Over the decades, there have been a significant number of Album projects that, due to one thing or another, got lost in the sauce and were never released by their respective record labels. Some projects, such as Brian Wilson's Smile, Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes and The Beatles Get Back, eventually received an official release but there still remain a number of legendary albums that are gathering dust in a vault somewhere out there in the world.
Jimi Hendrix - Black Gold
"On a blustery winter day in February 1970, Rolling Stone managing editor John Burks entered a New York apartment on East 37th street...Burks was brought in to provide the centerpiece for a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign: a feature story about the reforming of the original Jimi Hendrix Experience. Recently, the rock ‘n’ roll guitar virtuoso had busied himself by befriending other African Americans: Trumpeter Miles Davis, jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and (according to Burks) “living and jamming with an all-purpose crew of musicians — everything from older black gentlemen from the South who played blues guitar, to a Band of avant-garde jazz/space musicians.'
Hendrix had moved into his own Greenwich Village apartment to do some writing, and had come up with something new. 'Pieces,' Hendrix said. 'I guess that’s what you call it. Yeah, like pieces behind each other. Like movements, whatever you call it. I been writing some of those.' Because he could neither read nor write music, Hendrix recorded these new Song sketches on cassette tapes, along with other songs he’d already been working on. On one label he wrote, Idea for L.P. Side 1 suite…Black Gold. The tapes were made around the time of Burks’ interview.
'I remember Jimi telling me about his idea for Black Gold,' Animals lead singer Eric Burdon remembered, 'an autobiographical, multi-song fantasy piece he had been working on. Jimi intended it to accompany an animated feature about a black rock star — himself on the road…forty minutes of fresh new material that clearly demonstrated the direction Jimi was headed in. He talked excitedly about the cartoon character he’d envisioned. I know he did at least some work on the suite before he died.'
The Black Gold Suite was shelved. Hendrix would polish and record some of the songs that appeared on the tapes (Drifting, Astro Man, Stepping Stone), most would not find release. He gave Mitch Mitchell the Black Gold cassettes in a box, tied shut with a headband and labeled BG, to work out studio arrangements. After Hendrix died in September 1970, Mitchell forgot about them, apparently not even realizing the tapes contained unique material.
The Black Gold Suite distinguishes itself from most of this body of work. Central to Black Gold’s creation are issues of identity and empowerment. Featuring a version of Hendrix as a cartoon superhero, it could well have become an animated feature. The songs are complex, not a compilation of throwaway jams that make up most of Hendrix’s posthumous legacy. The Black Gold Suite stands as perhaps the most poignant evidence we have of Hendrix’s ambition to create an intricate conceptual project.
Hendrix had Black Gold in his mind for months. Its characters were fragments of himself. 'Here was this cat come around called Black Gold,' he told an interviewer the previous December, 'and there was this other cat came around called Captain Coconut. Other people came around. I was all these people.' Other Black Gold characters included Astro Man, Captain Midnite, and Trash Man. 'I am your trashman,' Hendrix sings on the cassette tape.
The only song from Black Gold Suite to see release is the tantalizing “Suddenly November Morning,” the first track of Side 1. It was included in 2010s West Coast Seattle Boy anthology. The song is melodic, lyrical, and introspective.
When Hendrix died a month later...The Black Gold tape box would stay undiscovered in Mitch Mitchell’s possession for another two decades.
Hendrix’ half-sister Janie now runs his estate, after enduring many legal challenges. Only nine when Hendrix died, she remembers her brother playing guitar and watching cartoons on the television. In 2010, she promised a proper release of the Black Gold Suite will happen before decade’s end.
Black Gold could have been incredible, had Hendrix brought it to fruition. It would have been unprecedented: an animated feature with a matchless soundtrack, portraying a black superhero as conceived by a black man. Hendrix would have combined his lifetime love of music and cartoons in a landmark way. It could not have come to pass because it didn’t: exhaustion, constant touring, intra-band personnel changes, the lack of a trusted producer’s steady hand, and ultimately the young man’s death prevented it." (longreads.com)
Velvet Underground - VU
The Velvet Underground album VU is the binding agent in a career of releases that differ so dramatically one from another as to be almost artistic reversals. VU has the dark majesty of The Velvet Underground & Nico, the neurotic strut (if not the head-wrecking dissonance) of White Light/White Heat, the tenderness and emotional insight of The Velvet Underground, and the pure pop sensibility of Loaded. In its 10 tracks, it contains refined versions of what the band did well during the four years they lasted. The irony is that VU wasn’t released until more than a dozen years after the Velvet Underground disbanded.
