the late 1990s, I feel their songwriting went downhill. But their musical talent otherwise remained as strong as ever. This is a collection of stray tracks from 2000 and 2001. A majority of the songs are covers, so their songwriting decline isn't really evident here. I think this is still a very good listen.

Los Lobos put out an album in 1999 ("This Time") and another one in 2002 ("Good Morning Aztlan"). This deals with the in-between time. The band has been very busy when it comes to contributions to soundtracks and various artist compilations, and a handful of songs here are from those.

Furthermore, since the late 1990s, they've done a lot of side projects. Four of the songs here are from an album by the group "Los Super Seven." That's a group with a lot of musicians in it, including a lot of different lead singers. I've only included the songs sung by either of the two main singers in Los Lobos. In my opinion, these sound exactly like Los Lobos songs.

Finally, three more songs are from a concert bootleg. This is an excellent soundboard recording with the audience noise removed, so you probably won't even notice they're not studio recordings unless you look closely at the mp3 tags.

I know Los Lobos' albums have continued to be critically acclaimed. But frankly, I like this albums of "odds and sods" more than the official studio albums that come before or after it.

01 Johnny 99 (Los Lobos)
02 Cumbia Raza [English Version] (Los Lobos)
03 Big Boss Man (Los Lobos)
04 Colas (Los Lobos)
05 El Rey (Los Lobos)
06 Mustang Sally (Los Lobos)
07 Spy Wedding [Instrumental] (Los Lobos & Robert Rodriguez)
08 El Pescador (Los Super Seven)
09 Calle Dieciseis (Los Super Seven)
10 Teresa (Los Super Seven)
11 Campesino (Los Super Seven)
12 Oye Como Spy [Oye Como Va] [Instrumental] (Los Lobos)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15262525/LosLbs_2000-2001_Tersa_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I found a Los Lobos concert poster. I don't know where or when it's from. I had to make some adjustments to get the rectangular poster to fit into a square shape.

Dusty Springfield - I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten - Non-Album Tracks (1968)

Dusty Springfield's statue has grown over the years, but her musical discography is still a mess. This is part of my effort to clean it up.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, she pretty much had a second career with all the songs she did on TV and radio. I made a seven album series on that called "On TV and Radio." I recommend you check it out if you haven't already, because almost all of it is still officially unreleased. But besides that, it turns out that many of her studio recordings never made it onto official albums at the time. There hasn't been any comprehensive archival releases to gather them all up either.

This album is a case in point. It gathers up all the stray tracks I could find from 1968. In my opinion, this album holds up with the official albums she put out around that time ("Dusty ... Definitely" in 1968 and the classic "Dusty in Memphis" in 1969). Seven of the 13 songs are A- or B-sides (plus an EP) that were released at the time, including the big hit "I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten." The rest came out years later on archival releases. You would have had to buy six different archival albums to get all the songs here!

This album is 36 minutes long.

01 Spooky (Dusty Springfield)
02 Sweet Ride (Dusty Springfield)
03 Meditation (Dusty Springfield)
04 Magic Garden (Dusty Springfield)
05 I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten (Dusty Springfield)
06 No Stranger Am I (Dusty Springfield)
07 I Will Come to You (Dusty Springfield)
08 The Colour of Your Eyes (Dusty Springfield)
09 Don't Speak of Love (Dusty Springfield)
10 Sweet Lover No More (Dusty Springfield)
11 It's Over (Dusty Springfield)
12 Wasn't Born to Follow (Dusty Springfield)
13 Midnight Sounds (Dusty Springfield)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15602636/DstySpr_1968_I_ClseMyEyesCounttoTn_atse.zip.html

The cover art this time is just the exact cover of the "I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten"singles cover. Actually, there were several different covers and I picked the one I liked the best.

Elliott Smith - Acoustic Versions, Volume 2, 1999

I've posted an album of Elliott Smith playing acoustic versions of some of his best songs, from 1996 to 1998. This is the second album in that series, just covering the year 1999.

Smith didn't release a studio album in 1999. But that was the year after his album "XO," and the year before his album "Figure 8." This album mostly contains acoustic versions of songs from those two albums. This first six songs come from an performance at a Seattle radio station. The rest are from concerts, but with the audience noise removed. However, these aren't from iffy sounding audience bootlegs. The sound quality is excellent throughout, probably all from soundboard recordings.

As with the previous volume in this series, there are no cover versions here, because I'll be posting those on a separate album series.

01 Happiness (Elliott Smith)
02 Son of Sam (Elliott Smith)
03 Baby Britain (Elliott Smith)
04 Everything Reminds Me of Her (Elliott Smith)
05 Rose Parade (Elliott Smith)
06 Waltz No. 2 [XO] (Elliott Smith)
07 Sorry My Mistake (Elliott Smith)
08 Half Right (Elliott Smith)
09 Stupidity Tries (Elliott Smith)
10 Easy Way Out (Elliott Smith)
11 See You Later (Elliott Smith)
12 Wouldn't Mama Be Proud (Elliott Smith)
13 Can't Make a Sound (Elliott Smith)
14 King's Crossing (Elliott Smith)
15 L.A. (Elliott Smith)
16 Color Bars (Elliott Smith)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16375926/ELLITTSMTH1999AcustcVrsionsVlume2_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I found the cover of an Elliott Smith bootleg that I liked. But I replaced the text in the lower half. I also swapped the photo in the middle to one of Smith in concert in 1999.

Pink Floyd - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: 1969

I've got a lot of Pink Floyd material to post, because I think they're fantastic and a lot of their stuff didn't make it onto their studio albums at the time.

This is the fifth Pink Floyd album I've posted so far. Two are stray tracks collections covering 1967 to 1969. Two others, plus this one, contain BBC performances, also from 1967 to 1969. The way I look at it, these five albums all go together, gathering up all the little bits and pieces of their musical output during that time. After 1969, Pink Floyd no longer played only a few short songs each time they showed up at the BBC. They did return to the BBC a couple more times, but each time, they performed entire concerts. Similarly, they began thinking in terms of cohesive albums and not individual songs. So 1969 was the last time they released a single that wasn't taken from an album.

Thus, this album is kind of an end of an era. The first four songs come from the last "normal" BBC studio performance Pink Floyd did, in May 1969.

