Albums That Never Were

Bob Dylan - Songs For Dwarf Music

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. Million Dollar Bash

2. Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread

3. Please Mrs. Henry

4. Crash on The Levee

5. Lo and Behold!

6. Tiny Montgomery

7. This Wheels On Fire

Side B:

8. You Ain't Going Nowhere

9. I Shall Be Released

10. Too Much of Nothing

11. Tears of Rage

12. Quinn The Eskimo

13. Open The Door, Homer

14. Nothing Was Delivered

This is a reconstruction of the 14-song acetate compiled in January 1968 of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes recordings for his music publishing company, Dwarf Music. Intended for distribution to recording industry insiders in order to shop the songs around for other artists to cover, it was this acetate that was used to create the very first bootleg album, Great White Wonder. Many believe this specific collection is the closest official word to a vintage, proper Dylan album compiled from the 1967 Basement Tapes recordings. This reconstruction of that acetate uses the very best sources (namely the Bootleg Series vol 11) uses the correct takes in correct sequence and is presented in a unique mono mix. As opposed to the overdubbed 1975 Basement Tapes album or even the 2014 Bootleg Series vol 11 box set, this reconstruction is how the material was originally presented and meant to be heard in early 1968. Note that this is not necessarily an upgrade from my previous Basement Tapes reconstruction Big Pink, even though the sound quality certainly is an upgrade and they share 13 of the same 14 songs; both Songs For Dwarf Music and Big Pink attempt different goals through the same body of music.

Infamously concluding his electric, amphetamine-fueled 1966 World Tour with a “debilitating” motorcycle accident, Bob Dylan was left to retire from the public eye and become the family-man he allegedly always wanted to be. But his old desire to make music eventually crept in, which amounted to Dylan placing phone calls systematically to the members of The Hawks, his backing band for his previous tour. Being on retainer, Robbie Robertson, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel—whom themselves were thinking about regrouping and renaming their own outfit into The Band—arrived to Dylan’s Woodstock home in the summer of 1967 and began simply jamming to old country, gospel and traditional standards while the world around them snacked on psychedelic pop. Hudson recorded the highlights of the proceedings for posterity to two-track tape and the quintet quickly amassed a pile of reels, unsure exactly what to do with them. The Basement Tapes were born.

But without a new Dylan album or tour on the horizon, manager Albert Grossman needed new product. Thus the gears eventually shifted and the daily basement jams evolved into demo sessions for new Dylan compositions, intended to be sold to other artists. Even though Dylan tailor-wrote each serious original for a specific artist, his originals were very different during this period, informed by the structure of the folk standards the quintet had jammed on during the previous months. Dylan’s lyrics were paired down from the verbose poetics of Blonde on Blonde to be concise, with every singular line being important and justified; many songs became structurally and even thematically similar to sea shanties and drinking songs. But the most notable characteristics are the full band arrangements, which often included: Dylan’s 12-string acoustic guitar and idiosyncratic voice; Rick Danko’s electric bass keeping the rhythm in Levon Helm's absence, reminiscent of Sun Records' drumless recordings; Richard Manuel’s piano keeping the backbone with Dylan’s acoustic; only Robbie Robertson’s tasteful electric lead guitar and Garth Hudson’s celestial electric organ remained from the previous year’s 'wild mercury sound’. Remarkably, some of Bob Dylan’s most cherished songs spawned from these sessions and the Basement Tapes set the standard for Dylan’s concise songwriting method and style for his following albums, from John Wesley Harding up to Planet Waves.

The first collection of demos was compiled by Hudson (who was acting as impromptu producer) in October 1967, a set of ten songs from Reels 8 & 9, sequenced in the order they were recorded (although “Tiny Montgomery” from Reel 4 was stuck in-between): Million Dollar Bash / Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread / Please Mrs. Henry / Crash on the Levee / Lo and Behold! / Tiny Montgomery / This Wheel’s On Fire / You Ain’t Going Nowhere / I Shall Be Released / Too Much of Nothing. It was this original tape that secured the initial covers of the Basement Tapes material, including Flatt & Scruggs take on “Crash on the Levee”, Brian Auger & The Trinity’s take on “This Wheel’s On Fire”, The Byrds take on “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and Peter, Paul & Mary’s take on “Too Much of Nothing.”

With The Byrds and Peter, Paul & Mary charting with Dylan originals, Albert Grossman asked for more songs. A second, five-song tape was compiled in January 1968 with the best songs from Reels 10 & 13 that included: Tears of Rage / Quinn The Eskimo / Open The Door, Homer / Nothing Was Delivered / Get Your Rocks Off. Eventually the final song was dropped, and the remaining four songs were tagged onto the end of the previous 10-song reel, creating the final 14-song acetate that lead to Manfred Mann’s take on “Quinn The Eskimo” charting as well as The Byrds take on “Nothing Was Delivered”. It was this 14-song configuration that made the most rounds in the inner circles, arriving not only in the hands of both music industry professionals and curious musicians, but in the hands of Jann Wenner who famously published an article about the great unreleased Bob Dylan album in Rolling Stone. It also arrived in the hands of Ken and Dub who pressed their own vinyl run of the material (coupled with recordings from 1961) and sold their wares under-the-counter to drooling Dylan fans starving for the originals of his currently-charting originals otherwise were unavailable to the general public. Eventually dubbed The Great White Wonder, this was the first bootleg record.

The mythology of The Basement Tapes grew throughout the 60s and 70s, largely due to the notoriety of those specific Dylan songs he never released, Wenner’s Rolling Stone article and the emergence of bootleg recordings. Meeting the demands for an official document of the Basement Tapes recordings, Robbie Robertson with Levon Helm (who did not appear in the Basement Tapes sessions until the 14-song acetate was completed) compiled and then overdubbed a double album of the recordings in 1975. While a great listen, the inherent faults of the album (anachronistic overdubs, poor sound quality of some source material, inclusions of unrelated Band material, exclusion of “I Shall Be Released” and “Quinn the Eskimo”) did not quench many Dylan fans’ thirst for the vintage Basement Tapes recordings. Since then, a number of bootlegs including A Tree With Roots and The Genuine Basement Tapes offered a more vintage anthology of the available material. Both sets were finally trumped by the official 6-CD box set The Bootleg Series vol 11: The Basement Tapes Complete, remastered (mostly) from the master reels, presented as a modern centralized stereophonic mix. The epic box set was everything a Basement Tapes aficionado would desire, but it lacked one thing: a remastered reproduction of that original fourteen-song acetate for Dwarf Music, the recording that started it all, what many Dylan fans believe is the true missing Dylan album from 1967.

Recreating the original 14-song acetate—what I have titled here as Songs For Dwarf Music—is a much easier task than it appears to be. All the source material is available on Bootleg Series vol 11 at the highest sound quality possible. The one kink is that it is in stereo with an overly-centered vocal track, while the original acetate is in mono. Furthermore, I propose the Basement Tapes were meant to be heard in mono all along for a few reasons:

1) All of the tapes were tracked live to two-track tape, with Dylan’s acoustic and vocal in one track and all of the remaining instruments in the other track. The end result, if mixed to stereo, is a difficult listen, akin to the awkward mixes of early Beatles albums in which the vocals are trapped in one channel and instruments in the other. The logical solution is to make a final mix in mono and I believe that was Hudson’s intention while recording it.

2) Any compilation of this material would have been used for industry insiders and played mainly in corporate offices, professional locations with no concern for stereophonic setups.

3) In 1967, mono was the standard anyways; it would take a couple more years for stereo to become the predominant format

But how would have these mono mixes have been prepared in 1967? Luckily we have fairly decent audio samples of “Million Dollar Bash” and “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” sourced from John Peel’s copy of the original acetate. Using those mixes as a guideline, we can take the correct tracks from BS11and split the left and right channels into separate tracks. From there, the right channel (Dylan’s vocal/acoustic track) is reduced in volume by 28 dBs and the two tracks are remixed to mono. The result is a mono mix with Manuel’s piano driving the song and Hudson’s organ up front in the mix, right behind Dylan’s voice. This matches the levels found on John Peel’s copy of the acetate, which was how Hudson originally mixed the songs. Making the assumption that all 14 songs were mixed this way, we apply these settings to all 14 songs (with the exception of “I Shall Be Released” which was already mixed with both channels at an equal volume on BT11; I instead created a mono fold-down that seemed to match the instrumental balance of the other 13 tracks).

What songs should be included? Luckily there is a lot of documentation that clarifies which takes were used and in what order, and we will follow that template (for better or for worse). Side A of my reconstruction begins with take 2 of “Million Dollar Bash”, followed by take 2 of “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread”, “Please Mrs. Henry”, take 2 of “Crash on the Levee”, take 2 of “Lo and Behold!”, “Tiny Montgomery” and “This Wheel’s On Fire”. Side B begins with take 2 of “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” followed by take 2 of “I Shall Be Released”. Take 1 of “Too Much of Nothing” was used on the acetate (as opposed to take 2 featured and overdubbed on the 1975 Basement Tapes album) and Peter, Paul and Mary’s cover version logically reflects that arrangement. Likewise, take 1 of “Tears of Rage” (as opposed to take 3 on the 1975 Basement Tapes album) and take 1 of “Quinn The Eskimo” (as opposed to the superior take 2 on Biograph and The Essential Bob Dylan) were both featured on the original acetate. This reconstruction concludes with takes 1 of “Open The Door, Homer” and (regrettably) take 1 of “Nothing Was Delivered”. While I don’t totally agree on these take selections (notably for “Nothing Was Delivered” and “Quinn The Eskimo”) we will concede to present an accurate artifact.

The final touch is the cover art, inspired by the blank, generic Emidisc sleeve that often housed these type of acetates, featuring only a typewritten title and tracklist, with some tracks even mistitled! Also included are scans of three (of the reported eight) copies of the actual acetate disc labels as well as a tapebox scan of the master reel of Hudson’s initial 10-song configuration from October 1967. So while BT11 is an amazing document of the entire Basement Tapes, presented here is what the genuine article was originally meant to be, if anything at all.

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC

Sources used:

The Bootleg Series vol 11: The Basement Tapes Complete

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Soundtrack

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

1. Love Missile F1-11- Sigue Sigue Sputnik

2. Oh Yeah - Yello

3. Beat City - The Flower Pot Men

4. B.A.D. - Big Audio Dynamite

5. Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want - The Dream Academy

6. Danke Shoen - Wayne Newton

7. Twist & Shout- The Beatles

8. Radio People - Zapp

9. I'm Afraid– The Blue Room

10. Taking The Day Off - General Public

11. The Edge of Forever- The Dream Academy

12. March of the Swivel Heads - The English Beat

In honor of April Fool’s Day—and of course Spring Break—this is a reconstruction of the unreleased soundtrack to the classic 1986 John Hughes film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Even though much of the film’s music and songs have since become staples of pop culture, an actual soundtrack album was never released because Hughes thought the material was too stylistically diverse and wouldn’t function as a continuous album. In effect, much of this material remained as rare vinyl-only b-sides and, in some cases, extremely out-of-print and nearly impossible to find. This reconstruction attempts to collect the best versions of the relevant selections from eleven different sources and present the cohesive album that Hughes did not believe could be made.

A top-grossing film at the time of its release that has grown to such celebratory heights as being selected for inclusion into the National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is the story of three teenagers search for freedom in our modern world, something that every young Baby Buster and old Generation X-er seemed to relate to. Following the antics of clever teen Ferris Bueller’s attempts to skip school with his friends Cameron and Sloane and jaunt around Chicago, the film also featured a classic soundtrack that bounced from then-contemporary New Wave to the classics to other cinematic comedic nods. But what set Ferris Bueller apart from other 80s John Hughes films such as Sixteen Candles or Pretty in Pink was the lack of an official soundtrack album, despite having noteworthy and culturally relevant music featured in the film. Quoted as feeling that he wouldn’t think “anyone would like it”, Hughes ditched the notion of actually releasing a soundtrack and instead released a hand-made limited edition 7” single of “Beat City” b/w “I’m Afraid” to the John Hughes mailing list. That 7” is now long-forgotten and hard to locate, with copies sporadically appearing on eBay, selling for upwards of $200; this dire situation is worsened by the fact that this is the only release one could find those two specific songs!

Although the Ferris Bueller soundtrack has been reconstructed by other blogs throughout the years, my version is a bit different as it does not attempt to be all-inclusive and exhaustively comprehensive, what I perceive as a pitfall of those other versions. My reconstruction will be limited to an album-length soundtrack, comparable to other John Hughes soundtracks—what would have most likely been released in 1986. In effect, I will not be including incidental music (notably the score by Ira Newborn) and other media themes used as comedic effect (The Star WarsTheme, the theme from I Dream of Jeanie); we will only include the music most likely to have been released on a 1986 soundtrack album. The songs are sequenced in the order they appear in the film and it is also available in a lossless option, something not previously found on other blogs -- especially for the Fan Club 7" tracks.

My reconstruction beings with the Extended Mix of “Love Missile F1-11” by Sigue Sigue Sputnik, which is featured as the music bed for the opening scenes in which Ferris lectures the viewer about skipping school. This is a rare mix not found on any album, taken from the A-side of the Love Missile 12” single. Next is probably the most well known track from the soundtrack, “Oh Yeah” by Yello which has become synonymous with greed and lust. Featured throughout the film—but most notably when Cameron shows Ferris his father’s Ferrari, it is taken from the first pressing of their album Stella. Next is one of the rarest tracks, “Beat City” by The Flower Pot Men, occurring during the scene as the trio drive to Chicago. This recording is the actual film version taken from a lossless rip of the rare John Hughes fan club 7”, not the live recording found on The Janice Long Session EP. Big Audio Dynamite’s “B.A.D.” follows, heard during the garage scene, taken from an original pre-emphasized copy of their debut album. An instrumental version of The Dream Academy’s cover of The Smiths’ “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” is taken from the compilation album Boutique Chill, the only CD release of the track in existence; the song was famously used during the trio’s visit to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Next is “Danke Shoen” by Wayne Newton, taken from the Capitol Collector’s Series CD; although the song is a reoccurring motif throughout the film, this recording is featured during the parade scene, “sung” by Ferris on a float. The second number to be “sung” is “Twist and Shout” by The Beatles, this recording taken from their current 2009 remaster series (still the best master in my opinion!). Notably, John Hughes overdubbed a horn section onto the track for the film to fit the setting, much to the displeasure of Paul McCartney;Hughes then kept the mix in the can after discovering he offended a Beatle! Driving home from Chicago we hear Zapp’s “Radio People”, taken from their album The New Zapp IV U. Probably the rarest of all recordings included is Blue Room’s “I’m Afraid”, heard during the poolside scene. This is taken from a lossless rip of the John Hughes fan club 7” and is an alternate mix as compared to the circulating version, featuring a longer ending. Another poolside track, “Taking The Day Off” by General Public is taken from the Classic Masters compilation. As Sloane and Ferris have a parting heart-to-heart, The Dream Academy’s “The Edge of Forever” is featured, taken from an original pressing of their debut album. My reconstruction concludes with the music bed featured as Ferris races to beat his parents home, The English Beat’s “March of the Swivel Heads”, itself an instrumental mix of “Rotating Head” and found on the deluxe version of Special Beat Service. And with that, we can stop and look around at what we otherwise missed!

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2)

Sources used:

The Beatles – Please Please Me (2009 remaster Capitol Records CD)

Big Audio Dynamite – This is Big Audio Dynamite (1985 Columbia Records, pre-emphasized CD)

The Dream Academy – The Dream Academy (1985 Warner Bros CD)

The English Beat – Special Beat Service (2012 Edsel Records deluxe eddition)

The Flower Pot Men/Blue Room split 7” (1986 Fireball Records, vinyl rip by asid25)

General Public – Classic Masters (2002 Capitol Records CD)

Sigue Sigue Sputnik – Love Missile F1-11 (1986 Manhatten Records 12”, unknown vinyl rip)

Various artists – Boutique Chill (2006 High Bias Records CD)

Wayne Newton – The Capitol Collector’s Series (1989 Capitol Records CD)

Yello – Stella (1985 Mercury/Polygram CD)

Zapp – The New Zapp IV U (1985 Warner Bros CD)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

Blur – Britain Versus America

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. PopScene

2. Advert

3. Colin Zeal

4. Pressure On Julian

5. Oily Water

6. Beachcoma

Side B:

7. Never Clever

8. Star Shaped

9. Into Another

10. Miss America

11. Turn It Up

12. Resigned

In honor of the just-released first Blur album in 12 years—The Magic Whip—I’m offering a reconstruction of the unreleased 1992 Blur album Britain Versus America, which evolved into their sophomore and band-defining 1993 album Modern Life Is Rubbish. Originally designed to sonically follow their debut Leisure using featuring the Madchester sound, the album got a complete facelift to become the first of their “Life Trilogy” and signaled a new era of the band, featuring a more traditional Brit-Pop sound and image. This reconstruction attempts to present the album as originally envisioned during the band’s dismal American Tour in 1992 and follows the abandoned aesthetic of their “PopScene” single, using alternate versions and a concise track sequence influenced by the setlists of that tour. Original masters are used when available and all tracks are volume adjusted for a cohesive listening experience.

Following the initial rush of British stardom upon the release of their single “There’s No Other Way” in 1991, their debut album Leisure was seen as an anticlimax, using the indie aesthetic of the Madchester sound—a mix of dance-grooves juxtaposed with shoegaze guitars—with a more pop-friendly face. Despite this, Blur soldiered on and by 1992 the band was in debt, embarking on an American tour to recoup and fronted by a new single for the occasion: “PopScene”. At the time, the song was thought of as their crown achievement by the band, with its punk influenced charisma juxtaposed by a particularly British horn section and vocal melody; unfortunately the Americans disagreed and the single flopped. As the tour continued, band morale diminished and Blur became resentful of the Americas, creating an “us vs. them” mentality. This planted the seeds for their next album, which would be decidingly British, combating what they felt was overly American music popular at the time: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, etc. Throughout 1992, Blur recorded new material and road-tested the songs for the Americans but received less-than stellar responses, especially when compared to the positive feedback garnished on their British contemporaries. The planned follow-up single “Never Clever” was scrapped and the band was left with about 20 new, finished studio recordings tracked between November 1991 and August 1992 at Matrix Studios with John Smith, with the tentative title Britain Versus America. Featuring an aggressive mix of Baggy and British references meant to compete with the American grunge scene, the recordings remained a sonic continuation of the band’s debut… at least for the time being.

This musical direction was second-guessed by frontman Damon Albarn, opting to give Blur a much-needed facelift, visually and sonically. Relegating the previous year’s work to demo status and focusing-in and honing the Brit-Pop aspect of the band with a sound reminiscent of The Kinks, The Beatles and The Small Faces, Blur began re-recording the material with XTC member Andy Partridge in September with disparaging results (before a quick single session with Steve Lowell, who had produced “PopScene”). After a chance meeting, Blur reconvened with Leisure producer Stephen Street to retrack the best of the 20 new songs with a renewed sense of musical purpose. By the end of 1992, Blur had compiled an album based on the Street and Lovell session, with a handful the best of the Smith material peppered in to round off an album, still provisionally titled Britain Versus America. This master was rejected by Food Records as not commercial enough and Albarn went back to the drawing board that Christmas, writing the album-defining hits “For Tomorrow” and “Chemical World”. After more sessions in early 1993, the more commercial (and more British) album was retitled to a safer Modern Life Is Rubbishand eventually reached critical and commercial acclaim, jump-starting the band back to not only British pop icons, but critical darlings. Note that it was the trajectory of one year that created this landmark; can we turn back the clock and hear how the album was originally intended?

The first step in reconstructing Britain Versus America is to separate the fact from fiction. There was a long-held belief that Britain Versus America was the unreleased Blur album reportedly compiled in the spring of 1992, which allegedly had a tracklist of: Oily Water / Mace / Badgeman Brown / PopScene / Resigned / Garden Central / Hanging Over / Into Another / Peach / Bone Bag / Never Clever / Coping / My Ark / Pressure on Julian. Blur guitarist Graham Coxon has recently debunked this myth, dismissing this information. We now know that not only was there no album compiled at this point, but it could not have even been Britain Versus Americaanyways, as the title was adopted in late 1992 after the Street sessions! Conversely, the Food Records-rejected master of Modern Life Is Rubbish from Christmas 1992 (a more likely candidate for the title Britain Versus America) was probably closer to the final album than we think, missing only the hit singles—not a very interesting reconstruction!

For our purposes, we will acknowledge both fact and fiction surrounding Britain Versus America and instead reconstruct an album that illustrates the evolution of Modern Life Is Rubbish. We will compile the theoretical second Blur album as is stood before the band’s facelift and attempts to re-record the album with Andy Partridge and then Stephen Street, focusing squarely on the best of the Matrix tapes recorded in the Fall of 1991 and throughout 1992. In effect, we will have an alternate Modern Life Is Rubbish that follows a more guitar-heavy Madchester sound, closer to that of Leisure. To do so we will use the alternate versions of the MLIR tracks found on the Blur 21box (paired with the original masters if they were already officially-released tracks) and a track selection and sequence that acknowledges both the track order for MLIR and the actual setlists of Blur’s 1992 American Tour. This reconstruction also sets a limit of 12-songs, in line with the length of Leisure and avoiding the hour-long lengths of Blur’s “Life Trilogy” albums.