Recorded primarily in 1969, after the ouster of multi-instrumentalist John Cale, and later cannibalized by principal songwriter Lou Reed for his solo career, the recordings that make up VU were shelved for 16 years. They stayed in the MGM vaults, mostly unmixed, until discovered during the process of reissuing the band’s catalog in the early 80s. As a result, VU benefitted from much improved audio technology and was released to a world not only better prepared for the Velvet Underground, but one that had largely absorbed its lessons. The album made a beautiful tombstone for the band’s career, at a time when all the members were alive to see it.
Between May and October 1969, the band recorded an album’s worth of material in the Record Plant in New York. “That was basically pre-production stuff,” Yule once said. 'It was done to studio quality but not with that intent. It was all done in the daytime. Which to me is, like, when you’re working on an album in the studio — you know it gets dark at like five p.m.. This was all done at ten in the morning.'
It’s not clear that the band had the resources to record releasable “pre-production” material, so I would disagree with Yule on this point. Also, however one believes these recordings fit into the canon, they were definitely intended for release. The proof is that MGM reserved a catalog number: SE-4641, which labels only use for official releases. This is most of the material that makes up VU, considered, rightly, to be the great lost Velvet Underground record.
"The process stretched over several months of desultory sessions, short enough to only allow the tracking of one song per day. What’s clear from the recordings — and something that could only have happened in Cale’s absence — is the intricate interplay of Reed and Morrison’s guitars. On I Can’t Stand It, they mesh and intertwine and begin to lose individuality in a combination of itchy rhythms and menacing drones, anchored by Yule’s steady bass lines.
Meanwhile, the band’s relationship with MGM was deteriorating. They didn’t believe the label was giving them much support. Conversely, MGM was cleaning house, moving in a direction to get rid of provocative bands as well as acts that weren’t selling. The Velvet Underground satisfied both those requirements, so MGM terminated their deal." (All Music)
The band signed with Atlantic Records almost immediately. Danny Fields, a publicist at Atlantic, has said that the label wanted to do a record right away, and hoped to rescue the MGM material. That was never going to happen, so the Velvet Underground made what became their fourth album, Loaded, in Atlantic’s New York studios, mostly without Tucker, who was at home with her newborn daughter.
“When we went to do Loaded the push was for FM hits and FM jingles which was hot in those days,” Yule remembered. “There was a lot of time spent ‘pep-talking’ Lou about hits and singles and like, three-minute songs, stuff like that. So when we went into to do Loaded there was this pressure on Lou and he started cranking up the heat on the tunes.”
But the isolation that Reed struggled against had caught up with him. “I gave them an album loaded with hits and it was loaded with hits to the point where the rest of the people showed their colors,” he said in a 1972 interview. “So I left them to their album full of hits that I made.” And so it was that Reed left his own band, one he wrested from Cale. He worked as a typist in his father’s accounting office for the next two years.
Popular music continued to evolve in the coming decades, in interesting and often unpopular ways. Punk appeared a few years after Lou Reed quit his own band, then post-punk, then new wave. The Velvet Underground’s music inspired all of it: in the confrontational material, the amphetamine tempos, the nervous anti-hero vocals, the unadorned queerness, the population of beautiful losers, the fully formed subculture, and the complete absence of blues licks (a band rule), heroic guitar solos, and swing rhythms. They were the architects, the Cassandras. They prophesied the coming world, and no one believed them." (longreads.com)
Sensing the band’s continued and growing relevance, Polydor Records began reissuing the Velvet Underground’s back catalog in the early 1980s. It was then that they discovered boxes of tapes of unissued recordings.
Once the shelved recordings were discovered in 1984, Reed had reservations about their being issued at all. “They got in touch with me to come out and listen to the tapes,” he said in Rob Jovanovic’s Seeing the Light: Inside the Velvet Underground. “It sounded pretty good at first and they said I could be involved in the production of it. Then after listening to the whole thing, I said, ‘I don’t think it should come out.’” He could have felt this way for any number of reasons, but it should be remembered that, by 1985, Reed had recycled most of the songs on VU for his solo career, rerecording “I Can’t Stand It,” “Lisa Says,” “Ocean,” “Andy’s Chest,” a retitled “Stephanie Says,” and “She’s My Best Friend.” The shadow of the Velvet Underground might have loomed a little large. In later interviews, both Morrison and Tucker stated that they made songwriting contributions, but let Reed claim sole authorship to keep the peace.
