What will be music’s next Holy Grail?
While this week’s release of Bob Dylan and the Band’s near-mythical The Basement Tapes finally brought to an end a decades-long quest for the Holy Grail of unreleased recordings, it almost immediately raised another question: What could possibly take its place as the object of our collective obsession?
Or, to bring up a more disturbing corollary: Is there anything left to take its place?
I posed that question to Bruno MacDonald, the self-confessed nerd behind a pertinent new book, The Greatest Albums You’ll Never Hear: Unreleased Records by the World’s Greatest Artists.
“Any unheard material by an artist at a peak of their creativity is potentially significant — particularly if, like Dylan at the time of The Basement Tapes, they were so prolific that their discarded work might be every bit as good as that which they released,” he emailed back.
“The obvious example is Prince, whose 1980s albums represent only a fraction of the hours of music in his vaults. You could also make a case for Black Gold by Jimi Hendrix, a kaleidoscopic concept album that might have pushed his psychedelic storytelling to its limit, or The Last Days of Easter, a sombre early ’70s project by Stevie Wonder. And, given the revelatory quality of Nirvana’s Unplugged, fans will doubtless continue to speculate what Kurt Cobain’s mooted solo album — perhaps a collaboration with R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe — would have sounded like.”
That answer touches on a lot of the titles that come up over and over again in the zealously argued, occasionally boozy discussions that the topic has an endless capacity to generate.
Let’s start with Prince, who managed to make news in Toronto this week simply by not playing a sur- prise concert. The example that repeatedly pops up is Dream Factory, a sprawling double album recorded in 1986 with his Purple Rain band, the Revolution. Like many of the unreleased titles that make up the loose canon of so-called never-heard albums, this one comes with an asterisk.
While Dream Factory remains locked in Prince’s vault, much of the material actually surfaced on Sign O’ the Times, while other songs found homes on several albums over the years, including four on 1997’s Crystal Ball. Given Prince’s hell-freezes-over détente with Warner Music this year, in which he re-signed with his former nemesis after regaining ownership of his catalogue, though, the odds of one day hearing the original Dream Factory have never been better.
The Prince scenario of repurposing unreleased material applies to a great many legendary lost works, from the Beach Boys’ Smile and the Who’s Lifehouse to Jimi Hendrix’s First Rays of the New Rising Sun, Neil Young’s Homegrown and, of course, The Basement Tapes themselves. Even The Last Days of Easter, the scrapped Stevie Wonder album Bruno MacDonald mentions above, gave birth to “Living for the City,” “Higher Ground” and “Golden Lady,” all of which ended up on 1973’s Innervisions. One of the other titles McDonald references, Hendrix’s Black Gold, has been the subject of debate for 40 years. Way back in 1974, Rolling Stone reported on controversial producer Alan Douglas’s discovery of a “Black Gold” suite: eight tunes, running for about 30 minutes. (Other sources would later say it included 16 songs.) Douglas describes it as an autobiographical fantasy, Hendrix playing a Buck Rogers figure called Black Gold. Again, some of those solo acoustic numbers surfaced later as studio recordings, but given the sheer volume of posthumously released material — both legitimate and bootlegged — that has come out under Hendrix’s name, the promise of an album of unheard music by the man is undeniably tantalizing. Of course, the unpalatable truth is some of the music that has achieved Basement Tapes- level notoriety may be desirable because it is unattainable rather than exceptional. Two candidates for that category are coming out this month, albeit in altered form. David Bowie’s suppressed Toy, his 2001album composed of new versions of very early material, will be the source for two tracks on his new compilation Nothing Has Changed. In the interim, the original Toy album lost some of its enigmatic stature after having been leaked in its entirety on the web three years ago.
Out next week, Pink Floyd’s final album, The Endless River, grew out of “The Big Spliff,” a celebrated artifact that engineer Andy Jackson described to Uncut magazine as just a “mash-up of some of the psychedelic noodling from the Division Bell jams.”
Perhaps Beck does the best job of putting the whole phenomenon in perspective. He is quoted in a previous book on the Holy Grails of unreleased albums, Dan Leroy’s The Greatest Music Never Sold: “I think there’s something to the idea of a record that you’ll never hear, something more stimulating or evocative,” he says. “They’ll always sound better in your mind.” Vinyl countdown: Speaking of Prince, both of his current albums, Art Official Age and Plectrumelectrum, the latter with his band 3rdEyeGirl, are getting the vinyl treatment. They’ll belatedly appear in that format on Nov. 24, almost two months after their release on CD.
Meanwhile, one of Prince’s musical influences, Sly & the Family Stone, is making a major reappearance on vinyl this month. Over the next two weeks, their first six albums will be reissued on vinyl. That’s everything from A Whole New Thing through Fresh, including the peerless There’s a Riot Goin’ On.
Also coming in two batches over the next two weeks are 13 titles by the Byrds, including mono versions of Mr. Tambourine Man, Turn! Turn! Turn!, Fifth Dimension and Younger Than Yesterday.
Finally, Bob Dylan’s first eight albums are being released individually as mono records four years after they were packaged as a pricey and now-hard-to-find box set. Coming out over the next two weeks is everything from his self-titled debut through John Wesley Harding.
That was, coincidentally, the first album to come out after he and the Band had recorded what were to become known as The Basement Tapes. jsakamoto@thestar.ca