The next song, "Merry Christmas Song," was written by Pink Floyd and apparently recorded by the BBC in 1969. However, it didn't actually get played by the BBC until 1975. It's a jokey Christmas number, and it's sung by the drummer Nick Mason.

The song after that is an instrumental called "Moonhead." It came about because the BBC thought it would be clever to have Pink Floyd play their "spacey" music during the broadcast of the first person landing on the moon in July 1969. The song is about seven minutes long. I edited out about 30 seconds of it, because about a minute into the song, a BBC announcer spoke over the music. I wouldn't have minded since he was talking about the moon landing, except what he said was inane or dumb, ending with the comment that when people finally land on the moon, they'll be able to find out if it in fact is made out of green cheese. I hope that was supposed to be a joke! Luckily, the half minute of talking takes place during a lull in the music, so I think I was able to remove it without it being noticeable or affecting the flow of the song.

I must confess that the final song here isn't associated with the BBC at all. I'm just sticking it here because I don't have a better spot in my musical collection to put it. Pink Floyd performs their instrumental "Interstellar Overdrive" later in 1969. What makes this special and unique is that Frank Zappa joins in and does a lot of soloing. In case you want to see it and not just hear it, there's a high quality video of it on YouTube.

As an aside, I find it amusing that when both Zappa and the members of Pink Floyd were asked about this musical collaboration decades later, they all had no recollection of it happening, though they did remember meeting each other. However, the video and audio definitely proves it happened.

01 Grantchester Meadows (Pink Floyd)
02 Cymbaline (Pink Floyd)
03 The Narrow Way, Part 3 (Pink Floyd)
04 Green Is the Colour (Pink Floyd)
05 Careful with that Axe, Eugene (Pink Floyd)
06 Merry Xmas Song (Pink Floyd)
07 Moonhead [Instrumental] [Edit] (Pink Floyd)
08 Interstellar Overdrive [Instrumental] (Pink Floyd with Frank Zappa)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/9j8JgQcE

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/iVtURE3zjz82ia3/file

I purposefully made the cover art to match the two earlier Pink Floyd BBC albums I made. For the band photo in the middle, I chose a publicity photo from 1969. It uses a fish-eye lens.. That was the hip thing to do in those days, but I like the effect in this case.

Van Morrison - Live Rarities, Volume 3: 1973-1974

Here's a brief recap. I've posted a lot of live Van Morrison from the late 1960s and 1970s, my favorite time period for his music. I've posted a number of his best concerts, with a mind to having a minimum of overlapping material. But there still are some interesting songs he's done in concert that I've missed, so I have this series of live rarities. All the songs on this album (and the rest of the series) are not on any of the other Morrison live albums I've posted here.

This is the third album of his live rarities I've posted. The first two had trouble sometimes with sound quality. If a song only gets played a few times in concert (or even just once!), the odds are not good that there will be a pristine soundboard bootleg of it. I'm glad to say that this time around the sound quality is better. Maybe his popularity was growing, but for whatever reason, there are more bootlegs of him by 1973 and 1974, which means more chances for better sound.

Some of the songs here date from Morrison's time with the band Them in the mid-1960s: "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" (which is also a Bob Dylan song), "My Lonely Sad Eyes," and "Don't Look Back." A couple others here are covers: "You Done Me Wrong" and "Just Like a Woman" (also a Dylan song). I believe the rest are Morrison originals that he just didn't play live very much, for whatever reason. "Streets of Arklow" appeared on the 1974 "Veedon Fleece" album. Three others - "Street Theory," "Wonderful Remark," and "Try to Sleep" - didn't appear on any official album at the time, though two of them did much later. I have different versions of all of those on series of Morrison's stray tracks albums.

This album is 48 minutes long.

01 You Done Me Wrong (Van Morrison)
02 It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Van Morrison)
03 Try for Sleep (Van Morrison)
04 Just like a Woman (Van Morrison)
05 Wonderful Remark (Van Morrison)
06 Streets of Arklow (Van Morrison)
07 My Lonely Sad Eyes (Van Morrison)
08 Don't Look Back (Van Morrison)
09 Street Theory (Van Morrison)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15257261/VanMrsn_1973-1974_LivRritiesolume3_atse.zip.html

The cover art comes from a 1972 concert in Berkeley, California. I would have preferred something from 1973 or 1974 for this album, but it looked too good with the blending colors for me not to use it. I didn't change much except for the necessary cropping I have to do with rectangular posters. I also moved up his name at the bottom to make things fit, and added in the album title.

The White Stripes - Conquest - Non-Album Tracks (2007-2008)

This is the fifth and last album of stray tracks for the White Stripes that I've made. Generally speaking, there's one of these for each studio album they put out. This one corresponds with 2007's "Icky Thump."

It's nice how so often I manage to bundle stray tracks like these into coherent collections that fit into one album's length of music, which I would consider roughly 35 to 50 minutes long. But it doesn't always happen that way. In this case, there's really only 22 minutes of White Stripes music. That's more like an EP than an album.

I've managed to flesh that out a bit by adding three Jack White solo songs from 2008 and 2009 that don't fit anywhere else. (He was fully involved with his new band the Reconteurs at that time. His first solo album wouldn't be released until 2012.) Even with those songs, it's still rather short at 32 minutes. But I'd rather keep it short than pad it out with lesser material.

The heart of this album are the first four songs, which make up the "Conquest" EP, released in 2008. The song "Conquest" is a cover made famous by Patti Page in the 1950s. A version of that appears on the "Icky Thump" album. But this is the "acoustic mariachi" version. I believe all the other songs on this album are originals.

Although this is my last album of White Stripes stray tracks, I do have one more album of theirs to post, which is a collection of acoustic versions of their songs. I'll post that some other time.

01 Conquest [Acoustic Mariachi Version] (White Stripes)
02 It's My Fault for Being Famous (White Stripes)
03 Cash Grab Complications on the Matter (White Stripes)
04 Honey, We Can't Afford to Look This Cheap (White Stripes)
05 Baby Brother (White Stripes)
06 Tennessee Border (White Stripes)
07 White Moon [Solo Piano Version] (White Stripes)
08 I Fought Piranhas [Solo Electric Version] (Jack White)
09 Another Way to Die (Jack White & Alicia Keys)
10 Fly Farm Blues (Jack White)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16701102/TWHITSTRPES2007-2008_Cnqest_atse.zip.html

I believe at least three different covers were made for the "Conquest" EP. I picked the one I like the best. I didn't make any changes to it. The White Stripes apparently made the decision not to mention their band name on the cover, so I've stuck with that.