Because Reed chose not to be involved, Morrison was called in to help assemble two album’s worth of material, VU and Another View, an album mostly comprised of demos and outtakes. Producer Bill Levenson oversaw the mixing. In an interview with Billboard magazine, Levinson stated that 'The tapes were in terrible shape; You could only play them backwards, and since they were recorded on 12-track, we had to modify a 24-track machine in order to transfer them up to 24 and get more tracks to work with.'
Once the tracks were cleaned and mixed, Levenson was able to change Lou Reed’s mind about their release.
VU came out to a popular culture ready to receive it. College radio held sway, and what media culture would call indie rock was only a few years off. The idea of being underground was respectable; selling records was not. “I didn’t start singing or playing till I was fifteen and heard the Velvet Underground,” Modern Lovers’ singer Jonathan Richman once said. “They made an atmosphere, and I knew that I could make one too!” Indeed, by the time VU was released in 1985 there were dozens of taste-making bands around who owed their careers to the Velvet Underground, with a dozen more who had yet to even form. The improved sonic quality of VU caused it to hold its own, at a time when most of its peer recordings sounded hopelessly dated, in both artistry and production. The album was marketed to college rock and alternative radio, two avenues of promotion that simply didn’t exist in 1969.
Benefitting from the advantage of hindsight, Cale makes a return on VU, appearing on two songs cut at New York’s A&R Studios in February 1968. “Stephanie Says” features his legato viola and bell-toned Celeste. “Temptation Inside Your Heart,” recorded the next day, features an unedited vocal take, with Reed, Cale, and Morrison joking and laughing in the background in between their vocals. There is no apparent tension in the track at all, even though this would be Cale’s next-to-last recording session with the group. For a moment, the two bulls appear in the pasture once more.
VU peaked at number 85 on the Billboard 200 chart, becoming the band’s highest charting release.
The Beach Boys - Adult/Child (1977)
Adult Child s an unreleased studio album by American rock band the Beach Boys, intended to follow the group's 1977 album which was called Love You. Like Love You, Adult Child was virtually a Brian Wilson solo project with other group members serving mainly as additional vocalists. After it was rejected by Reprise Records, the band released the 1978 M.I.U. album in its place with an almost entirely revamped song list. A few projected tracks for Adult Child were eventually released on later albums and compilations. Currently, the album is available only as a bootleg recording. Stylus Magazine tersely summarizes the work: 'Brian’s Sinatra album. Vegas big band arrangements, brassy cover tunes, a few songs written with the hopes that the Chairman himself might sing them. The label heard it and probably rejected it before track 2 began.'
Brian Wilson - Still I Dream Of It
"One day in 1976, Brian Wilson sat down at the piano in his Los Angeles home, turned on a tape recorder, and began to play. There’s a density to the introductory chords, like the air of an approaching storm. 'Time for supper now', he sings on the demo recording, the first verse so banal as to be almost exotic.
'Still I dream of it,' Wilson continues, his gutted voice not quite hitting the high note, 'of that happy day when I can say I’ve fallen in love. And it haunts me so, like a dream that’s somehow linked to all the stars above.'
The extraordinary chord progression, intricate melody, and anguished bridge all demonstrate Still I Dream of It to be a song written by a master songsmith, although one in decline. The confident tenor and soaring falsetto of Wilson’s youth are gone, and yet the song is somehow better for the ragged vulnerability.
Still I Dream of It was intended for inclusion on the Adult/Child Beach Boys album that was immediately shelved upon recording. A bewildering mix of sublime and terrible songs, and a hodgepodge of arrangement approaches from big band to mini Moog, Adult/Child is a bookend to the Beach Boys’ famously postponed 1967 opus, Smile. The Smile album documented a visionary at the height of his musical powers, unmoored by drugs and set adrift by overambition and a general lack of support; the Adult/Child is one of the final blows of that artist’s losing battle with his former self. What is most conspicuous about the period in between is Wilson’s absence.
Shortly after finishing the mixes for The Beach Boys Love You, Wilson began work on what would become Adult/Child. Wilson called in arranger Dick Reynolds to help with the album. Reynolds originally worked with the Four Freshmen and collaborated with Sinatra in 1964. Though Wilson claimed to want a similar feel as those classic Sinatra albums, the big band arrangements on Adult/Child are peculiarly lifeless.