Our Britain Versus America sets its tone with the quintessential song of this period, “PopScene”, taken from the original US MLIR release. The album continues much as MLIR does with the early and punkier Matrix versions of “Advert”, “Colin Zeal” and “Pressure On Julian”, all taken from the 21 box. Following is the exquisite “Oily Water”, this being the most dynamic master taken from the 1991 V2 compilation Volume Two which predated the MLIR album considerably. Side A concludes with the fantastic b-side “Beachcoma” from the For Tomorrowsingle and restarts Side B with the single that never was, “Never Clever” taken from the 21 box. This is followed by the early Matrix version of “Star Shaped” and one of the lost MLIR songs “Into Another” which was performed regularly in 1992, both also from the 21 box. The apropos “Miss America” from the US MLIR follows, with the album concluding with the more rockin’ Matrix version of “Turn It Up” found on 21 and the climactic “Resigned” from the MLIR US version. The effectiveness of this reconstruction is certainly up for debate—possibly dependent on if you are American or British!—but offers not only an alternate flavor to a magic whip, but if you might have thought that Modern Life was actually rubbish. Let the battle begin!

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2)

Sources used:

Blur 21: The Box (2012 Parlophone CD)

For Tomorrow (1993 Food Records CD single)

Modern Life is Rubbish (1993 SBK Records CD - US version)

Various Artists – Volume 2 (1991 V2 Records compilation CD)

flac --> wav --> editing in Goldwave and Audacity--> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

The Who – Introducing The Who

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. I’m A Man

2. Heat Wave

3. I Don’t Mind

4. Lubie (Come Back Home)

5. Out In The Street (You’re Gonna Know Me)

6. Please Please Please

Side B:

7. Leaving Here

8. Daddy Rolling Stone

9. Motoring

10. Anytime You Want Me

11. Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere

12. Shout and Shimmy

This is a reconstruction of what was almost The Who’s 1965 debut album, consisting mostly of amped-up versions of R&B covers, which was eventually scrapped and re-recorded as their classic genre-creating My Generation. This reconstruction attempts to follow the original promotional acetate sequenced by producer Shel Talmy to recreate what The Who’s first album could have been. The best sources are used and of course this reconstruction is all in mono—pretty much the only way this material should be presented!

How are legends born? Sometimes they are not ready-made brilliant, but their significance needs to be forged and honed. Following a change of drummer to the young yet prodigal Keith Moon and a change of moniker from The Detours to The Who in 1964, the band was discovered by manager Peter Meaden who urged them to change their name to The High Numbers and record his own originals “Zoot Suit” and “I’m The Face” to exploit the current mod movement in the UK. The single failed to chart and the band reverted to their Who moniker. At this time, The Who were crafting their chaotic and destructive stage antics and making a name for themselves as playing “maximum R&B”—electrified, high-energy covers of American rock and rhythm & blues standards, laying the groundwork of what would eventually become punk rock.

Meadon was promptly replaced by Kit Lambert, who was impressed by the band’s explosive live show and encouraged guitarist Pete Townshend to write original material to keep up with the current trend of self-contained bands such as The Beatles and The Kinks. Signed by producer Shel Talmy, the band recorded their debut single that November at the basement studios of Pyre Electronics—“I Can’t Explain” b/w “Bald Headed Woman”, which charted at number 8. This was the catalyst the band needed and Talmy rushed The Who back into the studio to record a follow-up single, “Leaving Here” b/w “Baby Don’t You Do It” in March 1965. The single was shelved for unknown reasons but the band relocated to IBC Studios instead to record a full-length album in April. Prodded by vocalist Roger Daltrey, the sessions focused on reproducing The Who’s current live set in that they consisted mainly of early rock and R&B covers, with the only Townshend originals being recorded of the twelve were the paltry “Out in the Street” and a stunning song that attempted to sonically marry both the melodic and chaotic elements of The Who, “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”.

The later was released in May as a single that charted as high as number 10 and Talmy reached a dilemma: should he release the covers-heavy recordings from April as-is, Daltrey’s vision of The Who? Or should Townshend be pushed to pen all-original material, as proven he could with both “I Can’t Explain” and “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere”? In a move that set in motion the band’s legendary trajectory, Talmy pressed a nine-song acetate from the sessions and shopped it around to music journalists. The acetate featured: I’m a Man / Heat Wave / I Don’t Mind / Lubie / Out In The Streets / Please, Please, Please / Leaving Here / Motoring and a final song (most likely “Shout and Shimmy”, as it was the only unheard song from the remaining four, with “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” already released as a single, “Daddy Rolling Stone” as it’s b-side in the UK and “Anytime You Want Me” as it’s b-side in the US). Aside from Townshend later claiming he hated the album in this early configuration, the feedback was dismal and the material was deemed unoriginal and lacked the electric spark heard on the previous singles. It was decided that the whole album should be scrapped and to start again from scratch; Townshend had beaten Daltrey over the direction of The Who.

After a summer tour, the band reconvened to IBC Studios in October with all-new original material and recorded eight more tracks: “A Legal Matter”, “The Good’s Gone”, “It’s Not True”, “The Kids Are Alright”, “La-La-La Lies”, “Much Too Much”, “The Ox” and a little two-chord tune with a bass solo called “My Generation”. Creating the bulk of the remade debut, The Who rescued “Out in the Street”, “I Don’t Mind”, “Please Please Please” and “I’m A Man” from the April sessions and the album was released in December as My Generation, with its title track as the lead single released the previous month. The rest may be history, but the twisted path The Who took to find their generation could have yielded a completely different introduction.

Our first step in reconstructing this early version of My Generation—which I have aptly titled Introducing The Who—is to simply recreate Shel Telmay’s nine-song acetate, sifting in the three remaining songs into side B. The results create a surprisingly well-balanced album, with side A beginning with the ruckus of "I'm a Man", side A ending with the slow-tempo “Please Please Please” and side B beginning with the up-tempo “Leaving Here” (intended as a single anyways!). Also seemingly much more than coincidence, the covers-heavy album would then have one Townshend-original buried deep within each LP side full of cover versions, much like another popular rock band also on Decca Records: The Rolling Stones, in which both of their 1965 releases The Rolling Stones No. 2 and Out of Our Heads featured the exact same layout! As for source material, we will only use the original mono mixes and focus on the very best master of the available material: the 2011 Japanese SHM-SACD remaster of My Generation. All other source material (the 2008 My Generation box set and the 2011 remaster of Who’s Missing Two’s Missing) was A/Bed, re-EQed and volume adjusted to match the parameters of that excellent 2011 SHM-SACD remaster to make a cohesive whole and as close to the sound of the master tapes as possible.

Side A specifically follows Telmay’s acetate, which begins with “I’m A Man” from the 2011 remaster of My Generation, followed by “Heat Wave” from the 2008 My Generation box set. Next is “I Don’t Mind” from the 2011 SHM-SACD followed by “Lubie” from the 2008 remaster, with the side concluding with “Out On The Street” and “Please Please Please” from the 2011 remaster. Side B deviates slightly from the Telmay acetate in order to include the three songs that were initially dropped due to the single release, although retaining the side opener and closer. The side begins with The Who single-that-never-was “Leaving Here” from the 2008 box, followed by “Daddy Rolling Stone” and “Motoring” also from the box. “Anytime You Want Me” is next, taken from the superb 2011 remaster of Who’s Missing Two’s Missing. Closing out the album is the single version of “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere” from the 2008 box and “Shout and Shimmy” from the 2011 remaster.

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC

Sources Used:

My Generation (2011 Japanese SHM-SACD remaster)

My Generation (2008 Japanese Collector’s box set)

Who’s Missing Two’s Missing (2011 Japanese SHM-SACD remaster)

flac --> wav --> SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

The Misfits – 12 Hits From Hell

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. Halloween

2. Vampira

3. I Turned Into a Martian

4. Skulls

5. London Dungeon

6. Night of the Living Dead

Side B:

7. Horror Hotel

8. Ghoul’s Night Out

9. Astro Zombies

10. Where Eagles Dare

11. Violent World

12. Halloween II

This is a reconstruction of the unreleased 1980 debut album from The Misfits, 12 Hits From Hell, which was scrapped after guitarist Bobby Steele was replaced by Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein. Some of the songs were instead released as 7” singles and the remaining tracks were used as a demo to secure a record deal and eventually re-recorded in 1982 as their seminal Walk Among Us. Although 12 Hits From Hell was given a modern remix and remaster for a posthumous release in 2001, it was again vetoed and scrapped by vocalist Glenn Danzig and bassist Jerry Only because of errors in mastering, artwork and liner note credit. This reconstruction ignores the posthumous 2001 remix and attempts to collect only authentic mixes to assemble how the album would have sounded in 1980.

Emerging as one of the first wave of hardcore punk acts in 1977 New Jersey, it took a few years and scrapped projects for The Misfits to find their sound. Harnessing the new-found aggression of hardcore punk, the quartet recorded what was intended as their debut album, Static Age, in 1978. Following a change in band lineup, image and lyrical subjects—embracing the themes and aesthetic of classic horror movies—the album was scrapped and The Misfits instead focused on touring and single releases. By 1980, the lineup had solidified with guitarist Bobby Steel and drummer Arthur Googy, backing up Danzig and Only.

Entering Master Sound Productions Studios on August 7^th, 1980, the quartet recorded twelve songs meant to function as their debut album. All the tracks were initially cut live in one take, except “London Dungeon”, which required two takes. Unknown to Steele, Only had been grooming his little brother Doyle to replace Steele as guitarist, and Doyle was brought in for his own set of guitar overdubs. The effect is unique in The Misfits body of work, as the album—provisionally titled 12 Hits From Hell—is the only release with two different guitarists. The recordings were equal parts energetic and atmospheric and were never replicated later in their career. The Caiafa Brothers (Jerry and Doyle) would have their way by October and Steele was ousted from the band, relegating the recordings to function as a demo tape to shop the band to prospective labels.

Luckily the recordings were not left in the vault for long, as “London Dungeon”, “Horror Hotel” and “Ghouls Night Out” were all released on the abbreviated EP 3 Hits From Hell in April 1981, and “Halloween” and “Halloween II” were released as a 7” on Halloween 1981. The session also did its job as a demo, securing the band a contract with Ruby Records that year and producing their ‘proper’ debut album Walk Among Us in 1982, which featured re-recorded versions of six of the remaining unreleased 12 Hits From Hell songs. While The Misfits eventually disbanded in 1983, Danzig took the liberty to overdub and remix a number of unreleased tracks for the 1985 compilation Legacy of Brutality, which featured doctored mixes of “Where Eagles Dare” and “Halloween” as well as pillaged versions of some of the Static Age songs. The original 1980 mixes of “Astro Zombies” “Night of the Living Dead”, “Skulls” and “Vampira” were released the following year on a self-titled compilation that was eventually known as Collection I, with “Halloween”, “Horror Hotel” and “Halloween II” released on the follow-up compilation Collection II in 1995. Finally, all the aforementioned tracks as well as the original unreleased 1980 mixes of “I Turned Into a Martian”, “Violent World” and “Where Eagles Dare” were released on The Misfits Box Set in 1996.

Interestingly enough, the scattered tracks found on the box set was not the last word on 12 Hits From Hell. After the unreleased Static Age album had been successfully issued as a proper posthumous release in 1997, 12 Hits From Hell warranted the same treatment and was remixed from the mastertapes in 2001 for a tentative Halloween release on Caroline Records. All twelve songs—as well as the alternate first take of “London Dungeon” as a bonus track—received a more spacious and wide-stereo mix, a very modern-sounding mix that was a sharp contrast to the tight and claustrophobic 1980 mixes. After a number of promotional copies had been distributed to industry insiders, the album was cancelled, promo copies recalled and subsequently destroyed. Why? Both Danzig and Only—the two who retained the rights to the Misfits brand—claimed not only a “mastering error” but incorrect credits in the liner notes, as well as subpar packaging and cover design that didn't meet their standard. On the other hand, former guitarist Bobby Steele had an opposing point of view: that the newly-remixed album was scrapped because of Danzig & Only’s egos, who wanted to erase his guitar parts that were featured prominently in the new mixes. In a possible retaliation and absurd twist, Steele recorded his own version of the entire album with The Undead in 2007. But putting aside petty squabbles, what did 12 Hits From Hell originally sound like?

For my reconstruction, we will focus solely on the original 1980 mixes of 12 Hits From Hell, for better or for worse; while admittedly the 2001 remix sounds stunning, it is not what The Misfits sounded like in 1980. Luckily all the (presumably) vintage mixes are found on the 1996 Box Set in their best mastering, making our task extremely easy! The tracklist will follow the planned 2001 12 Hits remaster, as the CD itself followed Danzig’s own handwritten tracklist from 1980, written on MSP Studios stationary. The final touch is a cover design that borrows from the 3 Hits From Hell EP, an art concept that is as vintage as possible (also included is alternate cover art designed by Jon Hunt of idesignalbumcovers). So without further delay, put on your make-up… it’s time for an early Halloween!

320 kps mp3s

Lossless flac

Sources used:

The Misfits - Box Set (1996 Caroline Records)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave--> flac encoding via TLH lv8

*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Wilco – Here Comes Everybody

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

1. A Magazine Called Sunset

2. Kamera

3. Radio Cure

4. Cars Can’t Escape

5. The Good Part

6. Shakin’ Sugar

7. Laminated Cat

8. Ashes of American Flags

9. Heavy Metal Drummer

10. I’m The Man Who Loves You

11. Pot Kettle Black

12. Poor Places

13. Venus Stopped The Train

14. Iamtryingtobreakyourheart

In honor of the surprise release of Wilco’s (pretty fantastic) new album Star Wars, here is a reconstruction of what could have been their fourth album--Here Comes Everybody. Eventually restructured as their 2001 masterpiece Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the album ended up very different than the early working tapes due to shifting band members, song arrangements and label affiliations. Compiling alternate versions from two sets of demo discs as well as a number of studio outtakes, we are able to piece together a less-experimental album more in-line with the band’s previous album Summerteeth (ideally featuring more appearances of multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett and drummer Ken Coomer, who exited the band during this period). Some unique edits were made to make new, complete takes; the tracks were also either crossfaded or banded closely; and all songs are volume-adjusted to create a cohesive listening experience.

At the end of the 20th Century, Wilco had become critical darling in search of the ever-elusive hit single and the battle between The Artist and The Industry had already bubbled over several times. Lead singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy desired Wilco’s second album--1996’s Being There--to be a double album, an idea vetoed by their label Reprise Records; a compromise was reached, in which Tweedy allowed a significant cut of his royalties from the album which offset the label’s loss, in order for it to be released as a double. The sprawling album that straddled alt-country and experimental-rock gained enough critical success to warrant artistic freedom for their follow-up, 1999’s Summerteeth. Although once again garnishing much critical acclaim for the album’s lush Pet Sounds-esque layers as well as Tweedy’s songwriting prowess, Reprise Records didn’t hear a hit single and demanded to create a radio-friendly mix of “I Can’t Stand It”. Wilco acquiesced, knowing how much freedom they had been already allowed in an era of the emergence of media oligopolies and a long list of bands dropped from the label's roster. The song failed to be a hit, and Wilco approached the danger zone.

Regrouping at the band’s own rehearsal space in late 2000 to record the follow-up entirely themselves, Wilco’s fourth album at this point had the working title of Here Comes Everybody, a reference to James Joyce’s masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake. The ever-changing metaphysics of Joyce’s H.C.E. character was appropriate, as the nature of the recording sessions changed as well, moving into early 2001. While initially the songs were a second wind of Summerteeth—solid songwriting played by a solid rock band with layers upon layers of experimental sounds by multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett—Tweedy wished to push the boundaries of the band itself. After spending the year with side project Loose Fur (consisting of Tweedy, experimental producer Jim O’Rourke and drummer Glen Kotche), the more daring and sonically progressive sound of the trio greatly informed how Here Comes Everybody would progress as well. The first step was replacing Wilco drummer Ken Coomer with Kotche himself. A less busy drummer who focused on unusual and homemade percussion instruments, Kotche was able to rhythmically reinterpret Tweedy’s new songs (many already recorded) into a more exotic backbone to perpetuate the atmosphere of the songs, in contrast to Coomer’s more traditional rock drumming.

The second step in the evolution of Here Comes Everybody into what we now know as Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, was the song selection and mixing process. Dropping obvious career throwbacks (the Summerteeth-esque “A Magazine Called Sunset” or the Being There-esque “Never Let You Down") and focusing on the songs that specifically dealt with the curious dissatisfaction and personal alienation in an increasingly modern and technological world ensured a fresh direction for the band. Jim O’Rourke was brought in to mix the album and much to the displeasure of the rest of Wilco, the songs were drastically stripped to their emotional core, often leaving merely Kotche’s exotic percussion and Bennett’s dizzying sonics. Gone was the traditional sound of a rock band and all that remained was the strength of the songs themselves, floating in a sea of opiate-inspired fuzzy guitars, twinkling pianos, anonymous voices and static.

Not only did the album transform, but the band itself. The behind-the-scenes battle over creative control of the band between Bennett and Tweedy had concluded with Bennett being dismissed from Wilco, an event depicted in the documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was also the breaking point of the fragile relationship between Wilco and Reprise Records. After the band refused to bend to label exec’s requests to “make some changes” upon hearing the album, Reprise refused to release it and instead offered Wilco to buy-out their contract (which included the rights to the album) for $50,000. Accepting their offer, Wilco not only bought the rights back to the album their label refused to release, but they leaked it themselves--streaming it on their website for free--and went public with Reprise’s tactics. The situation—as well as the strength of the fantastic album itself—earned a Wilco a new record deal with the indie label Nonesuch Records, this time with complete artistic freedom. Who owned Nonesuch Records? AOL/Time Warner , the same oligopoly who owned Reprise Records! Wilco self-produced an album of music they wanted and essentially sold it back to the company who refused to release it in the firstplace.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was the musical turning point in the postmodern era that embodied all the issues that artists presently face: digital media as distribution, the effect of media oligopolies and the transfer of power to the underdog indie artists from the dinosaur cash-cows. But in its original incarnation as Here Comes Everybody, history could have been very different for Wilco’s fourth album. Using two different bootlegs of the rough and early mixes of the album (known as the YHF Demos and the YHF Engineer’s Demos) as well as some of the outtakes which didn’t conceptually fit, we are able to make a very different album, one that more logically follows Summerteeth and did not create such a radical artistic shift. We will try to use as many Coomer-drummed tracks as possible as if he hadn’t been ousted from the band (as much as we ascertain, without knowing the specific credit of every recording). Just as well, we’ll include two Bennett-penned tracks that were left on the cutting room floor, as if he too hadn’t been ousted from the band.

We can begin this reconstruction of Here Comes Everybodywith the most radio-friendly song, “A Magazine Called Sunset”, taken from the More Like The Moon EP. Although an early mix most likely featuring Coomer on drums is found on the YHF Demos bootleg, we will use the more polished, finished track featuring Kotche on drums. This is followed with the more rock-anthem-arranged “Kamera” from the YHF Demos. Next, an early and very different, nearly tropicalia version of “Radio Cure“ that was originally titled “Corduroy Cutoff Girl”. Taken from the YHF Demos, the redundant verses are edited out for a more logical and concise song framework. Next is the fantastic piano ballad “Cars Can’t Escape”, taken from the Alpha Mike Foxtrot boxset and followed by the very Summerteeth-esque “The Good Part”, using the unreleased version from the YHF Demos that seem to feature Coomer on drums. “Shakin Sugar” from the YHF Demos follows, a deeper album cut for sure but a Jay Bennett original that would later be recorded for his only solo album post-Wilco. “Laminated Cat” concludes the first half of the album, a song later reimagined and recorded by Loose Fur. Here is a straightforward Springsteen-esque version from the YHF Demos originally titled "Not For The Season."

The second half of Here Comes Everybody follows more closely the sequence of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, except all sourced from early mixes found on the YHF Demos; these versions of “Ashes of American Flags”, “Heavy Metal Drummer”, “I’m The Man Who Loves You” and “Pot Kettle Black” all demonstrate how much of an impact Jim O’Rourke was on the sound of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by deconstructing the arrangements at crucial points in the songs. Next is a personal highlight for this album, the early version of “Poor Places” from the YHF Demospropelled by a barroom piano, featuring a full band and a slightly different structure. Following is an edit of two rough mixes to create a complete take of “Venus Stopped The Train”, a song composed by Jay Bennett around a Jeff Tweedy poem, also re-recorded by Bennett for his solo album post-Wilco. The album closes with the early version of “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” from the YHF Demos (which I have stylized as “Iamtryingtobreakyourheart”) which seems to feature Coomer on drums. Instead of being an exciting opening track on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that sets the mood for modern disillusionment, it becomes a confusing experimental afterthought to an already stylistically varied album.

