Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Happy House (1984)

Neil Young and Crazy Horse performed their first gigs together in six years at the Catalyst in February 1984. Coming right after the Everybody's Rockin' debacle, where he countered David Geffen's request for "more rock and roll" by making a rockabilly record, it was his first foray into loud rock music since Re-ac-tor three years previously. Neil had been making solo, synth-based demos with his Synclavier at home throughout late 1983 and January 1984, showing he was still pretty much interested in electronic music after Trans. But now, he decided to play that material with Crazy Horse, giving the songs more guitar-based arrangements and adding Ben Keith on saxophone and synthesizer. Those Catalyst gigs were meant as a warm-up to upcoming recording sessions at the Power Station with producer Elliot Mazer, a way to make sure that the band was familiar with the songs. Once the sessions came about, working with a producer unsympathetic to the Horse (his work with Neil is mostly with the Harvest band) at an unfamiliar studio, Neil's obsession with a big drum sound and drummer Ralph Molina's inability to provide it meant that not a single usable performance was captured. Neil was at war with his label, his band wasn't playing well, and he was frustrated and angry. He then decided to abandon this material altogether, spending the next two years performing country music and recording the second version of Old Ways, leaving what could have been one of his strongest efforts of the 80s in the vault.

But what if Neil Young had released an album with Crazy Horse in 1984? The very good Catalyst material will obviously be the centerpiece of the album, but we will naturally have to find other material to fill it out, in order to turn it into an eight-song, roughly forty minutes long record just like Re-ac-tor. We will be operating under the assumption that once Neil saw that the Power Station sessions were a failure, he decided to pull a Rust Never Sleeps and release a live album of brand-new original material. They did perform a Billy Talbot-sung track at those gigs, but given that Neil didn't include it in the Archives, and wouldn't be likely to give Billy a spot on his album, we won't be considering it. Anything else recorded in 1984 is fair game, as long as it fits in stylistically and has a similar, electronic sound. Of course, that means none of his country material from the International Harvesters era can be considered, as they couldn't be further apart in terms of genre, but his solo Synclavier recordings from early '84 are a very good fit in both fronts. Later versions of the Synclavier songs performed by Crazy Horse and earlier Synclavier versions of the live tracks would be interesting inclusions, but I'll be focusing on stuff recorded in 1984, so they won't make it to this reconstruction. We will also be using a soundboard of the Catalyst gig, as the Archives Vol. III box set inexplicably has an inferior-quality audience tape instead. With all of that out of the way, here's what our reconstruction looks like:

Rock, Rock, Rock (Live at the Catalyst)

So Tired (Live at the Catalyst)

Violent Side (Live at the Catalyst)

I've Got a Problem (Live at the Catalyst)

Your Love (Live at the Catalyst)

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Hard Luck Stories (Archives Vol. III)

Razor Love (Archives Vol. III)

Touch the Night (Live at the Catalyst)

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Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Happy House (1984)

Neil performing live with the Shocking Pinks, late 1983.

Our first six inclusions are pretty self-explanatory, the six originals debuted at the Catalyst gigs: "Rock, Rock, Rock", "So Tired", "Violent Side", "I've Got a Problem", "Your Love" and "Touch the Night". Of course, studio recordings exist of "Violent Side", "I've Got a Problem" and "Touch the Night", but the fact that they don't feature the Horse in any capacity and were only recorded two years after the failed Power Station sessions makes me stay with the live recordings instead, in spite of their sound quality. We're still going to need at least two more songs to bring this to album length, however, and to do so we've selected "Hard Luck Stories" and "Razor Love", recorded at Broken Arrow Ranch in January 1984. These are solo Synclavier recordings, but the proximity in dates between them and the Catalyst gig, the sheer quality of the two songs, and the fact that they fit in pretty well with the Crazy Horse material even though their arrangements are wildly different makes their inclusion here pretty much inevitable. In terms of sequencing, they are placed in between "Your Love" and "Touch the Night", as the first five songs were performed in order and close together at the '84 gigs, and I thought it would make sense to preserve that. That way, it's also less jarring to hear the two solo tracks, as they are bundled together and have their own side with "Touch the Night" still closing out the album. That way, we can circumvent the jarring transition between them by using a convenient side break.

A 42-minute record with a slightly longer side one, this album is the unreleased sequel to Re-ac-tor we should have gotten in 1984. Angry, confused songs performed by an electronically-enhanced Crazy Horse, clearly uncomfortable with the eighties. Re-ac-tor is probably the strongest of the two, but songs like "Razor Love" and "Touch the Night" ensure that this is one of the highlights of Neil's eighties. Big dumb rock surrounded by heartfelt and emotional songs. The Happy House name was first used many years ago in a spoof article about fake unreleased Neil albums, but I liked the title so I decided to use it anyway as a joke. Why not? It fits the vibe of the album when used ironically. As this album is so similar to Re-ac-tor, I made a cover that was literally meant to signal that this was part two, with inverted colors and a similarly divided name. Who knows, maybe Landing on Water/Life could've been part three? This record is decidedly uncommercial even for Neil's 1980s standards, and so I don't think it would sell very much. It has no obvious singles, but I think "Razor Love" would be good more as a statement than anything else. This album would certainly fulfill David Geffen's request for more rock and roll, but would be unlikely to resolve their conflicts. It's a shame that we need a whole parallel discography to actually hear Neil's best work of the 1980s, searching for direction in a decade marred with personal issues, lawsuits, changes in direction, and hard luck stories.

Sources:

- Neil Young - Archives Vol. III (1976-1987)

- Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Live at the Catalyst [Bootleg]

- Jimmy McDonough - Shakey: Neil Young's Biography

Neil Young - Island in the Sun (1982)

Neil Young signed with Geffen Records in 1982, after spending fourteen years under Reprise Records. Dissatisfied with what he considered a lack of promotion for his previous album, Re-ac-tor, Young took on a lucrative deal with Geffen, which guaranteed him a million dollars per album delivered. With that, Neil quickly got to work, putting together his first album of the new deal. He had already recorded the synthesizer Trans material with Crazy Horse in late 1981, and was finally free of the patterning program with his son Ben, which took up most of his time from 1979 to 1981. Now he could finally go back to writing and playing music full-time, and dedicate himself fully to his next project. He went to Hawaii in May 1982 with a few friends and producer Tim Mulligan to record an album, tentatively titled Island in the Sun. A breezy, tropical record about sailing, sunshine, and loving your wife, it featured a band seemingly assembled at random, with Nils Lofgren, Ben Keith, former Buffalo Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer, Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina, and CSNY sideman Joe Lala. Despite that, they gelled pretty quickly and became Neil's band for the rest of 1982, christened as The Royal Pineapples. By the end of the month, Neil and the Pineapples had recorded eight new songs, enough for a brand new studio album. He and Mulligan sequenced the songs, chose an album title, and sent it to label boss David Geffen, expecting the album to be released shortly thereafter.