The Beach Boys - Adult/Child
Adult/Child was shelved, by nearly unanimous consent. The band was nearing the end of their record contract with Warner/Reprise — who didn’t think the album had commercial potential anyway — and might have wanted to save some of the material for a major upcoming deal with CBS. Oddly, the only track from Adult/Child to be formally issued was Hey Little Tomboy, on the largely despised M.I.U album." (longreads.com)
Paul McCartney - Cold Cuts (1973)
Following the massive success of McCartney’s Band On The Run album in 1973, McCartney's label kept demanding a new album for the Christmas season. McCartney realized that he could not deliver an album of new material on such short notice so he devised a plan to release Cold Cuts, a double album which would feature a disc of popular singles that had been released along with a second disc of unreleased McCartney tracks. Due to the continuing chart action of Band On The Run, the record label decided to shelve the project.
"The original concept of Cold Cuts dates back to 1974: During the Wings recording sessions in Nashville, Tennessee, McCartney started working on the album for the first time. His intention for Hot Hitz And Kold Kutz, which was the original title, was to be released as a low budget album in March 1975, before the release of the Wings album Venus & Mars.
The album was to be partly non-album singles, such as Hi, Hi, Hi, C Moon and Junior's Farm, along with songs that have been left over from recording sessions from earlier albums and have not been released yet. However, a track list was never officially announced.
In an interview, McCartney stated that 'The original idea was based around a title I came up with and quite liked which was Hot Hitz and Cold Cuts. I thought it would be great, you just put all your top hits on it and then some cold cuts but actually when I mentioned it to my record label at the time, they didn't like the idea of the cold cuts, they wanted everything to be hits, hits, hits! So they didn't particularly go for that idea.'
The project disappears into the background, but when Wings takes a break due to the pregnancy of Linda McCartney in 1977/78, Paul decides to breathe new life into the idea. The 1978 version is based on the idea of a double album, with the first album containing the biggest hits and the second being filled with outtakes. But again the record company is obstructive. A compilation album comes out, but without the "cold cuts": Wings Greatest Hits.
In the latter days of Wings, the Cold Cuts album is being worked on again...and in January 1981 the band records a number of overdubs with in mind a release planned for mid-1981. But again it is the record company that is blocking the project. Five years later, in 1986, McCartney puts producer / arranger Richard Niles on the project again.
Here's a Track list from the 1987 bootleg:
A Love For You - This song was first recorded during the RAM sessions at the end of 1970. In 1981, Paul added some overdubs with Wings members Laurence Juber and Steve Holly.
My Carnival - Recorded during the Venus and Mars sessions in New Orleans in 1975.
Waterspout - An outtake from the London Town sessions, recorded in 1977 in Scotland. The song was planned to be released on the All The Best compilation in 1987, for which it received some horn overdubs, but was ultimately scrapped.
Momma’s Little Girl - Better known as Mama’s Little Girl. Recorded during the Red Rose Speedway sessions in 1972. Released as the B-side of "Put It There" in 1990, as a bonus track on the 1993 remastered CD edition of Wings' Wild Life album and in 2018 as part of the Red Rose Speedway Archive Collection.
Night Out - Recorded in 1972, in the Abbey Road Studios, and at one point regarded as a possible opening track for the album Red Rose Speedway.
Robbers Ball - Recorded in Lympne Castle, Kent, in Autumn 1978, during the Back to the Egg sessions. The song was probably meant to be put on Cold Cuts from the start.
Cage - Recorded in Pauls home studio in Campbeltown, Scotland in July 1979.
Did We Meet Somewhere Before? - Rejected as the main theme for Warren Beatty's film Heaven Can Wait and recorded with Wings in Abbey Road Studios, in Fall 1977.
Tragedy - This cover of a 1961 ballad by the Fleetwoods dates from Red Rose Speedway sessions.
Best Friend - Recorded live in Antwerp, Belgium during the 1972 Wings Over Europe Tour in order to be included on Red Rose Speedway double album. Released in 2018 as part of the Red Rose Speedway Archive Collection.
Same Time Next Year - Recorded in 1978 for the film Same Time, Next Year but not used.