The Move - California Man - Non-Album Tracks (1971-1973)

This is the third and last of stray tracks albums from the Move. However, I have even more albums of the Move performing for the BBC, and I plan on posting those soon.

For some reason, I don't have any stray tracks from 1970. By the time the music here starts in 1971, the band had changed drastically since the last stray tracks album I posted. The band's main lead singer Carl Wayne had left the group, and future ELO star Jeff Lynne had joined. The band was jointly led by Lynne and Roy Wood, who had been with the band from the beginning and still wrote most of the songs.

This album is fairly short by usual album standards, at only 34 minutes. But what it lacks in length in makes up in quality. The Move's last studio album, "Message from the Country," came out in early 1971, but they released four non-album singles after that, and all four A-sides are great.

It's strange to me that the band didn't put out an album to go with those singles, because this collection shows they had enough songs for it. But that probably had something to do with the band's strange transformation into Electric Light Orchestra, better known as ELO. In fact, the two bands are really just one band, with a name change. I guess by 1972, Lynne and Wood felt the Move name carried certain musical baggage and expectations, and they wanted to make a new start. So all three remaining band members at the time (the two of them plus Bev Bevan) began calling themselves ELO. Two more musicians were brought in to help record their last singles, Richard Tandy and Bill Hunt, and they wound up joining ELO too. Funnily enough, at one point in 1972, these five people promoted a Move song with a TV performance, and then promoted an ELO song for the exact same show on the same day, just calling themselves a different band name for that song!

ELO was supposed to be a joint project between Lynne and Wood, just like the last days of the Move. But after just one album as ELO, Wood left to pursue a solo career. It's hard to say what exactly is the Move and what is ELO. I've included an early version of "10538 Overture" from 1971, back when they were known as the Move, but that song went on to be a minor hit for ELO.

By the way, if you know the hit songs from ELO but you're not that familiar with the Move, you may wonder about the inclusion of the song "Do Ya" here. That originally was the last single by the Move, in 1972. But it totally flopped despite being a great song, not making the charts at all in Britain and barely scraping the bottom of the charts in the US. Lynne wrote it, so he revived it in 1976 with ELO and had a hit with it in many countries.

This album is 34 minutes long.

01 Tonight (Move)
02 Don't Mess Me Up [Acappella Version] (Move)
03 Chinatown (Move)
04 Down on the Bay (Move)
05 10538 Overture [Early Version] (Move)
06 The Words of Aaron [Acoustic Version] (Move)
07 California Man (Move)
08 Do Ya (Move)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/cL22Rjkj

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/wOIHhBAyulY4hhr/file

The album cover is based on the cover of the "California Man" single. However, that one had a rather bland black and white photo in the middle. I replaced it with a color photo showing the three last members of the Move in 1971.

Ronnie Lane - How Come - Non-Album Tracks (1971-1974)

I must admit that although I like the Faces, I'm not a huge fan of the band. I suppose lead singer Rod Stewart annoys me somewhat. However, I am a huge fan of Ronnie Lane, who was a key member of the Small Faces, then the Faces, and also had a solo career.

Lane left the Faces in 1973, after the band's "Ooh La La," album. The Faces never really recovered from this, even though he wasn't their main songwriter. They lingered on for two more years and recorded some more singles, but never put out another album. Meanwhile, also in 1973, Lane put out his first solo single, "How Come," which reached number 11 in Britain. (It made zero impact in the US, because he was pretty much unknown there.) He followed this with his first solo album, "Anymore for Anymore," in 1974, and more solo albums after that.

It's turns out there's plenty of material for a stray tracks album covering Lane's solo output from 1971 to 1974. Naturally, his hit "How Come" has to be included, since he didn't put that on any of his studio albums. Many songs here are Lane's solo versions of songs he wrote for the Faces. Sometimes he got to sing them with the Faces, and sometimes Rod Stewart sung them. But either way, his solo version have a different feel, generally with more of a folky vibe.

Another key piece are some songs from the album "Mahoney's Last Stand." This was an album Lane and fellow Faces member Ronnie Wood did together for an extremely obscure movie. For some reason, the movie and its soundtrack wasn't released until 1976, but all the songs for it were recorded in 1972, so I'm treating them as songs from that year. Most of the songs on the album are background music-type instrumentals, and others are written and sung by Wood, so I'm only including four songs here that are dominated by Lane. One of those songs, "Chicken Wired," also appeared on Lane's 1974 solo album, but in a significantly different arrangement.

There are a couple other songs here, such as a B-side ("Done This One Before") and a cover of the 1972 Rolling Stones song "Sweet Virginia." Add it all up and you get an album that's 52 minutes long.

Sadly, Lane didn't have a very successful solo career, and "How Come" was his only major solo hit. He suffered multiple sclerosis, which already started to seriously physically affect him by 1977, and he died in 1997. But he kept recording and playing music into the 1990s despite his problems. I'll have more albums to post from him eventually.

01 Richmond [Demo] (Ronnie Lane)
02 Stone [Evolution] (Ronnie Lane)
03 From the Late to the Early (Ronnie Lane & Ronnie Wood)
04 Just for a Moment (Ronnie Lane & Ronnie Wood)
05 Chicken Wired (Ronnie Lane & Ronnie Wood)
06 Rooster Funeral (Ronnie Lane & Ronnie Wood)
07 How Come (Ronnie Lane)
08 Done This One Before (Ronnie Lane)
09 Ooh La La (Ronnie Lane)
10 Flags and Banners (Ronnie Lane)
11 Debris (Ronnie Lane)
12 Sweet Virginia (Ronnie Lane)
13 Last Orders Please (Ronnie Lane)
14 You're So Rude (Ronnie Lane)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15223469/RonnieL_1971-1974_HwCome_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I used the cover to the "How Come" single. It's extremely ornate and strange for a singles cover. (And I wonder if the photo of him in the middle has some kind of 3D or hologram effect to it?) One strange thing about it is that neither Lane's name nor the song's name show up anywhere on it. So I added both of those at the top.

