I didn't know there were so many.
I didn't know there were so many.
On the subject of great XTC songs not included on an album:
And may I add, I adore the beautiful “Mermaid Smiled,” and sought out the original pressing of Skylarking because I resented it being ousted from the track listing in favor of the dour “Dear God.” But I suppose David Geffen figured “no publicity is bad publicity.” And the remastered CD returns the song to its proper place.
I’d add “Red Brick Dream,” which was added to the Big Express CD, and which is one of my favorite XTC songs.
Confirmed Bachelors: the dramedy hit of 1883...
I've heard a lot of negative feedback on PE about Dear God but I love it.
I don’t hate it, but by Jove is it ever miserable. And didactic. So very didactic. It’s a Todd Rundgren production, all right. I mean, he could have written it!
Confirmed Bachelors: the dramedy hit of 1883...
I've never gotten the Stones' Flowers album because I have most of the "hits" on other comps. But I might get it now just to have this:
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
I love The Stones but their catalogue is a mess, and needlessly so. Flowers was actually the first of their albums I heard but it is indeed just a mish-mash. 'Ride On Baby', 'Sittin' On A Fence' and 'My Girl' did not come out in the UK in the 60s; the first two however were moderate hits on the Immediate label for Chris Farlowe and Twice As Much respectively. Both have that Aftermath sound for sure. The cover of 'My Girl' is an oddity.
I finally got back into The Stones about 4 or 5 years ago, buying most of the 60's era material as downloads from Amazon. In the case of Flowers, which is effectively the Rolling Stones version of Yesterday...And Today, I just bought a few of the songs, since I had also bought the UK versions of most of the preceding albums (hence, I didn't need the songs that London Records had left off the respective Stateside albums).
I had never owned Flowers either, so I was a bit taken aback when I heard Ride On, Baby (and to a slightly lesser extent, Sittin' On A Fence), and realized that it had somehow been left off any of the "regular" albums, and upon further review, I don't think it's even been on any of the subsequent compilations. If there was a song that should have been on something like Hot Rocks, it was Ride On, Baby. As far as I know, Flowers is the one record it's appeared on. And that's a shame, because it means most fans, probably even out and out hardcore Stones fans, have never heard it. And I think it's an awesome song.
I have a Thin Lizzy compilation titled "Remembering Pt. 1." Lots of great, non-album tracks.
^Their first UK hit, 'Whisky In The Jar', was not on an album at the time.
I think by the time they were on Vertigo, it was mostly only occasional B-sides that were non-album.
All those non-album, non-single (in the UK anyway) tracks fit easily on one disc- that would be the two EPs that came out, and also songs that never came out on anything in the UK at the time like these, 'Blue Turns To Grey' (a hit for Cliff Richard), 'Look What You've Done', 'One More Try' etc.
If they'd followed the UK album order only, they could have cut down the amount of CDs released by half.
The Stones did a lot of R&B covers on their 60's records (eg Under The Boardwalk, Hitch Hike, Good Times, If You Need Me, etc), which in my opinion, generally weren't very good. There were exceptions, such as Time Is On My Side, but a lot of them come off a bit...I dunno, "cute" or "adorable", might be a good way to describe it. One things for sure: Mick's "white boy" renditions of these songs you weren't going to make you forget the Sam Cooke, Wilson Pickett, Marvin Gaye, or The Temptations).
I've heard the Chris Farlowe version of Ride On, Baby, and frankly, it again strikes me as a bit..."stiff". He just sounds like a pop singer singing a song he has no emotional connection to (I was gonna say, teen idol, but I didn't want to be insulting). By contrast, The Stones version has a lot of energy and Mick sounds like he's genuinely pissed off at the girl he's singing about (he had a lot of songs during that era that are said to have been his response to the end of his relationship with Chrissie Shrimpton, who had been his during the entire British Invasion era, ending during the Aftermath/Between The Buttons era).
Like I said, it's basically The Stones version of Yesterday...And Today, combining a bunch of songs left off the US editions of albums, along with a couple singles (excluding the B-side of one of them) plus the above cited gaggle of "previously unreleased songs". The inclusion of Let's Spend The Night Together and Ruby Tuesday (which had both been on the US version of Between The Buttons, released just a few months earlier) makes it feel like a reach for the wallet more than any true attempt to anthologize songs that were (at the time) otherwise unavailable Stateside (or anywhere else, in the case of the three songs JJ mentioned).