Hey Diddle - Recorded in 1970 during the Ram sessions as a Paul and Linda duet. Later, the track received further overdubs in Nashville, Tennessee in the summer of 1974." (Macca News blogspot.com)
Paul McCartney - Hey Diddle
A Hole in the Sock of Dave Davies - Dave Davies (1972)
"A Hole in the Sock of Dave Davies refers to an unreleased album of solo material by Dave Davies, lead guitarist and co-founder of British rock band The Kinks. Apparently the album was, at least for a time, intended to be released under the name Lincoln County, however, numerous names have been applied to it, including The Album That Never Was.
Technically work began on the project after the unexpected success of Dave Davies single, Death of a Clown. Initially, proposed material included blues numbers by Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy in addition to original material. Eventually, lack of both original material and interest delayed further work on an LP until the very end of 1968, when four new songs were recorded at Polydor Studios in London. Work was to have completed early in 1969 but was delayed at least partly when Dave Davies fractured a finger. Much of the unissed material seems to have been recorded in June 1969, just after completion of recordings for Arthur. Two titles (This Man He Weeps Tonight and Mindless Child of Motherhood), both released as B-sides of Kinks singles were recorded as part of the Arthur sessions, but eventually not included on that LP's final track selection.
The Reprise label files imply that the record label had received tapes of this album, under the title Lincoln County, in July 1969 while it was still considered for release by the band. By September of that year, the decision was made not to release the album. Throughout 1970, reports of a reworked version with new material were discussed; the possibility of issuing Dave's LP as the second half of a 2-LP set was raised, but by the close of that year all talk of the LP's release had ceased. Oddly, tapes of this LP were not officially logged into Reprise's official master tape log until 1972, as part of their contractual settlement after The Kinks moved to RCA. Short of the existence of this acetate in their vaults, there is no other indication that Reprise ever seriously considered this LP for release in its entirety. All songs were mixed (in the case of Susannah's Still Alive, remixed) in stereo for this release." (Wikipedia)
Big Star - 3rd
In 1974, the remaining members of the Memphis pop group Big Star (with many musical guests) participated in a series of recording sessions that would result in an album called Third. Regardless of what the people who made it thought at the time, it is as much an album as Pet Sounds or The Dark Side of the Moon. It served as a terrible mirror, reflecting things falling apart — a label, a band, and the principal songwriter’s emotional stability.
“'Big Star Third — I don’t even remember it as if it were an album project, ’cause we did it in fits and starts,' producer Jim Dickinson remembered. 'We did it in, really I guess three or four short, brief periods of time — ’cause it was painful. … The whole record’s about decomposition and decay. Relationships were falling apart, the band had fallen apart, the record company was going out of business — everything was falling apart around us. That and midtown Memphis are the two themes of the record. There’s a geographic center to that record — well, it’s not really a record, it’s a group of recordings.'
If nothing else, Third is a blueprint of pop mastery and dismantlement. In its lyrical desolation, sonic dissonance, and emotional vulnerability, it is as prescient a document of the coming trends in musical culture as was possible to achieve at the time of its creation. It is a remarkable album, a collection of snapshots of a fractured family, each taken in a different time and place, but bound together as a collection. In every picture, however pastoral, lurks something dark. What distinguishes this album is that it admits the darkness.
Recorded for Memphis’s famed Stax label, Third got shelved. A promising distribution deal with Columbia Records imploded. Subsequent test pressings were rejected by major labels. Since 1978, it has been released several times, by different labels, with different names, songs, and track orders. Yet Third has had such an effect on popular music that, in 2016, Omnivore Recordings issued a three-CD box set of every known recording associated with the project. This, then, can be considered the definitive version of Big Star’s Third, if not the official version." (longreads.com)
John Fogerty - Hoodoo (1976)
After the John Fogerty solo album, Fogerty wasted no time in recording more material for a new album to be followed with a tour, which would be very low-key, with a small group of musicians. In April 1976, he released a new single, You Got the Magic, backed with Evil Thing, which peaked at number 87 on the Billboard Hot 100 and wasn't that great a hit with the Creedence fans. Fogerty submitted Hoodoo to Asylum Records, which assigned it a catalogue number, 7E-1081. Shortly before shipment, however, Fogerty and Asylum's Joe Smith made a joint decision that the album did not merit release. After several unsuccessful attempts to improve the album's quality, Fogerty began a nine-year estrangement from the music industry. He has confirmed in interviews that he instructed Asylum to destroy the master tapes, but bootleg copies have appeared over the years.