Is Here Comes Everybody an improvement over Yankee Hotel Foxtrot? I don’t believe it is; pushing Wilco to new musical boundaries is a must for the band, and the album would not have had its historical impact had it not been cutting edge and unified vision. Here Comes Everybody would certainly have been Wilco's White Album! But this reconstruction at least shows how much Wilco did push their music at the time, how they got from point A to point B. At the very least, Here Comes Everybodyoffers a more traditional option for those who like their Wilco without all the bells, whistles and... static.

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2)

Sources used:

Alpha Mike Foxtrot: Rare Tracks 1994-2014 (1994 CD boxset Nonesuch)

More Like The Moon EP (2003 CD Nonesuch)

War On War (2002 CD Nonesuch)

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Demos (bootleg, 2002)

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Engineer Demos (bootleg, 2002)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave--> flac encoding via TLH lv8

*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

The Who – Jigsaw Puzzle

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. I’m A Boy

2. Run Run Run

3. Don’t Look Away

4. Circles

5. I Need You (Like I Need a Hole In My Head)

6. Showbiz Sonata

Side B:

7. In The City

8. Boris The Spider

9. Whiskey Man

10. See My Way

11. Man With The Money

12. Barbara Ann

This, the second in a series of alternate Who albums, is a reconstruction of the unreleased Who album Jigsaw Puzzle, which evolved into their 1966 album A Quick One (or Happy Jack, depending on your continent). Originally intended to showcase each member of The Who as a figurehead by allowing each to write their own half of an LP side, the concept was scrapped due to a lack of quality material and was rescued by Townshend’s seminal mini-rock opera “A Quick One While He’s Away”, which replenished the scrapped material and occupied the remaining LP side. This reconstruction is all in its original mono—as early Who should!—and uses the best possible mastering available. Unique mono mixes were made of some songs which never received a proper vintage mono mix.

After the success of The Who’s singles “My Generation” and “Substitute” that emphasized the songwriting talents of guitarist Pete Townshend, the public greatly anticipated the band’s sophomore album. In June 1966, The Who recorded a trio of solid tracks for the follow-up single to “Substitute”: “Disguises”, “I’m A Boy” and the John Entwhistle/Keith Moon collaboration “In The City." Although “Disguises” was originally earmarked for single release, its position was overpowered by “I’m A Boy”, the best and probably most idiosyncratic song The Who had in their repertoire at this point. Originally written as part of a scrapped rock opera called Quads, “I’m a Boy” told the story of a boy whose parents wished he was a girl, and was performed with a dramatic power-pop arrangement that only The Who could muster. It turned out to be their highest-charting single to date, and The Who began to collect original compositions for an album while simultaneously recording non-original compositions in August destined for their live residency on the Ready Steady Go! program (“Barbara Anne”, “Man With The Money”, “Batman” and “Heatwave”).

But Townshend wasn’t alone in the strive to compose original material; manager Kit Lambert (who had asserted himself also as The Who’s producer) secured a new publishing deal that could make the whole band a bit of cash, but the other members were required to write at least two songs each. Taking Kit’s request to heart, the Jigsaw Puzzle album was originally conceived as a way to exploit this publishing deal by prominently featuring each member of The Who as a lead songwriter, thus making a virtual four-part solo album in which each member of The Who received their half of an LP-side (a concept later revisited in 1973 for the Quadrophenia album).

Recording at IBA, Pye and CBS studios at the tail end of September and the first week of October, The Who tracked just under an album’s worth of material for Jigsaw Puzzle with the four-part-solo-album concept in mind. Townshend offered his own “Don’t Look Away”, “Run Run Run” (a song he had originally given to the band The Cat) and “So Sad About Us” (a song he had originally given to The Mercies); lively Keith Moon contributed his snide snub of John Lennon “I Need You” and the instrumental “Showbiz Sonata” (later retitled “Cobwebs and Strange”); stoic John Entwhistle contributed his own compositions “Whiskey Man” and the now-classic “Boris The Spider”; and Roger Daltrey’s sole contribution was his “See My Way.” The Who also recorded a new, longer and more elaborate version of “I’m A Boy” intended for Jigsaw Puzzle, as well as a cover of “Bucket T” and a new version of “My Generation” coupled with “Land of Hope and Glory”, again both intended for both Ready Steady Go! and it’s accompanying soundtrack EP, Ready Steady Who!

By November 1966 the official announcement was made of Jigsaw Puzzle’s release on December 1^st. The official tracklist was as follows… Side A: I’m A Boy / Run Run Run / Don’t Look Away / Circles / I Need You / Showbiz Sonata. Side B: In The City / Boris The Spider / Whiskey Man / See My Way / Heat Wave / Barbara Ann. The problem occurred when astute fans notice a majority of the album had already been heard before: Both “I’m A Boy” and “Circles” had been an A-side and B-side respectively; “Run Run Run” had already been covered by The Cat; “In The City” had already appeared as the B-side to “I’m A Boy”; “Barbara Ann” was already released on the Ready Steady Who EP that same month! Of the twelve album tracks, half of them were nowhere near being new.

The Who must have been wise to this fact and that month the album was completely restructured. Returning to the studio in the midst of touring, the band cut their next single, “Happy Jack” b/w “I’ve Been Away.” They also cut a song meant to replace the redundant Jigsaw tracks, a song so quintessentially The Who in this period that it could only become the title track of this new, reborn album. It was a nine-minute epic that functioned as a mini-rock opera, a collection of suites that formed a narrative about infidelity and reconciliation: “A Quick One While He’s Away.” Using this as well as their fine rendition of “So Sad About Us” from October and a cover of “Heatwave” from their August Ready Steady Who sessions to replace “I’m A Boy”, “Circles”, “In The City” and “Barbara Ann”, a completely new album emerged: A Quick One (although “Heatwave” was replaced with “Happy Jack” in America, and instead being used as the album’s title track). Although A Quick One became The Who’s sound-defining album of the 60s that initiated the creative trajectory of the band’s entire career, are we able to reassemble this jigsaw puzzle?

The first step is source material. It is very relevant that A Quick One signaled the beginning of Kit Lambert as an active producer of the band and the effects of this are immediate. Although Lambert was a fine manager, music promoter and possibly even filmmaker, he was an awful record producer and the sound quality of A Quick One often sounds inconsistent, moving in and out of clarity. After A/B’ing numerous masters and needledrops of A Quick One, I have determined that this is just simply how the album sounds, and no mastering of the album will fix “Run Run Run”. Perhaps it was supposed to sound like garbage? I have also determined that the very best master of the album is the latest HDtracks 2014 remaster, which features the most rich and robust sound and is often the most pristine, considering the sound of the album.

The track order is an easy task, as The Who published Jigsaw Puzzle’s initial tracklisting and the songs are all readily available to reconstruct the album. While at first it appears to be a fairly random assortment of songs The Who just simply had finished at the time, a closer inspection will reveal it’s organization: that Side A are all Townshend and Moon compositions and Side B are all Entwhistle and Daltrey compositions (note that since Daltrey’s original vision of The Who were as interpreters of cover songs, the two covers of “Heatwave” and “Barbara Ann” are included within his section of the album). In attempt to create a conceptual continuity within this series of alternate Who albums, we will replace “Heatwave” since it was already featured on my previous reconstruction Introducing The Who. Its replacement will be a different cover song: The Everly Brothers’ “Man With The Money” since it featured a fairly elaborate, album-worthy arrangement, not to mention Entwhistle had specifically stated in an April 1966 article that an Everly Brothers song was intended for their second album!

As with my previous Who reconstruction Introducing The Who, we will only use the song’s original mono mixes, as that was the way they were intended to be mixed as; any listen to the awkward stereo mixes will tell you! That is an easy task for all but the long October version of “I’m A Boy”, which only has been released as a modern stereo mix. Luckily, the stereo mix featured elements prominently hard-panned left or right, so in splitting the left and right channels and mixing them separately I was able to create a mono mix that fit the rest of the album, specifically using “I Need You" (which seemed to feature a similar instrumental arrangement) as a reference. Likewise, a mono mix of “Man With The Money” has not been released, so we collapse the stereo and rebuild a monophonic mix using “Don’t Look Away” as a reference.

How does this jigsaw puzzle compare to a quick one? As with the previous Who alternate album, this listener enjoys it much more! It is surely missing a quintessential Who track, but I personally don’t believe they’d truly ‘nail’ the title track anyways until at least their 1968 performance of “A Quick One While He’s Away” on the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, not to mention the penultimate version featured on 1970’s Live At Leeds. In that case it is a welcomed trade for this superb version of “I’m A Boy”, as well as “Circles” and “In The City”—smaller trees in The Who’s forest they might be, but the pair improve the atmosphere and create a slightly more horn-driven sound. And although we lose the fantastic “So Sad About Us”, we have a more well-rounded album as a whole. So what is next for The Who? Maybe a better question to ask is... who’s Lily?

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC

Sources used:

A Quick One (2014 HDtracks mono remaster)

A Quick One (1995 Polydoor CD remaster)

Who’s Missing Two’s Missing (2011 Japanese SHM-SACD remaster)

flac --> wav --> SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

The Monkees – The Monkees Present

Micky, Peter, Michael and Davy

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Micky Side:

1. Through The Looking Glass

2. Mommy and Daddy

3. Rosemarie

4. Just a Game

5. Shake ‘Em Up and Let ‘Em Roll

6. Shorty Blackwell

Peter Side:

7. (I Prithee) Do Not Ask For Love

8. Lady’s Baby

9. Seeger’s Theme

10. Tear The Top Right Off My Head

11. Merry Go Round

12. Come On In

Michael Side:

13. Listen To The Band

14. The Crippled Lion

15. Nine Times Blue

16. St. Mathew

17. Carlisle Wheeling and The Effervescent Popsicle

18. Hollywood

Davy Side:

19. My Share of The Sidewalk

20. Me Without You

21. Laurel and Hardy

22. Smile

23. You and I

24. The Girl I Left Behind Me

Happy holidays! This reconstruction is a little ‘present’ for you… Four presents actually! This is a reconstruction of the unfinished 1969 Monkees double album entitled The Monkees Present Micky, Peter, Michael and David. Intended as a four-part solo album in which each Monkee wrote and produced their own side of the double album, the project was scrapped after Peter Tork quit the group at the conclusion of 1968. The completed tracks were all either shelved or trickled out on subsequent Monkees releases, with the title itself reappropriated for an unrelated album. This reconstruction attempts to gather the best of the material intended for the project and present the double album The Monkees could have released, had Tork not left. Attempts were made to use vintage mixes as well as the best masters when available, and unique mixes and edits were created to present the album as a complete, cohesive whole, true to what it would have sounded like in 1968.

The battle for creative control—and respect—had been the undertone of The Monkees chaotic existence; it was also their own undoing. Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith and Davy Jones were initially cast as a band of characters (or rather, characters who were in a band) but Colgems producer and Monkees creator Bob Rafelson didn’t care that of those four young men who could sing and act, one was already a locally-known Greenwich Village guitarist and the other a promising Los Angeles singer/songwriter himself. Rafelson and Screen Gems musical director Don Kirchner insisted chose not only to use their own slew of Brill Building professional songwriters (including Neil Sedaka, Neil Diamond, Carol King and the pair who wrote many of The Monkee’s classics, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart) but session musicians to actually play on the recordings (often The Wrecking Crew), leaving the four Monkees to act in the show and to drift into the recording studio to add lead vocals to already finished backing tracks.

Dismayed they were not even allowed to perform on albums credited to themselves, Tork and Nesmith spent the early years of The Monkees attempting to gain some sort of musical control over their career, even if the remaining Monkees Jones and Dolenz were simply actors who could sing, mostly ambivalent to the quest for musical independence. Rafelson and Kirshner eventually acquiesced and allowed The Monkees to tour as a live band. The tour proved financially successful (and musically adequate) and the producers allowed The Monkees to write and record as an actual band, albeit under the supervision of The Turtles’ Chip Douglas as acting producer. The results were a pair of 1967 albums—the charming Headquarters and the ambitious Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd—and the chart-topping singles “Daydream Believer” and “Pleasant Valley Sunday.”

The celebration was short lived, as this musical independence took its toll on The Monkees. While it was relished by Tork, Dolenz and Jones learned that being in a real band was hard work and it was easier to operate with session musicians; Nesmith learned that it was just easier to do it all himself! By February 1968, The Monkees television show was cancelled; this was not a big problem for Rafelson and Kirshner, as The Monkees made more money from record sales anyways, and their solution was to give the band unlimited studio time to continue making product: this time records instead of television programs. The result was a staggering amount of material recorded by all four members acting as essentially four solo artists with their own set of backing session musicians, although still under The Monkees’ unified banner. By April 1968, Kirshner handpicked twelve out of the sea of over 40 songs recorded since November 1967 to constitute their fifth album The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees. All of Tork's tracks were passed over (aside from a short spoken word piece), being mostly unfinished and obviously in need of help from his bandmates.

If never-ending recording sessions for each individual Monkee was not enough, they also commenced a larger project in February 1968 that overlapped with the recording sessions: a full-length motion picture co-written by Jack Nicholson, intended to not only destroy the mythos of The Monkees, but end their career as they knew it. Meandering, nonsensical and decidingly psychedelic, HEAD made zero sense to their teeny-bopper audience and Screen Gems failed to market it properly to the counter-culture scene who might have understood it. While the movie was a complete bomb, the soundtrack album has recently been reevaluated as a psychedelic masterpiece, including Frank Zappa-esque dialog collages assembled by Jack Nicholson, interspersed between seven of the remaining 30-or-so songs recorded during The Birds, The Bees & The Monkeessessions, as well as a few months beyond.

Even after eating up the riches of The Monkees’ 1968 recording sessions on both The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees and HEAD, there was still an abundance of quality music remaining. That summer during the press junkets for HEAD, The Monkees hinted at their next project: a double album consisting of 24 tracks, with each Monkee writing, producing and featured on 6 of the songs. That November, in the final group interview with all four Monkees, Micky confirmed the plan for a double album with each Monkee given their own side of the LP and further elaborating that each side would have its own unique sound due to each Monkee’s own musical interest (noting that Michael’s side would by Country/Western, Davy’s as Broadway-Rock and Micky describing his own side as, oddly enough, weird and electronic). This comment was all but verified by Nesmith’s move to record nine of his own compositions in Nashville that May (with the studio musicians who would eventually be called Area Code 615), effectively completing his side of the intended 2LP ahead of schedule.

Unfortunately Nesmith’s side—which predated Bob Dylan’s attempts at Nashville country-rock by a year—would be the only Monkees Present side completed. November 1968 saw The Monkees returning in-front of a camera, filming 33 1/3 Revolutions per Monkee, a television-special equivalent of HEAD that would further cement the band’s demise. During the first day of filming, Tork announced he was quitting The Monkees, and the 2LP Monkees Present project was effectively shelved indefinitely. 1969 saw attempts to commercially revive the Monkees, now a trio, at first with an updated sound courtesy of newly-drafted The Association and The 5^thDimension producer Bones Howe (who oversaw musical production on 33 1/13 Revolutions per Monkee). The decision was also made to resurrect some unused Monkees songs from 1966 in order to exploit the initial Monkeemania. Both accrued dismal results, with Instant Replay released in February (featuring only 8 of The Monkees Present 2LP songs) and the official incarnation of The Monkees Present Micky, David, Michael released in October (featuring only three of the original 1968 Monkees Present 2LP songs). Nesmith officially quit the group in early 1970, choosing to focus on his own music with his newly-formed First National Band. By this point The Monkees had completely devolved from their spur of creativity in 1968... but is there a way to find their 2LP missing link?

For my reconstruction of The Monkees Present we will assume that any song recorded between November 1967 (the start of The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees sessions) to November 1968 (when Tork quit The Monkees) which hadn’t already been released on either The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees or HEAD is fair game. That amounts to 44 possible songs throughout twelve months (8 Micky songs, 7 Peter songs, 13 Michael songs and 16 Davy songs) to choose from for this 24-song album, allowing each Monkee their best six, for optimal quality. We will also attempt to exclusively use mixes prepared in 1968 (when possible), rather than later mixes that could feature new overdubs and revisionism. This reconstruction is also all in stereo since this was the time period that mono was beginning to be phased out, since The Monkees Present would have been release in early 1969.

Micky’s side is quite easy to assemble; dropping the weakest track (“Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad”) and excluding the single "D. W. Washburn" released in June, we are left with six strong songs from the voice that defined the band, creating a side that is quite the psychedelic-fueled Sunshine Pop--an excellent successor to HEAD. We open Micky’s Side with the original 1968 mix of “Through The Looking Glass” from the The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees Delux 3CD. This is followed by his own composition, the politically charged “Mommy and Daddy” to which Colgems highly objected, using a vintage 1969 mix with its uncensored lyrics but the intro taken from the album version, both found on the Monkees Presents remaster. Next is a 1968 mix of Dolenz’s own funky “Rosemarie” taken from TBTBTM 3CD, followed by the rollicking Leiber/Stoller-penned “Shake ‘Em Up and Let ‘Em Roll”, an alternate mix also from TBTBTM 3CD. Dolenz’s own stream-of-conscious track “Just A Game” is taken from Instant Replay, and his side ends with his truly bizarre but wonderful psychedelic-pop of “Shorty Blackwell”, this being it’s original 1968 stereo mix found on the Instant Replay Delux 3CD.

Peter seemed to be the only Monkee who had problems finishing a side of an album; by the time he left The Monkees in late 1968, he only had a handful of finished songs and a laundry list of unrealized ideas. He infamously spent a lot of work on “Lady’s Baby”, recording four different versions, each with multiple revisions. Unfortunately for this reconstruction, the most final versions of the seven songs he cut only total twelve and a half minutes, so we must essentially use all of it just to complete Peter’s side of the album! In effect Peter’s side seems a bit minimal, meandering and frankly unfinished, but appropriately reflects his folky roots. Beginning with the fantastic “(I Prithee) Do Not Ask For Love”, presented here as an exclusive stereo mix created when the mono vocal acetate mix is synced with the stereo backing track, both found on the Instant Replay 3CD. Following is one of many versions of his own “Lady’s Baby” he cut throughout 1968, this being the overdubbed acoustic Second Version from TBTBTM 3CD. Following with Peter’s standard spoken-word interlude of “Alvin”, uncredited here but taken from TBTBTM 3CD, flowing directly into the Third Version of “Seeger’s Theme” from TBTBTM 3CD. Next is “Tear The Top Right Off My Head”, the acetate mono mix from Missing Links Vol 2 is speed-corrected, with stereo spectrum processing by my friend Skyfinity. Following is the admittedly unrealized Version Two of “Merry Go Round” from TBTBTM 3CD and Pete’s scant side concludes with “Come On In”, taken fromMusic Box and speed-corrected.

Michael’s side becomes a bit more tricky, since we have a wealth of material to choose from: “Propinquity”, “Some of Shelly’s Blues”, “Don’t Wait For Me”, “The Crippled Lion”, “Hollywood”, “How Insensitive”, “Good Clean Fun”, “Listen To The Band” and “St. Mathew” were all recorded in late in Nashville specifically for the album, not to mention Michael had the TBTBTM outtakes “While I Cry” from January and “If I Ever Get To Saginaw Again” from March, and the HEAD outtakes “Carlisle Wheeling” and “Nine Times Blue” from April already in the can. Here we will pick the cream of the crop and open with his own tribute to The Monkees, “Listen To The Band”, using the original 1968 mix found on The Monkees Present remaster. Following are the vintage 1968 mixes of “The Crippled Lion” and “Nine Times Blue”, both found on the Instant Replay 3CD. The alternate 1968 mixes of the psychedelic-country rocker “St. Mathew” and the Dylanesque “Carlisle Wheeling” from Instant Replay 3CD follows, with the side ending with a ride out in the sunset of “Hollywood” from the Instant Replay3CD, but with the channels swapped in order to match the rest of the songs.

Davy’s side is even trickier, as he recorded a vast amount of songs in 1968: TBTBTM outtakes "The Girl I Left Behind Me", "Ceiling In My Room", "Me Without You", "Laurel and Hardy", "Don't Listen To Linda" and "My Share of the Sidewalk" (note we are excluding the "It's Nice To Be With You", which appeared as the b-side to "D.W. Washburn" in June); HEAD outtakes "Changes", "War Games", "Look Down", "Smile", "You and I", "I'm Gonna Try" and "The Party"; and the Bones Howe-produced "A Man Without a Dream" and "Someday Man" from November 1968. Just as the previous LP side, we will take the six best songs from these 15 to make the strongest album possible (or at least the least obnoxious; I will admit a significant amount of bias against this batch of songs!). The side opens with “My Share of The Sidewalk” found on TBTBTM 3CD, followed by the cream of Davy’s crop, the vintage 1968 mix of “Me Without You” from the Instant Replay3CD. Although a bit cheesy, “Laurel and Hardy” from the TBTBTM 3CD is next, purely because of the sitar and my own nostalgic love of the comedy duo! Of all the original compositions Jones offered during this time period, the least terrible would be the sappy “Smile” and followed by the relentless rocker “You and I” featuring a Neil Young guitar solo, both taken from the Instant Replay 3CD. The Monkees Present 2LP concludes with the Second Version of “The Girl I Left Behind Me”, the very first song recorded during these sessions. This version is sourced from the Music Box set, but includes a reprise of the unfinished tag of “A Girl Named Love” sourced from TBTBTM 3CD and remixed to match the panning of the Music Box mix.