Joan Osborne - Under the Covers, Volume 3 (1993-1998)

Here's the third, and apparently final, version of my Joan Osborne series "Under the Covers." As with the previous two, these are all live cover versions of classic songs.

It's the last, because Osborne put out an album of mostly original material, "Relish," in 1995. Then, starting in 2000, she began putting out more albums of mostly or all original material. As a result, she's had long stretches where she's done little to no covers in concert, and when she does covers, they tend to be the songs from this series or covers from her albums. I will have more material like this to post eventually, but not after a long gap in her career.

If you know the two previous albums in this series, you should know the deal. Osborne sings her soulful ass off, as usual. Maybe the only significant difference is that a few of the songs here are more recent and/or obscure. "Little Angel, Little Brother" is a Lucinda Williams song from 1992. "People Have the Power" is a Patti Smith song from 1988. "The World Is Mine" is a Cracker song from 1998 played with Cracker that year.

01 Papa Was a Rolling Stone (Joan Osborne)
02 Little Angel, Little Brother (Joan Osborne)
03 Son of a Preacher Man (Joan Osborne)
04 [Sittin' On] The Dock of the Bay (Joan Osborne)
05 Brick House (Joan Osborne)
06 Bring Me Some Water (Melissa Etheridge & Joan Osborne)
07 On Broadway (Joan Osborne)
08 Beast of Burden (Joan Osborne with Tony Rich)
09 People Have the Power (Joan Osborne)
10 Spooky (Joan Osborne & Isaac Hayes with David Sanborn)
11 The World Is Mine (Joan Osborne with Cracker)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15847312/JoanO_1993-1998_UndrCovrsVolume3_atse.zip.html

The cover art is based on a photo of Osborne in concert in Chicago in 1995.

Aimee Mann - Baby Blue - Non-Album Tracks (1992-1996)

Now that I posted an album of Aimee Mann singing for 'Til Tuesday, I can get started on her solo career.  Personally, I think she's both a great singer and a great songwriter. She's consistently put out quality material for her entire solo career, But I especially like her 1990s output.

One reason I think her 1990s era was so good was because she had a few "lost years" during one of her most creative time periods. She put out 'Til Tuesday albums in 1985, 1986, and 1988. Their last album, "Everything's Different Now," was their best in my opinion, because it showed Mann was growing by leaps and bounds as a songwriter. But then the band broke up, and Mann had a hard time getting a good record contract to begin her solo career. (She continued to tour under the band's name for two more years.)

It wasn't until 1993 that her first solo album, "Whatever," finally came out. So that was a gap of about five years since her last album. That gave her a backlog of songs to choose from. I'm sure many, if not most, of the songs here were written during that gap, even if they were recorded later. There are probably still more that remain unreleased and unbootlegged, since she had high quality control and almost nothing has been bootlegged from that time period.

So I consider this album a "lost album," even though it's mostly B-sides. The vast majority of songs here are Mann originals that didn't get on any of her studio albums. I believe the only covers are "Baby Blue" (originally by Badfinger), "Girls Talk" (originally by Elvis Costello), "Inverness" (originally by Scott Miller of Game Theory,, as well as the Loud Family, who plays the song with her). and "Christmastime." Plus, there's kind of a self-cover, in that she does a version of her 'Til Tuesday hit "Voices Carry," but it's done in a very different way here, making it two and a half minutes longer.

If you like Mann's solo albums, you should definitely enjoy this. It's a mystery to me why she hasn't put these out on proper albums.

By the way, Mann has a habit of recording acoustic versions of her songs, either as B-sides or in concert. I plan on posting more albums of stray tracks from her, as well as a separate series of acoustic versions.

01 Put On Some Speed [Demo] (Aimee Mann)
02 Truth on My Side [Demo] (Aimee Mann)
03 Baby Blue (Aimee Mann)
04 Take It Back (Aimee Mann)
05 Jimmy Hoffa Jokes (Aimee Mann)
06 [Believed You Were] Lucky (Aimee Mann)
07 Will She Just Fall Down (Aimee Mann)
08 Girls Talk (Aimee Mann)
09 Driving with One Hand on the Wheel (Aimee Mann)
10 Inverness (Scott Miller & Aimee Mann)
11 Christmastime (Aimee Mann with Michael Penn)
12 Time for You to Go (Aimee Mann)
13 Voices Carry [Long Version] (Aimee Mann)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16687555/AIMEMNN1992-1996_BbyBlue_atse.zip.html

I made the cover using a publicity photo of Mann from 1993.

Tom P*tty & the Heartbreakers - Live Cover Versions, 1997

Here's the next in my long series of dealing with Tom P*tty and the Heartbreakers' live covers. The second half of the last one had songs from the band's famous month-long series of concerts at the Fillmore in San Francisco in 1997. All of this album is from those concerts, and nearly all of the next one is as well.

(Note that I'm not using the full name of this artist due to concerns about copyright issues.)

The reason there are so many songs from those Fillmore shows is because they opened up their set list and played all sorts of unusual songs. This time around, nearly all of the songs are from the 1960s or early 1970s. The most recent song is "Crazy Mama" by J. J. Cale in 1971. There are three songs from before the 1960s, two of them Chuck Berry songs ("Around and Around" and "Johnny B. Goode"), plus "Country Farm."

During these Fillmore shows, the band had a number of guest stars join them, typically figures who were major influences on them, such as John Lee Hooker or Bo Diddley. I didn't include any songs where it was a guest star singing their own songs. However, I did include Carl Perkins singing his 1969 song "Restless," because he did it as a duet with P*tty.

The sound quality is generally excellent. Four of the songs are officially released, so of course they sound great. Most of the rest are from soundboard bootlegs or concerts that were played live on the radio at the time, so those all sound great too. In fact, I'd say the sound quality is the best of the series so far. If you've been missing out on this series, this is a good place to start.

This album is 46 minutes long.

I'm not including the track list due to copyright issues. But you can find it in the mp3 download file.