Pink Floyd: Household Objects
Pink Floyd's follow up to Dark Side of the Moon was supposed to be an album called Household Objects but it never saw the light of day.
"Listening to a renowned album as cohesive as The Dark Side of the Moon, you would never guess that the follow-up to that historic release was going to be made using everyday items. Household Objects, recorded during several desultory sessions over a two-year time frame, was constructed with rubber bands, wine glasses, spray cans, newspapers, brooms, and other such utilitarian gear. It was shelved.
Pink Floyd The Hard Way Household Object Project
When people talk about Household Objects — including the members of Pink Floyd themselves — it’s usually described as a wasteful and pointless distraction, a primary example of mid-70s rock star indulgence. This is not the case. Household Objects may not have turned into an album, but it was entirely consistent with the band’s previous use of found sound on The Dark Side of the Moon. What initially appears as a stylistic deviation from its powerhouse predecessor — or worse, full-blown self-sabotage — is, in fact, a return to form. Moreover, the mournful tone of one of its experimental tracks became the emotional center of Wish You Were Here, the highly successful follow-up to Dark Side. Most interesting of all, the work on Household Objects can be seen as the musicians’ affirmative attempt at reconnection to the “non-musical” world, to their past, and ultimately to each other." (longreads.com)
The ideas of Household Objects began when Pink Floyd began working on a new song called Work, which involved sawing wood and boiling kettles while on stage. A year later they released Atom Heart Mother, an album that included the track Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast, featuring the sound of roadie Alan Styles frying eggs and bacon before ending with the hypnotic sound of a dripping tap. The band and most probably the band's fans, were surprised when Atom Heart Mother was a UK No.1 hit.
It would be more than two years before Pink Floyd returned to the Household Objects idea. By then The Dark Side Of The Moon had topped the UK and US charts. But when the members of Pink Floyd began work on a follow-up album in late 1973 they suddenly realized that they were in trouble and seemed to have no concrete ideas once they gathered together in the recording studio.
"After making Dark Side of the Moon, the most accessible album of their career, the band’s contrary solution to their writer’s block was to reprise Household Objects. Weeks were spent with engineer Alan Parsons at Abbey Road, creating a percussive rhythm by scraping a witch’s broomstick on the floor or hitting a piece of wood with an axe, and twanging elastic bands stretched between matchsticks. 'I’ve always felt that the differentiation between a sound effect and music is all a load of shit,' bassist/songwriter Roger Waters told Zigzag magazine at the time. 'Whether you make a sound on a guitar or a water tap is irrelevant.' Waters insisted that Floyd’s new music, using 'bottles, knives and felling axes is turning into a really nice piece.'” (loudersound.com)
Buffalo Springfield - Stampede (1967)
Buffalo Springfield's Stampede was a legendary "unreleased" album that actually never existed. From For What It's Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield (John Einarson & Richie Furay): 'Earlier that spring, in an effort to accumulate tracks for a second album Ahmet Ertegun came out to Los Angeles to supervise a number of recording sessions sandwiched between engagements. Shuttling between Gold Star, Columbia, and Sunset Sound Recorders studios, the band managed to record a variety of tracks, but most ended up as either discards, fragments, or demos. Many of these songs are often cited by Springfield aficionados as proposed tracks for an album supposedly to be called Stampede, which was rumored for release that spring. The Stampede story, much like the Beach Boys’ legendary Smile album, has grown to near mythical proportions over the decades with amateur musicologists poring over song lists and speculating on possible tracks. Although Atco had a follow-up album in mind and assigned a catalog number to the anticipated album, going as far as to print up a sleeve, there was, in fact, no Stampede album ever planned by the group themselves. True, they were recording that spring, albeit sporadically with or without several members, but not with the specific goal in mind of a definite album.
In the 1970s, a well-circulated Stampede bootleg purporting to be the real thing was, in reality, merely composed of several outtakes from the debut album and New York sessions… Nonetheless, Atco went ahead and printed up a sleeve using an existing photo shoot of the group up in the Hollywood Hills posed around a western corral. Given the western motif and the group’s name, Atco chose Stampede as the title, lettering it in stars and stripes. Close to one hundred thousand of these sleeves were printed in anticipation of the album, only to be given away as promotional items later that fall after the official release of their second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, which was assigned the catalog number originally intended for Stampede, 33-226. Of those various tracks, Down To The Wire has drawn the most attention.