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2)

Sources used:

The Birds, The Bees & The Monkees (3CD Delux Edition, 2010 Rhino Records)

Instant Replay (3CD Delux Edition, 2011 Rhino Records)

Missing Links Vol 2 (1990 Rhino Records)

The Monkees Present (1994 remaster Rhino Records)

Music Box (2001 Rhino Records)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

The Who – Who’s Lily

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. Armenia City in The Sky

2. Mary Anne with The Shaky Hand

3. Pictures of Lily

4. In The Hall of The Mountain King

5. Our Love Was

6. I Can See For Miles

Side B:

7. I Can’t Reach You

8. Silas Stingy

9. Glittering Girl

10. Tattoo

11. Relax

12. Rael (1 and 2)

Continuing my on-going series of Who albums that never were, this is a reconstruction of the unreleased 1967 album Who’s Lily. Standing as the working title of their follow-up to A Quick One—or Jigsaw Puzzle in my continuity—the album was revised from a loose collection of songs into a conceptual framework that mimicked a pirate radio broadcast and released as their seminal album The Who Sell Out. This reconstruction attempts to reproduce what the original incarnation of the album could have sounded like, before the Sell Out concept. Some new edits were created and several tracks crossfaded for continuity. The album is again presented all in mono—as all early The Who should!—and uses the best possible masters for each track.

As London entered 1967 and became a lot more swingin', The Who found themselves in a rapidly changing music scene. Contemporaries Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience were laying the ground for a more wild sound and The Who’s mod image was beginning to seem outdated. To keep up with their competition, The Who returned to IBC studios in early April to cut a handful of songs for a new single: “Glittering Girl”, “Doctor Doctor” and “Pictures of Lily”, the later being an exquisite specimen of power pop, concerning masturbation. The song was just what The Who needed and shot up the charts, establishing The Who as a force that once again could be reckoned with in this upcoming year of musical change. In keeping up with these tides, the band planned to follow the single with a purely instrumental EP and even recorded a duo of songs for it—the bass-driven “Sodding About” and a crazed rendition of Edvard Greig’s “In The Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt. Although the duo of songs seemed to anticipate and embrace the forthcoming psychedelia craze, the results were less than satisfactory and the instrumentals were set aside, the EP concept scrapped. The Who would have to go back to what they did best: writing great pop songs and performing them with gusto.

In May the band returned to the studio to cut a slew of new songs for their forthcoming third album, built around the previous month’s success of “Pictures of Lily”, making the album’s provisional title Who’s Lily. Much had been learned from splitting the songwriting duties on A Quick One, and all Who members once again contributed original material: Daltrey offered “Early Morning: Cold Taxi”; Moon offered “Girl’s Eyes”; Entwhistle offered “Someone’s Coming”; Pete offered what he thought was his magnum opus, “I Can See For Miles”; and finally “Armenia City in the Sky”, a song written by Pete’s driver Speedy Keen (of Thunderclap Newman) which fully captured the current psychedelic era. With half an album started, The Who turned their eyes across the Atlantic for a handful of shows in New York and a spot in the famous Montery Pop Festival, co-headlining with The Who’s chief British competition: The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Briefly returning home to De Lane Lea Studios in July, The Who cut the basics for two more Who’s Lily tracks, “I Can’t Reach You” and “Relax”. They immediately left for a three-month tour of North America with Herman’s Hermits and additional work on Who’s Lily would have to be done on the road, across the ocean.

The Who's seafaring seemed to be an influence on the new album, as Townshend unearthed a rock opera he had been composing since the beginning of the year, concerning a soldier from the fictional country of Rael who travels across the sea to battle the invading Chinese. In an attempt to finish Who’s Lily for its proposed summer release, Townshend whittled his rock opera down from 30 minutes into a 10 minute opus; it was further whittled down as much as possible for consideration as a single! “Rael” was recorded at Mirasound Studios in New York with Bob Dylan’s keyboardist Al Kooper, but it’s 6-minute run time excluded it from a single release and "Rael" was tossed into the batch of other album-contenders. Two more songs were recorded at Mirasound with further August recording at Columbia Studios in Nashville for the single that “Rael” could not occupy: a balled called “Our Love Was” and another power-pop song about masturbation, “Mary Anne with The Shaky Hand”, the later released as a single in the US. After more work was done at Columbia Studios to complete the unfinished tracks recorded throughout the year, as well as a September session at Goldstar in LA to complete “I Can See For Miles”, a total of ten album contenders were to be paired with “Pictures of Lily” (and possibly it’s b-side “Doctor Doctor” or session outtake “Glittering Girl”). This was most certainly the Who’s Lily album, but was it the best album The Who could muster in this changing musical climate? Was it a good idea to build an album around a straight-ahead power-pop song midst the increasingly colorful Summer of Love? The Who gave pause to Who’s Lilyand they would have to come up with the album’s selling point.

Throughout 1967, The Who recorded various commercial jingles, including adverts for Coke in April and Great Shakes in May. Perhaps the success of these adverts inspired The Who to use it as a framework for a redesigned Who’s Lily. Upon returning home in October, The Who hit the studio and cut a number of ridiculous faux commercial jingles: “Medac”, “Top Gear”, “Heinz Baked Beans” and “Odorono”. These jingles would be interspersed throughout the proper Who songs on their upcoming album, designed to replicate a pirate radio broadcast. This sudden burst of inspiration fueled the band to pump out several more proper Who songs to trump the weaker material recorded earlier in the year: Entwhistle’s creepy character-study “Silas Stingy”; Townshend’s paced classic “Tattoo” and the atmospheric acoustic ballad “Sunrise”; updated versions of “Glittering Girl” (now with a stronger rhythm and Roger’s vocal), “Mary Anne with The Snaky Hand” (now acoustically laid-back) and “Rael” (now more typically power-pop but lacking the psychedelic majesty of the New York version). Choosing the original “Rael” over the new version (although the final minute was edited off due to time limitations of the LP), several more jingles were cut—"Jaguar", “Premiere Drums”, “Rotosound String”, “John Mason Cars”, “Bag O’ Nails”, “Charles Atlas” and “Track Records”—and Sell Out was completed. Released in December, it was a critical and commercial success, being one of the most obvious and intentional rock concept albums, one which pushed into the borders of pop-art. But is there a way we can hear the original commercial-free version?

For this reconstruction of Who’s Lily we will (mostly) stick to the batch of songs prepared up until the end of the American tour, as that seems to be the point where Who’s Lily became Sell Out. We will also exclusively keep the album in mono for two reasons: 1) a stereo “Pictures of Lily” does not exist and 2) early The Who simply sounds better in mono! Side A of my reconstruction begins with “Armenia City in The Sky”, taken from the 2014 HD Tracks remaster of Sell Out, the most pristine source of its original mono mix. Following is the original US single mono mix of “Mary Anne with The Shaky Hand”, a bonus track from the aforementioned HDTracks remaster. The pseudo-title-track follows, “Pictures of Lily” taken from its currently best source, The Who Hits 50. In a nod to the band’s brief initial concept of an instrumental EP, I have included a mono fold of “In The Hall of the Mountain King” from the 2006 Sell Out Deluxe; although admittedly this track probably would not have been featured on Who’s Lily, it serves as an interesting diversion and fits the psychedelic theme of the album. Following is “Our Love Was”, using the much cleaner-sounding alternate mono mix found on the 2009 Sell Out remaster, and closing with the song that is essential to be heard in mono: “I Can See For Miles” from the 2014 HDTracks remaster but with the first few bars from the early mono mix (from the 2009 Sell Out) edited in to create a clean introduction.

Side B starts appropriately with the 2014 mono remaster of “I Can’t Reach You”, but next I admit to making a grave anachronistic error: I used three of the tracks recorded in October, when the album was undoubtedly Sell Out and would not have been on Who’s Lily. But in an effort to 1) not let this reconstruction overlap with my previous reconstruction of Who’s For Tennis and 2) make this reconstruction a better album and fuller listening experience, I chose to include them (please forgive me!). “Silas Stingy” from the 2014 HDTracks mono remaster is next, followed by the exquisite October remake of “Glittering Girl”, here a mono fold of the stereo mix from the 2009 Sell Out. A personal favorite, I don’t think I could have done away with “Tattoo”, here taken from the 2014 HDTracks mono remaster. The droning psyche-rock of “Relax” follows, also taken from the 2014 mono remaster, with the album concluding with the cleaner-sounding early mono mix of “Rael” found on the 2009 remaster, with its actual part 2 tagged onto the end as the song was meant to be heard in its full six-and-a-half minute glory. Who's Lily's final touch is the psychedelic cover art by Mark Heggen, taken from the poster included with the original copies of Sell Out--truly a picture of Lily!

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2)

Sources used:

Sell Out (1995 Polydor remaster)

Sell Out (2009 Polydor Deluxe Edition)

Sell Out (2014 HDTracks mono remaster)

The Who Hits 50! (2014 Geffin Records)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

Prince and The Revolution – Dream Factory

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. Visions

2. Dream Factory

3. Train

4. The Ballad of Dorothy Parker

5. It

Side B:

6. Strange Relationship

7. Slow Love

8. Starfish and Coffee

9. Interlude

10. I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man

Side C:

11. Sign o’ The Times

12. Crystal Ball

13. A Place In Heaven

Side D:

14. Last Heart

15. Witness 4 The Prosecution

16. Movie Star

17. The Cross

18. All My Dreams

In honor of the passing of Prince, this is a reconstruction of what would have been his final album with The Revolution, 1986’s Dream Factory, which eventually evolved into Sign o' The Times. Originally conceived as a double album with a significant amount of creative input from the band (at least compared to previous Prince releases), the album was scrapped after Prince broke up The Revolution in 1986. Prince then turned his attention to a solo concept album Camille, which was also scrapped and combined with the Dream Factory material to create the unreleased triple album Crystal Ball. Warner Bros Records then asked Prince to whittle the 3LP down, and the result was the double album Sign o' The Times, which many consider to be Prince’s masterpiece. This reconstruction attempts to present what Prince originally intended the Dream Factory album to sound like, volume-adjusted and using the best possible masters—EQd to match a virgin vinyl rip of Sign o’ The Times—to make the most natural-sounding album possible.

Prince was truly the reigning star of the 1980s. Armed with both worldwide smash hits, musical chops and the artistic credibility to back it up, Prince also had the vision and determination to prove himself a modern music legend… But let's not forget he also had the band to back it up. Even though Prince was a great songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist who had the ability to mastermind his own works and retain both commercial and critical success, his output throughout the 1980s grew to allow more collaboration from his backing band he formed in 1979. The lineup of The Revolution seemed to be in flux at times, but after the transcendent success of Purple Rain in 1984 and their subsequent albums Around The World in a Day and Parade, the classic core of the band coalesced as guitarist Wendy Melvoin, keyboardist Lisa Coleman, keyboardist Matt Fink, bassist Brown Mark and drummer Bobby Z. In working on the follow-up to Parade before it was even released, Prince invited members of The Revolution—although mostly Melvoin and Coleman—to contribute backing vocals, songwriting, instrumentation and even lead vocals to the material. Reworking older songs as a starting point—the 1982 recordings of “Teacher, Teacher”, “Strange Relationship” and “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man”—as well as the project's title track in December 1985, most of the work occurred in Prince’s newly built home studio on Galpin Boulevard. By April 1986, Prince had created a rough cut of an album called Dream Factory that elevated both Wendy and Lisa as major players (although they later claimed they didn’t receive the credit they thought they deserved!). At this point in time, Dream Factory was a single-disc album that included: “Visions”, “Dream Factory”, “It’s a Wonderful Day”, “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”, “Big Tall Wall”, “And That Says What?” “Strange Relationship”, “Teacher, Teacher”, “Starfish and Coffee”, “A Place in Heaven” and “Sexual Suicide”.

Work on the album continued throughout the summer with Prince often tracking all the instruments himself, although he also continued to work with Windy and Lisa in the studio. A mountain of tracks began to collect and by June a double album had emerged. Although songs such as “Big Tall Wall” and “That Says What” fell to the wayside, great and interesting new tracks such as “It”, “In A Large Room With No Light”, “Crystal Ball”, “Power Fantastic”, “Last Heart”, “Witness 4 The Prosecution”, “Movie Star” and “All My Dreams” were added to the running order as well as linking tracks “Wendy’s Interlude” and “nevaeH ni ecalP A”, the later based around “A Place In Heaven” played backwards and meant to introduce the title track. Now a double-album, this sequence of Dream Factory went through further refinement over the month when more work was done to the songs. By July, Prince had dropped “Teacher, Teacher”, “In a Large Room With No Light”, “Sexual Suicide” and “Power Fantastic” and replaced them with newly completed tracks “Train”, “Slow Love”, “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man”, “Sign o' The Times” and “The Cross”. A master was prepared on July 18th and Prince concentrated on the Hit n Run Tour, which would signal the closing of the Dream Factory.

For the summer’s Parade/Hit n Run Tour, The Revolution was expanded to include former members of The Time as well as The Family—jokingly dubbed The Counter-Revolution. This would include a full horn section, Melvoin’s twin sister Susannah (who was romantically involved with Prince) and a set of former-bodyguards-turned-dancers. This created a strain in the relationship between Prince and his band members, who were questioning Prince’s artistic direction—why did the band nearly double in size? Why are on-stage dancers getting more attention than the musicians proper? Wendy was especially annoyed at the addition of her sister as an official member of the band and most of the core members of The Revolution attempted to quit, only for Prince to convince Wendy, Lisa and Mark to stay until at least the remainder of the tour in October.

As fate would have it, the growing animosity between Prince and his Revolution was at least reciprocated. At the end of the tour, Prince called in Wendy and Lisa to Paisley Park and fired them. Bobby Z was replaced by Sheila E. Allegedly out of loyalty to the rest of his band members, Mark quit. With The Revolution over, the collaborative Dream Factory was shelved and Prince went back to his roots—being the sole maestro. Prince promptly began work on a concept album called Camille, in which a vocally-manipulated Prince would perform as the character Camille. Intending to fool the public, the album was never to be credited directly as Prince and the cover art was to be blank! A master to Camille was prepared in October but that album too was scrapped and Prince rethought his strategy. In a bold move, Prince combined the best of both the scrapped Dream Factory and Camille albums into one triple-album entitled Crystal Ball (not to be confused with the 1998 rarities boxset of the same name). With The Revolution no longer existing, Prince generally mixed-out Wendy and Lisa’s contributions from the Dream Factory tracks destined for Crystal Ball: “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”, “It”, “Starfish and Coffee”, “Slow Love”, “Crystal Ball”, “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man”, "The Cross" and “Sign o' The Times”.

In a final turn of events that makes the Dream Factorymythos even more complex, this 3-LP Crystal Ball album was ultimately rejected by Warner Brothers Records, and in December Prince was tasked to pair the album down to at least a more marketable double album. After adding a more commercial single “U Got The Look”, the result was retitled into Sign o’ the Times and released as a Prince solo album in 1987. Although not quite hitting the commercial peak that Purple Rain had three years earlier, Sign o’ The Times was universally critically acclaimed and recent revaluations fairly state it as his masterpiece. But to be fair, the album was the culmination of three other scrapped albums—Dream Factory, Camille and Crystal Ball—so it’s glory should come as no surprise. But to truly see how Signo’ the Times was manufactured, we must first see what it’s like in the Dream Factory.

While there were three different masters of Dream Factoryprepared throughout the summer of 1986, my reconstruction will focus on its final iteration, using those specific mixes and track sequence; luckily all the tracks are available on both official and high-quality bootlegs. In the name of creating the most natural-sounding reconstruction, I choose to use a pristine needledrop of an unplayed virgin vinyl copy of Sign o’ The Times (by thesnodger) for the songs also found on that release. Furthermore, all of the tracks taken from bootlegs were EQd to match the mastering and EQ parameters of that unplayed copy of Sign o’ The Times. The result is an attempt to preserve the sound originally intended by Prince in 1986 and to avoid the temptation for anachronistically maximizing specific frequencies (such as a certain, unnamed Dream Factory remaster with exaggerated bass frequencies).

Side A begins with “Visions” taken from the collector's edition of Wendy & Lisa’s Eroica album, which hard edits into the unlisted “nevaeH ni ecalP A” taken from the Work It bootleg. The original mix of “Dream Factory” appears here taken from the Work It bootleg but EQd to match the released version from the 1998 compilation Crystal Ball. Following is the fantastic “Train” taken from the Work It bootleg but EQd to match the aforementioned vinyl Sign o’ The Timesparameters. Concluding the side are “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” and “It”, both taken from thesnodger’s needledrop of Sign o’ The Times since the Dream Factory mixes are identical to the official Sign mixes. Side B begins with the superior original mix of “Strange Relationship” that features Wendy & Lisa’s overdubs that Prince exorcised for the Sign album, here taken from the Work It bootleg. “Slow Love” and “Starfish and Coffee” follow, mixes identical as heard on Sign so again taken from the needledrop (but with “Starfish”’s alarm removed, as per what is heard on Dream Factory). “Interlude” follows, taken from the Work It bootleg and Side B concludes with “I Could Never Replace Your Man” a longer mix than on Sign, taken from the Work It bootleg but EQd to match the shorter Sign version.

Side B opens with the single version of “Sign o’ the Times”, taken from The Hits/The B-Sides compilation. The closing drumbeat is hard edited into the opening beat of the jaw-dropping “Crystal Ball”. The Dream Factory version is unfortunately an early mix that lacked Clare Fisher’s extraordinary orchestration. Regardless, this mix taken from the Work It bootleg, is EQd to match the final version from the Crystal Ball rarities compilation. The side closes with the original mix of “A Place in Heaven” from the Work Itbootleg featuring Lisa on lead vocals. Side D opens with the original mix of “Last Heart” from the Work It bootleg, EQd to match the final mix on Crystal Ball. The admittedly less-than-stellar “Witness 4 The Prosecution” and “Movie Star” follow, both taken from the Work It bootleg and re-EQd. The album closes with the double-punch of the fantastic "The Cross" from Sign and the legendary unreleased track many claim could have been a hit—“All My Dreams”, here taken from the Dream Factory bootleg on Sabotage Records, but EQd to match my own reconstruction.

Lossless FLAC (part1, part 2, part 3)

320kps mp3s

Sources used:

Prince – Dream Factory (2003 bootleg CD, Sabotage Records)

Prince – The Hits/The B-Sides (original 1993 CD pressing)

Prince – Sign o’ The Times (1987 thesnodger vinyl rip)

Prince – Work It – Volumes 2 & 3 (2008 bootleg, GetBlue Records)

Wendy & Lisa – Erioca (1990 collector’s edition CD pressing)

flac --> wav --> SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

Buffalo Springfield – Stampede

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. For What it’s Worth

2. Mr. Soul

3. We’ll See

4. Pretty Girl Why

5. Down To The Wire

6. Everydays

Side B:

7. Sell Out

8. My Kind of Love

9. No Sun Today

10. Bluebird

Happy Fourth of July! What better way to celebrate the birthday of Murica with a bunch of expat Canadians who sang about the unfair treatment of peaceful protesters by the uptight US government! This is a reconstruction of the unreleased Buffalo Springfield album Stampede. The brainchild of more their label than the actual band, Stampede was to be released in the summer of 1967 to capitalize on Buffalo Springfield’s hit “For What It’s Worth”. Due to internal band conflict—namely ego battles and the departure of vocalist/guitarist Neil Young and bassist Bruce Palmer—the album never materialized and instead the fractured Buffalo Springfield Again was released at the end of the year. This reconstruction attempts to recreate what Stampede could have been, particularly focusing on full-band recordings rather than the assemblage of nearly-solo tracks as heard on the eventual Again. This reconstruction is presented in mono and all songs are volume adjusted and sequenced for a cohesive whole. And of course, as much Neil as possible!

After a bidding war over the young Los Angeles band with stars in their eyes, Buffalo Springfield recorded their self-titled debut album and released it at the conclusion of 1966. Although a powerhouse in the local LA scene, the album and its lead single "Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing" made little impact. It wasn’t until lead singer and guitarist Stephen Stills witnessed the Sunset Strip Riots in November, in which local law enforcement unfairly cracked down on the counterculture 'loiterers'. Influenced by the emerging madness and civil unrest of the 1960s, Stills composed “For What It’s Worth”, a cautionary tale of a government policing its citizens who should otherwise have the freedom to peacefully assemble. Recorded in December, the song was released in January 1967 and hit the Top Ten nationally, becoming a peace anthem as well as eventual history as one of the greatest rock songs of the 20th Century.