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6BxHC3Nb 

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/en/ADwbVp4E7M48GBc/file

As I mentioned with the last album, four concert posters were made for the Fillmore concerts that all had the same artistic style. I'm using all four for albums in this series. As usual with concert posters, I had to do some severe cropping to get the rectangular poster into a square shape.

The Kinks - Live in '65 - Selected Live Tracks (1965)

Unlike most major rock acts that were famous in the 1960s, the Kinks don't have a good live album from the 1960s. One could technically point to the 1967 live album "Live at Kelvin Hall," but I strongly dislike that album due to the fact that after it was recorded a loop of a screaming audience was overdubbed on top of all the songs, ruining the album for me.

Luckily, there are lots of recordings of the Kinks playing at the BBC in the 1960s. I've already posted a series of albums of their BBC recordings. But all but a couple of those songs were played in a studio, with no audience. Thus, I've put together this album, to try to capture the excitement of the Kinks playing in front of an audience, but one that doesn't drown them out.

The Kinks were a very popular live act from 1964 to 1966, and that's the era I'm focusing on here. Unfortunately, there's no single well recorded concert from that time period (at least that I know of). But there are some decent recordings of a few songs here and there. Funnily enough, all of them happen to be from 1965. Adding them all together, it makes for a nice 42 minute long album.

There are virtually no known bootlegs of Kinks concerts from this time period. But what does survive are TV appearances, and we can extract that audio from those. That's the case for all but two of the songs here ("Come On Now" and "Beautiful Delilah"). For the rest, you can find videos of all the other performances on YouTube. None of these performances have been officially released on album as far as I know.

I have to admit the sound quality isn't fantastic, generally speaking. But we're lucky to have any live recordings from the Kinks from their early years, and the sound was good enough for the TV shows of the time. It definitely captures more of the live energy than the BBC performances do.

One interesting thing to note is how many of the songs are sung mainly by Dave Davies, instead of the band's main singer and songwriter, his brother Ray Davies. Also, about half of the songs are covers.

By chance, virtually none of the songs I found were duplicates. One exception was that "You Really Got Me" was played at the first show here, an NME Poll Winners concert. (The songs are in chronological order of the days they were performed.) But it wasn't a very good version, and it's an overplayed song to begin with, so I left that off. But you can find that on YouTube as well.

01 Tired of Waiting for You (Kinks)
02 I Gotta Move (Kinks)
03 Bye Bye Johnny (Kinks)
04 Louie, Louie (Kinks)
05 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
06 Got Love If You Want It (Kinks)
07 Long Tall Shorty (Kinks)
08 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
09 Hide and Seek (Kinks)
10 Come On Now (Kinks)
11 Beautiful Delilah (Kinks)
12 A Well Respected Man (Kinks)
13 Milk Cow Blues (Kinks)
14 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
15 I'm a Lover Not a Fighter (Kinks)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15256415/TKnks_1965_Lvein65_atse.zip.html

I made the cover from a photo I found on the Internet. When I first posted this I didn't know when or where it was from exactly. But I have since been told that ti's from a January1965 appearance on the British TV show 'Thank Your Lucky Stars' where the Kinks performed "Tired of Waiting for You." So I'm glad (and lucky) it's from 1965.

Lucinda Williams - In My Girlish Days - Non-Album Tracks (1981-1986)

Lucinda Williams is another musician I really like. I plan on posting a lot of her music here.

Williams' career got off to a rather unusual start. She put out an acoustic all-covers album in 1979 called "Ramblin'" then an album of originals called "Happy Woman Blues" in 1980. So far, so good. But then she didn't release anything else all the way until 1988. That delay would have killed off the careers of most musicians. But her 1988 album, simply titled "Lucinda Williams," was so strong that it put her  on the map as a serious artist.

So what's the deal with that eight year gap between her second and third albums? Partially, it turned out she had a very tough time getting a record contract that she was satisfied with. But also, it turned out that she was a perfectionist. Her next two albums in particular also were delayed for years while she labored to get things exactly as she wanted them.

However, as it turned out, those eight years weren't wasted in terms of songwriting. I'm not a big fan of her 1980 album of originals. It's okay, but not great. However, her 1988 album is fantastic. Clearly, in the years in between, she made great strides in her songwriting. In fact, it turns out that many of the songs on her later albums, including at least half of her acclaimed 1992 album "Sweet Old World" were actually written during this eight-year period.

Furthermore, it turns out that she wrote even more songs during that period that fell by the wayside and were never officially released. Who knows just how many such songs there are, but we know some of them due to songs that have been made public through bootlegs. This album is a compilation of all the unreleased songs I could find.

The songs here come from four sources. The first three are from a 1981 radio show. One of the songs there, "Pancakes," was released on a various artists compilation in 1993, but that was a very different arrangement. The next five songs are from 1984 acoustic studio demos. One of those, "Out of Touch," was released on her 2001 album "Essence." But again it's a different arrangement, with somewhat different lyrics. The next three songs are from a 1985 radio show. The last song is from a 1986 studio session. A live version of that song, "Sundays," would be released on the 25th anniversary edition of the 1988 "Lucinda Williams" album. But again, that very is significantly different.

So, all in all, most of these songs are totally unreleased, but three of them have appeared elsewhere in other forms. All the songs are acoustic in nature, with a couple of musicians joining Williams for the first three songs and the last one. I'm not entirely sure, but as far as I know, the only song that wasn't written by Williams is "In My Girlish Days," which is a cover of a Memphis Minnie song.

I don't think this album is as great as the great 1988 album "Lucinda Williams." But I like it more than her 1980 album "Happy Woman Blues." It's quite different from both of those albums too, since the 1988 one is a lively mix of country, blues, and rock, and the 1980 one has a strong country feel, but this one is mellow and acoustic. If you're a Lucinda Williams fan, you should definitely give it a listen.

01 All I Want (Lucinda Williams)
02 Song for a Jewelry Maker (Lucinda Williams)
03 Pancakes (Lucinda Williams)
04 Out of Touch (Lucinda Williams)
05 Venetian Blinds (Lucinda Williams)
06 I Bet It (Lucinda Williams)
07 What I'm Living For (Lucinda Williams)
08 Hard Times (Lucinda Williams)
09 In My Girlish Days (Lucinda Williams)
10 This Is Not My Town (Lucinda Williams)
11 Lover of the Hour (Lucinda Williams)
12 Sundays (Lucinda Williams)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15191371/LucndaWllms_1981-1986_InMyGirlishDys_atse.zip.html

I figured "In My Girlish Days" is a good time, since the mid-1980s are "girlish days" when compared to the length of Williams' musical career since then. I'm not sure where the photo for the cover art comes from, or what year it's from, but I can guess her general age. It was damn hard for me to find any photos of Williams from the early to mid-1980s. I settled on a black and white one. But, over a year later, I colorized it.

