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"Holy Grails" that actually exist

Started by great_badir, June 08, 2015, 12:17:57 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

great_badir

Apologies if this thread has been done before – I did a search but, beyond the odd slightly related post, I couldn't find anything.  So...

With more and more bands, artistes and record labels raiding their archives for juicy (and, sometimes, not-so juicy) releases, partly thanks to digital downloads easing some of the admin and process burden, it's a good time for hardcore music fans who are obsessed with getting their hands on every recorded note available.  These days, it's not unusual to see a band release a box set containing every concert from an entire tour, so one could even argue that there's just far too much out there (it's a nightmare being a Grateful Dead fan!).  Indeed, King Crimson fans (like myself) have gone from having practically nothing available other than what was officially released and some REALLY bad sounding bootlegs, to some warts-n-all box sets and an almost complete collection of decent soundboard recordings from their most infamous and popular period, 1972-1974, not to mention legitimate access to everything from shit-box partial audience recordings to stunning sounding complete shows from 1980 onwards.  Likewise, Led Zepp fans, who at one time had to make do with "remasters" where all they did was turn the master volume up, now have proper remasters and remixes, along with a wealth of archival audio and video live stuff.

However, despite this relaxing hold over historical material (regardless of whether or not making money is the only factor), some things remain frustratingly known-to-exist, but also unlikely to be released.  This thread is about those "holy grails" which are actually out there and real but beyond our reach...

My favourite band is Genesis and, even though there's a good chunk of decent soundboard bootlegs out there which are easy to find and download, there are still quite a few things which exist to people like me only as a tantalising glimpse – from 1972 onwards, Phil Collins recorded, from the soundboards, pretty much every single performance Genesis did.  The tapes exist in several boxes, stored in their own recording studio The Farm.  Unfortunately, they aren't labelled so, apart from a few photos on the tinterwebs, nothing from them has been released because no one knows what tapes hold what and Tony Banks, principal archivist for the band, basically can't be bothered to start digging.  Amongst that lot would be their legendary Roxy shows from the Selling England tour, currently only available as mediocre sounding bootlegs.  Also MIA are the complete tapes used for the Seconds Out live album, taken from two respective shows on the 1976 and 1977 tours.  Rumoured to be some of the best performances the band ever did, the official album only acts as a sampler and there aren't even any audience recordings out there.  Finally, in the absence of there not being a complete professionally shot film of a show from The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway tour, THE Genesis holy grail – in 1976, director Tony Maylam (who went on to direct the laughably banned video nasty The Burning) filmed two complete performances (separate from those presented on the Seconds Out album) from the Trick of the Tail tour.  They were later cobbled together and edited down to a 45min film for a brief theatrical (and subsequent Japanese laserdisc) release, with much of the in-concert footage bizarrely replaced with various bits of stock footage (old silent movies, student films, and nuclear bomb tests).  As they contain the only professionally shot footage of the band with Bill Bruford on drums, and filmed during a major musical crossroads in the band's timeline both artistically and technically, most Genesis fans would soil themselves at the news of a proper release.  Unfortunately, whilst both shows are known to exist, complete and without the annoying stock footage, the original reels and total rights to what they contain are held by Maylam himself.  And he refuses to do anything with them.  The cunt.

I'm also a Zappa fan.  Some of you will already know what I'm going to say – the complete Roxy performances.  All three December shows at the Roxy on The Mothers' 1973 tour were filmed and recorded using multiple cameras and a multi-track board.  Some of the material went into the Roxy & Elsewhere album.  The rest of it was teasingly promised to Zappa fans way back when Baby Snakes was released on DVD in 2003, with a trailer for the Roxy film ("the complete shows, remastered") and, later, an extended piece of footage put on YouTube.  Despite that, all we have seen of it is a single (incomplete) audio CD culled from two shows, and that was only released last year (a whole decade after the material was promised), and the odd single song that has made its way onto compilations (the You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore series, for example).  The fans have been up in arms about it for ages, but the Zappa Family Trust (headed up by FZ's widow Gail, and partly overseen by Dweezil) don't seem to be able to give a straight answer as to what the hold-up is, or even if we will ever see what was promised so long ago.  Similarly missing, with much less fanfare, is the Elsewhere portion of the album, recorded in 1974.  One complete soundboard show does exist, but it is a dreadful sounding bootleg (either a very very low generation, or a very poor recording first time around).  Beyond that, for years the consensus has been that the FZ archives contain a wealth of unreleased concerts, albums and other material, but keeper of the vault (and ex Dweezil alumni) Joe Travers maintains that there really isn't anywhere near as much as people think, and most of the decent sounding stuff has already been released.  Who knows.