While “For What It’s Worth” was the song that made Buffalo Springfield, it was also the song that destroyed them, as the young band was not ready to attain superstardom so quickly. Neil Young had to briefly leave the group in January due to epileptic seizures, but returned in time for their first recording sessions of 1967 in New York. After working on several new compositions for a second album tentatively titled Stampede (Still’s “We’ll See”, Young’s “Mr. Soul” and guitarist Richie Furay’s “My Kind of Love”), Palmer was arrested for marijuana possession and deported back to Canada. Throughout the next six months, Palmer was temporarily replaced by a number of revolving bass players including: Ken Forssi of Love, Ken Koblum of The Squires, Miles Thomas of The Poor, Jim Fielder of Blood, Sweat & Tears and The Mothers of Invention... and not to mention Buffalo Springfield road manager Dickie Davis who famously mimed the bass parts on a television appearance!

The band went in and out of several studios in February and March with Fielder on bass. Although the label thought they were tracking Stampede, the bend felt they were just killing time until the turbulence subsided: Stills’ “Pretty Girl Why”, “No Sun Today” and “Everydays” and Young’s “Down To The Wire”. In April, the band tracked “Bluebird” with session player Bobby West on bass, as well as more recording and mixing done to the January recording of “Mr. Soul” in attempt to compile a follow-up single to “For What It’s Worth”. Meanwhile, Atlantic Records capitalized on the success of the top ten hit by re-issuing the band’s self-titled debut album, dropping “Baby Don’t Scold Me” for “For What It’s Worth”. The move worked and the album shot up the charts, unlike its original configuration several months before. The label then booked Buffalo Springfield to pose for an album cover photo shoot for the Stampede album they were pressured to be making throughout the turmoil. While this picture itself became a classic—with Davis posing as the missing Palmer, face obscured—Stampede never did, as the album never was.

Aside from the missing bassist and thus a lack of a solid foundation, a second variable was at play: Neil Young. In-fighting had developed between Stills, Young and Furay, all vying to edge their compositions into the band, resulting in each member essentially producing the sessions for their own songs. By June, Palmer was able to return to Buffalo Springfield but Young had already left, attempting a solo career free of the Buffalo Springfield. Young was temporarily replaced by Doug Hastings of The Daily Flash and then briefly David Crosby of The Byrds. More studio works was done to ‘kill time’ during the summer: Furay’s “A Child’s Claim To Fame” and Stills’ “Rock ‘n’ Roll Woman” and “Hung Upside Down”. Buffalo Springfield’s trajectory had only increased after playing Monterey Pop Festival and the band was surprised to find that Neil wanted to rejoin. Unfortunately the damage was already done and by August the band realized they needed to deliver an album to Atlantic.

Oddly enough, the fractured and reassembled Buffalo Springfield scrapped most of the material recorded throughout the tumultuous year, and instead cobbled together an album mainly consisting of solo recordings. Chosen was: the Palmer-less “Bluebird” and “Everydays”; the Young-less “A Child’s Claim To Fame”, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Woman” and “Hung Upside Down”; Young offered his own recordings of “Expecting To Fly” and “Broken Arrow” originally meant for his short-lived solo album; Furay offered his own recordings of “Sad Memory” and “Good Time Boy” (the later which was sung by drummer Dewey Martin and session musicians filling out the rest of the instrumentation!). Only “Mr. Soul” featured all of the classic Buffalo Springfield lineup. Despite being full of fantastic material, Buffalo SpringfieldAgain was incongruent and was hardly Buffalo Springfield as a band. Are these faults something we can correct?

Many people have theorized and reconstructed what Stampede could have been, but due to the lack of any finalized tracklist—or even the confirmation that the band believed they were making an album in the first place—the results vary wildly. Despite this, there are two chief methods to organize the album: it could have either been a collection of the songs Buffalo Springfield were working on in 1967 before Young quit, or it could have been a cash-cow album by the label using unreleased 1966 material as filler. Here we will attempt the former, making an album that would chronologically follow their debut album and replace Again with a more unified “band-sound” with Neil, rather than a stopgap collection to stand alongside both Buffalo Springfield and Again. Furthermore, we will make the assumption that the Stampede album would have touted “For What it’s Worth” and the debut Buffalo Springfield will remain as it was initially released in 1966 without it. Finally, this reconstruction will be presented in mono, which is what the Buffalo Springfield preferred.

Side A begins with “For What It’s Worth”, taken from the Buffalo Springfield boxset. It’s followed by the rare single mix of “Mr. Soul” with a more upfront lead guitar and bass track, taken from a vinyl rip by Professor Stoned. Next is “We’ll See” and “Pretty Girl Why” from the Buffalo Springfield box set, followed by Neil’s vocal version of “Down To The Wire” from his Archives Vol 1. Side A concludes with the mysterious “Everydays” from the mono vinyl rip of Again by Professor Stoned.

Side B gently departs from my theme of not using the 1966 outtakes, using Neil’s fantastic “Sell Out”, taken from Archives Vol 1. Recorded near the very end of the Buffalo Springfield sessions in September 1966, Neil plays all the instruments and the recording was meant as a publishing demo; regardless, it fits well in my Stampede (not to mention it being my favorite track on the album!). Following is “My Kind of Love” and “No Sun Today” from the Buffalo Springfield box. Ending the album is the rare 9-minute version of “Bluebird”, taken from a vinyl rip of the obscure 1973 Buffalo Springfield double LP, collapsed into mono to match the rest of the reconstruction.

320 kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC

Sources used:

Buffalo Springfield (1973 Atco Records, noxid vinyl rip)

Buffalo Springfield (2001 Rhino Records 4CD box set)

Buffalo Springfield – Again (1967 Atco Records Prof Stoned mono vinyl rip)

Buffalo Springfield – Bluebird b/w Mr Soul (1967 Atco Records Prof Stoned mono vinyl rip)

Neil Young – Archives Volume 1 (2009 Reprise Records CD)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

* md5 files, track notes and artwork included

The Who – Lifehouse

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

September 2016 UPGRADE

Side A:

1. Teenage Wasteland

2. Time Is Passing

3. Love Ain’t For Keeping

4. Going Mobile

5. Baby Don’t You Do it

Side B:

6. Baba O’Riley

7. Mary

8. I Don’t Even Know Myself

9. Greyhound Girl

10. Bargain

Side C:

11. Naked Eye

12. Behind Blue Eyes

13. Too Much of Anything

14. Let’s See Action

15. Getting In Tune

Side D:

16. Pure and Easy

17. Won’t Get Fooled Again

18. This Song Is Over

This is a long-overdue upgrade to one of the very first reconstructions on my blog: the doomed rock opera Lifehouse by The Who, the next in a series of alternate Who albums. Originally planned as a double concept album and the soundtrack to its accompanying film, Lifehouse was too technically complex and conceptually baffling to all except Pete Townshend. After a nervous breakdown while making the album and the lack of support from manager and producer Kit Lambert, Lifehouse was scrapped and paired down to the single LP Who’s Next, which became one of The Who’s crown achievements, critically and commercially. This reconstruction attempts to pull the best sources of all tracks associated with the Lifehouse project recorded by The Who and assemble them not only in a pleasing and cohesive track order, but to follow the storyline of the film.

The upgrades to this September 2016 edition are:

Revised track order that follows the Lifehouse storyline more logically, as well as a more sonically-pleasing flow.
“Relay” and “Join Together” are dropped from the tracklist, as there is no evidence they were originally meant to be in the Lifehouse project.
“Baby Don’t You Do It” and “Naked Eye” are added to the tracklist as there is evidence they were originally considered for the Lifehouse project in some fashion.
The final Olympic takes of “Behind Blue Eyes” and “Pure and Easy” are used instead of the rougher Record Plant takes.
A unique stereo mix of “Time is Passing” is featured, using the left channel of the track from Odds and Sods synced with the right channel from the Exciting The Who bootleg.
Most sources are taken from the Japanese 2010 and 2011 SHM CD remasters of Who’s Next and Odds and Sods respectively, the most pristine and dynamic masters available of both releases.
“Let’s See Action” is sourced from the new The Who Hits 50, which features the full single version.

Following the critically and commercially successful 1969 rock opera Tommy was no easy task for The Who. At first the beginnings were modest with a self-produced EP recorded in May 1970 at Pete Townshend’s garage studio (dubbed Eel Pie)—possibly to mimic the stripped and fantastic Live at Leeds, released that month. Featuring recent songs written while touring Tommy, The Who tracked “Postcard”, “Now I’m A Farmer”, “Water”, “Naked Eye” and “I Don’t Even Know Myself”. This EP never saw the light of day for various reasons, including questions of marketability and inflated song length. It's more likely that Townshend had instead concocted an epic idea worthy enough to follow-up Tommy—another rock opera that not only functioned as a soundtrack to a companion film, but would include an audience-participated live performance with the band itself. That September, Townshend began recording elaborate demos for much of the album, tracking all the instruments himself. Unlike Tommy, the material for this project—now called Lifehouse—would consist of approximately 20 stand-alone songs, without the need for musical interludes to propel the storyline; each song would be self-sufficient.

The original storyline itself was simple, albeit Bradbury-esque. The setting was in the not-too-distant future, in an ecologically-destroyed United Kingdom. Most people live in the major cities and are electronically connected via special suits to The Grid, a Matrix-like virtual reality computer program that feeds, entertains and pacifies the populace, which is controlled by a villainous character named Jumbo. Since it is not approved by The Grid, music is outlawed completely; despite this, a hacker musician named Bobby who lives outside the city amongst the hippy-gypsy farmer communes broadcasts a signal of classic rock (called Trad) into The Grid. Some rebellious few congregate to the secret Lifehouse to experience the music Bobby broadcasts, which are somehow tailor-made for each individual person, the music representing their own life experience (and performed by, who else, but The Who!).

The story begins with Ray and Sally, husband and wife turnip farmers, also living in a traveling commune outside of the city. Their teenage daughter Mary intercepts the Lifehouse broadcasts and runs away from her family to seek the source of the pirate signal. While Ray goes after her, Sally finds Bobby attempting to find The One Note, a musical note that represents all people and unites the universe. After falling in love, the pair travel to London to find and play The One Note at The Lifehouse. By the end of the double album, Ray catches up to the couple, Jumbo’s troops storm the rock festival at The Lifehouse just as Bobby plays The One Note, and we find the rebel youth have simply vanished, transcended to another plane, along with any civilians attached to The Grid who had witnessed the event.

The story seems to make sense to us, in the internet age. But the rest of the band members failed to understand Townshend’s concept (specifically Roger Daltrey’s inability to conceptualize wireless communication), and likewise Towshend had difficulty articulating it. To make matters more confusing, Townshend intended not only live performances of The Who to be intercut within the narrative in the film, but the performances themselves were to be metaphysical music that would be “tuned” to each individual audience member. The final touch was that The Who, by the end of the performance, would become holograms. These performances at The Young Vic Theatre beginning in January 1971 and carrying on sporadically until the spring seemed to be unpromoted and open to the general public—anyone curious enough to wander into the Young Vic and discover The Who playing new material! Unfortunately, The Who were a band who wanted to make metaphysical music that represented the souls of the individual audience members, who themselves casually arrived just wanting to hear the bands’ hits. The Young Vic performances were a failed experiment and in the end simply amounted to public rehearsals of the new Lifehouse material. With Townshend disheartened that not only the audience “didn’t get it” but his band as well, The Who relocated to New York to record the new songs properly in the studio, giving Lifehouse one final chance.

Initial album tracking began at the Record Plant in March 1971, produced by manager Kit Lambert as usual and featuring legendary keyboardist Al Kooper and guitarist Leslie West of Mountain. At least six core Lifehouse songs were all worked on to completion or near to it: “Baby Don’t You Do It” (allegedly a studio warm-up), “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, “Love Ain’t For Keeping”, “Behind Blue Eyes”, “Pure and Easy” and “Getting in Tune”. By this time the band’s relationship with Lambert had broken down completely. Lambert was producer only in name, as he was preoccupied with a heroin addiction and was unable to even mix the session! Townshend (himself by this point a chronic alcoholic) also had problems finding a common-ground with Lambert in regards to the Lifehouse narrative; Kit had helped Townshend flesh out the concept of Tommy two years before, but they were unable to agree upon a script for the Lifehouse film. The situation reached its boiling point when Townsend overheard Lambert blasting him at their hotel room, including his recommendation that the band should abandon the project. Townshend in effect spiraled into a nervous breakdown, later claiming to have attempted to jump out of the hotel window. That was the deathblow to Lifehouse.

Still needing to finish an album—be it Lifehouse or otherwise—producer Glyn Johns was brought in to mix the Record Plant sessions and to see if it was salvageable. Johns thought the recordings were up to par but recommended restarting the project with him at the helm, as he could better capture the essence of The Who to tape. Recording began at Mick Jagger’s mansion Stargroves in April, testing the waters with “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. Impressed with the results, Johns and the band relocated to Olympic Studios in May to overdub it and to record at least another 15 songs. At this point in time, Johns urged an already discouraged Townshend to shelve the Lifehouse concept indefinitely and release the best material as a singular, non-conceptual album. The result was Who’s Next, regarded as not only one of The Who’s greatest albums, but one of the greatest in rock history.

While Johns apparently made the correct call in whittling down Lifehouse to Who’s Next, Townshend never really gave up on the project. He continued working on it, adding new songs to the project that regardless found their way onto other Who singles and albums (“Join Together” and “Relay” in 1972, “Slip Kid” in 1976, “Who Are You” in 1977, etc). After a failed attempt to write a new Lifehouse screenplay in 1980, the themes and basic plot outline were recycled by Townshend for his 1993 solo album Psychoderelict. Townshend eventually commissioned a Lifehouse radio play for the BBC in 1999 and released a multi-disc boxset of his original 1970 Lifehouse demos, the radio play and its soundtrack in 2000 as The Lifehouse Chronicles. To top it off, Townshend performed a series of concerts of the Lifehouse material later that year, released as Pete Townshend Live: Sadler Wells 2000.

While Townshend clearly gave his final word on the project, is it possible to rebuild the original Lifehouse that The Who attempted to raise in 1971? An exact tracklist was never published and Townshend has revealed only the basic plotline, lacking any specifics or subplot descriptions. And while The Lifehouse Chronicles gives an excellent overview of the material, presented in a cohesive narrative framework, it is very much retro-active, including later 70s compositions not originally included in the 1971 project and based upon the largely rewritten and convoluted 1999 BBC radio play. For my reconstruction we will attempt to only use the songs originally intended to be a part of the 1971 project, using exclusively The Who recordings with gaps filled-in by Townshend’s 1970 solo demos. Our tracklist will follow what we know of the original storyline, as reflected in the song lyrics, with further insight from the performance order of Townshend’s Live: Sadler’s Wells 2000. Structurally, the first disc of will be set in the Scottish countryside and follow Mary’s journey to find Bobby, and Ray’s journey to find Mary. The second disc will be set in The Grid of London and portray Bobby’s search for The One Note and his final confrontation with Jumbo’s army. No live material is included, as I believe that intent was scrapped after the failure of The Young Vic experiments.

Side A opens with “Baba M1” representing The One Note as an introduction, crossfaded into “Teenage Wasteland”, both Townshend’s demos taken from Lifehouse Chronicles. Since there is an overlap between this and “Baba O’Riley”, the song is faded out before the redundant passages. Here Ray introduces the listener to his world: living on the land in a caravan outside of The Grid. Next, we introduce Bobby who is performing music in his own caravan with “Time Is Passing”. Here a unique stereo mix of the song is created by syncing the left channel from Odds and Sods with the right channel from the bootleg Exciting The Who. “Love Ain’t For Keeping” follows (using the Olympic take from Who’s Next with the extended Record Plant jam from Odds and Sods tagged onto the end), character development for Ray who sings this love song for his wife Sally. The couple and their teenage daughter Mary travel the countryside in “Going Mobile” from Who’s Next, until Mary hears Bobby’s pirate broadcast of “Baby Don’t You Do It” from the Who’s Next 2010 remaster and decides to leave her parents in search of whomever is sending these magical signals. Ray chases after her, which his perceived betrayal is also reflected in the song’s lyrics.

Side B opens with Bobby experimenting with The One Note in “Baba O’Riley” from Who’s Next. Mary finds him and joins his caravan, on its way to London to host a rock concert at The Lifehouse, intending to free the populous from The Grid. Bobby falls in love with Mary as heard in Townshend’s demo of “Mary” from Lifehouse Chronicles, but Mary is reluctant as heard in the Olympic version of “I Don’t Even Know Myself” from Odds and Sods. Bobby tries to win Mary over in Townshend’s demo of “Greyhound Girl” from Lifehouse Chronicles, and disc one concludes with Ray vowing to retrieve his daughter no matter the cost—even venturing into the city to find her—in “Bargain” from Who’s Next.

Side C takes place in the future city of London, as we see the populace hooked up into The Grid, living a virtual reality life, an idyllic illusion meant to control them. Here we use “Naked Eye” to create this setting and describe The Grid, using the Eel Pie recording from Odds and Sods; although this recording predates Lifehouse and hails from the scrapped 1970 EP, there is documentation that a version of “Naked Eye” was actually recorded during the 1971 Olympic sessions, thus indicating Townshend’s intent to use the song in Lifehouse. Following, we are introduced to Jumbo, the controller of The Grid, who attempts to convince the listener he’s just misunderstood in “Behind Blue Eyes” from Who’s Next. As Bobby and Mary infiltrate the city, they attempt to show people that their Grid lives are an illusion in the original mix of “Too Much of Anything” from Odds and Sods. Both Bobby, Mary and Ray all arrive at The Lifehouse together and prepare for the rock concert in “Let’s See Action” from The Who Hits 50 and the show begins in “Getting in Tune” from Who’s Next, as Bobby hacks into the Grid and broadcasts The Lifehouse concert live to all linked into The Grid.

Side D opens with Bobby explaining what The One Note is and Mary urging him to use it to free everyone from Grid in the Olympic version of “Pure and Easy” from Odds and Sods. Jumbo’s army storms the Lifehouse during “Won’t Get Fooled Again” from Who’s Next just as Bobby plays The One Note. Right as the soldiers close in, all the protagonists and concert-goers vanish from their reality—as well as all the people on The Grid watching the show from their homes. The closing credits presumably play over “This Song Is Over” from Who’s Next. The final touch being cover art created long ago by I Design Album Covers, we have one of the seminal Albums That Never Were, now better than ever.

320 kps mp3

lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2, part 3)

Sources used:
The Who - Who’s Next (2010 SHM remaster)
The Who - Odds & Sods (2011 SHM remaster)

The Who - Exciting The Who (bootleg, 1997 Midas Touch Records)
The Who – Hits 50! (2014 Geffen Records)

Pete Townshend - Lifehouse Chronicles (2001 Eel Pie Records)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Bob Dylan – Eat The Document Soundtrack

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. Tell Me, Momma

2. I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)

3. Ballad of a Thin Man

4. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

Side B:

5. Mr. Tambourine Man

6. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down

7. One Too Many Mornings

8. Like a Rolling Stone

My New Year’s Resolution is to keep this blog updated! Starting off 2017 is an album that truly never was: the theoretical soundtrack to the unreleased documentary film Eat The Document, which chronicled Bob Dylan’s famous 1966 World Tour, backed by what would become The Band. A behind-the-scenes look at a controversial and confrontational moment in rock history in which Dylan “went electric” to the great chagrin of his folk-purist audiences, the tour is filled with impassioned and even spiteful performances, a direct response from the jeers from the audience who thought he “sold out”. This reconstruction compiles the soundboard recordings of the actual, full performances only partially featured on Eat The Document, presented in (mostly) film order, edited to sound as a continuous performance and effectively becoming a unique Bob Dylan live album in itself.

Bob Dylan’s famed “Electric Trilogy”—1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and 1966’s Blonde On Blonde—proved that rock music could be intellectual by combining his often abstract poetics into a rock band context. While obviously a success on record, Dylan slowly tested the waters for a live incarnation of his vision throughout 1965, beginning with his performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25^th, backed by the Buttersfield Blues Band--a performance allegedly infuriating Pete Seeger who attempted to cut all power to the stage! Deciding he needed a formal and relatively trustworthy backing band for the following tours, Dylan hired Canadian bar-rockers The Hawks to back him on sporadic gigs throughout 1965. Although The Hawks—who would later re-title themselves to The Band and see their own success—proved to be an excellent backing band in a live setting, they failed to accommodate Dylan in the studio. Early sessions for Highway 61 Revisited’ s follow-up in January 1966 proved unusable to Dylan’s standard and he relocated to Nashville to finish the album; only “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” from the January New York sessions made the album.

Regardless, Dylan regrouped with his road-tested crew, intending to promote his new album Blond On Blonde with a world tour. Although the tour went underway in February—before the album was even finished!—two new faces slipped into Dylan’s entourage by April. The first was soundman Richard Alderson, who provided the PAs for the European leg of the World Tour. Personally invited to make soundboard recordings of that leg of the tour by Dylan (in exchange for assistance in building Alderson’s dream recording studio), Alderson ran the sound while taping almost everything on a trusty mono Nagra recorder. He was no stranger to this, since he had also recorded Dylan’s set at The Gaslight Café in 1962.