However, it didn't quite go that way. Once Geffen heard the LP, he was underwhelmed by it, and told Young so. Surprisingly enough, Neil agreed with him and promised to rework it into something else. This wasn't unheard of, as he had already shelved Oceanside/Countryside at the suggestion of Reprise head Mo Ostin, so he simply combined it with the late 1981 recordings to form a different album, titled Trans. Upon release, it confused casual fans, alienated his dedicated fanbase, didn't sell, and was the beginning of his many troubles with Geffen. But what if Neil had managed to release the album he wanted to release? While the actual tracklist of Island in the Sun has sadly never leaked, we finally have all the songs recorded for it, thanks to the release of Archives Vol. III, which means we can at least reconstruct what it might have looked like. We'll be aiming at eight songs and roughly forty minutes, using all Hawaiian songs, as "Like an Inca" is a pretty long song and we need to make space for it. We'll only be including material from the May 1982 sessions in Honolulu, which means no live songs, and no contemporary material recorded at different locations. By doing that, we'll ensure we have a cohesive album recorded all in one go, instead of the random hodge-podge of styles Neil tends to release every now and again. The leftover Vocoder material in turn would simply become a separate release, probably still by Reprise in late 1981. With all of that out of the way, here's what our album looks like:

Little Thing Called Love (Trans)

Raining in Paradise (Archives Vol. III)

Big Pearl (Archives Vol. III)

Silver and Gold (Archives Vol. III)

If You Got Love (Archives Vol. III)

-

Hold on to Your Love (Trans)

Island in the Sun (Archives Vol. III)

Like an Inca (Trans)

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Neil Young - Island in the Sun (1982)

Young performing live with the Royal Pineapples in Europe, September 1982.

When it comes to song selection, we pretty much have our work cut out for us. We simply select all nine of the songs tracked at Commercial Recorders in Honolulu, three of which are on Trans and six on the Johnny's Island disc of Archives Vol. III. Not included are the electronic "Johnny", which despite being recorded immediately before the material on this album would be much more at home in the Trans EP, and "Soul of a Woman", "Love Hotel" and "Berlin", which were all written and recorded during the 1982 tour and never made it into the studio. When it comes to sequencing, we will maintain the placement of the Hawaiian songs on the Trans album and simply expand on it, filling out the sides with the remaining material. That means "Little Thing Called Love" and the nine-minute version of "Like an Inca" still open and close the album, and "If You Got Love" and "Hold on to Your Love" still bookend the two sides. With that, all that's left to do is to place the other four songs where they fit best, replacing one emotional love letter to a family member with another ("Transformer Man" and "Silver and Gold"), one weird track on the theme of the album with another ("We R in Control" and "Big Pearl"), and so on. "Raining in Paradise" becomes the second song on the album, and "Island in the Sun" slots in pretty nicely right in the middle of side two, giving us a coherent, enjoyable album that wouldn't have felt out of place if it had actually come out right before his European tour in August 1982.

Clocking in at 35 minutes with a slightly shorter second side, Island in the Sun would've been easily Neil's softest, mellowest album to date, sounding like a long-lost sequel to his half of the Stills-Young Band's Long May You Run. It's also a pretty good album, and his take on yacht rock really shouldn't work nearly as well as it does during this album. Being their own separate entities really benefits both Island in the Sun and the Trans EP, no longer sounding like the Frankenstein compromise of an album it was, and allowing their best qualities to shine. "Little Thing Called Love" would still be the lead single, but "Silver and Gold" could make for a really good second single, given how great a song it is. Given that this was the first record of a brand new deal Neil undertook a massive tour in support of it in 1982, this album would have actually stood a chance of being commercially successful, given how accessible it sounds. The critics probably wouldn't like it that much, but it would probably sell better than Hawks & Doves. The cover is something I quickly threw together, with the Geffen logo cheekily added to the bottom corner to remind us of the reason it didn't come out. This alternate album opens the door to an entire alternate 1980s for Neil, free from the meddling of David Geffen and free to explore wherever it is that his muse took him, whether it was the distant future or simply Hawaii.

Sources:

- Neil Young - Archives Vol. III (1976-1987)

- Neil Young - Trans

- Jimmy McDonough - Shakey: Neil Young's Biography

Crosby, Stills & Nash - Songs for Beginners (1970)

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young released their second studio album, Deja Vu, on March 11, 1970, through Atlantic Records. Mostly recorded during the latter half of 1969, it came as the successor to the highly successful Crosby, Stills & Nash album, which they had toured with the addition of leader Stills' former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young on guitar and keyboards. It became an even bigger success than its predecessor, with Nash's "Teach Your Children" becoming a hit that summer and the supergroup performing a very successful tour through July 1970. During that tour, they debuted and performed many songs that would later appear on their solo albums, in order to fill out the early acoustic sets and showcase the individual members' talents. It was also probably due to the internal issues the band was facing at the time, with their group spirit giving way to infighting, drug use, and egotism. It was really no surprise when, following the end of the Deja Vu tour, the individual members decided to simply carry on with their solo careers instead of regrouping later in the year to start work on a third LP. It would be three years before the next time CSNY would perform together as a group again.

We will collect the best then-unreleased songs CSN played during their 1970 tour and turn them into a new album, the follow-up to Deja Vu. That way, we have an objective way of selecting the songs, and a way to avoid this turning into a "my favorites" playlist, which has always annoyed me. The reason I chose to exclude Neil Young from this was because I figured the only way CSN could carry on in the 70s would be to leave Neil alone. It seems clear that they could resolve their issues as a three-piece, but not as a foursome, it being no coincidence that when they finally managed to reunite in 1977, Young was nowhere to be seen. When it comes to their quotas, four Stills songs and three each for Nash and Crosby seems fair enough, as Stills was always the domineering one in the group, and he's the one who had the most material available. It would be ten songs long, just like the previous two, and as no high-quality live performances of this tour are available to us, we will have to make do with their solo studio versions. We operate under the assumption they wouldn't save their best songs for their solo albums, so that we can put together the best possible album here. With that out of the way, here's our album:

Love the One You're With (Stephen Stills)

Simple Man (Songs for Beginners)

The Lee Shore (Four Way Street)

Black Queen (Stephen Stills)

Laughing (If I Could Only Remember My Name)

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Chicago (Songs for Beginners)

So Begins the Task (Manassas)

Man in the Mirror (Songs for Beginners)

Song With No Words (If I Could Only Remember My Name)

As I Come of Age (Illegal Stills)

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Crosby, Stills & Nash - Songs for Beginners (1970)

Young, Crosby, Nash & Stills performing at the Fillmore East, 1970.

Of the ten songs selected for the album, nine were mainstays of the 1970 CSNY tour. The exception is "Song With No Words", which was only performed during the early 1969 tour. As we're short on Crosby songs for the album, we'll allow it, making it the only outlier in the reconstruction. In "The Lee Shore" we have our only de facto CSN recording, as the only studio version of it available is a Deja Vu outtake. However, given there are plenty of harmonies in the rest of the songs, it's easy to imagine the trademark Crosby, Stills & Nash vocals in most of these songs. The exception is "Black Queen", which would take "Almost Cut My Hair"'s spot as the harmony-less song on the record. "Chicago" incorporates the "We Can Change the World" coda, as it doesn't feel quite complete without it, bringing its runtime to four minutes. Outtakes include Nash's "Sleep Song" and Stills' "We Are Not Helpless". There's nothing wrong with those two, other than the fact that they were played live only once in 1970. Given that the others were played semi-frequently, I thought it was fair to give them preference. With three songwriters in the band, there are always a few outtakes to their albums, and this one would be no different.

In terms of sequencing, this album opens with its probable lead single, "Love the One You're With", with the second side starting with "Chicago", its probable follow-up. Side one ends with Crosby's magnificent "Laughing", and the album ends with one of the best songs on the album, Stills' "As I Come of Age". Other than that, I simply tried to not have two songs by the same member in a row, and put the songs where I thought they fit best. The result was a 41-minute album with roughly equal sides, which is what we were aiming for. Since they'd already released a self-titled album before, I decided to steal the Songs for Beginners title from Nash's album, as it's a nice name and fits this material well, them starting over after Neil's chaotic passage. I also made a nice album cover to go along with it, them rehearsing backstage at a CSNY gig with Young carefully cropped out. This album, which ideally would come out right before Christmas 1970, is a very good record, a better and more focused album than Deja Vu, but without reaching the heights of the debut, somewhat a compromise between the two. It would be nice to see what they would've done during the 70s, their sound and image evolving as they came of age.