Johnny Cash - American Outtakes (1993)

I'm kinda surprised I haven't posted this album yet, because it's exactly what this blog is all about. It's a classic example of an album that should exist, and I'm baffled that it still hasn't been officially released. If you're a Johnny Cash fan at all, you need to hear this.

I'm not a huge country music fan, but I am a big Johnny Cash fan. To me, he's one of the greatest musicians of all time. But after decades of success, his career had reached a low point in the early 1990s. His still had his vast musical catalog, of course, but few were interested in his new albums. Then producer Rick Rubin stepped in. He gave Cash's career a rebirth with the album "American Recordings," recorded in 1993 and released in 1994. Cash was recorded in totally stripped down mode, just him and his acoustic guitar, and he was given a bunch of very interesting songs to play. Personally, I consider "American Recordings" a five-star album, and it's my favorite Cash album.

But it turns out the 13 songs on "American Recordings" were far from the only songs recorded for that album. He played dozens more, then he and Rubin picked out their favorites for the album. So what happened to all the rest? In 2003, the same year Cash died, the box set "Unearthed" was released, and many more songs that Cash recorded in 1993 in acoustic mode appeared on that. But, surprisingly, many were not included on that, and remain officially unreleased to this day.

In the late 1990s, a bootleg appeared called "American Outtakes" that was nothing but outtakes from the 1993 Rubin-produced recording sessions. That came out before "Unearthed," so some songs on it later were officially released. What I've done here is remove all the released songs. Happily, that still leaves 45 minutes' worth of music, which is an ideal album length, in my opinion.

The bootleg has excellent sound. However, I've edited many of the songs, because the bootleg took a "warts and all" approach, including false starts. Most of those are just Cash playing a few seconds of the song and then stopping, often because he has to cough. So unless you're a big fan of hearing people cough, you're not missing anything from having the false starts removed. I also made an edit to "All of God's Children Ain't Free" because that, alone of all of the songs on the album, ended prematurely, right in the middle of a chorus. I patched in the rest of the chorus from earlier in the song to give it a proper ending.

Is this album as good as "American Recordings?" No. That album has some really great songs, many of them specifically written for it. This is more of a collection of traditional songs, and redone songs from earlier in Cash's career. But still, as Cash albums go, it's one of my favorites. Since Cash died in 2003, there have been some archival albums released, including some from the very end of his life when his voice was failing him. I honestly don't understand why that material has been released, and yet this hasn't, back when his voice and musical powers were at the best.

By the way, not all the songs are just Cash and his acoustic guitar. "I Witnessed a Crime" has Billy Gibbons, the guitarist from ZZ Top, playing guitar on it. Also, the last two songs have some other instruments on them. But they don't have drums of them, and they're still acoustic in nature.

01 What On Earth Will You Do for Heaven's Sake (Johnny Cash)
02 The Drifter (Johnny Cash)
03 I Witnessed a Crime (Johnny Cash with Billy Gibbons)
04 The Next Time I'm in Town (Johnny Cash)
05 To Beat the Devil (Johnny Cash)
06 Friends in California (Johnny Cash)
07 The Wonder of You (Johnny Cash)
08 East Virginia Blues (Johnny Cash)
09 Go On Blues (Johnny Cash)
10 Go Where I Send Thee (Johnny Cash)
11 Loving Her Was Easier [Than Anything I'll Ever Do Again] (Johnny Cash)
12 T for Texas [Solo Version] (Johnny Cash)
13 Bad News (Johnny Cash)
14 All of God's Children Ain't Free (Johnny Cash)
15 One More Ride (Johnny Cash)
16 Don't Sell Daddy Any More Whiskey (Johnny Cash)
17 The Devil (Johnny Cash)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15602890/JohnnyC_1993_AmericnOuttakes_atse.zip.html

There have been various versions of this bootleg released, with various titles and covers. I picked a cover that I particularly liked. It's very much in line with the look of the "American Recordings" cover. I shortened the title.

Norah Jones - Butterflies - Non-Album Tracks (1999-2000)

Norah Jones continues to amaze me. As I've mentioned in this blog several times, I'm not a big fan of many of her official studio albums, but I love her other career, the vast amount of music that has not appeared on her albums. And what especially amazes me is how much of that non-album material there is. I keep thinking I've found it all, and then I find more.

Previously, I had only found a few of Jones's songs from 1999 or 2000. But I've just discovered a bunch more. In 1999, Jones was the sole vocalist as part of a band named "Laszlo." Laszlo only put out one album, and all the songs on it were originals (except for one, "Freak"), but written by other band members. I previously had only found three of these songs, but I was able to find the whole album. I've included all of the songs from it here, except for one, "Your Head's Too Big," because the lyrics for that one are really bad.

This Laszlo album, titled "Butterflies," is totally obscure, to the point that I given up on finding most of the songs on it. But I think it's pretty good. It sounds very much like the rest of Jones's stuff, with a kind of pop-jazz style. But it's more likely and rocking than her usual style, so I actually prefer it. Most importantly, even though the songwriters are totally obscure and apparently only did this one album, the songs are as good or better than those on her later studio albums, in my opinion.

But that's not all. The first eight songs here are from the Laszlo album. The last three are from 2000, and involve Jones working with other musicians. Jones sings lead on all three, and they're just as good. Two of the three are unreleased, but you'd never know based on the sound quality.

This album is 53 minutes long.