The second new face was filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, who was tasked to film Dylan’s tour—onstage and off—to make a comprehensive document of the turbulent events. Like Alderson, Pennebaker too was no stranger to Dylan’s inner-circle, as he had recently filmed Dylan’s acoustic European tour the previous year, eventually released as Don’t Look Back, the penultimate statement from Dylan’s live acoustic period. Just like the previous year, Pennebaker filmed behind the scenes: early morning hangovers in hotel rooms; backstage celebrity jam sessions; furious audience members; an awkward limo ride with John Lennon. Pennebaker also filmed the live performances themselves, usually on-stage with the man himself, getting extreme close-ups of a jubilant Dylan relishing in challenging the audience, their outrage only fueling him to rock harder. But unlike Don’t Look Back (in which Dylan himself had little input), Dylan wanted directorial credit and final cut privilege. After a handshake deal, Pennebaker was slated as cinematographer with the intent of Dylan and his crew editing Pennebaker’s footage for the ABC Television series ABC Stage 67.

The tour closed with a pair of shows at The Royal Albert Hall on May 26^th and 27^th, which were professionally recorded to three-track by CBS Records for a possible live album, but it never materialized (within the proceeding 50 years, anyways). Exhausted, Dylan retired to his new home in Woodstock, NY for a temporary break until a motorcycle crash on July 29^th gave him an excuse to retire from the live stage for an indefinite amount of time. Meanwhile, Pennebaker and Bob Neuwirth compiled their own edit of the footage, tentatively called You Know Something Is Happening. This edit was rejected by Dylan that summer, and he proceeded to create his own edit of the tour footage with Howard Alk and Gordon Quinn assisting. Influenced by the surrealism movement, Dylan’s cut of the film relied on no established narrative, featured no complete performances and was assembled in no specific order. It was titled Eat The Document, a paraphrased quip by music journalist Al Aronowitz suggesting how to approach the documentary medium itself. Of course, ABC rejected Eat The Document as being incomprehensible to the general audience and has remained unreleased ever since.

Uneaten documents of the 1966 Tour eventually leaked out over time, beginning with bootleg copies of Alderson’s acetate recordings. Reputation grew of the confrontational tour, which even led to a legendary misappropriation of a legendary show. The Manchester Free Trade Hall show on May 17^thfeatured a legendary jeer—calling Dylan a “Judas”, in which Dylan responds “You’re a liar!” and tells the band to “Play it fucking loud!” The initial bootlegger intentionally mislabeled the show as being at the Royal Albert Hall so the records could be stealthy pressed as the album Royal by Albert Hall. The bootleg’s fame had grown so much that an official recording sourced from CBS’s multitracks was scheduled in the 90s, even perpetuating its mythos by retaining the incorrect venue location as the Royal Albert Hall! While this pristine stereo mix of the show was scrapped by Dylan, a bootleg sourced from a leaked Sony Records DAT tape appeared in 1995 as Guitars Kissing & The Contemporary Fix. An official remixed rawer version that featured more of the room ambience was finally approved by Dylan and released as The Bootleg Series Vol 4 in 1998.

Pennebaker’s footage itself was scarcely seen aside from bootleg videos and private showings of Eat The Document until Martin Scorsese’s 2005 biopic No Direction Home. Unlike Eat The Document, No Direction Homefeatured complete performances and even featured the entire Judas/Liar affair. Finally, the 36-CD box set The 1966 Live Recordings was released in 2016, containing all of Alderson’s surviving soundboard tapes as well as the three shows professionally recorded to three-track by CBS (as well as a handful of audience tapes to represent the missing shows). Due to the sudden availability of audio recordings paired with the No Direction Home footage, some online sleuths—notably members of the Expecting Rain forums—were able to piece together what specific performances were originally featured on Eat The Document, a task that was previously impossible due to Dylan & Alk’s abstract film editing techniques. For the first time in fifty years, we are able to piece together an actual soundtrack to this film that never was!

All recordings on this reconstruction are taken from The 1966 Live Recordings, all being Alderson’s fantastic mono soundboard recordings. The tracks are presented in the order as seen in Eat The Document, with the exception being that “Mr. Tambourine Man” is moved up to open Side B as a sort of acoustic intermission, and “Like a Rolling Stone” is moved down to end the album and create a finale. Side A opens with the energetic Liverpool 5/14/66 performance of “Tell Me, Momma”, which was also featured on The Band’s 2005 anthology A Musical History. This is followed by the driving Cardiff 5/11/66 take of “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)”. While the film features a montage of three performances of “Ballad of a Thin Man” (from Newcastle, Cardiff and Glasgow), here we will use the entire Newcastle 5/21/66 performance in which Dylan truly accuses the audience itself to be the flabbergasted Mr. Jones. Concluding the side is the anguished Belfast 5/6/66 performance of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”

Side B begins with what we now know as the serene Newcastle performance of “Mr. Tambourine Man”, which merges into the rollicking Liverpool “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.” Next is the dusty Belfest performance of “One Too Many Mornings”; since the recording was incomplete, a patch is used from Sheffield 5/16/66 to create a full take of the song which luckily includes a large amount of booing from the audience, followed by Dylan’s taunting. After an audience member requests his biggest hit, Dylan obliges and the album concludes with the powerful Liverpool “Like a Rolling Stone”. The resulting album not only fills in the ambiguity left from Eat The Document, but creates a hair-raising live record filled with some of the highlights from his 1966 Tour, worthy of a theoretical release in March 1967 (a place surely taken by Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits). Although as an imaginary soundtrack to a film that was never released, it's a bit of a stretch... but when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

320 kps mp3s

Lossless Flac (part 1, part 2)

Sources used:

The 1966 Live Recordings (2016 Columbia Records)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Neil Young – Homegrown

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. Homegrown

2. Little Wing

3. The Old Homestead

4. Love is a Rose

5. Love Art Blues

Side B:

6. Star of Bethlehem

7. Give Me Strength

8. Deep Forbidden Lake

9. Pardon My Heart

10. White Line

Happy Valentine’s Day! What better way to celebrate this day of romance than with an album all about the loss of love and its effects thereafter! This is a reconstruction of the unreleased Neil Young album Homegrown, the subdued and acoustic album primarily about Young’s separation from his wife Carrie Snodgress. Originally meant to be released in 1975 as the proper follow-up to On The Beach, it was shelved in favor of the more electric and immediate Tonight’s The Night, never to see the light of day. Since most of the recordings reported to have been featured on Homegrown are not available to listeners, this reconstruction attempts to compile all available songs that were at least recorded during the Homegrown sessions in order to present an approximate facsimile of what Homegrown could have sounded like; luckily there is just enough to make a ten-song album. All songs have been volume-adjusted for continuity and album cohesion.

Neil Young has always been a man on the edge, a troubadour who embraced his inner-turmoil. This was a characteristic that informed his music and ensured a long-lasting artistic integrity. Presented with mainstream success that outshined his previous musical outlets with several hits from his 1972 album Harvest, Neil Young choose to intentionally follow-up the album’s commercial acoustics with more abrasive and difficult material to challenge his newly horizoned audience. The subsequent albums were called “The Ditch Trilogy”, formed by 1973’s Time Fades Away, 1974’s On The Beachand 1975’s Tonight’s The Night. All three projects shared the theme of loss and how Young dealt with it emotionally, as Young lost three of his closest confidants in the course of making the albums. But “The Ditch Trilogy” is a misnomer, as it should have been the Ditch Tetralogy: the fourth and final recorded project during Young’s turbulent 1972-1975 era remained in his vault, as it not only was too personal, but the sound of the album was too reminiscent of Harvest, the album he strove to shy away from. Regardless, it is the quintessential Ditch album, the final word of that era, although it was never actually heard.

After being fired from Crazy Horse years earlier, Young had given guitarist Danny Whitten a second chance with a rhythm guitar spot in his backing band The Stray Gators for the upcoming Harvest Tour. Unable to perform competently due to his rampant alcoholism and heroin addiction, Young fired Whitten a second time. Within 24 hours, Whitten was dead, overdosed on alcohol and Valium. The effect on Young was immense, as he felt he was responsible for Whitten’s death. The initial outcome was Time Fades Away, recorded live on the subsequent tour, mere months after Whitten’s death. The sloppy sound of anguish and denial—an artist in mourning with an inebriated backing band—Young has since regretted the album, possibly due to the sound quality of the album, recorded live by very early digital technology. Time Fades Away exists solely as a document of this troubled time in Young’s career, which was only strengthened by an additional subtext of the tour: Young was growing apart from his wife Carrie Snodgress, the muse of his Harvest. The freedoms of a rock star’s wife did not seem to gel with the pressures of a grieving and overbooked rock star, and the two became distant.

A brief interlude from the turmoil occurred as a hopeful writing and recording session with a reunited Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in mid-1973, resulting in the genesis of the Human Highway project (which was also reconstructed on this author’s blog). Unfortunately, a second casualty temporarily ceased the project, as Neil Young and CSNY’s long-time roadie Bruce Berry overdosed on heroin, a habit that was introduced to him by none other than Danny Whitten. Leaving Crosby, Stills and Nash to their own battling egos, Young recorded possibly the rawest and most anguished recording of the 1970s, Tonight’s The Night, between August and September. A painful ode to both Whitten and Berry, the album was perhaps too raw and Young sat on the completed recording for the remainder of the year while road-testing the material, toying with the mixing and sequence, finding the best way to release the album. This cathartic tour for a soon-to-be-released record became a stereotype for rock band excess, and as Snodgress later recollected, was the beginning of the end of her marriage with Young.

With a more-or-less completed album in his back pocket and a slew of even newer songs, Young returned to the studio in February 1974 and recorded the third of his Ditch Trilogy, On The Beach. While more refined than the previous Ditch albums, anguish still loomed over the songs while still soaked by the drug excess of the previous year’s tour. With Young both emotionally and physically absent, the lonely and hungry eye of the rock star’s wife looked in other directions; surely he had taken other lovers while on the road, why couldn’t Carrie? As the album was being released, Young's realization that Snodgress had been cheating on him unleashed a flurry of new songs about their disintegrating relationship and the break-up of their family. Young was given a surprise opportunity to road-test his new material with a re-reunited CSN&Y, on a much-hyped national tour through the rest of 1974 that the band later called “The Doom Tour”. During rehearsals for the tour, Young recorded one of his new laments, “Pardon My Heart”, as well as an acoustic backstage duet with The Band’s Robbie Robertson on another of his new compositions “White Line”.

The miserable CSNY tour ended that fall, and in November Young went into Quadrafonic Sound Studios in Nashville to capture the heartbroken ballads he had written about Snodgress, including “Star of Bethlehem” and “Frozen Man”. Temporarily returning home to his ranch, Young found Carrie with her lover and he kicked her out; it was officially over. After this heart-crushing break from the recording sessions, Young returned to Quadrafonic in December, tracking a number of bleak yet razor-sharp songs of romantic despair that seemed to balance between western-tinged, full-band renditions and solo acoustic performances, some also tracked at his home studio Broken Arrow. Songs recorded during these sessions include: “Separate Ways”, “Love is a Rose”, “Love Art Blues”, “Homefires”, “The Old Homestead”, “Deep Forbidden Lake”, “Homegrown”, “We Don’t Smoke It”, “Vacancy”, “Try” and “Give Me Strength.” In January 1975, final recordings for this new project, now called Homegrown, were tracked in LA at The Village Recorder, including “Little Wing”, “Kansas”, “Mexico” and “Florida.” The exact tracklist of Homegrown was never published but it is believed to include any number of the aforementioned 17 songs from the Quadrafonic, Broken Arrow and Village Recorder sessions, as well as “Pardon My Heart” and “White Line” recorded during The Doom Tour.

While Young was uncertain about releasing Homegrown because of its brutal honesty (he even claimed he couldn’t sit through the entire album), the label was excited for Young’s return to a more delicate sound after his recent abrasive albums. In typical Neil Young fashion, that was never to be. In the oft-repeated story, Young previewed Homegrown to a party of friends; after the album finished, the rough cut of Tonight’s The Night—still unreleased from 1973's work—played afterwards. More impressed by the later work, The Band bassist Rick Danko suggested to release Tonight’s The Night instead of Homegrown. And that is exactly what Young did that June of 1975 and Homegrown as it’s completed album has never been heard outside a select few.

Only a handful of the various songs from the Homegrown sessions have been released over the years, wetting fan’s appetites for what was purported to be Neil Young’s strongest and most emotionally vulnerable album. Many have tried to reconstruct Homegrown, but the truth is that not only do we not know the official tracklist, but less than half of the material is even available to us officially or even unofficially! Young himself only recently performed some of the material live for the first time, in recent decades. In an effort to retain the best possible soundquality and historical accuracy, my reconstruction of Homegrown will focus only on recordings dating from the mid 1970s, as well as only studio or soundboard recordings. With this criteria, that reduces the number of available songs to ten, which luckily is enough to make a complete album. While not precisely the mythical Homegrown, this could be viewed as an approximation culled from the Homegrown sessions, what the album might have sounded like.

The album begins with the title track, “Homegrown”. For the actual unreleased album, the recording would have been more downbeat and probably Western; since that recording is unavailable, we’ll use the Crazy Horse re-recording dating from November 1975, from the album American Stars n Bars. Next is the delicate “Little Wing” and majestic “The Old Homestead”, both taken from Hawks and Doves. Somber “Love is a Rose” from Decade follows, with Side A concluding with “Love Art Blues”; while the unheard Homegrown album version was probably a solo acoustic recording, here we will use the slick full-band Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young live recording from CSNY 1974. Side B opens with “Star of Bethlehem” from American Stars n Bars. The studio “Give Me Strength” allegedly sounded much like the eerie “Will To Love”; since unavailable, we will use a live recording from 1976, taken from the GF Rust Chrome Dreams bootleg. Following is the exquisite “Pardon My Heart” from Zuma and “Deep Forbidden Lake” from Decades. The Homegrown album version of “White Line” would have been an acoustic duo with Robbie Robertson; since unavailable, we will end the album as it began, with the Crazy Horse re-recording from November 1975, taken from the GF Rush Chrome Dreams bootleg.

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC

Sources Used:

Neil Young - American Stars n Bars(2003 Reprise CD remaster)

Neil Young– Chrome Dreams (bootleg, 2008 Godfather Records)

Neil Young – Decade (original CD pressing)

Neil Young – Hawks and Doves (2003 Reprise Recerds CD remaster)

Neil Young – Zuma (1993 CD remaster)

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – CSNY 1974 (2014 CD box set)

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*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Pink Floyd – The Shape of Questions to Heaven

(a soniclovenoize re-imagining)

March 2017 UPGRADE

Side A:

1. Vegetable Man

2. Apples and Oranges

3. Remember A Day

4. a) Golden Hair

b) Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun

5. In The Beechwoods

Side B:

6. John Latham

7. Paintbox

8. Scream Thy Last Scream

9. Jugband Blues

Although I said I wouldn’t, the material spontaneously struck me one day recently and I was motivated to upgrade this original re-imagining from four years ago, which postulates “What if Syd Barrett hadn’t been fired from Pink Floyd?” The Shape of Questions to Heaven is the theoretical 1968 follow up to 1967’s The Piper At The Gates of Dawn, and culls material from Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets sessions and Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs sessions to create a second album of Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd, an album that most certainly never was.

The updates to this March 2017 edition are:

Revised tracklist that focuses more on actual Syd-led Pink Floyd sessions and less reliant on Syd’s solo work without the rest of the band—a true 2^nd Pink Floyd album with Syd Barrett
“Late Night”, “Lanky Part One” and “Clowns and Jugglers” are dropped from the tracklist and replaced by “In The Beechwoods” and “John Latham” sourced from The Early Years boxset.
More recent (and in my opinion) superior sources are used, including the 2011 remaster of A Saucerful of Secrets and the 2015 remaster of The Madcap Laughs

After a sequence of high-charting singles and the focused attention of the swinging London scene, Pink Floyd looked to broaden their horizon of success. Their 1967 debut album The Piper at The Gates of Dawn seemed to accentuate the eccentricities of their front man Syd Barrett; it’s marriage of psychedelic pop and experimental space-rock seemed to encapsulate Barrett’s own spaciness. But all was not well within the Pink Floyd camp… Just as the album was released in August, Barrett began to show signs of a breakdown, probably due to his escalated use of LSD. A few shows were canceled that summer due to Barrett’s erratic behavior and attempts to take him to a doctor had failed.

Struggling through Syd’s antics, the band attempted to record a follow-up single to the newly-released album. Two new compositions were recorded on August 7^th and 8^th, 1967 at De Lane Lea Studios: Barrett’s “Scream Thy Last Scream” b/w Roger Waters’ “Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun”; unfortunately they were rejected as a single by EMI. After starting work on a new album proper at Sound Techniques Studios in September with an instrumental backing track for “In The Beechwoods” and two free-form jams “Reaction In G” and “No Title”, Pink Floyd returned to De Lane Lea in early October to record Barrett’s “Vegetable Man” b/w “Jugband Blues” as a prospected single, as well as adding overdubs to an unfinished outtake from The Piper sessions, Richard Wright’s “Remember A Day”. With “Vegetable Man” also rejected by the record label, Pink Floyd reconvened in late October at De Lane Lea Studios for a third attempt at a single, Barrett’s “Apples and Oranges” b/w Wright’s “Paintbox”. Even though this single was finally approved by EMI and released in November, it failed to chart. Also recorded at this session was a 30-minute improvisational piece for John Latham’s experimental animated film Speak; it too was rejected and it has remained in the vaults for nearly 50 years!

Following a disastrous American taping of “Apples and Oranges” at The Pat Boone Show in which Barrett stood motionless instead of performing (as well as a similar spaced-out interview on American Band Stand) the other members of Pink Floyd decided that they needed a fifth member to backup Barrett’s unpredictability. Drafting Barrett’s guitarist friend from art school, David Gilmour joined Pink Floyd at the end of 1967 as a second guitarist and the band functioned as an awkward quintet for a month in January. As a five piece, rehearsals commenced for upcoming gigs and new songs were written, often with Barret not showing interest or not even showing up altogether! Barrett’s madness climaxed during a rehearsal in which Barrett attempted to teach his bandmates a new song, allegedly entitled “Have You Got It Yet?”; after every run-through of the song, Barrett altered the structure so the band could not possibly follow along and then sung to the band members “Have you got it yet?” With Gilmour on guitar and without Syd at all, the band entered Abbey Roads Studios on January 24th and 25th to record the newly written songs “See-Saw”, “Corporal Clegg” and “Let There Be More Light”. The very next day, Waters decided not to pick up Barrett on the way to a gig; Syd was out of Pink Floyd, and the rest was history.

By February 1968 the band realized that they were now absent a lead songwriter who could write pop hits; Wright contributed “It Would Be So Nice” and Waters offered “Julia Dream”, both an attempt to create a formula Syd Barrett psyche-pop single. The results were dismal as the single failed and the band has since blacklisted the songs as rubbish. By spring, Pink Floyd assessed what recorded material could make an album, and found they were quite short; they would have to find a new way to operate, without a Syd Barrett. The answer was “A Saucerful of Secrets”, a 12-minute instrumental epic concerning the effects of war, composed as if it was an architectural design, which became the title track of the album. By becoming a more conceptual and jam-based band, Pink Floyd were able to free themselves from the unreachable expectations of the ghost of Syd Barrett. In the end, of Barrett's songs only “Jugband Blues” was used, as well as “Remember A Day” and “Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun” (the later which also featured overdubs from Gilmour, making it the only Pink Floyd track to feature all five members). But is there a way to present this album how it could have been, before Pink Floyd lost their crazy diamond?

Side A of my reconstruction of a second Barrett-led Pink Floyd album begins with “Vegetable Man”. Here I am using the mix found on the bootleg The Syd Barrett Tapes, as I think the new 2010 remix found on The Early Years sounds anachronistic and too modern, definetly not fitting with the rest of the album! This is followed by the stereo mix of “Apples and Oranges” from The Piper at The Gates of Dawn remaster and “Remember A Day” from A Saucerful of Secrets. Next is my original crossfade of take 5 of “Golden Hair” from The Madcap Laughs and “Set The Controls For The Heart of The Sun” from A Saucerful; although “Golden Hair” was tracked during the first sessions for Barrett’s first solo album on May 28^th 1968, it still fits into the timeline of this reconstruction, but more importantly it sonically fits as Syd’s intro to “Set The Controls”. Side A concludes with Syd’s (presumably) unfinished song “In The Beechwoods” from The Early Years.

Side B begins with an abbreviated, nearly-12-minute edit of “John Latham” from The Early Years, effectively taking the place of “Saucerful” on the actual album. Following is the stereo “Paintbox” from Relics and “Scream Thy Last Scream”, again taken from the bootleg The Barrett Tapes, avoiding the overly-polished 2010 mix from The Early Years. The album ends just as Saucerful does, with “Jugband Blues”.

How does The Shape of Questions To Heaven compare with A Saucerful? Quite bluntly, we can hear Syd's mind being undone, but at least in a focused and more cohesive manner than on A Madcap Laughs. What was only suggested on "Jugband Blues" is fully explored on "Vegetable Man" and "Scream Thy Last Scream", songs Barrett wrote directly about his madness. As for "In The Beechwoods", we can only imagine what the vocal melody and lyric would have been, but here it’s just an instrumental that closes Side A. With an interesting yet meandering improvisational piece to occupy half of side B, it's interesting to note that the other band members were already contributing supplemental material with "Paintbox", "Remember A Day" and "Set The Controls", as if they knew Syd was falling short. Regardless, it is an enjoyable listen and an interesting alternative to A Saucerful of Secrets, and succeeds in creating an album that demonstrates just what Pink Floyd could have done with their lunatic on the grass.