Sources:
- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Songs Performed in 1970

- Peter Doggett - CSNY: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

The Rolling Stones - Come On! (1963)

The Rolling Stones released their first single, a cover of Chuck Berry's "Come On", on June 7, 1963, through Decca Records. Backed by a version of Willie Dixon's "I Want to Be Loved", it reached number 21, a minor hit and an impressive result for their first-ever release. The Stones were signed to Decca through the recommendation of George Harrison, the label still reeling from their infamous rejection of the Beatles the year before. And so, after some demo sessions in March 1963 where they stepped into a recording studio for the first time, they recorded on and off for the rest of the year, releasing another single before the year's end, the Lennon/McCartney original "I Wanna Be Your Man". It became a big hit, and showed the label that the Stones had the potential to become a big act in the UK, and their first hit wasn't a fluke. However, Decca was still afraid to commit to a full LP by the band so early, even though they had already recorded enough material to fill one. So, they decided to release an EP instead, a compromise while they decided when and how to make the Stones' first album. The self-titled EP came out in the first week of 1964, featuring the highlights of their 1963 recording sessions, with songs such as "You Better Move On" and "Bye Bye Johnny". With its success, the first Stones album was finally greenlit, and they entered the studio to record it in February 1964.

But what if the Rolling Stones had released their first album in 1963? To answer that question, we will have to collect everything the Stones recorded before their first album, and turn it into a cohesive and feasible record, given the way the record industry worked in 1963. It will feature fourteen songs instead of twelve, just like your average Beatles album of the period. Singles weren't included in albums in the UK at the time, under the premise that the album needed to be worth the money, without songs you've already bought on singles, but we will have to make an exception at this time as we wouldn't be able to fill out a record otherwise, and even if we did, it wouldn't be of the quality we have come to expect of a Stones album. The Beatles' debut album also featured their singles, and so we will use it as a template, having the two songs off the single as either side closers or openers. Along with their early studio recordings, some live recordings of songs from their live set such as "Roll Over Beethoven" made for the BBC are also available, but won't be used here as their sound quality is much too poor. Studio outtakes that weren't officially released are fair game as well, as long as they are in decent enough sound quality. It will only feature a single original, the instrumental "Stoned", a fair cry from the six on Please Please Me, but it will have to do. With that out of the way, here's what our album looks like:

Bye Bye Johnny (Singles Collection)
Money (Singles Collection)
Baby, What's Wrong? (GRRR!)
Go Home Girl (Genuine Black Box)
Bright Lights, Big City (GRRR!)

I Want to Be Loved (Singles Collection)

Come On! (Singles Collection)

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I Wanna Be Your Man (Singles Collection)
Stoned (Singles Collection)
Road Runner (GRRR!)
Fortune Teller (More Hot Rocks)
Diddley Daddy (GRRR!)
Poison Ivy (Singles Collection)
You Better Move On (Singles Collection)

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The Rolling Stones - Come On! (1963)

Jones, Watts, Richards, Jagger & Wyman at ATV Studios, late 1963.

Our first inclusions are from the Stones' first proper studio session, in March 1963 at IBC Studios. With Glyn Johns on the producer's chair, they cut their versions of Rn'B staples "Baby What's Wrong", "Bright Lights, Big City", "Diddley Daddy" and "Road Runner". These recordings are very rough-sounding, for obvious reasons, but are more than good enough to help fill out the album, so we can include them without issue. Their next session, that May at Olympic, produced by Andrew Oldham, they cut their first single, "Come On" and "I Want to Be Loved". Oldham produced another session in August, this time at Decca, where "Fortune Teller" was recorded. Meant for a single, it was left unreleased until it made its way into a compilation a few years afterward by Decca. In October, they reconvened at De Lane Lea to record their next single, "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Stoned". With it, gifted by the Beatles' Lennon and McCartney, they had their first real hit and were well on their way to stardom. Shortly thereafter in November, they returned and recorded "Poison Ivy", "Money", and "Go Home Girl", with the first two being paired with the leftover recordings from August to form their first EP, and the latter surfacing only through bootlegs. By including all of those songs, we managed to reach our goal of having fourteen songs, and all that's left for us to do is sequence this into a real record.

To sequence these songs into an album, we will have all the songs released either on the EP or on singles open and close the sides, and the lower quality studio outtakes and IBC demos will fill out the middle of the sides, thus burying them deep onto the record and making their lackluster quality less apparent to first-time listeners. Clocking in at 32 minutes with two even sides, Come On! is your typical early '60s album, inessential but fun, giving us a glimpse of the Stones' early stage act. This album would've been released instead of the EP, which only came out because Decca wasn't sure the Stones could release an album and wanted to test the waters first. Coming out hot on the heels of the "I Wanna Be Your Man" single, and right in time for the Christmas season of 1963, I see no reason for this album to fail to sell well. Would it have topped the charts? Who knows, but I'm sure it wouldn't have been a failure, and the Decca executives had no reason to worry. With the EP songs coming out for the first time here, we would have ten out of the fourteen songs on the album being released for the first time here, not up to British standards, but still pretty solid. I've taken both the cover and the title from the great AndrewskyDE from the Steve Hoffman Forums, who put this together a few years back. While their real-life debut album is no doubt much better, it's interesting to see the Stones in this early stage of their long career, just six blues and Rn'B fanatics who wanted to be loved.

Sources:

- The Complete Works of the Rolling Stones Database: 1963

- Bill Wyman - Rolling With the Stones

John Lennon - Now and Then (1977)

John Lennon released Rock and Roll, his sixth studio album, on February 17, 1975, through Apple Records. It was his last until 1980's Double Fantasy, giving way to a period during which he stayed at home, did no recording, and very little songwriting, his "house-husband" period. It came after a period of considerable personal turmoil for Lennon, who had been separated from his wife Yoko Ono for a nearly two-year period between 1973 and 1975, during the so-called Lost Weekend. He spent most of that period getting drunk with his buddy Harry Nilsson, mingling with other stars in Los Angeles, and getting into trouble. During this period, he had also become increasingly disillusioned with his career and the recording industry, after a series of issues that plagued him throughout this period. Those of course included the Beatles' official legal breakup in 1974, his firing of Allen Klein as a manager, the plagiarism lawsuit involving his "Come Together" and Chuck Berry's "You Can't Catch Me", as well as the troubled production of Rock and Roll, which saw producer Phil Spector stealing the master tapes and only returning them a year later. By early 1975, John was tired, discouraged, and ready to move on from those wilder times, and even though he made plans to record a follow-up to Rock and Roll later that year, the idea of taking some time off was certainly already in his mind by then.