I also like Yes (but only up to, and including, 1977).  About to be released is a box set of several complete shows from their Close to the Edge tour, from which the album Yessongs was taken.  Whilst this is great news for fans, many of the band's tours from their classic period are ill-served.  There's the odd song here and there, but otherwise we are missing any complete shows with Bill Bruford on drums, and shows from the Tales From Topographic Oceans (hugely re-assessed by both critics and fans alike in the last few years), Relayer (aside from one BBC filmed show at QPR's stadium, which suffers greatly from technical problems, a dreadful mix, and Patrick Moraz savaging many of the songs) and Going For the One tours, despite confirmation that the stuff does exist in the archives.  Particularly frustrating is the lack of any decent sounding live stuff from 1977, when the band were arguably at their musical peak with Rick Wakeman having rejoined them and refreshed the whole live performance dynamic (much of Patrick Moraz's live tenure being quite a mess due to his completely different style and technique) – an extended version of Awaken, perhaps the band's magnum opus, performed at this time being very special indeed, with the only existing recording beings poor audience tapes (many on YouTube) only hinting at how good the band had got live. 

What are some of yours?

purlieu

Being a Future Sound of London fan is a pain in regards to this, as they so often announce things, or slip them into conversation, and then they never seem to appear. The most obvious example is the Environments album, mentioned on the sleeve of Lifeforms in 1994, and not released until 2007. At the moment there are 29 releases known to exist in some form or other, either complete or incomplete; of these, some haven't been mentioned in almost ten years.

A few really stand out as exciting though: when they announced the Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble mix CD series in 2007, a volume mixed by FSOL (as opposed to the Amorphous Androgynous ones) was promised; this was going to be titled Electric Brain Storms and feature similar material to their EBS radio mixes: early avant-garde electronics, modern classical, krautrock, hauntology, industrial. The radio mixes are fantastic and it'd be great to get an official CD release of one. But it never came out.

An album called 2" Tape Reels of live jams and remixes recorded in 1996, announced in 2007, but the only track heard so far is a really crazy cut up remix of We Have Explosive. No news on that since.

A reworking of the Liz Fraser collaboration 'Lifeforms', which the band were never happy with in the early '90s due to the limitations of their samplers at the time. Snippets have been heard since in live and radio shows, which suggest it's going to be an epic ethereal ambient thing - but Virgin/EMI didn't seem too interested so it's basically held up indefinitely.

Their 1994 3D Headspace Tour. Whilst a lot of shows from their 1996 ISDN tour have been made available through their online shop, they are all quite similar, containing a lot of overlap in material. Only three 1994 shows are currently available, and they're all drastically different; low quality bootlegs from the tour suggest other shows were equally varied and contained lots of unheard material. Of everything, I want these the most!

The Masked Unit

The billion or so versions of Detox by Dr Dre, which he's been working on since 2001, and which I'm certain will never see the light of day, especially now he's a gazillionaire from the Beats products.

I wouldn't expect it to come anywhere near to people's expectations after all this time, but there are allegedly hundreds of songs in existence, and if he just let somebody put together the best 12 or so tracks, I think we'd easily have a lost classic on our hands.

Brundle-Fly


great_badir

Quote from: Brundle-Fly on June 08, 2015, 12:56:26 PM
This was a 'holy grail' for forty five years but was finally released this month
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/11536234/Lost-Robin-Gibb-album-to-be-released-thanks-to-fans.html

Ah yes.  A mate of mine is a Bee Gees fan and he already had some of the stuff from okay-sounding bootlegs.  He'll be getting the release proper for sure, but thinks it will be filed under "disappointing after the wait, but listenable all the same" a la Pink Floyd's "new" album.