320 kps mp3s
Lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2)

Sources used:
Pink Floyd – A Saucerful of Secrets (2011 remaster)

Pink Floyd – The Early Years (2016 box set)

Pink Floyd – The Piper at The Gates of Dawn (2007 Remaster)

Pink Floyd – Relics (1996 reissue)
Pink Floyd – The Syd Barrett Tapes (bootleg, 2008 Needledrop Records)
Syd Barrett – The Madcap Laughs (2015 Harvest remaster)

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*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

The Rolling Stones – Could You Walk On The Water?

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. 19th Nervous Breakdown

2. Sad Day

3. Take It Or Leave It

4. Think

5. Mother’s Little Helper

Side B:

6. Goin’ Home

7. Sittin’ On A Fence

8. Doncha Bother me

9. Ride On, Baby

10. Looking Tired

Happy Easter! In honor of this bunny-hopping holiday, I give you a reconstruction I’ve actually been sitting on for nearly three years now. This is a reconstruction of the unreleased 1966 Rolling Stones album Could You Walk On The Water. After Decca Records refused to release such a blasphemous album title, the band restructured the album into their seminal Aftermath album. This reconstruction gathers all of the best sounding masters of the source material and is presented all in mono, as it was meant to be heard.

By 1965, The Rolling Stones had become one of the biggest rock bands in the world, proving their value with innovative British interpretations of American R&B music. In an attempt to keep up with their contemporaries—self-contained bands that wrote their own songs—manager Andrew Loog Oldham pushed the band to compose their own material. Specifically focusing on creating a song partnership between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the tactic proved successful as Jagger/Richards-penned singles “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, “Get Off Of My Cloud” and “As Tears Go By” were all major hits. But what of their albums? Up until then, the Rolling Stones’ albums had been a mixed bag of rock and blues standards with only a sprinkling of their own material. Possibly taking a cue from The Beatles, The Rolling Stones set out to record an album by the end of the year consisting of all original material.

While on their fall North American tour in 1965, the band filed into Hollywood’s RCA Studios in December to record the new material they had been composing. At least nine songs were finished during these fruitful sessions, including: “Doncha Bother Me”, “Goin’ Home”, “Mother’s Little Helper”, “19th Nervous Breakdown”, “Ride On Baby”, “Sad Day”, “Sittin’ On A Fence”, “Take It Or Leave It” and “Think”. Not only was the band impressed they were able to record nearly a full album of solid, original compositions in a week, but the songs themselves featured impressive exotic adornments by guitarist Brian Jones. Growing bored of simply playing guitar, Jones literally picked up a number of unusual instruments to contribute, such as an autoharp, harpsichord and koto, giving the songs a colorful, proto-psychedelic flavor. Finally "Goin Home" was noteworthy as one of the longest continuous performances in recorded rock music thus far, spanning over 11 minutes! Two tracks from the sessions were selected as a single to be released in February, “19th Nervous Breakdown” b/w “Sad Day”.

Marveling at the results of the RCA sessions, Oldham and the band vied to rush-release all nine finished songs plus a tenth track (the quaint Out Of Our Heads outtake “Looking Tired”, recorded three months prior) in March as Could You Walk On The Water. Featuring entirely original compositions—as well as the current hit “19th Nervous Breakdown”—the album was supposed to feature cover art from a California reservoir photo shoot and a deluxe gatefold with pictures taken from their recent American tour. Unfortunately, Decca Records balked at the title, afraid that the name of this decidingly American album would offend the American religious, allegedly stating, “We would not issue it with that title at any price!” As Oldham negotiated the release of the album, The Rolling Stones continued to tour relentlessly while continuing to compose new material. As the proposed album release date of March 10th began to close in, it was obvious Could You Walk On The Water would not rise above its own title; with Oldham finally giving in to Decca, it was decided the compilation Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) would be released in its place in the United States and The Stones reevaluated the shelved album.

Fortunately, there was a silver lining in the failure of Could You Walk On The Water to launch, as the day before its scheduled release date the band returned to RCA Studios to cut another batch of original material. This second set was more impressive than the first, which included: “Flight 505”, “High and Dry”, “I Am Waiting”, “If You Let Me”, “It’s Not Easy”, “Lady Jane”, “Long Long While”, “Out Of Time”, “Paint It Black”, “Stupid Girl”, “Under My Thumb” and “What To Do”. Brian Jones again adorned The Stones' brand of rock with such exotic instruments as a dulcimer, marimba and a sitar. Now with 21 new songs in total, The Stones combined the best of the December 1965 and March 1966 sessions into one 14-track album. With “Paint It Black” the lead single in the US market and “Mother’s Little Helper” the lead single in the UK market (both backed with “Lady Jane”), the album—now titled Aftermath—was released in April to critical and commercial acclaim, marking The Rolling Stones’ first masterpiece. Aftermath not only became one of the greatest albums from the British Invasion era, but stood head-to-head against other legendary rock albums of the time, including Highway 61 Revisited, Rubber Soul and Pet Sounds. But is it possible to resurrect Could You Walk On The Water, the album that was 'passover' by both Decca and ultimately The Stones themselves?

Luckily the tracklist of Could You Walk On The Water has been published and nearly all of the tracks have been released, allowing many listeners to reconstruct the album. The difference here is that we will exclusively be using the original mono masters for all songs, as the stereo mixes of the material leave much to be desired, featuring an antiquated soundstage. Side A opens with “19th Nervous Breakdown” taken from Singles 1965-1967, since The Rolling Stones in Monoboxset used an inferior master with excessive noise floor in-between vocal lines. Following is “Sad Day”, taken from the Stray Cats discs of the In Mono box set. “Take It Or Leave It”, “Think” and “Mother’s Little Helper” close out Side A, all taken from the Aftermath disc of In Mono.

Side B opens with the full-length mix of “Goin Home” from Aftermath. Although some sources claim there would have been an edited version of the track on the actual Could You Walk On The Wateralbum, I chose to include the full 11-minute version, making Side B about 6 minutes longer than Side A. While that may seem in err, remember that Side B of the US version of Aftermath was also 6 minutes longer than its side A! Next is “Sittin’ On a Fence” taken from the Flowers disc of the In Mono box, followed by “Doncha Bother Me” from Aftermath. “Ride On, Baby” again from Flowers follows, with the album concluding with the as-yet-unreleased “Looking Tired” taken from the bootleg More Stoned Than You’ll Ever Be but collapsed to mono and EQd to match the rest of the album.

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC

Sources used:

More Stoned Than You'll Ever Be (bootleg CD, Scorpio Records)

The Rolling Stones in Mono (CD boxset, 2016 ABKO Records)

Singles 1965-1967 (CD 2004 ABKO Records)

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*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

The Who – Rock is Dead – Long Live Rock

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1. Relay

2. Long Live Rock

3. Is It In My Head?

4. Put The Money Down

5. Join Together

Side B:

6. Cut My Hair

This is the final entry in a series of alternate Who albums, a reconstruction of the unreleased album Rock is Dead – Long Live Rock, a project scrapped in 1972 for sounding too much like Who’s Next. Intended as a concept album about The Who themselves, the idea was further developed the following year into their seminal double album Quadrophenia. Rather than simply emulating Pete Townshend’s original demo sequence for Rock is Dead – Long Live Rock, this reconstruction attempts to replicate what The Who had intended for the album just before abandoning it during their European Tour in August 1972: standalone singles on Side A and a rock opera occupying all of Side B. All the best and most dynamic masters were used and all tracks volume adjusted for continuity.

1971 was a landmark year for The Who, releasing Who’s Next—born from the ashes of the aborted Lifehouse album—and achieving some of the band’s greatest hits throughout the year. After a brief but much-deserved break after the Who’s Next Tour was completed, the band slowly began to regroup in the spring of 1972 to plot it’s follow-up. Although creative mastermind Pete Townshend swore to the media that he would never tackle another long-form concept album after Tommy’s success and Lifehouse’s demise, he had a jumble of concepts bouncing around in his head, waiting for the opportunity to use them. Drawing from several alleged unrecorded Lifehouse leftovers and additional newer compositions, Townshend recorded demos that charted out the entirety of this next Who album, provisionally titled Rock is Dead – Long Live Rock. A final 40-minute compilation tape of Townshend's demos contained: “Relay”; “Get Inside”; “Love Rein O’er Me”; “Woman’s Liberation (Riot in the Femail Jail)”; “Long Live Rock”; “Is It In My head?”; “Put The Money Down”; “Can’t You See I’m Easy”; and “Join Together”.

Heading into Olympic Studios with Glyn Johns in May 1972 to properly record band versions of Pete’s Rock is Dead – Long Live Rock demo album, the band tracked suburb versions of “Join Together”, “Relay” and “Is It In My Head?”. The following month, three more of the songs were tracked: “Long Live Rock”, “Put The Money Down” and “Love, Reign O’er Me”. At this point in time, a conceptual theme emerged and was applied to the project: an autobiographical history of The Who themselves. Early brainstorming included plans to musically represent the various eras of The Who: from early-60s Mod to late 60s neo-psyche to early 70s stadium rock. This idea was quickly discarded and the band instead stuck with a jumble of songs vaguely about themselves or their rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, particularly in “Join Together” and “Long Live Rock”.

While The Who seemed to have a good start on a new album, the band themselves were not so sure. Reviewing the six songs properly tracked—as well as the remaining songs from Townshend’s Rock is Dead demo that still needed to be recorded (the flimsy faux-Eastern “Can’t You See I’m Easy”, the meaningless whimsy of “Get Inside” and the abysmally dismal “Woman’s Liberation”)—the collection seemed as a pale imitation of Who’s Next. Wanting an album of more substance, Townshend told Johns that he wished to write another rock opera to at least occupy one whole side of the album, with the best of the material from the Olympic sessions occupying the other. Needing more time to write the opera, the album’s release date was postponed from August to December and “Join Together” was released as a single in June, an apparent preview of the upcoming album. After tracking a throw-away Keith Moon original entitled “Wasp Man” for future B-side use, the band embarked on a brief tour of Europe in August, debuting both “Join Together” and “Relay” and touting them as a part of their upcoming album. While promoting the tour, Townshend dropped hints of the rock opera he was in the process of composing, claiming it was about teenage adolescence and reminiscent of earlier mid-60s-era Who singles, and was to be called “Cut My Hair”.

By the end of the tour in September, Townshend began to have doubts about the intended Rock is Dead – Long Live Rock album. Most of his thoughts centered on the rock opera provisionally titled “Cut My Hair”; as he added new sections to it, the piece began to outweigh the collection of songs recorded at Olympic in the spring. It is at this point when Townshend’s plan changed: instead of having one side of standalone songs vaguely about the history of The Who with a mini rock opera about adolescence on the other side, Townshend combined the two concepts into one. Going as far back as 1971, Townshend had always wanted to make a single album that embodied the character of each individual member of The Who, so this was woven into “Cut My Hair” and expounded into the length of one whole album. Now, the adolescent protagonist of the rock opera became a schizophrenic, harboring the four personalities of The Who: Townshend (the “good boy”), Daltrey (the “bad boy”), Entwhistle (the romantic) and Moon (the madman). That autumn, Townshend continued writing new pieces for the opera, with Rock Is Dead – Long Live Rock’s own death signaled by the single release of “Relay” b/w “Wasp Man” in November 1972, a stopgap as Townshend bought time to polish off this song cycle.

Early 1973 saw The Who build their own 16-track recording studio out of an old church, dubbed Ramport Studios. By March Townshend had completed demoing his new song cycle and The Who convened at Ramport in June to record their opus. Aside from “Is It In My Head?” and “Love, Reign O’er Me”, nothing from the previous year’s Olympic session was used. The resulting album—now titled Quadrophenia—became what many hail as the band’s masterpiece, a seamless double album with a concept more comprehensible than Lifehouse but musically more impressive than Tommy. While Quadrophenia is certainly the last great work of The Who, is it the real album it could have been? Can we join together the castaway material and revive Rock is Dead?

The most obvious way to reconstruct Rock is Dead – Long Live Rock is to simply gather the six songs from the 1972 Olympic sessions and pair them with Pete’s demos of “Get Inside” (found on the Quadrophenia box set), “Woman’s Liberation” and “Can’t You See I’m Easy” (found on bootlegs), and sequence them as per his demo reel—and possibly even throw on “Wasp Man” for good measure! The problem is that this assemblage becomes a very weak album and one can understand why The Who scrapped it. As a more interesting and musically fulfilling experiment, we will instead attempt to construct Townshend’s August concept of having the “Cut My Hair” rock opera filling an entire side of the album and leaving the best of the Olympic sessions to their own side. But what exactly would have the mini rock opera “Cut My Hair” consisted of?

Luckily, recording dates for Pete Townshend’s demos are stated in the Quadrophenia box set. Plowing through the data, Townshend had essentially demoed the album over two distinct periods, separated by The Who’s August 1972 Tour (roughly spanning April-July 1972 and October 1972-March 1973). Based on this, it is reasonable to believe that any material demoed during that first period was meant for the “Cut My Hair” mini-rock opera, since it occurred before Rock Is Dead’s death in September. These would include: “Drowned”, “Anymore”, “Joker James”, “Cut My Hair”, “Four Faces”, “We Close Tonight”, “You Came Back”, “Dirty Jobs” and “Doctor Jimmy”. Using a supposed imaginary timeline, this reconstruction assumes The Who wrapped Side A of Rock is Dead – Long Live Rockbefore the tour, but required additional time to properly record Side B’s mini rock opera; thus any material recorded the following year in the Quadrophenia sessions proper is fair game.

Side A (the standalone singles half) begins as Townshend’s demo of Rock is Dead does, with “Relay”, here the full-length version taken from The Who Hit 50. This is followed by the title track, “Long Live Rock”, taken from the 2011 SACD remaster of Odds & Sodds. “Is It In My Head?”—here considered its own song separate from any concept, as was originally intended in 1972—follows, taken from the 2012 SACD remaster of Quadrophenia, the original 1973 mix of the song. “Put The Money Down” from Odds & Sodds is next, with Side A concluding with “Join Together” from The Who Hit 50.

Side B (the rock opera half) consists of an edit of “Dirty Jobs”, “Cut My Hair”, “Doctor Jimmy” and “Love, Reign O’er Me”, all taken from the 2012 remaster of the original mix of Quadrophenia. Much like “A Quick One While He’s Away”, all four tracks are crossfaded into one 20-minute continuous piece, more or less about adolescence. We will hope for a suspension of disbelief from the listener and request to set aside the knowledge of Quadrophenia's plot. Here, the "Cut My Hair" mini opera describes a teenage protagonist who works a dead-end job and receives guff about his hair and clothes from his elders. He laments his self-destructive nature and at it's conclusion, has an epiphany that only love can save him.

This resultant Rock is Dead – Long Live Rock becomes a midpoint between Pete’s scrapped nine-song demo reel and the eventual Quadrophenia album. It becomes a much better listen minus the atrocious “Women’s Liberation/Riot In The Female Jail”, and including what could be thought of as a condensed Quadrophenia itself on Side B. And with that, let love reign o'er you. Special thanks to Jon Hunt for his original artwork, found on his blog.

320kp2 mp3s

Lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2)

Sources used:

The Who - Quadrophenia(2012 SACD remaster – original mix)
The Who - Odds & Sods (2011 SHM remaster)

The Who – Hits 50!(2014 Geffen Records)

Pink Floyd – The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes

(soniclovenoize “The Man & The Journey” studio reconstruction)

September 2017 Upgrade

Side A:

1. Daybreak, Pt 1

2. Work

3. Afternoon

4. Doing It!

5. Sleeping

6. Nightmare

7. Daybreak, Pt 2

Side B:

8. The Beginning

9. Beset By Creatures of the Deep

10. The Narrow Way

11. The Pink Jungle

12. The Labyrinths of Auximenes

13. Behold The Temple of Light

14. The End of The Beginning

After the release of Pink Floyd’s The Early Years anthology—especially the Dramatis/ationvolume—I reevaluated this previous reconstruction, contemplating if it could be improved upon. And I found I could! This is an upgrade to a studio reconstruction of the never-recorded experimental performance piece of “The Man and The Journey”, often titled The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes. This reconstruction attempts to present a version of the performance that would have taken the place of the More soundtrack and Ummagumma album, only utilizing studio recordings and condensing the performance down to two sides of a vinyl album.

The upgrades to this September 2017 edition are:

“Careful of that Axe Eugene” is used for “Beset by Creatures of the Deep” instead of “Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up”
“Main Theme” is used for “The Pink Jungle” instead of the live version of “Syncopated Pandemonium”
“The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party II” is used for “The Labyrinths of Auximenes” instead of the live version of “Interstellar Overdrive”
A new, longer edit of “Behold The Temple of Light was created.
“Cirrus Minor” is used for “The End of The Beginning” instead of the live version of “Celestial Voices”.

Musical soul-searching was the predominant mindset in 1969 for Pink Floyd. The previous year had seen the band attempt to mimic their former bandleader’s singles-oriented approach to psyche-pop with their second release A Saucerful of Secrets as well as the single releases “It Would Be So Nice” and “Point Me At the Sky”. While both singles failed to make any significant chart impact, it was actually the latter’s instrumental b-side “Careful With That Axe Eugene” that garnished some underground FM-radio play, prompting the band to make it a live staple. Following the cues of their audience’s reaction to the one-off track, Pink Floyd switched gears and focused on what the remaining four members could do the best without Syd Barrett: sprawling, experimental psychedelic jams.

The perfect opportunity to test these waters came in February 1969, recording the soundtrack for the film More at Pyre Studios in London. For several months, the band tracked a few songs and a number of musical themes for director Barbet Schroeder that ranged from Pink Floyd’s typical space rock to pastoral ballads, from exotic influences to even proto-metal hard rock. The soundtrack album was released in June and while not a critical nor commercial success, several of the album’s highlights were added to their current set, including “Green is The Colour” and “Cymbaline”. But More was not all; by then Pink Floyd had also been working on their own proper follow-up to A Saucerful of Secrets.

That Spring, each member of Pink Floyd entered Abbey Road studios alone to record solo material, intended to be collected together as the next Pink Floyd album. Although Nick Mason and Richard Wright’s material was largely instrumental and experimental, Roger Water’s and David Gilmour’s material each featured a song that had already been performed live with the full band, “Grantchester Meadows” and “The Narrow Way”. Paired with exquisite live recordings from The Mothers Club on April 27^th and the Manchester College of Commerce on May 2^nd, Ummagumma was released in October and cemented Pink Floyd’s status as a cult band, prepared to push rock’s envelope, even without hit singles.

While both More and Ummagumma tell a story of Pink Floyd’s progress in 1969, it is not the complete story. With new and original material spread across two separate albums essentially recorded simultaneously, as well as another two albums-worth of material in their back pocket, the band pondered how to present the material in a cohesive live setting beyond the typical rock band performance. Choosing to cull the highlights from both projects as well as their favorite instrumental jams from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets (as well as the b-side that was the catalyst for it all), Pink Floyd designed a series of performances from April to June, sometimes entitled The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes but usually titled “The Man and The Journey”.

“The Man & The Journey” was arranged as two 40-minute movements, and utilized the newly-built Azimuth Coordinator, a primitive incarnation of a surround sound system which played pre-recorded samples meant to fit into the performances itself. The first set—called “The Man”—seemed to follow the events of a typical person throughout his mundane, British, post-Industrial life. The set included the members of Pink Floyd actually building a table on-stage (to represent ‘Work’) and being served tea (to represent ‘Teatime’). The concept, as explained by Gilmour, was inspired by graffiti near Paddington Station, which said “Get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, get up, go to work, come home, go to bed, [repeated]... How much longer can you keep this up? How much longer before you crack?”

The concept of the second set is less clearly defined and seemed to be largely instrumental and improvisational. Called “The Journey”, sketches from the performances’ playbill—and even the songs themselves—seem to suggest the piece follows a pilgrim’s quest. A member of Pink Floyd’s crew even appeared in a sea creature’s costume, moving through the audience and appearing on-stage near the end of the set. Is there some greater meaning or metaphor beyond this? Is this the Man’s own spiritual journey through existence? Knowing Pink Floyd’s conceptual pretensions, that very well might be the case. But Pink Floyd has never given any hints of what the journey nor its prize was, the task apparently left to the imaginations of the listeners. My own interpretation is that “The Journey” is the evolution of agricultural mankind into industrial mankind, the quest for knowledge and technology; while there isn’t an actual Greek name Auximines, it could be stemmed from the Latin auxiliāris (to help) and the first pharaoh of Egypt, Menes (whose name translates to “he who endures”), literally a metaphor for the king (of humanity) who is assisted by gadgets (our technology) as he endures (history).