Making his decision that much easier was a surprise reconciliation with Yoko in early 1975, followed by her becoming pregnant. It was a very high-risk pregnancy, as she and John had already lost a baby in 1969, and if they were to have a kid, this would most likely be their last chance. Thankfully, Sean was born healthy in October 1975, and a week later, a compilation of non-album tracks called Shaved Fish came out, fulfilling John's contract and freeing him from Apple/EMI. The fact that he had no obligations and plenty to preoccupy himself with at home meant he stopped working, and from there, it was radio silence for the remainder of the 1970s. He wrote and demoed the occasional song, but his only major creative project in those five years was the Ballad of John and Yoko musical, which still ended up unfinished. He only attended a single recording session through this period, to give Ringo a helping hand, but other than that he stayed home, baked bread, took care of Sean, traveled to Japan, and kept music low on his list of priorities. When the odd idea came about, he would take a boombox that was placed near his piano, turn it on (usually with a rhythm box), and tape a few takes of whatever he was working on. He sometimes finished them, sometimes didn't, but they ended up unreleased, relics of the Dakota Years, before a trip to Bermuda in 1980 reenergized him and had him working again.

But what if John had released an album during his five-year hiatus? If we think creatively, we might be able to make an album out of the first two years of it, collecting all the demos he recorded. Of course, to do so we need to set some rules first. Nothing that was on Double Fantasy is to be considered, as this album is meant to bridge the gap between it and 1975's Rock and Roll, not to change the timeline in any significant manner. Also, our cutoff date for this album is 1977, so any song that was begun after that is left for a separate reconstruction. Maybe something for the future! Why 1977, you ask? I decided on it because it was the first year where enough songs for an album were available, and it's the exact middle point between his last two LPs of originals, 1974's Walls and Bridges and 1980's Double Fantasy. This will be twelve songs long, just like his final few albums before Sean was born, and we will be using exclusively John's demos here, to make this as faithful as possible to what he recorded. That means no Threetles overdubs, no fan mixes, and no AI, just John, his guitar/piano, and his boombox. Unfinished songs are fair game, as John really didn't record a lot for the first four years of his House Husband period, and we aren't able to be very picky when it comes to the songs' state of completion because of that. With that out of the way, here's what our reconstruction looks like:

Real Love (Between the Lines)

Everybody (Between the Lines)

She is a Friend of Dorothy's (Between the Lines)

Whatever Happened To? (Between the Lines)

Mucho Mungo (Between the Lines)

Tennessee (Between the Lines)

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Free as a Bird (Between the Lines)

One of the Boys (Between the Lines)

Mirror, Mirror (Between the Lines)

Cookin' in the Kitchen of Love (Between the Lines)

Sally and Billy (Between the Lines)

Now and Then (Between the Lines)

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John Lennon - Now and Then (1977)

John and his son Sean at their home's kitchen, in late 1977.

According to both his mistress May Pang and Apple vice-president Tony King, John already had plans for his follow-up to Rock and Roll in early 1975. He planned to record with David Bowie guitarist Carlos Alomar serving as his musical director, and he had already written two songs for the new album: "Tennessee" and "Everybody". He had even chosen a name for the album, calling it Between the Lines. However, as you probably know, life got in the way, Sean was conceived, and John ended up moving back with Yoko and entering his house-husband years, music ceasing to be one of his priorities. He didn't write any other songs for the whole of 1975, and 1976 saw him write only three new songs: "Cookin' in the Kitchen of Love", written on demand for Ringo, "Sally and Billy", and "She is a Friend of Dorothy's", probably the least productive period of his whole life. Although John had already given it away, "Mucho Mungo" was still seemingly in his head by the time 1976 rolled around, as he could be heard demoing the song at the time. We'll consider that a sign that John wasn't done with this tune yet, either due to dissatisfaction or writer's block, and so had he recorded an album back then, it would have been a serious contender. The same goes for Ringo's song, as it's one of the few songs Lennon actually managed to finish for the whole of this 1975-1977 period, we can't waste it.

John's inspiration seemingly returned to him by the time 1977 rolled around, however, as the bulk of this reconstruction comes from that year. From it, we have "Free as a Bird", "Now and Then", "One of the Boys", "Mirror, Mirror" and "Whatever Happened To?", five songs that could've made for the backbone of a very strong record. Finally, although it wasn't finished until 1980, "Real Love" was begun in late 1977, making it the last song to be written for the album, arriving just in time for us to be able to include it. When it comes to sequencing, I tried to take all of the most finished/strongest songs on the record and use them to open and close the sides, with the more unfinished and low-quality songs hidden away in the middle of the record. I was also trying to avoid having too many ballads in a row, as many of these demos are on the slower side, but the album doesn't seem to drag at any moment. An interesting detail to note is that half the album's songs were released commercially: Nilsson recorded "Mucho Mungo" for his Pussy Cats album in 1974, Ringo recorded "Cookin'" in 1976, and John himself re-did "Everybody" as "Nobody Told Me" in late 1980. Finally, the trilogy of "Free as a Bird", "Real Love" and "Now and Then" was finished by none other than The Beatles, during the Anthology project in the 90s. Not bad for something that's just supposed to be a collection of demos!

Clocking in at 40 minutes with two 20-minute sides, Now and Then is the lost link between two distinct periods of John's life, showing us what he'd been up to all those years. As an album, there's clearly no denying that these songs are very rough and unfinished, but with a little bit of work and the right producer being used (and I'm not convinced Alomar would be the right man for the job), it could've easily been as good as Walls and Bridges. The seeds for a good record are all there, and all that it would take for it to come out is some editing and tinkering. Our album cover is a repurposed pannel by his friend and occasional bass player Klaus Voormann, making for a very strong image. "Real Love" would probably be the lead single off the album, as it's one of the strongest, most finished-sounding songs on it and one of the poppiest ones too, with something lighter such as "Mucho Mungo" serving as its b-side. Although it would be fun to reuse the title, this album cannot be called Between the Lines because it is completely different in concept and in song choice, coming out two years after BTL would have, which means we'll have to settle for a different title. I went for Now and Then, which not only is one of the best songs here, but is also a fitting description of where John was at in 1977: dedicated to raising his son and watching the wheels, music relegated to a hobby he picked up every now and then.

Sources:

- Between the Lines: Complete Home Demo Recordings 1975-1980

- John Green - Dakota Days: The True Story of John Lennon's Final Years

Van Morrison - Not Supposed to Break Down (1973)

Van Morrison released his seventh studio album, Hard Nose the Highway, in October 1973 through Warner Bros Records. His first fully self-produced album, it was the product of two batches of sessions, one during August and the other during October 1972. Well received critically, it saw the release of fan favorites such as "Warm Love", "Wild Children" and "Snow in San Anselmo", and odd song choices such as a cover of Kermit the Frog's "Bein' Green" and the traditional "Purple Heather". It didn't sell as well as some of its predecessors, as it didn't feature a clear-cut hit single as something like Moondance did, but it charted relatively well and kept Morrison on the good run of albums he was on in the mid-70s. However, immediately after finishing Hard Nose the Highway, he returned to the studio in November 1972, staying until March 1973 and recording seven new songs, nearly enough for a brand new studio album. With those songs in the can, he then spent most of 1973 touring the United States and Europe with the Caledonia Soul Orchestra, something immortalized on the It's Too Late to Stop Now live album. By the time October 1973 rolled around, those songs hadn't yet been released and Van already had a brand new batch of songs, inspired by a trip to his native Ireland. Feeling that it was the strongest collection of songs of the two, he scrapped the late '72 material and released what became known as Veedon Fleece instead, ending up with one of his most revered albums in the process. 