Really, the only reasons to own this disc are Ride On Baby, Sittin' On A Fence, and Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadows, since if you buy carefully, you can get all the other worthy songs on the now readily available UK editions of Aftermath and Between The Buttons, or Hot Rocks (which had Let's Spend The Night Together and Ruby Tuesday).
^I think their affinity was more for the Chess blues sound than what would later be deemed 'soul'. But it seems to have all been dubbed R&B at the time, so it stands to reason that they'd do all this material.
'Under The Boardwalk' was an Australian hit I think! It's a dreadful version, very poor vocals. The first version of 'Time Is On My Side' is also atrocious- that's also the one which was the hit in the US! The re-recorded version at Chess, as heard on Hot Rocks but first appeared on Rolling Stones No. 2 here (the wonky out of tune one didn't come out in the UK), wipes the floor with it.
I'm not really up on my THin Lizzy singles, but yeah, there's at least a few B-sides during the Vertigo era that didn't appear on the albums. Just The Two Of Us and Me And The Boys are two that come to mind. Also, the single release of Rosalie was a different mix to the version that appeared on Fighting. I have those on the Vagabonds, Kings, Warriors, Angels boxset which I bought (I think) in Amsterdam (hard to remember what all I did in Amsterdam...ya know how it is).
They could have used the UK album order, appending the singles from the respective era on as bonus tracks. I know I've brought this up several times before, but that's mostly what I did with my own CD-R's that I burned from the stuff I got off Amazon. Allen Klein might be dead, but he's still trying to rip us off, and I felt this was the most effective way to acquire the majority of that stuff. I've got one CD that covers the 12x5/Rolling Stones No. 2/The Rolling Stones, Now! era, one covering the Aftermath/December's Children era, and one that covers the Between The Buttons era. I'm not completely happy with the results, but nothing's perfect. I still have to get the two Hot Rocks compilations to get a gaggle of songs that I missed from the late 60's.
All those non-album, non-single (in the UK anyway) tracks fit easily on one disc- that would be the two EPs that came out, and also songs that never came out on anything in the UK at the time like these, 'Blue Turns To Grey' (a hit for Cliff Richard), 'Look What You've Done', 'One More Try' etc.
If they'd followed the UK album order only, they could have cut down the amount of CDs released by half.
Yeah, I know at the time, they were calling themselves an "R&B band", or at least that's how Andrew Loog Oldham tried to hype them as (as opposed to merely being a "pop group" or "rock n roll group"). So it could have been him saying "Lads, the next record should have a Marvin Gaye song on it" or whatever, in keeping with said PR efforts.
If we buy into Keith's assertion that Mick "Always wants to play what he heard in the nightclub last night", it's possible that some of those covers were Mick's early attempts at getting the band to "do what he heard at the nightclub last night". It certainly makes sense that the guy who would later want to do stuff like Miss You and Undercover Of The Night, might have started off wanting to do Motown covers (note: The Who did a quite a few R&B covers in their early history too).
Or it may have been a reflection of the era, when it was still commonplace for bands to do lots of cover tunes (The Beatles, The Who, and even The Beach Boys all did covers on their early records). Or a reflection of a songwriting team who hadn't yet blossomed into being able to deliver enough original material for 1 or 2 albums a year plus however many singles the label wanted out of them.
Remind me: which version is which? I know one starts off with a sort of churchy sounding organ, which I think is the version on 12x5. As I recall the one on Hot Rocks has a short guitar solo over the organ intro, before the full band comes in.'Under The Boardwalk' was an Australian hit I think! It's a dreadful version, very poor vocals. The first version of 'Time Is On My Side' is also atrocious- that's also the one which was the hit in the US! The re-recorded version at Chess, as heard on Hot Rocks but first appeared on Rolling Stones No. 2 here (the wonky out of tune one didn't come out in the UK), wipes the floor with it.
(this might be heresy, but I actually prefer the version of Time Is On My SIde that was on the Still Life live album, taken from the 81 tour, that's how I first heard the song, thanks again to MTV airing the video regularly, and it's still the one I kind of hear in my head, when I think of that song)
^The one with the guitar is the superior Chess remake. It is not clear to me when that version first came out in the US. Similarly I don't know when the 'church organ' original was ever released in the UK. I remember when I first heard the latter on a CD and thinking, ugh, that's horrible!
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