Famous Albums You Won't Believe You Can't Buy Anymore
Albums go out of print all the time, and it's usually damn well justified. Humanity has produced a lot of terrible music over the years, and we just don't have enough room to keep it all lying around.
It's not all bad, though. Music goes extinct for many reasons, and it's a phenomenon that has claimed the shelf-lives of plenty of excellent albums. Music we'd like to see disappear forever is the topic of this week's Unpopular Opinion podcast ...
... where I'm joined by Cracked art snob Randall Maynard and J.F. Sargent, whoever that is.
Far be it from me to write a column full of bullshit opinions, though. Instead, let's talk about a few out-of-print albums (and a few that refuse to be sold any way other than "in print") that need to make themselves available to us immediately. For example ...
Neil Young's First-Ever Live Album
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I talk about Neil Young in this column like it's still the 1970s, which is his fault for still being alive and doing things at such an advanced age. At any rate, let's talk about him some more! If you don't know any other Neil Young songs, there's a good chance you're at least familiar with stuff like "Old Man"and "Heart of Gold" ...
... which were both huge singles from his most successful and beloved album ever, Harvest. That "classic" is also responsible for spawning what has come to be known as "The Ditch Trilogy," a series of sloppy-but-completely-incredible albums that earned Neil Young a lifetime of reminders that, no matter how many times he's been asked, not once has he cranked out another album even remotely similar to Harvest.
Unless you count all of these.
The albums earned their group nickname by way of this Neil Young quote, taken from the liner notes of the greatest-hits collection Decade.
"['Heart of Gold'] put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch."
I've talked about one of those three albums previously. It's called On the Beach, and it's fantastic, but I almost wrote about another of the "Ditch" albums, Tonight's the Night, in that article instead.
If you've never heard it before, rectify that by picking up a copy anywhere fine music is sold. Also, be grateful that you can, because that isn't the case with all of the albums in this series.
Following the success of Harvest, Neil Young's record label wanted another album just like it and his fans wanted him to go on tour and play every song from it. He gave all of those people none of those things. Instead, his official follow-up to the expert craftsmanship of Harvest was a circus of an album called Time Fades Away, which consisted of completely new songs recorded while on a stadium tour of the United States. By that, I don't mean he used his downtime to hit the studio. No, he literally recorded the songs live onstage in front of scores of fans who'd never heard them before.
It's a mess, but the songs are still mostly in the same vein as the material on Harvest, except with louder guitars and less practice. In that way, it's a natural link between the studio perfectness of its predecessor and the complete and total chaos of Tonight's the Night. Also, it's completely unavailable in stores.
Well, if you're the Record Store Day type, you could have picked up a copy of the album on vinyl, provided you were willing to shell out for a boxed set that also included three other albums. He eventually scrapped that plan, though, in the name of "focusing on other projects." There have been several reasons given for the album's continued absence from store shelves, chief among them being that Neil Young just plain doesn't like it. He calls Time Fades Away his least favourite among everything he's recorded, like he doesn't even realize he was still making music in the '80s.
That's probably just a convenient excuse meant to mask the true and far more hilarious reason why you'll never get to buy a pristine copy of Time Fades Away in your lifetime. To put it plainly, the album doesn't exist anymore. Specifically, the master tapes are missing because, as is stated right on the back cover, the songs were recorded directly to a computer that, as it turned out, made music that kind of sounds like ass. No two-track master tapes were ever made. That makes remastering the album in the traditional sense completely impossible, meaning any new release will sound like the same shit it did back when it first came out. So, if you've ever wondered how Neil Young developed his healthy mistrust for digital music, this album is probably your answer. It's also, all things considered, pretty damn great.
Any Garth Brooks Album (Digitally)
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Quick! Name the best-selling albums artist of the SoundScan era! If you said anything other than Garth Brooks, your deduction skills are fucking terrible. Everyone else, great job. The answer is, indeed, Garth Brooks. Also, who cares, right? Certainly not me; there are few things in this world I enjoy less than the music of Garth Brooks.