01 Beloved (Norah Jones & Laszlo)
02 As We Fall (Norah Jones & Laszlo)
03 Traces (Norah Jones & Laszlo)
04 Song for Samuel (Norah Jones & Laszlo)
05 Wait (Norah Jones & Laszlo)
06 In a Whisper (Norah Jones & Laszlo)
07 Freak (Norah Jones & Laszlo)
08 Butterflies (Norah Jones & Laszlo)
09 Ain't Gonna Ask You (Norah Jones)
10 Angels (Wax Poetic & Norah Jones)
11 Technologie (Wax Poetic & Norah Jones)
12 Purple Elephants (Wax Poetic & Norah Jones)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16696762/NORHJNS1999-2000_Btterflies_atse.zip.html

In my opinion, given Jones's appealing looks, if you have an album with Jones as the lead singer, it's a no-brained to put her face on the cover. Maybe one reason Laszlo stayed so obscure is that they didn't do that. They titled the album "Butterflies," which I have done here as well, and made the cover some abstract art with a butterfly theme. I used that as the background for my cover, but pasted a photo of a young Norah Jones on top of it. (I'm not sure what year her photo is from). In case you're curious, or want to use the original cover, here it is.

After Jones hit it big and sold millions upon millions of albums, I'm surprised this album was never rereleased, with Jones's name and/or photo on the cover. But apparently that never happened. It wouldn't be false advertising, because she dominates the album.

Robyn Hitchcock - Acoustic Covers, Volume 4: 1999-2000

As I work my way chronologically through Robyn Hitchcock's extremely prolific career, I've been posting three kinds of albums: full-band stray track albums, all-acoustic versions of studio albums, and live cover versions albums.

It's been a long time since I've posted any of the last kind, and I've only posted two of those so far. But here's another. These will come more frequently from now on. Maybe part of that is that he started playing cover versions more often in concert. But I think more of it is that the number of bootlegged concerts increased, and the sound quality of such bootlegs increased too. If he's played a particular song many times over the years, I tried to go with the best sounding version. I'm glad to say the sound quality is pretty good on this album, even though every single song is from concert bootlegs. Most of them are from soundboard recordings.

Hitchcock loves the Beatles and Bob Dylan. So it's not that surprising that he covers four Beatles songs and three Dylan songs here. But he also does some less expected songs, such as tunes by R.E.M. ("Electrolyte") and Morrissey ("Every Day Is like Sunday").

Here's a list of the original artists for each song:

01 I'll Get You - Beatles
02 Let It Be Me - Everly Brothers
03 Peggy Sue - Buddy Holly
04 I've Got a Feeling - The Tracks of My Tears - Beatles - Smokey Robinson
05 Satellite of Love - Lou Reed
06 What Goes On - Velvet Underground
07 Too Much of Nothing - Bob Dylan
08 Waterloo Sunset [Acoustic Band Version] - Kinks
09 4th Time Around - Bob Dylan
10 Tangled Up in Blue - Bob Dylan
11 Everyday Is like Sunday - Morrissey
12 Only a Northern Song - Beatles
13 Old Brown Shoe - Beatles
14 Rock Your Baby - When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman - Kung Fu Fighting - George McCrae - Dr. Hook - Carl Douglas
15 All I Have to Do Is Dream - Everly Brothers

Here's the usual song list:

01 I'll Get You (Robyn Hitchcock)
02 Let It Be Me (Robyn Hitchcock)
03 Peggy Sue (Robyn Hitchcock)
04 I've Got a Feeling - The Tracks of My Tears (Robyn Hitchcock & Grant Lee Phillips)
05 Satellite of Love (Robyn Hitchcock & Grant Lee Phillips)
06 What Goes On (Robyn Hitchcock & Grant Lee Phillips)
07 Too Much of Nothing (Robyn Hitchcock)
08 Waterloo Sunset [Acoustic Band Version] (Robyn Hitchcock)
09 4th Time Around (Robyn Hitchcock)
10 Tangled Up in Blue (Robyn Hitchcock)
11 Everyday Is like Sunday (Robyn Hitchcock)
12 Only a Northern Song (Robyn Hitchcock)
13 Old Brown Shoe (Robyn Hitchcock)
14 Rock Me Baby - When You're in Love with a Beautiful Woman - Kung Fu Fighting (Robyn Hitchcock & Grant Lee Phillips)
15 All I Have to Do Is Dream (Robyn Hitchcock & Grant Lee Phillips)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15272688/RobynH_1999-2000_AcousticCoversVolume4_atse.zip.html

I couldn't find a good photo of Hitchcock with an acoustic guitar in 1999 or 2000. I'm not sure when this photo is from exactly, but judging by his hair, which was rapidly turning grey around this time, it's from roughly around 1999.

Belle & Sebastian - Live Cover Versions, Volume 2: 2002-2004

Belle and Sebastian had a neat habit of playing cover versions in concert back in the early 2000s. (They don't do that so much anymore, since they have so many originals to play instead.) But there are two things they did that were unusual. One, they picked some really interesting and unexpected songs to cover. Two, they typically only played them once.

This second thing is a big problem here, because only three of the songs here have been officially released. (All three of them are from a BBC album.) So if a song only gets played once in concert, the chances of it getting recorded well on a bootleg are small. It's a lucky thing if it gets bootlegged at all. I've found compilations of dozens and dozens of cover versions played in concert by Belle and Sebastian. The problem is, the vast majority of them have unacceptably poor sound quality to my ears. So this is my collection of just the ones that sounded good enough to me.

Even then, I had to make a couple of drastic edits. Note that for the song "Good Vibrations," most of the first verses and chorus was missing on the bootleg source that I found. So I edited it to start cleanly with the beginning of the second verse. I think that's much better than not including the song at all.

It's too bad so many songs didn't make it for sound quality reasons. I hope the band made their own recordings and will release some of them one day. But what's left on this album is still a lot of fun. Look at the rest of the song list - everything from Burt Bacharach to the Supremes to Sly and the Family Stone to Kraftwerk. They even did great versions of songs in Portuguese and French!

I explained more in the write-up for Volume 1 how it is that I found more songs that I'd previously missed. But note that all the songs with "[Edit]" in their titles are ones that I'd missed due to sound quality issues. However, I was able to use audio editing programs like X-Minus to fix most of the flaws, making them acceptable to my ears. As an example, the lead vocals to "Stayin' Alive" were too quiet compared to the instrumentation, so I boosted them.