Serge

Talking of the Floyd, I would still like them to release 'Spare Bricks', the mooted soundtrack album from 'The Wall', containing the alternative versions from the film ('Another Brick In The Wall Part 3' is at a faster tempo and far superior, and 'Mother' is completely different, and I'm sure there are others), plus 'What Shall We Do Now?', which should have been on the original album, but was bumped for space (but soundtracks one of my favourite bits of animation in the movie.) I'd hoped that it might have been released as part of one of the deluxe editions of the album that came out a couple of years ago, but nope.

great_badir

Quote from: Serge on June 08, 2015, 01:47:23 PM
Talking of the Floyd, I would still like them to release 'Spare Bricks', the mooted soundtrack album from 'The Wall', containing the alternative versions from the film ('Another Brick In The Wall Part 3' is at a faster tempo and far superior, and 'Mother' is completely different, and I'm sure there are others), plus 'What Shall We Do Now?', which should have been on the original album, but was bumped for space (but soundtracks one of my favourite bits of animation in the movie.) I'd hoped that it might have been released as part of one of the deluxe editions of the album that came out a couple of years ago, but nope.

Not being a fan of The Wall at all (film or album, although I prefer watching the film over listening to the album), I don't know that much about it, but weren't at least two of the concerts filmed professionally?  I know there's a couple of pro-shot vids on YouTube, and the audio from several shows was certainly recorded.

Serge

Yeah, the original idea for the film was for it to be live footage with extra animation and scenes added, but I think the footage was deemed not to be good enough or something. Somehow it developed from there into what it became. At least we were spared Waters playing Pink (which was his intention when it started going that way.)

CaledonianGonzo

Along with various other alt versions and curios, the Get Yer Leeds Lungs Out! bootleg gets its first ever official release today as part of the new Sticky Fingers box set / special edition.

http://strangerthanknown.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-rolling-stones-finest-hour-get-yer.html

The cherry on the cake was that Amazon mistakenly listed the deluxe edition with the book and 7inch version of Brown Sugar for a tenner for long enough for me to acquire a copy.

NoSleep

I would like a live recording of the classic 1974 version of Gong performing the tunes from "You".

The nearest thing there is to this is a very bad audience recording of their performance in Hyde Park, which all my forensic skills have been unable to render more listenable. Nonetheless, there's enough energy trickling off that old tape to indicate that it is an amazing performance. For some reason all the fairly decent bootlegs from around that time feature drummers other than the inimitable Pierre Moerlen. There's good bootlegs from '73 (and great versions of earlier material here) and there's good bootlegs from '75, but by then Daevid Allen had left his own band and they began their transformation into a Jazz-Rock outfit.

I know that band reformed a couple of years later to perform in Paris and this ended up as the double LP "Vive Gong", but they aren't firing on quite the same number of cylinders as when they were touring in '74; it's all a bit shambolic in comparison.

I was at the Hyde Park gig as well as several other performances and know well that even "You" is lacking what this band could deliver on that material on a good day.

checkoutgirl

Quote from: purlieu on June 08, 2015, 12:42:33 PM
The most obvious example is the Environments album, mentioned on the sleeve of Lifeforms in 1994, and not released until 2007.

I think Environment was an idea they had when Lifeforms was released so they stuck an ad for it on the sleeve of Lifeforms. The album they eventually released had some new stuff on it and some old stuff. For some reason I'm convinced that the Environments they released and the one advertised on Lifeforms are not the same thing. FSOL are terrible for stuff like this, especially over the last 10 years or so. They released more Environments stuff as you know, but the Environments releases were always a disappointing mix of old and new stuff up to Environments 4, then in late 2014 they release Environment 5 to no fanfare. It was the first FSOL album of completely new material in 18 years. Even Chinese Democracy only took 15 years to release.

You would have had to be keeping a pretty close eye on FSOL to even know it was released. I haven't listened to it yet but I'm in a dilemma. I listen pretty much only to mp3 nowadays but it feels wrong to listen to Environment 5 on such a crappy medium. I might buy the CD and listen to that.