Ultimately released on Neil’s triple album compilation Decade in 1977, the song was cut with Stephen, Bobby West, Jesse Hill, and Mac Rebennack.
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - Electric Nebraska (1982)
In 1982, Bruce Springsteen recorded a collection of song demos for an album which would be named Nebraska. After completing the demo process, he went in the studio to rehearse and record the demo songs with the entire E Street Band for a lengthy period of time after which he decided to release his home demo tapes as the actual album instead of the tracks he and the E Street Band had been working on.
After the release of Springsteen's solo version of Nebraska, rumors began to surface that there was also another version of the record featuring the entire E Street Band in the studio vaults. At the time, several members of the E Street Band praised the full-band's work on the Electric Nebraska version of the album. Over the years, Electric Nebraska has become a rare collector's item among Springsteen fans. In recent years, Springsteen has authorized various archival releases and it seems a good bet that this lost album will eventually be officially released.
Brain Opera - Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band
The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band (aka The Bonzo Dog Band) was brought to life by a group of British art-school students in the 1960s. Their stylistic mission was to combine elements of music hall, trad jazz and psychedelic pop with surreal humor and avant-garde art.
By 1967 they were contemplating embracing a more contemporary style of rock music, in order to counter claims that they sounded too much like the fictional, studio-concocted New Vaudeville Band. According to Neil Innes, The Bonzos had learned a salutary lesson about the pitfalls of show business.
The situation proved fortuitous, however, as they were able to capitalize on the spirited culture of Swinging London, they began to combine their jazz material with their psychedelic touches. As the Bonzo band's popularity increased, they were asked by Paul McCartney to appear in The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film at the end of 1967, performing their song, Death Cab For Cutie. As the band's career trajectory continued to rise in 1968, the band also became a popular live attraction and pursued a busy tour schedule. The band's hard work began to show dividends when they released a Top Five hit single in October with a Neil Innes song called I'm the Urban Spaceman, which was produced by Paul McCartney and Gus Dudgeon under the collective pseudonym Apollo C. Vermouth.
Viv Stanshall
From the Long Reads website: "In 1993, interviewers from the psychedelic music magazine Ptolemaic Terrascope stood on Viv Stanshall’s stoop, wondering if he would answer the doorbell. Stanshall’s friend, who set up the meeting, was just beginning to apologize when she turned and gasped: A frail and obviously drunk Stanshall, according to the article, “staggering down the road clutching a carved stick and a white plastic carrier bag containing a freshly purchased bottle of Mr. Smirnoff’s elixir, lurched toward the house...Stanshall ― artistic polymath and quintessential English eccentric― had just lost another round in his decades long battle with anxiety...Thirty years before, Stanshall established his career by co-founding a seminal musical comedy group, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. The Bonzos, as they would become affectionately known, started out covering novelty numbers from the 1920s and touring the pub circuit. They went on to have a top-10 hit in Britain and appear in a Beatles film. Hilarious, absurd, vaguely threatening, and anarchic, the Bonzos had an enormous influence on the sketch comedy group Monty Python. They released four albums before initially breaking up in 1970. Another project, an ambitious if nonsensical review called Brain Opera, was shelved...Stanshall was the face of it all. Playing by turns a bumbling compère and crooning frontman, he wrote songs with simple melodies and intricate wordplay. His humor was somehow both dry and camp. He would soliloquize in a posh accent while wearing ping pong ball eyes, or sing a ballad like an addled Elvis before reciting the spoken word lyric in an oversized mask. By the time he collaborated on Brain Opera with fellow English oddball Arthur Brown, Stanshall was at a critical juncture of anxiety and ambition: unable to tour because of stage fright and addicted to drugs and alcohol, he was nevertheless fully invested in the British pop star lifestyle. For their part, the Bonzos were less than a year from dissolving after three years of overwork and underpay.
The Brain Opera is a case in point that some projects can never be realized. What fragments we have of it are demented and chaotic. The men who conceived it weren’t able to see it through, and even if they had, the group who would have performed it were disintegrating, and even if they weren’t, the managers and label people who would have allowed it out into the world would have never.
Hilarious, absurd, vaguely threatening, and anarchic, the Bonzos had an enormous influence on the sketch comedy group Monty Python. With rock and psychedelia now part of their repertoire, the Bonzos could satirize the entire British Invasion. In 1966, with the cultural dominance of all musical things English, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. The group bought electric guitars and concentrated on writing original compositions...