Van recorded an entire album's worth of songs in between the sessions for Hard Nose the Highway and Veedon Fleece which never saw the light of day. These "lost" November 1972/March 1973 sessions carried the same high quality as the great albums Van released during the 1970s, with several of their songs becoming live staples of his, which makes us wonder: why did he not release this album? To right this wrong, we will take all seven songs he recorded in those sessions, alongside others from other sessions in the same time period, and make a brand new album. Hard Nose the Highway outtakes are fair game, as they hail from only a couple of months prior, but anything before that is too early for inclusion. That, unfortunately, means "Wonderful Remark", from the Tupelo Honey sessions of 1971, won't make this reconstruction, but there are three other songs in the compilation that qualify, coming from September 1972. As far as what doesn't make the cut, the great "Sweet Sixteen" cannot be included, as it comes from a standalone April 1973 session after the parameters of this reconstruction, and features Jackie DeShannon on lead vocals, with songwriter Van relegated to backup. The same goes for two songs that were only performed live between May/June 1973: "I Paid the Price" and "No Way", from the It's Too Late to Stop Now box set, two very good songs but that came much too late for us, and thus cannot be included. With that out of the way, here's what our album looks like:

Not Supposed to Break Down (The Philosopher's Stone)

Laughing in the Wind (The Philosopher's Stone)

Madame Joy (The Philosopher's Stone)

Contemplation Rose (The Philosopher's Stone)

Don't Worry About Tomorrow (The Philosopher's Stone)

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Try for Sleep (The Philosopher's Stone)

Lover's Prayer (The Philosopher's Stone)

Drumshanbo Hustle (The Philosopher's Stone)

Tell Me About Your Love (Back on Top Single)

There, There Child (The Philosopher's Stone)

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Van Morrison - Not Supposed to Break Down (1973)

Van Morrison performing live, sometime in early 1973.

The seven songs Van recorded between November 1972 and March 1973 are "Not Supposed to Break Down", "Contemplation Rose", "Don't Worry About Tomorrow", "Try for Sleep", "Lover's Prayer", and "Drumshanbo Hustle" from the Philosopher's Stone box set and "Tell Me About Your Love", released in the Back on Top CD single in 1999. Together, they clock in at a measly 37 minutes. Normally, that would be ok, but given that Van's albums in the 70s would be somewhere around the 40+ minute mark, that means we're a couple of songs short. What do we do now? Given that Morrison had a history of including outtakes on his albums ("Listen to the Lion" was recorded during the Tupelo Honey sessions, but became the centerpiece of St. Dominic's Preview), it would be an interesting idea to add leftovers from Hard Nose the Highway to our reconstruction. Luckily, there are three outtakes available to us: "There, There Child", "Laughing in the Wind" and "Madame Joy", all three fantastic songs that would make sensible inclusions to the album. "There There Child" was a setlist staple and "Laughing in the Wind" made occasional appearances during the Caledonia Soul Orchestra tour, which goes to show that even though Van shelved them, he still thought them worthy. Together, they would bring the album to ten songs and 48 minutes, a bit on the longer side but almost identical to Veedon Fleece, which means Van could at least consider doing something similar. With that, all that's left to do is sequencing.

Generally, we'll follow The Philosopher's Stone's sequence of these songs, as they were mostly put together on its sequence, and it was everybody's (myself included) first exposure to these songs, and it's hard to hear them any other way now. We'll only add "Tell Me About Your Love" in-between "Drumshanbo Hustle" and lead single "There, There Child", as there were other songs in between those two, and "Tell Me" manages to fill the gap nicely. When it comes to the album itself, it probably didn't come out because Van's hectic release schedule with Hard Nose the Highway, It's Too Late to Stop Now and Veedon Fleece coming out within six months of each other probably didn't allow space for another studio album to be released in between. If it did, this album would have probably come out in late 1973, four months after Hard Nose and two before Too Late, which only goes to show the insane pace with which Morrison was working at the time. The regular release cycle of album/tour/album simply couldn't keep up with him. As an album, this is every bit the equal of his other 70s release, fitting right in as if it was always meant to be there, being as essential as his other unreleased album, Mechanical Bliss. The cover was my own creation, just the title of one of the best songs on the record accompanied by a picture of him in 1973. It's a shame we couldn't get this extra chapter of Van's discography until much later, but here he again shows how reliable he is as an artist, not prone to failing or breaking down.

Sources:

- Clinton Heylin - Van Morrison: Can You Feel the Silence?

Bob Dylan - Wallflowers (1971)

Bob Dylan released his eleventh studio album, New Morning, on October 21, 1970, through Columbia Records. Considered a return to form after the controversial Self Portrait, it was moderately successful both critically and commercially, setting detractors from the former significantly at ease. 1969 and 1970 were busy years for Bob, where he recorded and released three albums in 18 months, one of them a double. He had done quite a lot of recording, and so he spent the following year of 1971 working under a far less productive rhythm, tracking the occasional song or two without an album in mind. The first example of that came in March, when with Leon Russell in the producer's chair, "Watching the River Flow" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece" were made, with the former getting released as a single in June. From there, his next spurt of activity came a few months later that August, when he performed live at George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden, his first concert in the United States in six years and one of the greatest performances of his career, as you can see in the film.

Hot from the Bangladesh performance, he made four recordings that September with folkie Happy Traum on banjo and backup vocals. They were all re-recordings of older songs of his that he never got around to releasing on an album, there of them dating back to the Basement Tapes. These recordings were meant to enhance his Greatest Hits, Vol. II compilation, one Dylan had unusually agreed to cooperate with. At year's end in November, he was reunited with Leon Russell, taping two versions of the protest song "George Jackson", and another song that would remain unreleased for the time being. As 1972 rolled around, he performed at The Band's New Year's gig at the Academy of Music, debuting "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and ending with a rousing version of "Like a Rolling Stone". It might've seemed like the beginning of a busy year, but Dylan didn't do anything at all in 1972, going further and further into semi-retirement before being brought back to play a cowboy in a movie. It marked the end of a three-year hiatus between his albums that was nearly unheard of at the time.

But what if Bob Dylan had released a new studio album in 1971? To create this missing link between New Morning and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, we will take all the songs Bob recorded throughout the year and piece them together in the best manner we possibly can. Since "George Jackson" was released in two different versions in the same single, it shows that Bob considered both of them worthwhile, meaning we can include either of them on the record. As for the others, we will use the more common studio versions of them, one of each to avoid (too much) repetition. We will also not include any outtakes from either Self Portrait or New Morning, even though an abundance of them exist out there. It would dilute too much the purpose of our reconstruction, and Dylan didn't have the habit of putting things from the vault on new records. Older songs re-recorded during these sessions are fair game, as long as they were unreleased. This record is also studio-only, so even though he performed live twice that year, nothing from those can be included. With that, here's our album:

Watching the River Flow (Greatest Hits Vol. II)

Wallflower (The Bootleg Series Vol. I-III)

Only a Hobo (Another Self Portrait)

George Jackson (Side Tracks)

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George Jackson (Side Tracks)

When I Paint My Masterpiece (Greatest Hits Vol. II)

I Shall Be Released (Greatest Hits Vol. II)

You Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Greatest Hits Vol. II)

Down in the Flood (Greatest Hits Vol. II)

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Bob Dylan - Wallflowers (1971)

Dylan and the Band performing live, December 1971.

Our choices for this album are quite simple: every single song Bob recorded in 1971. From the March sessions produced by Leon Russell, we have "When I Paint My Masterpiece" and "Watching the River Flow". From the September session with Happy Traum we have re-recordings of "Only a Hobo", "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere", "Down in the Flood" and "I Shall Be Released". And finally, from the November sessions, we have both the solo acoustic and "Big Band" versions of "George Jackson" and "Wallflower". With that, we have eight songs and nine versions, clocking in at 31 minutes. That might not seem like much, but it's already longer than Nashville Skyline, meaning it's well within the realm of possibility. We could have included some New Morning outtakes such as "Tomorrow is a Long Time", which was featured on Greatest Hits in a live version from 1963, or his cover of "Spanish is the Loving Tongue", which was the b-side to "Watching the River Flow", but the fact that we've managed to break the 30-minute barrier tells us to keep well enough alone.