The closest thing to a holy grail for me is a completely new FSOL album and Environment 5 is it.

momatt

#11
I would love to hear, have and hold the Sam Sever[nb]and the Raiders of the Lost Art[/nb] solo LP (on Mo'Wax).  I've no idea why it never came out because I bet it's brilliant.  His single did quite well I think.
James Lavelle has confirmed that test pressings exist.  One day I'm going to break into his warehouse and steal the fucker.

It's also turning out that this bastard is a bit of a white whale / holy grail too:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mowax21/urban-archaeology-21-years-of-mowax

lazyhour

There are two for me: the melody-oriented stuff Jim O'Rourke worked on between Insignificance and The Visitor[nb]apparently there definitely was some - in about 2006 the percussionist Tim Barnes told me he'd heard a fantastic 20-minute instrumental piece that would end up forming the bulk of a new album - I don't think this would have been The Visitor as I think Jim wrote and recorded that entirely in Japan.[/nb], and the 3rd Earl Brutus album "20 Brutus Greats", which was seemingly recorded but never released.

Norton Canes

Pop Will Eat Itself finally released their unfinished 1996 album 'A Lick of the Old Cassette Box' (not sure it would have been called that in '96) in 2013. It even got a remaster, which is more than any of their other albums except Dos Dedos Mis Amigos.

It's not very good.

NoSleep

Tony Williams Lifetime live at Montreux 13th June 1971 (recorded from FM radio broadcast) is the definitive recording of the Ego-period Lifetime, with Tony Williams himself getting into Jaki Liebezeit territory on the outing. It should really have been issued as an official album.

If only there was a similarly recorded version of the 4-piece who toured the UK featuring Jack Bruce plus the original trio.

Subtle Mocking

Don't wish to turn this into yet another Beatles thread, but there's plenty of missing stuff including a version of Good Night sung by John Lennon.

As far as albums go, there's apparently an unfinished Broadcast album knocking around, recorded before Trish Keenan's death.

greenman

Zep - The 1970 Bath festival show has always been rumoured to have been record/filmed and is considered one of the best, the 1971 Japanese tour was supposedly recorded and is arguably there best work although some of the bootlegs are good enough to enjoy it. Theres a lot of soundboards around but I doubt Page will ever release them officially.

Floyd - Theres quite a bit of bootlegged stuff that's good enough to be released, the Man/Journey show from Amsterdam in 1969, BBC recordings in 70/71, parts of Montreux 70 and the longer outtakes from Zabriskie Point. What might be in the vault has never really been rumoured although I would love to have a pro quality recording of one of the 1977 shows with Snowey White, probably the best tour of there classic rock phase.

Can - You would think theres got to be loads of recordings that the classic albums were cobbled together from, would be great to hear them in a Miles Davis fusion era like boxset.

lazyhour


Quote from: Subtle Mocking on June 08, 2015, 05:38:05 PM
As far as albums go, there's apparently an unfinished Broadcast album knocking around, recorded before Trish Keenan's death.

I think that James is very slowly finishing this album, painful as it is to do.

Serge

Quote from: greenman on June 08, 2015, 06:13:40 PMCan - You would think theres got to be loads of recordings that the classic albums were cobbled together from, would be great to hear them in a Miles Davis fusion era like boxset.

I wouldn't hold your breath - Irmin Schmidt said that 'The Lost Tapes' were pretty much all they were ever likely to release (legally).


zonko

I was a bit gutted when Adam Ant blocked this being released http://lightbluecar.com/nl/demosbox.html love a bit of early Ants.

Rolf Lundgren

Pacific Ocean Blue by Dennis Wilson was famously unavailable for years and hunting down a copy that wouldn't set you back hundreds of pounds required the patience of Job and the detecting abilities of a German Shorthaired pointer. Last year I saw it going for £3 next to a till in Fopp.