Here are the original artists for each song:

01 Oliver's Army [Edit] - Elvis Costello
02 So You Want to Be a Rock 'N' Roll Star - Byrds
03 Darlin' [Edit] - Beach Boys
04 Stayin' Alive [Edit] - Bee Gees
05 Baby Love - Supremes
06 The Model [Das Modell] - Kraftwerk
07 Lucifer Sam - Pink Floyd
08 Runnin' Away - Sly and the Family Stone
09 My Little Red Book - Burt Bacharach / Love
10 The Train from Kansas City - Shangri-Las
11 This Guy's in Love with You - Burt Bacharach / Herb Alpert
12 Good Vibrations - Beach Boys
13 Comment te Dire Adieu - Francoise Hardy
14 The Boy with the Thorn in His Side - Smiths

And here's the usual song list:

01 Oliver's Army [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
02 So You Want to Be a Rock 'N' Roll Star (Belle & Sebastian)
03 Darlin' [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
04 Stayin' Alive [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
05 Baby Love (Belle & Sebastian)
06 The Model [Das Modell] (Belle & Sebastian)
07 Lucifer Sam (Belle & Sebastian)
08 Runnin' Away (Belle & Sebastian)
09 My Little Red Book (Belle & Sebastian)
10 The Train from Kansas City [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
11 This Guy's in Love with You [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
12 Good Vibrations [Edit] (Belle & Sebastian)
13 Comment te Dire Adieu (Belle & Sebastian)
14 The Boy with the Thorn in His Side (Belle & Sebastian)

This album is 40 minutes long.

https://www.upload.ee/files/15602300/BellenS_2002-2004_LivCoverVersionsVolume2_atse.zip.html

I wanted to use a photo of the entire Belle and Sebastian band playing in concert in the time period of this album. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any good ones. But I did find a good one of band leader Stuart Murdoch singing as part of the band at Wembley Arena in 2004, so I used that.

Nick Lowe - Bowi - Non-Album Tracks (1976-1979)

I've been in a mood to listen to Nick Lowe lately, so here's some more from him.

Lowe has had a long and impressive career. I think he's been exceptionally consistently good, except in the 1980s, when his albums were patchy. But my favorite time period of his career has to be the late 1970s. Not only did he put out his two best albums, "Jesus of Cool" in 1978 (also known as "Pure Pop for Now People" in the US), and "Labour of Lust" in 1979, but he toured extensively with Rockpile. I have a whole series of albums I plan to post covering his work with Dave Edmunds and Rockpile.

This stray tracks album covers the exact time of his career peak, so of course it's pretty damn good too. All but three songs here are from 1976 and 1977, which is when his solo career was slowly getting started, but before "Jesus of Cool" came out. There's been a compilation released of roughly this time period called "The Wilderness Years," and a lot of songs here come from that.

After some false starts documented on the 1975 stray tracks album I posted already, including some strange Bay City Rollers tribute songs released under a pseudonym, his solo career got started for real with his great single "So It Goes" in mid-1976. "So It Goes" is a fantastic song, and I'd love to have it here, but he included that exact same single version on "Jesus of Cool," so I don't want to duplicate that. The B-side, "Heart of the City," is nearly as great. That also made it on "Jesus of Cool," but the version there is a live one. The B-side version to "So It Goes" is the studio version, so I was able to include that.

Three of the songs here are from an EP Lowe put out in 1977 called "Bowi." There's a funny story behind that name. In 1977, David Bowie put out his acclaimed "Low" album. Lowe jokingly pretended that Bowie had named the album after him, but had left out the last letter of his name. So he responded with the EP "Bowi," with the last letter of Bowie's name missing. He even parodied the "Low" album cover, for instance using the same font and text location. I enjoyed this joke so much that I've used "Bowi" as the name for this album as a whole.

Lowe was a very prolific songwriter in this time period, so much so that he gave away lots of good songs to other artists without even recording any known versions for himself. Dr. Feelgood even had a ton ten hit with a song he co-wrote, "Milk and Alcohol." So it's not surprising that most of the songs on this album are Lowe originals. I'm not totally sure, but I think the only songs here he didn't at least co-write are "Born a Woman," "Halfway to Paradise," and "Endless Sleep."

A few songs need a little more explanation. "They Called It Rock" shows up here. It's basically the exact same song as "Shake and Pop" on "Jesus of Cool." The only difference is that the chorus of one is the phrase "they called it rock" repeated several times, and the other has the chorus of "shake and pop" repeated several times. Lowe wrote the song and preferred "Shake and Pop." However, his Rockpile band mate Dave Edmunds preferred the "They Called It Rock" version, so Rockpile always played it live that way. I'm not sure why Lowe recorded "They Called It Rock" as a B-side.

"Heart" is a song that appeared on Rockpile's 1980 album "Seconds of Pleasure." It sounds a lot like Lowe singing it, but that version is actually sung by band member Billy Bremner. The version here is sung by Lowe. He also did it on his 1982 album "Nick the Knife," but this has a different reggae styled arrangement.

"I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)" is one of my favorite Lowe songs. Although he wrote it, he gave it to Edmunds for his 1977 album "Get It." When Rockpile would play live, Edmunds would always sing it. But this version from an obscure 1978 album has Lowe doing most of the singing. (I'm not sure who he's singing with, since Edmunds isn't on that recording.) Lowe would release his own studio version on his 1985 album "The Rose of England," but that has a very different arrangement.

01 Heart of the City (Nick Lowe)
02 Let's Go to the Disco (Nick Lowe)
03 Everybody Dance (Nick Lowe)
04 Keep It Out of Sight (Nick Lowe)
05 Truth Drug (Nick Lowe)
06 Born a Woman (Nick Lowe)
07 Endless Sleep (Nick Lowe)
08 Shake that Rat [Instrumental] (Nick Lowe)
09 Halfway to Paradise (Nick Lowe)
10 I Don't Want the Night to End (Nick Lowe)
11 I Love My Label (Nick Lowe)
12 Heart [Reggae Version] (Nick Lowe)
13 I Got a Job (Nick Lowe)
14 They Called It Rock (Nick Lowe)
15 I Knew the Bride [When She Used to Rock and Roll] (Nick Lowe)
16 Basing Street (Nick Lowe)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15264508/NickL_1976-1979_Bwi_atse.zip.html

The cover is just the cover of the "Bowi" EP without any changes.