Including two versions of "George Jackson" might seem like cheating on our part, but the fact that Dylan later did the same thing with "Forever Young" on Planet Waves sets a precedent that we'll be happy to indulge in, given the dearth of material available to us. When it comes to sequencing, I mostly followed the track listing to Greatest Hits Vol. II, as that's where the vast majority of the songs here were released, and shows us how Dylan might have dealt with that material, as well as giving us a nice framework from which to start. With that in mind, we also kick things off with "Watching the River Flow", and side two has the four last songs on GH2 in the very same order they were featured there, making "Down in the Flood" the album closer. The big band version of "George Jackson" closes off side one, and the acoustic version opens side two, again taking a cue from "Forever Young"'s placement on Planet Waves. With that, all we need to do is fill out the first side with "Wallflower" and Greatest Hits Vol. II outtake "Only a Hobo", which only saw release twenty years later, and our work is mostly done.

Wallflowers is a transitional album, his first not to be produced by Bob Johnston since Bringing it All Back Home and part of a move away from straight country music started on New Morning the previous year. The fact that this album features four re-recordings of older material, which weren't released in any other Dylan studio album before this one but were already widely known through other artists' recordings. For that reason, I can see contemporary critics labeling it as lazy or uninspired, which is a fair criticism, even though all four of those versions are quite good. You could even make the argument that this is a sequel to Self Portrait, only this time he's paying homage to his own past work and not other people's. It was titled after what I think is the best song on the album, a gentle country ballad that was inexplicably the only 1971 original composition Bob didn't release at the time. It would surely be interesting to see this coming out instead of Greatest Hits Vol. II, filling a pretty big hole in Bob's life where he had become reclusive and unproductive, himself a Wallflower.

Sources:

- Still on the Road: 1971 Recording Sessions

- Clinton Heylin - Revolution in the Air

The Beatles - Introducing the Beatles (1962)

The Beatles entered Decca Studios in London on New Year's Day 1962, for their first-ever audition for a record label. Nervous, hungover from the previous night's celebration, and unable to use their own amplifiers, they struggled through fifteen songs, which were chosen as they best represented their live act at the time. The audition came about because Decca had been going through a major reshuffling in its roster, necessitating new artists, and through Brian Epstein's ties with Decca (he did own Liverpool's biggest record store, after all), he got them to do a Commercial Test, as they were called. Newly hired A&R man Mike Smith was the one put in charge of finding new talent, and even though he wasn't very impressed with their performance (especially with their drummer), he still thought them worthwhile and wanted to sign them. But because of company policy, Decca insisted he only sign one act out of the two he had recently auditioned: he'd get either Brian Poole and the Tremeloes or the Beatles. He went with the more professional and established Tremeloes, as they were the safer bet, and the Beatles drifted for a while before signing with Parlophone six months later. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But what if the Beatles had passed their Decca audition? To answer that question, we will be presenting the fifteen Decca audition songs as if they were the Beatles' first studio album, with all the necessary substitutions and tweaks being made for it to slide in easily along with the rest of the Beatles' discography. That means we will be removing any songs that were featured in actual Beatles albums, trying to make this into a standalone collection of songs, a snapshot of the Beatles during the Pete Best era. It will be presented in the order it was recorded, which means we'll forego any sequencing, and only songs that either feature Pete Best on drums or are known to be performed with him will be considered. Given that it was common practice in the UK to have recordings from auditions be released as an artist's first single at the time, it's not as insane as it seems to have the audition itself be commercially released, though it was rare to have artists release albums right out of the gate. Some suspension of disbelief will be needed, of course, as we'll be working within very tight constraints, but I'm sure we can put together a decent album with what we have. With that out of the way, here's what our Decca album looks like:

Like Dreamers Do (The Decca Tapes)

The Sheik of Araby (The Decca Tapes)

To Know Her is to Love Her (The Decca Tapes)

Take Good Care of My Baby (The Decca Tapes)

Memphis, Tennessee (The Decca Tapes)

Sure to Fall (The Decca Tapes)

One After 909 (Cavern Club Rehearsal)

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Hello Little Girl (The Decca Tapes)

Three Cool Cats (The Decca Tapes)

Crying, Waiting, Hoping (The Decca Tapes)

September in the Rain (The Decca Tapes)

Besame Mucho (The Decca Tapes)

Searchin' (The Decca Tapes)

Love of the Loved (The Decca Tapes)

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The Beatles - Introducing the Beatles (1962)

Harrison, Best, McCartney & Lennon rehearsing at the Cavern in early 1962.

First of all, we need to get rid of the two songs that were later featured on With the Beatles in late 1963: "Money (That's What I Want)" and "Till There Was You", to avoid repetition. Now down to thirteen songs, our next task is to find one more tune to fill out the album and have it be a 14-track record, like all other Beatles records up to 1966. And although recordings from the Best era are pretty hard to come by, we do have a few candidates, such as a cover of Roy Orbison's "Dream Baby", recorded for their first BBC appearance later that March, and Joe Brown's "A Picture of You", also recorded for the BBC in June. The Lennon/McCartney original "One After 909", the only other original in their live repertoire by January 1962, survives as recorded in a rehearsal at the Cavern taped that August, with one caveat: Ringo's on drums. Pete had already been sacked by the time it was captured, so to include it, we'd have to deal with that anachronism. Given that they only performed three originals for Decca, "One After 909" seems like the most sensible inclusion, and we'll have to leave it to our imaginations as to what a version with Pete would have sounded like, had they recorded it properly for Decca in January 1962.

Clocking in at 33 minutes, Introducing the Beatles is a very capable, if not brilliant, debut album, one that shows both the strengths and weaknesses of the Beatles as they were in 1961. It's not, of course, anywhere near the level of any of their other studio albums, but as a curiosity, it does quite a good job. Would it have sold well? Who knows, but with "Hello Little Girl" b/w "Like Dreamers Do" as the first single, the two most immediately commercial and poppy songs performed at the audition, I'd say they'd have at least a fair shot at making the top 50. We title our reconstruction Introducing the Beatles as it sounds like the kind of generic first album title Decca would probably come up with, and it fits this collection of songs well. As for the album cover, it was made by AndrewskyDE over at SHF, and was one of the main inspirations behind this reconstruction, using one of the Beatles' best photos with Pete Best and the original Beatles logo as designed by Paul McCartney. So thanks to him! While Ringo and George Martin's absences are very much felt, this proves to be an invaluable document of the Beatles at their rawest, captured nervously trying to convince the Decca suits that their dream was worth it.

Sources:

- Mark Lewisohn - Tune In [Extended Edition]

- The Beatles - The Decca Tapes [Bootleg]

The Clash - Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg (1981)

The Clash released their fourth studio album, Sandinista, on December 12, 1980, through Columbia Records. A triple album, it saw the band going further in their pursuit of different rhythms and sounds, which started with the release of London Calling the previous year. Received mostly with confusion, it failed to capitalize on the momentum of their previous album and didn't sell very well, probably on account of being a triple LP. However, critical acclaim was still considerable, and the album topped the Pazz and Jop poll of 1981, the best record of the year according to the critics. Their label wouldn't fund an American tour, so the band booked a now infamous residency of the Bonds casino in New York, and underwent a European tour in mid-1981, a band at their live peak promoting their brand new single "This is Radio Clash". Paul Simonon and Joe Strummer also felt the band's management was too boring and professional, and decided to hire back first manager Bernie Rhodes to reinstate the "chaos" and "chaotic" energy they felt they needed. Mick Jones was strongly against this, he didn't trust Rhodes and had many issues with him while he was their manager in 1977, but was forced to go along with it as he was outvoted. Meanwhile, Topper Headon was on a hundred-pounds-a-day habit of heroin and cocaine, probably oblivious to all of those issues and to the fact that the band was thinking of firing him because of his ever-escalating unreliability. It was under those circumstances that the Clash entered the recording studios in September 1981, to record their fifth studio album.