Steven

Black Gold - Jimi Hendrix's lost tapes of demos he was working on before he died. Mitch Mitchell found them wrapped in a bandana in the loft and gave them to the Hendrix estate run by Jimi's twatty adopted sister Janie and they've sat on them for 20 or more years now content with putting out the same crap over and over repackaged.

purlieu

Quote from: checkoutgirl on June 08, 2015, 02:19:42 PM
I think Environment was an idea they had when Lifeforms was released so they stuck an ad for it on the sleeve of Lifeforms. The album they eventually released had some new stuff on it and some old stuff. For some reason I'm convinced that the Environments they released and the one advertised on Lifeforms are not the same thing. FSOL are terrible for stuff like this, especially over the last 10 years or so. They released more Environments stuff as you know, but the Environments releases were always a disappointing mix of old and new stuff up to Environments 4, then in late 2014 they release Environment 5 to no fanfare. It was the first FSOL album of completely new material in 18 years. Even Chinese Democracy only took 15 years to release.

You would have had to be keeping a pretty close eye on FSOL to even know it was released. I haven't listened to it yet but I'm in a dilemma. I listen pretty much only to mp3 nowadays but it feels wrong to listen to Environment 5 on such a crappy medium. I might buy the CD and listen to that.

The closest thing to a holy grail for me is a completely new FSOL album and Environment 5 is it.

According to Brian Dougans, the released version of Environments is "very close" to the planned released version, which he reconstructed in early 2007 to the best of his memory from their DATs[nb]You know that super-fan that every band has, who gets to the stage that they actually get to know the band themselves and are really tedious in their encyclopedic knowledge of the groups' oeuvre? That's me with FSOL. They've even released three of my albums on FSOLDigital[/nb]. The album was given a catalogue number by their US label Astralwerks. It sits alongside the Eggshell and Glass singles in their scrapped '90s releases (both of which had Virgin catalogue numbers).

I like all of the Environments albums except 3, which is really patchy. Opens with three gorgeous tracks, with a few later on, but lots of stuff I still can't get into years on. Five is beautiful - very organic sounding, certainly far less 'electronic' than classic FSOL, but with a gorgeous, melancholic mood. It was well reported within certain circles, but yeah, they need something resembling a promotional campaign behind their albums, as the only time they appear in the press at the minute is when a new Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble compilation is out, or when Gaz is talking about the Noel Gallagher album.

Oops! Wrong Planet

Quote from: great_badir on June 08, 2015, 12:17:57 PMFinally, in the absence of there not being a complete professionally shot film of a show from The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway tour, THE Genesis holy grail – in 1976, director Tony Maylam (who went on to direct the laughably banned video nasty The Burning)...

Soundtrack by one Rick Wakeman, naturally.

Quote... filmed two complete performances (separate from those presented on the Seconds Out album) from the Trick of the Tail tour.  They were later cobbled together and edited down to a 45min film for a brief theatrical (and subsequent Japanese laserdisc) release, with much of the in-concert footage bizarrely replaced with various bits of stock footage (old silent movies, student films, and nuclear bomb tests).  As they contain the only professionally shot footage of the band with Bill Bruford on drums, and filmed during a major musical crossroads in the band's timeline both artistically and technically, most Genesis fans would soil themselves at the news of a proper release.  Unfortunately, whilst both shows are known to exist, complete and without the annoying stock footage, the original reels and total rights to what they contain are held by Maylam himself.  And he refuses to do anything with them.  The cunt.

Well, quite.  That film is tantalising and infuriating.

Quote from: great_badir on June 08, 2015, 12:17:57 PMI also like Yes (but only up to, and including, 1977).  About to be released is a box set of several complete shows from their Close to the Edge tour, from which the album Yessongs was taken.

It was released a couple of weeks ago and is all up on Spotify. It's superb - Alan White is terrific for someone who had only just joined the band and had a couple of weeks to learn the material, and Wakeman is much better served than he was on Yessongs; it confirms what a great band musician he was, unobtrusively helping to drive the music, not just a caped virtuoso showboater.

Quote from: great_badir on June 08, 2015, 12:17:57 PMWhilst this is great news for fans, many of the band's tours from their classic period are ill-served.  There's the odd song here and there, but otherwise we are missing any complete shows with Bill Bruford on drums, and shows from the Tales From Topographic Oceans (hugely re-assessed by both critics and fans alike in the last few years), Relayer (aside from one BBC filmed show at QPR's stadium, which suffers greatly from technical problems, a dreadful mix, and Patrick Moraz savaging many of the songs) and Going For the One tours, despite confirmation that the stuff does exist in the archives.  Particularly frustrating is the lack of any decent sounding live stuff from 1977, when the band were arguably at their musical peak with Rick Wakeman having rejoined them and refreshed the whole live performance dynamic (much of Patrick Moraz's live tenure being quite a mess due to his completely different style and technique) – an extended version of Awaken, perhaps the band's magnum opus, performed at this time being very special indeed, with the only existing recording beings poor audience tapes (many on YouTube) only hinting at how good the band had got live. 