That said, there is one aspect of this accomplishment that makes him stand out among his peers. Unlike Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Metallica, and pretty much any other name you'll see regularly in contention for the title of best-selling artist of all-time, Garth Brooks has never once made his music available digitally.
t's not for business reasons, either. He believes that albums should be enjoyed in their entirety and not divided up into singles and sold for less than a dollar each. You might recognize that as the exact same stance Radiohead used to take on their music. Who would've put their money on Garth Brooks being the last holdout among those two?
Jim Dyson/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty ImagesEveryone in Radiohead, probably.
It's true, though ... for now. He's actually making plans to release his catalog in digital formats literally any day, and when he does he'll probably become the best-selling solo artist of all-time. Not just the best-selling solo artist of the SoundScan era. All-time.
The Only Album Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham Recorded as a Duo
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When it comes to music duos, few are as recognizable or respected as Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, which, considering there are five people in the band, is probably a standout among the litany of reasons why everyone in Fleetwood Mac hates everyone in Fleetwood Mac.
Most people probably can't even list any of the rest of the members, and the band is named after one of them.
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are fairly well-known as a duo, is what I'm getting at, which makes it all the more strange that, for almost four decades now, the only album they ever recorded as a pair has been out of print. It's called Buckingham Nicks, appropriately enough, and holy shit, check out Stevie Nicks on the cover.
So, what gives? Is this a terrible album? Is this just another case of musicians not wanting their embarrassing early recordings to see the light of day? Not at all. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham have both included songs from the album in their subsequent releases and live shows, and one of them ("Crystal") was re-recorded and released on the 1975 self-titled Fleetwood Macalbum where the two made their first appearance with the band. The music is just fine.
The Beatles' Only Live Album
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It always surprises me that in the timeless "Beatles vs. Stones" debate, fans of The Rolling Stones almost never pull the most obvious card you can play in that argument: Who's the better live band?
That's not even sort of a contest. There has never been a time in history when The Rolling Stones would not have completely annihilated the The Beatles in a live setting. Granted, a lot of that has to do with the fact that The Beatles stopped touring altogether about halfway through their career because the screams from adoring fans made playing music in their presence a completely pointless effort, but still, they stopped and the Stones didn't. Facts are facts.
Even with that being the case, isn't it still sort of weird that a Beatles live album doesn't exist? Yes, there are technically a few releases of varying degrees of legitimacy that consist of live recordings you can purchase, but there is no official recording of The Beatles playing music in front of the sea of screaming girls that halted their growth as live performers. At least, it doesn't exist anymore.
In the years following the band's demise, fans demanded a live album of some sort, and they finally got one in 1975 when Sir George Martin (the band's producer, often referred to as "the fifth Beatle") was handed tapes from a few different live performances at the Hollywood Bowl. The resulting album sounded like shit, but they released it anyway. When it came time to re-release everything on CD, though, The Beatles' only live album wasn't invited to the party.
On the one hand, it's understandable. If you've heard Live at the Hollywood Bowl then you know it's not exactly a pleasant listen.
The crowd sounds like a million rape whistles being blown at once, and because it's compiled from a few different performances it even contains a Hollywood movie-style continuity error that involves the band referring to both A Hard Day's Night and Help! as their "new album," when the two were actually released more than a year apart. Bringing the album to life was a process plagued with all sorts of mishaps and glitches, the most hilarious among them being that part of it involved using a vacuum cleaner to blow air into a piece of recording equipment to keep it cool enough to transfer the original recordings to a usable mixing board. Nevertheless, fans ate it up. The album debuted at No. 1 in the U.K. and at No. 2 in the U.S.
Again, I do understand the thinking behind not making this available today. It does sound terrible. On the other hand, though, that's exactly why it should still be in print. The Beatles were a phenomenon that will be discussed for a long time, and a huge part of the mystique surrounding them as a band has to do with those deafening screams from the crowd that basically ruined every attempt at putting on a decent concert.
It's not like The Beatles were the only band making music people liked at the time, but they were the only band that elicited that kind of reaction from the general public. What's happening in that video is not fandom, it's an illness. Beatlemania was a plague that infected the United States. It's all well and fine to explain that part of the legend to someone, but wouldn't it really drive the point home if you could throw on the band's lone attempt at an official live album for future generations to hear while we bore the shit out of them by talking about the Beatles?
I'm not saying we need this album for entertainment purposes, but as far as documents of noteworthy moments in American history go, we could do a lot worse.
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