Having shortened their name to the Bonzo Dog Band, the group toured America twice in 1969. The shows were well-received, if poorly planned. Stanshall’s behavior began to change. 'I think something happened to him between the two tours,' Innes said. 'I don’t know what, but he began to drink more to steady his nerves. I think he lost his nerve a bit, and I don’t know what caused that. …When we went to pick Viv up, to actually go to the airport for the second trip, he answered the door with his hair completely shaved off. And he didn’t look at ease at all...He got locked into Valium, which I didn’t really understand about Valium in those days, Legs” Larry Smith remembered, 'but he was apparently prescribed lethal doses early on, which made him all the more dependent on the stuff.”' Touring had become a grind, with little return. In Ireland, the band performed on a football pitch near a slaughterhouse. The only power supply cable was originally for an electric kettle. When it immediately failed, Stanshall chased after his manager across the field, yelling 'Debag the rotter!'
Arthur Brown
These are the unstable conditions in which the Brain Opera was conceived. Most of the work was done by Stanshall and Arthur Brown, of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Brown had a huge hit with 1968s Fire, and was known for wearing flaming helmets on stage. The fruit of this collaboration was going to be nothing short of fascinating. 'The Crazy World did quite a few gigs here and there with the Bonzos, and were great admirers of their humor and theatricality,” Arthur Brown told me recently. 'That led to Viv and I having meetings up.' To the extent that it can be understood, Brain Opera is set in an alternate universe, where The Craig Torso Show is an enormous success, and features, according to The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band: Jollity Farm, 'German surgeons vying for cash and prizes and the chance to work in America.' Stanshall wrote a libretto, and Brown composed the music.
'We gradually started talking about doing things together, and he wanted to do something about a cosmic slug,' Brown told me. 'It kind of developed from there, and the idea was maybe the slug could get a human brain implant or something. My band had been playing a section which went...We want your brains to pay for further education, We want your brains, they belong to the nation...This led Vivian to make the connection that we could bring certain of our ideas together. We started talking about it and working on it.' Stanshall described Brown as 'an incredible singer and…a freak.' 'I think Viv was capable of being the rudest person I ever met,' Brown told me. 'Somehow he had some second sense of people and he would just say things that would make them either want to hit him ― and sometimes did ― or they’d collapse.' 'Christ, we went down to…I don’t know where,' Stanshall told the Terrascope. 'Arthur was on drugs and I was on booze.'
'We came up with all these strange ideas,' Brown continued. 'There was going to be a silver slug that came across the stage. It was going to be a very surreal and adventurous piece. We discussed, about, the first act.' I said to Vivian, ‘Look, most of my stuff at this time has a sort of mystical content. So it’s going to have a mystical content which would be carried by the surreal element of it.’ And then of course, with it being Vivian, it was also going to be quite funny. But that was about as far as it got, really. He was at the time drifting in and out, and I was doing one of my bands, and we got temporally pulled apart.'
The project would have involved the Bonzos and Brown, 'and we would have had other people as well,' Brown said. 'Some female parts. Really, we didn’t get around to discussing the sort of technicalities or too many of the actual personnel. It was a very interesting prospect. And the…you know, some of those things just disappear. Not because you decide they’re not good or you’re not going to do them, it’s just things carry you other ways.' 'I don’t know. Whatever happened, happened,' Brown told me about the end of the project. 'I decided I wanted to form a new band, Kingdom Come. Probably because of that I didn’t get in contact with Viv. Sometimes working with him was impossible. In his down phase he was just lie in bed — that was it, full stop.'
An excerpt of Brain Opera, performed by the Bonzos and recorded for John Peel’s radio broadcast, has surfaced. 'I’d lost interest in the direction the band was taking by then, so I don’t know,' multi-instrumentalist Roger Ruskin Spear said recently. 'I know Pete Townshend said in the press at the time he was planning a ‘Brain Opera’ which rather inhibited our thoughts on the subject.' (Townshend later called his project Tommy.) In the same interview, Rodney Slater claimed to remember nothing about Brain Opera. Stanshall was given co-writing credit and recorded backing vocals on the recording of “Brains” for Kingdom Come’s 1971 Galactic Zoo Dossier album.
The Bonzos management rejected Brain Opera out of hand and pressured the band for another s