I think more Yes archive will follow, especially as the sales of the 14-disc box have been surprisingly encouraging.  With their concert attendances falling, Anderson and Wakeman being long past the point of return, and now Squire struck down with leukaemia and replaced on tour by Billy Sherwood, it looks like mining the vaults might become a financial necessity.

Panbaams

Quote from: Subtle Mocking on June 08, 2015, 05:38:05 PM
Don't wish to turn this into yet another Beatles thread, but there's plenty of missing stuff including a version of Good Night sung by John Lennon.

"Carnival of Light" is the obvious Beatles one, although it could never support the weight of expectation surrounding it. Ian MacDonald reckons in Revolution in the Head that it will never be released, but you never know.

NoSleep

Quote from: Steven on June 08, 2015, 11:06:10 PM
Black Gold - Jimi Hendrix's lost tapes of demos he was working on before he died. Mitch Mitchell found them wrapped in a bandana in the loft and gave them to the Hendrix estate run by Jimi's twatty adopted sister Janie and they've sat on them for 20 or more years now content with putting out the same crap over and over repackaged.

Those will probably just be recordings of guitar ideas on an acoustic guitar in a hotel room, unlikely to be band tapes; the kind of thing that should have come out as a bootleg decades ago if it was anybody else except Jimi Hendrix (like those piano demos of Captain Beefheart). That album that Eddie Kramer cobbled together a couple of years back was purported to be the last new finished music we would hear from Hendrix.

DukeDeMondo

Tagger beat me to it, but yes, "Contact Yourself," Shane MacGowan's 20 minute acid house number.

When he was puttin The Pogues box set together, Phil Chevron insisted that the track didn't exist anymore, and that it "only briefly" existed in the first place.

He talked about it on the Medusa Forums a few times. More a twenty minute loop, he said, that they never seriously intended to put forward as a contender for an album that everyone at the label already hated.

I'm sure there's a tape of it kickin about somewhere. Chances are it's awful, but still.

Subtle Mocking

Quote from: Panbaams on June 09, 2015, 12:05:13 AM
"Carnival of Light" is the obvious Beatles one, although it could never support the weight of expectation surrounding it. Ian MacDonald reckons in Revolution in the Head that it will never be released, but you never know.

I doubt it'll ever be officially released, at least. Can't imagine it's that good, but it has the mystery surrounding it because it's a long experimental piece.

momatt

Quote from: NoSleep on June 09, 2015, 05:59:16 AM
That album that Eddie Kramer cobbled together a couple of years back was purported to be the last new finished music we would hear from Hendrix.

This was pretty good too.  I really liked the slightly rough and loose nature of it.  A really good jam session.

great_badir

Quote from: greenman on June 08, 2015, 06:13:40 PM
Zep - The 1970 Bath festival show has always been rumoured to have been record/filmed and is considered one of the best

Floyd - Theres quite a bit of bootlegged stuff that's good enough to be released, the Man/Journey show from Amsterdam in 1969, BBC recordings in 70/71, parts of Montreux 70 and the longer outtakes from Zabriskie Point. What might be in the vault has never really been rumoured although I would love to have a pro quality recording of one of the 1977 shows with Snowey White, probably the best tour of there classic rock phase.

Floyd's performance of Atom Heart Mother (with orchestra and choir) at the same festival was definitely recorded (also unreleased, aside from some REALLY bad filmed excerpts), so good chance Zepp were too.  This - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZZ-GeZk1gM excellent sounding (at least from that excerpt) performance of AHM was also filmed in full, but remains unreleased.

I would also love an Animals soundboard.  Hasn't it been confirmed that almost the entire Animals tour was properly recorded?  I seem to remember discussions about it cos they used (then) new recording technology to better present the live audio in the home environment.