Already having "Sean Flynn" and "Car Jamming" in the bag from the sessions for the "Radio Clash" single back in April, the Clash recorded some eight additional tracks at the People's Hall in London that September, followed by a further ten at New York City's Electric Lady Studios between November and December. As they returned to England on New Year's Day 1982, the group had the makings of yet another multi-disc release in their hands. Mick Jones, who had acted as the de facto producer during the 1981 sessions, assembled an acetate of a double album, entitled Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg that January. Fifteen songs and seventy minutes long, the Clash had for the first time recorded songs that broke the five-minute barrier, and it was Jones' idea to showcase this as one of the main features of their new album. The others still weren't convinced, however, and the band went on their Far East tour of early 1982 still undecided about how to release this material. By the time they returned, it was decided to scrape the double album idea and instead release a single record, with shorter songs and only what they considered the best of the sessions. The man tasked with this was classic rock producer Glyn Johns, who in April remixed the twelve songs they considered best and assembled Combat Rock. With it, the band achieves the greatest commercial success of their career when "Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" become hits, but at the cost of intensifying intra-band conflicts, with Headon fired in May and Jones in 1983, spelling the end of their classic lineup.

But what if The Clash had released Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg? It might be easier thank you think, as we know the tracklist as assembled by guitarist Mick Jones, we know the specific mixes he would have used, and we even have a drawing by Paul Simonon of what the cover would've been, where Bragg is curiously spelled as "Brag". That means all the harder issues are already solved for us and all that's left to do is to assemble the record, but there are some smaller problems we'll need to address nonetheless. The first is that we will be not including anything from the late 1981 sessions such as "Midnight to Stevens", "Walk Evil Talk", "Hell W10", "He Who Dares or is Tired" that doesn't have any clear link to the Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg album, as we'll be trusting Mick and the band's artistic vision for it, and considering that anything they didn't find worthy of the original list was probably going to end up in the cutting room floor nonetheless. The same goes for "This is Radio Clash" and its b-side of the same name, which as great as it is, was always meant to be a standalone single, and so it stays. While Glyn Johns did do a fantastic job when he was eventually put in charge of the project and assembled Combat Rock, we will always consider a vintage 1981 Rat Patrol mix over a Glyn Johns mix, unless no Mick Jones mix exists, in which case they're fair use. The same goes for the tracklist itself, we will not interfere with the 15-song list unless it's absolutely necessary for the goal of this reconstruction. With that out of the way, here's what our album looks like:

Straight to Hell (Sound System)
Know Your Rights (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
Rock the Casbah (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
Red Angel Dragnet (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
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Should I Stay or Should I Go? (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
Ghetto Defendant (Sound System)
Sean Flynn (Sound System)
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Car Jamming (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)
The Fulham Connection II (Sound System)
Atom Tan (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)

First Night Back in London (Sound System)

Long Time Jerk (Sound System)

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Overpowered by Funk (Combat Rock)

Inoculated City (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)

Death is a Star (Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg)

Cool Confusion (Sound System)
Idle in Kangaroo Court W1 (Sound System)

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The Clash - Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg (1982)

Simonon, Headon, Strummer, and Jones during their Asian tour, January 1982.

While low-fidelity copies of the original Mick Jones mix of Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg have circulated as a bootleg for quite some time, the first time anything from it was officially released was on the Sound System box set in 2013. There, the original versions of "Straight to Hell", "Rock the Casbah", "Ghetto Defendant", "Sean Flynn", "The Beautiful People Are Ugly Too", "Fight Night Back in London", "Cool Confusion" and "Kill Time" were included as part of the Extras disc, half of the album finally available in good quality. The other nine mixes would prove elusive, however, as the 40th Anniversary box set of Combat Rock outrageously didn't include any of those songs. It seemed as if the jarring experience of combining the Sound System tracks with the awful cassette leaks was as close as we'd ever get to the album, until in May 2021 an acetate from January 24, 1982, containing the original Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg showed up for auction. With it, mp3 files of what the acetate contained were made available for download. As easy as that, nearly forty years of searching ended in the most unexpected way possible! And sure, mp3 rips of an acetate aren't the master tapes, but when cleaned up correctly, it's good enough to be listened to alongside the Sound System tracks without distracting you too much. With that, we now have the vintage Mick Jones mixes of "Know Your Rights", "Red Angel Dragnet", "Should I Stay or Should I Go?", "Car Jamming", "Atom Tan", "Inoculated City", and "Death is a Star". And with that out of the way, the album has other problems we need to solve as well.

While it's a well-known fact that Mick Jones' original tracklist for Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg was fifteen songs long, starting with "Straight to Hell" and ending with "Idle in Kangaroo Court W1". A lesser known fact, however, is that Jones also planned for there to be a bonus 7" single that would come for free with the album: "Overpowered by Funk" b/w "Long Time Jerk". This practice was not new for the band, who intended to do the same with "Train in Vain" and "Armagiedon Time" on the London Calling album. However, they ended up scrapping the idea at the eleventh hour, with "Train in Vain" ending up as a hidden track. With that in mind, I believe that the same would have ended up happening here, as the bonus single really isn't practical for mass production, and the second disc of this record would be painfully short had we followed Jones' sequence faithfully. With that, we can add "Long Time Jerk" as the last song on side three and "Overpowered by Funk" as the first on side four and still end up with a 38 minute disc, compared to the 37 minutes of the first disc! Since "Long Time Jerk" as released on the "Rock the Casbah" single was already a Jones mix, we needn't worry about it. But since "Overpowered by Funk" only exists as the Glyn Johns mix from Combat Rock and a later dance remix, we'll have to break the rules and include the Combat Rock version of the song, as no Mick Jones mix is available. With those two inclusions, all the songs recorded during the Rat Patrol sessions for the album have made the cut, and we've fixed two of the main issues of the album at once. Not bad!

"Rock the Casbah" and "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" would certainly still be the two lead singles off the album, remixed by Glyn Johns for single release only. His are the versions sent to radio stations and included in the 7" singles, while Mick's are the ones that make the album. A "best of both worlds" scenario, where CBS gets its hit singles, The Clash gets its sprawling, weird double album and everyone is happy with the results. Single mixes/edits of album tracks were definitely nothing new by 1982, so I really don't see why this compromise couldn't have worked. Meanwhile, "Radio Clash" and "Midnight to Stevens" are their own thing, serving the same purpose to Fort Bragg as "Bankrobber" and "Stop the World" did to Sandinista, a stopgap single and a non-album b-side. There's no mistaking that on the account of being a double record, this would sell considerably less than Combat Rock, but lifted by the aforementioned singles, could still do some pretty good numbers. Certainly better than Sandinista, which pretty much sunk without a trace since it didn't have a clear lead single And while Combat Rock is certainly a much more concise and accessible album, I can't help but feel that Rat Patrol is the superior album out of the two. Call it overindulgent, call it over the top, but these seventeen songs are the logical conclusion of a trilogy beginning with London Calling and Sandinista in a way Combat Rock never seemed able to be, taking the world music influences and overall weirdness of the Clash to its logical limit, overpowered by a million different genres and by their own issues. 