After two seasons of performances of “The Man & The Journey” which concluded with a penultimate performance in Amsterdam on September 17^th professionally recorded by VPRO Radio, Pink Floyd retired the conceptual pieces in time for Ummagumma’s release in October. Unfortunately, the music assembled as “The Man & The Journey” was never formally recorded in the studio, suggesting that it was simply a way for the band to present the disparaging More and Ummagumma material in a live setting, rather than “The Man & The Journey” being the true genesis of either albums. But is there a way to construct a studio version of “The Man & The Journey”, to condense and create some sort of conceptual order to Pink Floyd’s 1969 output?

My reconstruction of “The Man & The Journey” will have two rules. The first (which I regretfully broke when I originally reconstructed this album a few years ago) is that only studio material recorded in this era will be allowed. This will exclude both live material and anything after 1969. The problem that arises from this rule is that some of these pieces (“Work” and “Behold The Temple of Light”, for example) were never properly recorded by Pink Floyd. The solution to this is in the second rule: we will substitute some unavailable tracks for other similar ones, assuming they are still from this same era. Likewise we will try to avoid using previously-released tracks (“Pow R Toc H” or any section of “A Saucerful of Secrets”, for example) so that this album reconstruction can fit into any continuity you desire. The Azimuth Coordinator sound effects are also omitted, as I believe it fits better for a live performance rather than a studio album. I also chose to condense each set to fit on its own side of an LP, limited to 24 minutes.

Side A—The Man—remains unaltered from my previous version of this reconstruction. The Man wakes at “Daybreak” (“Grantchester Meadows” from Ummagumma) and then goes to “Work (since this musical piece was never recorded by Pink Floyd, we will use a similar-sounding track, “Sysyphus Part III” from Ummagumma). “Tea Time” is omitted from my reconstruction, as it seemed more of a performance piece and less effective as an album recording. “Afternoon” follows (“Biding My Time” from Relics), as well as the track “Doing It!” meant to represent sexual intercourse (often a Nick Mason drum solo, Pink Floyd often used either “Up the Khyber”, “Syncopated Pandemonium” or “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party (Entertainment)” for this; here I use the later from Ummagumma). Next the Man falls asleep (using an edited version of “Quicksilver” from More) and slips into a “Nightmare” (as represented by “Cymbaline” also from More). The side concludes with the Man waking from his dream to the next day’s “Daybreak” (a short edit of "Grantchester Meadows").

Side B—The Journey—begins with the pilgrim leaving the British pastoral countryside (“Green is the Colour” from More) by sea, when they are soon “Beset By Creatures of The Deep” (depicted by “Careful With That Axe Eugene” from Relics). The pilgrim’s ship plows through a 'horrid storm' (as depicted by “The Narrow Way III” from Ummagumma) and finally arrive on land, moving through a “Pink Jungle” (while Pink Floyd performed “Pow R Toc H” for this piece, here we will substitute a different ‘tribal’ track based around a rolling bass riff: an edit of “Main Theme” from More). Our adventurers next creep through the “Labyrinth of Auximenes” (this piece often featured the bassline to the verses of “Let There Be More Light” juxtaposed with guitar effects and ominous drums; when stripped of the bass line, we are left with a track reminiscent of the first few minutes of “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party II” from Ummagumma, which I used here) and “Behold The Temple of Light” (looping the chord sequence from “The Narrow Way II” also from Ummagumma). “The End of The Beginning” is a problematic conclusion to the album, as any use of “Celestial Voices” would be reusing an old track, not to mention an anticlimax if using the subdued studio version that lacks the bombast of how it was performed for “The Man and The Journey”. Here, we will substitute a different song that features a very similar organ passage: “Cirrus Minor” from More. Not only are we then concluding the album on an actual song, but also it references a journey and features bird sound effects, a reoccurring motif of the performance.

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2)

Sources Used:

Relics (1996 remaster)

Soundtrack to the Film ‘More’ (1987 remaster)
Ummagumma (1994 remaster)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR and Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

The Traveling Wilburys – Volume 2

(a soniclovenoize re-imagining)

Side A:

1. You Got It

2. I Won’t Back Down

3. Lift Me Up

4. Cheer Down

5. Runnin’ Down A Dream

Side B:

6. Every Little Thing

7. Poor Little Girl

8. California Blue

9. Zombie Zoo

10. Blown Away

In remembrance of Tom Petty after his recent passing earlier this month, this is a re-imagining of the unrecorded Traveling Wilburys album Volume 2, which would have logically appeared in-between 1988’s Volume 1 and 1990’s Volume 2. Culling material from 1989 that featured shared-contributions from four of the five band members Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne, this re-imagination attempts to fill the gap and present a cohesive album. Best sources have all been used and all tracks volume adjusted for continuity.

Just five friends, sitting around a campfire, strumming acoustic guitars and makin’ up songs. Sound familiar? We all might have done it at some point. But in this case those five friends were Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, and the songs they just simply made-up became Top 10 Hits. The back-story is well known: George Harrison needed a b-side for his “This Is Love” single and over dinner with friends Roy Orbison and producer Jeff Lynne, asked them for help. Bob Dylan provided the studio and Tom Petty brought the guitars. Soon enough, the quartet quickly wrote and recorded a song in April 1988, each contributing one-off lines of lyric. The result was “Handle With Care”, a song Warner Bros thought was too great for a mere b-side. The band—now called the Traveling Wilburys—adopted personas Nelson (Harrison), Lefty (Orbison), Otis (Lynne), Lucky (Dylan) and Charlie T (Petty) and recorded a full-length album. Released in October 1988, Volume 1 became a hit and The Traveling Wilburys were the premier super-group at the end of the 1980s. But then what? When the fun was over, the five friends went back to their own individual projects, although the various members often continued to contribute with each other.

Roy Orbison had already been working on his comeback album throughout 1988, partially produced by Jeff Lynne. “You Got It” and “California Blue” were co-written by Tom Petty and Lynne, and “A Love So Beautiful” co-written with Lynne; both Petty and Lynne also performed on the album, with other tracks produced by one of Petty’s Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell. Tragically, Orbison passed away in December 1988 and the album Mystery Girl was released the following January, making the album a posthumous hit and a fitting epitaph to the legendary rocker who helped shape Rock n' Roll.

Tom Petty himself was also working on a new album throughout 1988. This time abandoning his backing band The Heartbreakers in order to be free of any musical expectations (although ironically still featuring most of The Heartbreakers anyways), the album too was co-written and produced by Jeff Lynne, who played many instruments on the album. Recorded in Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell’s garage, the trio worked on the album throughout 1988, compiling a very concise and strong body of work featuring fellow Wilburys George Harrison on “I Won’t Back Down” and Roy Orbison on “Zombie Zoo”. Unfortunately, MCA records were originally unsure of the marketability of the album and hesitated to release it that year. But after the success of The Traveling Wilbury’s (and the addition of the newly-recorded “I’ll Feel A Lot Better” to commercialize the album a bit) MCA welcomed Lynne’s slick sound and Full Moon Fever was released in April 1989 to critical and commercial acclaim, many considering it Petty’s masterwork.

In contrast to Petty, George Harrison was just beginning to let his career go into hibernation. Content with the success of 1987’s Lynne-produced Cloud Nine and being the figurehead of The Traveling Wilburys, Harrison only completed an unfinished track from the Cloud Nine sessions, “Cheer Down”, in March 1989. Co-written by Tom Petty and once again produced by Jeff Lynne, the song was released on the Lethal Weapon 2 soundtrack in August. George also recorded two more tracks in his home studio Friar Park in July, meant for an October release on his upcoming Best of Dark Horse 1976-1989 compilation: the solid “Poor Little Girl” and meager “Cockamamie Business”. Although the production credit was assigned to Harrison, Jeff Lynne again contributed instrumentation and the songs more-than coincidentally sounded like Lynne’s idiosyncratic production.

Jeff Lynne himself was busy in the studio recording a solo album, his first since Electric Light Orchestra’s Balance of Power in 1986. Throughout 1989 and 1990, Lynne whittled away at Posh Studios in England, often with his familiar Wilbury bandmates: Tom Petty co-wrote “Blown Away” and Harrison was featured on “Every Little Thing”, “Lift Me Up”, “September Song” and “Stormy Weather”. The album Armchair Theatre was released as a moderate success in June 1990.

What about that pesky fifth Wilbury, Lucky? Bob Dylan was mostly apart from his four bandmates throughout 1989, just starting his Neverending Tour and recording with producer Daniel Lanois in New Orleans from February to April 1989. The resulting album Oh Mercy released in September (a month before Volume 1), while hailed as Dylan’s masterpiece of the 1980s, was the complete opposite of a Jeff Lynne-produced album: it was dark, atmospheric and organic. After more touring, Dylan made a complete about-face and recorded the follow-up with producer Don Was in Los Angeles from April to May in 1990. Although the resulting album Under The Red Sky did feature a guitar solo by George Harrison on the title song, the album was an over-polished shamble of absurdly simple songs—very uncharacteristic for Dylan--and was seen almost immediately as a career embarrassment. It would take him another seven years to regain his creative footing.

After Orbison’s death, the remaining four Wilburys reconvened with a follow-up album tracked while Dylan was recording Under The Red Sky in Los Angeles. Released in October and entitled Volume 3 as a joke at Harrison’s suggestion, the four members also donned new aliases: Spike, Muddy, Clayton and Boo. Although a quaint sophomore release with moderate charting singles “She’s My Baby” and “Inside Out”, the album lacked the magic of Volume 1. Upon Harrison’s death in 2001, The Traveling Wilbury’s were put to rest indefinitely without their founding brother. But is there a way to make these volumes a trilogy and uncover the “missing” Wilbury’s album?

Many have tried reconstructing a third Traveling Wilburys album, so my take on a Volume 2will heed to a few rules. Much like my CSNY Human Highway reconstruction, I will compile the solo material that each member recorded or released approximately in between both Volume 1 and 3 (generally in 1989). I will also be selecting the songs that featured the most amount of Wilburys, with a minimum requirement of two contributing Wilburys for a song. This will unfortunately exclude Dylan’s Oh Mercy album, as it had little to do with the other members. Likewise, Under The Red Sky will also be disqualified since it was recorded simultaneously with Volume 3. This is reasonable, since neither album really fits with Jeff Lynne’s production, in which the remaining tracks are steeping. Sorry Bob… The second rule is to follow the pattern of the other two Wilburys albums and only use original compositions. This would exclude miscellaneous cover songs actually recorded by the Traveling Wilburys, such as “Nobody’s Child” and “Runaway”, as well as Jeff Lynne’s “Stormy Weather” and “September Song”. I will also shy away from tracks that were later overdubbed by Dhani Harrison in 2007, “Maxine” and “Like a Ship”.None of these are needed anyways, as there is more than enough material spread across Armchair Theatre, Full Moon Fever, Mystery Girl and Best of Dark Horse.

Side A of my Volume 2 begins with Orbison’s “You Got It” from Mystery Girl (featuring Otis and Charlie T). Following is Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” from Full Moon Fever (featuring Otis and Nelson) and Lynne’s “Lift Me Up” from Armchair Theatre (featuring Nelson). Harrison’s “Cheer Down” taken from Best of Dark Horse follows (featuring Otis and Charlie T), with the side closing with Petty’s “Runnin’ Down A Dream” from Full Moon Fever (featuring Otis). Side B begins with Lynne’s “Every Little Thing” from Armchair Theatre (featuring Nelson) followed by Harrison’s “Poor Little Girl” from Best of Dark Horse (featuring Otis). Orbison’s “California Blue” from Mystery Girl (featuring Otis and Charlie T) and Petty’s “Zombie Zoo” from Full Moon Fever (featuring Lefty and Otis) is next, and the album concludes with Lynne’s “Blown Away” from Armchair Theatre (featuring Charlie T).

Of the ten songs assembled, including co-songwriting, performance and production: Tom Petty contributed to seven songs; George Harrison contributed to five songs; Roy Orbison contributed to three songs; Jeff Lynne contributed to all ten; Bob Dylan contributed to exactly none. Although you might be miffed that Lucky was not so lucky this time around, it is reasonable that if Volume 3 did not feature Orbison, Volume 2 wouldn’t have to feature Dylan. If you disagree, feel free to swap “Runnin’ Down A Dream” with “Under The Red Sky” and even the playing field a bit. Otherwise, may your Halloween be a full moon fever.

320 kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2)

Sources used:

George Harrison – Best of Dark Horse 1976-1989 (1989 Dark Horse Records, original pressing)

Jeff Lynne – Armchair Theatre (1990 Reprise Records, original pressing)

Roy Orbison – Mystery Girl (1989 Virgin Records, 2007 remaster)

Tom Petty – Full Moon Fever (1989 Warner Brothers Records, 2009 SHN remaster)

flac --> wav --> editing in Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

The Velvet Underground – IV

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

December 2017 Upgrade

Side A:

1. We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together

2. One of These Days

3. Andy’s Chest

4. Lisa Says

5. Ferryboat Bill

6. Foggy Notion

Side B:

7. I Can’t Stand It

8. Coney Island Cyclone

9. I’m Sticking With You

10. She’s My Best Friend

11. Ocean

12. Ride Into The Sun

This is an upgrade to my reconstruction of the fabled “lost fourth album” by The Velvet Underground, recorded in-between 1969’s The Velvet Underground and 1970’s Loaded. With the master tapes discovered in the 1980s and remixed, the material originally saw the light of day on compilation albums VU and Another View. The original 1969 mixes, as well as newer 2014 remixes that emulated the sound of those original 1969 mixes, were finally released on the 45th anniversary The Velvet Undergroundsuper delux boxset. Sundazed also released their own reconstruction of this “lost fourth album” as a limited edition vinyl entitled 1969, but various pressings used either the 1969, 1985 or 2014 mixes. My reconstruction uses only the vintage 1969 or “dry” 2014 mixes to present a cohesive, completed album and attempts to be true to what an actual fourth Velvet Underground might have been like in 1969.

Upgrades to this December 2017 edition are:

Original 1969 mixes of “Foggy Notion”, “I’m Sticking With You”, “Andy’s Chest” and “She’s My Best Friend” are used, replacing the 1985 mixes.
New 2014 remixes of “One of These Days”, “Lisa Says”, “Coney Island Cyclone”, “I Can’t Stand It” and “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” are used, replacing the 1985 mixes.
“Ocean” is sourced from The Velvet Underground super delux, an upgrade from the What Goes On source.
The original 1969 mix of “Ferryboat Bill” is added to the reconstruction, after much protest from blog followers!
“Ride Into The Sun” is speed-corrected and volume-adjusted to match the sound of the new sources.

After the proto-shoegaze of 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico and the groundbreaking noise-rock of 1968’s White Light/White Heat, we have a completely different Velvet Underground by 1969. After recording an album intended to be the polar opposite of White Light/White Heatwith John Cale’s more musically apt (albeit less experimental) replacement Doug Yule, the band enjoyed critical success with their The Velvet Undergroundalbum, even though commercial success still eluded them. Although the band was tired of MGM Records—or perhaps reading the writing on the wall and anticipated a drop from the label due to a lack of commercial potential—The Velvets continued recording a follow-up to The Velvet Underground while touring throughout 1969, biding their time until their management found a better label.

These recording sessions, based at the Record Plant in New York, began on May 6th with The Velvet Underground tracking the jaunty “Coney Island Cyclone”, as well as a rocker heavily featured on their current tour and effectively becoming the most-well known originals of this batch, “Foggy Notion”. The band returned to the studio on May 13th and tracked a song Lou Reed himself would re-record for his seminal 1972 Transformer album “Andy’s Chest”, as well as the charming Mo Tucker-sung “I’m Sticking With You” which would be tried again but ultimately scrapped for the Loaded sessions. The next day the Doug Yule-sung “She’s My Best Friend” was recorded, a song Reed would himself rerecord for his 1976 Coney Island Baby album. On May 20th the band recorded another live staple that would be revisited for Lou Reed’s 1972 solo album Lou Reed, “I Can’t Stand It”. The Velvets returned to the studio on June 19th & 20th to track an additional three songs: the bizarre “Ferryboat Bill”; another road-tested epic “Ocean” again later rerecorded for both Loaded and Lou Reed; and a rough performance of “Rock and Roll”, a song later re-recorded as the centerpiece for Loaded. At this two-day session they also made mixes of seven of the nine songs tracked thus far and compiled an acetate that contained, in order: “I’m Sticking With You”, “Foggy Notion”, “Ferryboat Bill”, “Andy’s Chest”, “Ocean”, “Rock and Roll” and “She’s My Best Friend”.

With half the album in the can, The Velvets took the summer off to continue touring and returned to The Record Plant on September 5th for more work on the project. The exquisite “Ride Into The Sun” was tracked, a song too later rerecorded but scrapped for Loaded and finally appearing on Lou Reed. While a multi-layered instrumental version exists, the multitracks containing the vocal overdubs seems to have been lost, and unfortunately only exists as an acetate. The band returned to the studio on September 23rd to cut the bar-room rollick “One of These Days” and the aimless instrumental jam “I’m Gonna Move Right In” was tracked on September 27th. Live staple “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” was recorded three days later and finally the somber “Lisa Says” recorded on October 1st. In the end, fourteen new songs were recorded between May and October—most of which were excellent, studio captures of this incarnation of The Velvet Underground who had become a live-performing machine throughout 1969. But by the end of the year, MGM had dropped The Velvet Underground from their roster of artists and the mastertapes were filed away in a vault, forgotten and never to be heard again in that decade or the next.

It should be noted that the actual band members seem to have differing opinions on what the intent of these recordings was. In interviews and personal correspondence, bandleader Lou Reed expressed that the 1969 Record Plant recordings were meant for their fourth album—specifically noting that “We’re Gonna Have a Real Good Time Together” was meant to be the lead single, a tongue-in-cheek ode to mindless dance music. Mo Tucker sides with Reed, stating she was under the impression they were recording a proper fourth album (although she confusingly claims that The Record Plant recordings were not it). In contrast, Doug Yule claimed they were simply professionally-recorded demos for the album that would eventually be Loaded. Sterling Morrison offers a completely different explanation: the recordings were simply “busy work”, a put-on so that MGM would not suspect the band was shopping for a new contract, and that these recordings were never meant to see the light of day. Who are we to believe, if we believe any of this at all?

Regardless, the multitracks of the 1969 Record Plant sessions (along with a few unreleased John Cale-era tracks from 1968) were accidentally found in the vaults in the mid 1980s, remixed and released as the compilation album VU in 1985. Perfectly timed during a revival of interest in the band, the album was a hit; it was probably no coincidence that VU featured rather modern mixing techniques (such as gated reverb on the drums) wowing audiences that a band from the 60s could have such a modern sound! With the remainder of the tracks released on 1986’s Another View, these mixes circulated on compilation albums for nearly thirty years. With fans complaining of the anachronistic mixing of the Record Plant sessions, the vintage 1969 mixes were finally given an official release in 2014 on the 45^th anniversary super delux boxset of The Velvet Underground. Also included were freshly-made remixes of the remaining seven songs, created to match the sound of the vintage 1969 mixes. By this point in time, Sterling and Yule’s view of these recordings were ignored and the sessions were touted as “the great lost fourth Velvet Underground album,” be it accurate or not.

My reconstruction attempts to use the best of these 1969 Record Plant Sessions and present a finished, cohesive album, as could have been released by the end of 1969 as the fourth Velvet Underground album. We will be using all original 1969 mixes or the new 2014 mixes found on The Velvet Underground super delux boxset. All introductory studio chatter is edited out as well as some outros faded out, as per what the final tracks probably would have been released as. My reconstruction drops “I’m Gonna Move Right In” for the sake of conciseness and drops “Rock and Roll” for the sake of redundancy. We will also substitute the instrumental “Ride Into The Sun” with the vocal acetate version found on the What Goes On boxset, speed corrected and volume-adjusted to match the previous eleven songs. The resultant album is a strong collection of twelve tracks that amount to just over 40 minutes, the perfect Velvet Underground album. While succumbing to a more polished sound, we also essentially have a more energetic version of The Velvet Underground, bridging the gap between that and Loaded. Also, we can fully appreciate the underrated powerhouse of Doug Yule, a forgotten hero who kept the band together without John Cale. A document of a short-lived era of the band usually only heard on live recording like The Quine Tapes, IV are the waves to ride us into the sun. Let's have a real good time together.

320kps mp3s

Lossless FLAC (part 1, part 2)

Sources Used:

The Velvet Underground (2014 CD boxset)

What Goes On (1993 CD boxset)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR & Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8

*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Bob Dylan - Songs For Dwarf Music

Ferris Bueller's Day Off Soundtrack

Blur - Britain Versus America

The Who - Introducing The Who

The Misfits - 12 Hits From Hell

Wilco - Here Comes Everybody

The Who - Jigsaw Puzzle

The Monkees - The Monkees Present 2LP

The Who - Who's Lily

Prince and The Revolution - Dream Factory

Buffalo Springfield – Stampede

The Who - Lifehouse (upgrade)

Bob Dylan - Eat The Document Soundtrack

Neil Young - Homegrown

Pink Floyd - The Shape of Questions to Heaven (Upgrade)

The Rolling Stones - Could You Walk On The Water?

The Who - Rock is Dead - Long Live Rock

Pink Floyd - The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes (upgrade)

The Traveling Wilburys - Volume 2

The Velvet Underground - IV (upgrade)