Sources:

- Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg [Acetate]

- Sound System [Box Set]

- Combat Rock

Derek and the Dominos - One More Chance (1971)

Derek and the Dominos released their first album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, in November 1970 through Polydor Records. The band had formed after lead guitarist, vocalist and main composer Eric Clapton met keyboardist and vocalist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle, and drummer Jim Gordon while on tour with Delanie and Bonnie, and decided to form a group with those three, having just quit his last group, Blind Faith. The group's first recordings were made in May 1970, as a backing band to George Harrison in his triple All Things Must Pass album, with Phil Spector as the producer. From there, the band recorded their first single, with Spector as the producer (the single, "Tell the Truth" b/w "Roll it Over", ended up being canceled before release), played their first gigs, and stayed at Clapton's house to write the material for their first record. Once they'd gathered up some material, the band went to Miami's Criteria Studios, met guitarist Duane Allman, and well, the rest is history. What we got was one of the best double albums in the history of rock and roll, and probably Clapton's finest hour as a singer, guitarist, and composer. Following a tour (without Allman, who decided to stay with the Allman Brothers) that dragged on until December 1970, the band was looking forward to recording a follow-up to the Layla album, and cementing their reputation as one of the best live acts around.

However, not everything was roses within the band. All four of them were dealing with substance abuse issues and addiction, while drummer Jim Gordon was especially hard to deal with, mostly due to his then-undiagnosed schizophrenia in addition to his drug issues. There were also some creative issues at stake, more notably because Gordon wanted to write some of the band's repertoire, an idea that wasn't well-received by Whitlock and Clapton. It was with such tension and fracture that they entered Olympic Studios in London, in March of 1971, to record what would be the follow-up to Layla, and what we know now as the band's final recording sessions. They managed to record some 14 backing tracks, some of them with promise, others just meandering jams, and six more-or-less finished songs: "One More Chance", "Snake Lake Blues", "High", "Evil" (a Willie Dixon cover), "Mean Old Frisco" (also a cover, by Arthur Crudup) and the best of the bunch, "Got to Get Better in a Little While", which they'd also debuted live back in October 1970. However, the band's issues got the best of them, leaving all of this material unfinished and breaking up the band by that July. After the sessions inevitably broke down, the band splintered, with Gordon going on to tour with Traffic, Radle going back to being a session musician, Whitlock releasing solo albums, and Eric more or less going into hiding until 1974.

But what if Derek and the Dominos had finished their second album? Luckily for us, the Crossroads box set of 1988 already features a side's worth of material that comes from the 1971 Olympic sessions, five songs that give us a blueprint as to what that album would sound like. With that, all we have left to do is to assemble a second side, giving us a roughly ten-song-long album. When it comes to what can be included, it's ok to include solo Clapton or Whitlock songs, but they have to have a clear connection to the band and not simply feature other members of the Dominos, as many solo Bobby Whitlock songs did. Layla outtakes are fair game as well, so long as they too have a clear connection to the second album or were still performed live after the album was released. "Devil Road", a Renée Armand song with the foursome as her backing band, will not be included here, as it wouldn't really make sense to have a solo spot by someone outside the band on their album, even though this is quite a riveting performance of the song. Also, none of the very unfinished instrumentals from the sessions that can be found in bootlegs such as Substance will be considered, as they're nowhere near the level we'd expect from a Derek and the Dominos album, sounding much more like meandering jams than the finished songs we found on Layla. With that out of the way, here's what our album looks like:

Got to Get Better in a Little While (Crossroads)

Evil (Crossroads)

One More Chance (Crossroads)

Mean Old Frisco (Crossroads)

Snake Lake Blues (Crossroads)

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High (There's One in Every Crowd)

Mean Old World (Crossroads)

Country Life (Bobby Whitlock)

Roll it Over (Crossroads)

Motherless Children (Crossroads)

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Derek and the Dominos - One More Chance (1971)

Clapton during rehearsals for the Concert for Bangladesh, August 1971.

Side one, as presented here, was issued in that very same order in the Crossroads box set in 1988, comprising the only five completed masters from the March/April 1971 Olympic Studios sessions. With two blues covers, an instrumental, and two new songs, it's certainly not much to write home about, but it has its moments. With this side of music already put together for us, we are halfway there to getting a second Derek and the Dominos record. But the second half will be a lot more difficult, as we've just about run out of completed studio tracks. Our first inclusion for side two will be one of the easiest, "High" from There's One in Every Crowd. It was first recorded during the '71 Olympic sessions as an instrumental backing track, and resurrected by Clapton for his third solo album in a version with vocals. Since we already have an instrumental on the album, I'll be including the vocal version of the song, even though it only features Clapton and Radle of the Dominos. Another song that later made a Clapton solo album, but had its origins within the Dominos was his cover of the Blind Willie Johnson song "Motherless Children", a staple of the Dominos' late 1970 gigs. Unfortunately, no good quality live recordings exist of the band performing the song, so we will have to substitute the solo Clapton version, which uses the exact same arrangement but again only features him and bassist Radle of the band.

Since keyboard player Bobby Whitlock co-wrote more than half of the Layla album, and had a solo lead vocal on "Thorn Tree in the Garden", it's only fair that he be awarded the same opportunity here. So filling his lead vocal quota is "Country Life", a song he recorded for his first solo album in early 1971 with Domino Carl Radle on bass. It was one of the few new songs the Dominos played live in their final tours of late 1970, which makes me think it would have been a contender for their second album, given the little material they had. The same opportunity will not be extended to drummer Jim Gordon, who recorded several demos in 1971 with songs such as "It's Hard to Find a Friend" and "Till I See You Again". Even though he contributed the famous piano coda to "Layla", none of that material comes even remotely close to the level of that piano part, and since he didn't write any songs on their first album, I doubt he'd get any on this second album as well. By now, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel, and we'll take Layla outtakes "Roll it Over" and "Mean Old World", and make them part of the record as well. Our reasoning is again taken from their live repertoire, as by late 1970 they were still strongly featured in their setlists, which leads me to believe Clapton hadn't given up on the two yet.

Clocking in at 41 minutes with two roughly twenty-minute long sides, One More Chance is a clear step down from the heights of the Layla album, but is nonetheless a strong record that actually points the way quite clearly to Clapton's solo career in its mix of laid back originals and choice cover cuts. And given that Eric spent 1972 and 1973 as a recluse who barely even touched a guitar, getting this album instead would have been a great thing, its actual quality notwithstanding. As for a lead single, the obvious and easy choice is "Got to Get Better in a Little While", by far the greatest of the finished songs, and already a live staple by the time it made it to the studio. I can see it getting quite a lot of airplay on FM radio in the 1970s, and pushing the album towards some pretty respectable sales. The artwork is another painting by the same artist who provided the Layla artwork, painter Fradsen de Shomberg. Instead of a lovely blonde girl, the artwork here has some darker undertones, to reflect Clapton's downward spiral toward heroin addiction and the intra-band conflicts that had become commonplace by then. It's a shame Clapton's greatest band only lasted for an album and a half before collapsing in a haze of drugs and in-fighting, as given the level of their live performance and the greatness of the Layla album, the Dominos certainly deserved at least one more chance.

Sources:

- Eric Clapton - Crossroads [Box Set]

- Eric Clapton - There's One in Every Crowd

- Bobby Whitlock - Bobby Whitlock