Vultures mostly just eat the meat of dead animals, but hyenas do it all: They scavenge, they hunt, and they take anything they can find. They are true all-around opportunists. If you stop and think about it, almost every walk of life has a hyena of some sort. Certainly the music industry has an abundance.
What I aim to do here is look at a particular kind of predator — the kind who acquires and releases early demos, studio rarities, live fare and other recordings that artists would prefer to keep under wraps.
Blondie
The 1975 Demos
The band finally put out these June 1975 Alan Betrock-mixed four-track demos on their 2022 box set Against The Odds: 1974-1982. There have been several different versions of the demos available on bootleg copies ever since the band got their first No. 1 with Heart Of Glass in 1978. The demos include an earlier version of that song when it was known as Once I Had A Love (The Disco Song). Other tracks include Platinum Blonde, Thin Line, Puerto Rico and Out In The Streets.
Jimi Hendrix
Too many to count
When Hendrix died on Sept. 18, 1970, he was working on a new album called Black Gold. He also had a slew of other unreleased songs from his Experience and Band of Gypsys eras. After he died there were a number of official posthumous albums featuring these songs, namely The Cry Of Love (1971), but also on the Rainbow Bridge soundtrack (1971) and War Heroes (1972). In 1997, a more uniform tracklist of these songs was curated and released as First Rays of the New Rising Sun. The Black Gold tracks have yet to be released.
However, in 1974, Hendrix’s father Al sold the rights to his son’s music to producer Alan Douglas, who put out the albums Crash Landing and Midnight Lightning in 1975. But Douglas removed the original bass and drum tracks and added guitar overdubs — all by session musicians. He also occasionally used female backing vocalists and even gave himself songwriting co-credit on a few of the songs.
This bastardization of Hendrix was happening even before Jimi died. In fact, it started right after he got famous in 1967. Two years earlier, when Hendrix was a session player, he signed a recording contract with Ed Chalpin. Chalpin saw an opportunity to cash in on the popularity of The Jimi Hendrix Experience by taking the session material and putting it out as though it were actually Hendrix material. Chalpin would take tracks and remove the vocals, add different vocals and other overdubs and re-release the songs numerous times under a variety of names. There are literally hundreds of these fake Hendrix records.
Jimmy Page
Special Early Works
By the mid-’70s, Led Zeppelin were arguably the biggest band in the world. So everybody wanted a piece of the action. Springboard Records — a legendary ’70s budget label — got its hands on one of the many recordings Jimmy Page was paid to do as a session musician in the mid-’60s. It was a three-hour session with Sonny Boy Williamson II. They issued it as a Page album, complete with a 1973 photo of him on the cover. Sonny Boy died of a heart attack less than four months after it was recorded on Jan. 28, 1965 at IBC Studios in London. Similarly, there are several albums like this featuring Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck.
The Beatles
Live At The Star-Club in Hamburg, Germany; 1962
It’s hard to believe neither The Beatles nor Apple Records ever decided to acquire any of the recordings of the band from their residency gigs in Hamburg, Germany from 1960 to 1962. This 1977 double album — released in two different versions — is in every Beatle fan’s collection, and features 30 songs performed by John, Paul, George and Ringo in late December, ’62. Ringo had only just played his first gig with the band on Aug. 18, 1962 at a horticultural society dance in Merseyside.
The Star-Club shows were recorded using a single microphone and a Grundig reel-to-reel machine. The sound quality isn’t awesome, but it could be worse. And, this is pretty exciting, historic stuff. Fellow Liverpool musician Ted “Kingsize” Taylor had instructed the club’s stage manager, Adrian Barber, to make the recording. Taylor’s band, The Dominoes. were also playing there at that time. Lennon gave verbal approval to Taylor for Barber to record The Beatles, in exchange for beer. Taylor initially tried to sell the tapes to Beatles manager Brian Epstein in the mid-’60s, but Epstein didn’t see them as having any commercial value. A decade later, Taylor and The Beatles’ former booking manager Alan Williams decided to try selling them to Apple in 1973. They were hoping to get upwards of £100,000, but no dice. They also are said to have offered them directly to Starr and Harrison for £5,000 and were denied.
Instead, the tapes were given to Paul Murphy of Buk Records, who was tasked with finding a label to buy the rights. Murphy simply bought the tapes himself and formed a company to handle the affairs. He managed to sell the distribution rights to Larry Grossberg — the manager of Muhammad Ali and Andy Warhol. Grossberg paid $100K for the tapes and spent more money having their sound improved and edited. There were sections of damaged tape which were edited out, and the song order was changed in order to fit better onto the sides of a vinyl LP.
After refusing to pay for the tapes, The Beatles still tried to have their release blocked but were unsuccessful. In the ensuing years, the content of the tapes has been licensed and re-licensed several times, appearing on a variety of labels in various forms and running orders. The original double LP was released by Murphy’s company Lingasong, and a little later on Bellaphon. The 26-song version is the most common one.
In 1979, Pickwick Records did some additional audio filtering and equalisation of the songs on the Lingasong U.S. version, and released it over two volumes as First Live Recordings. This release famously contains the song Hully Gully, performed by Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers, but mistakenly credited as The Beatles. In 1981, Audio Fidelity Enterprises released Historic Sessions in the UK, which was the first release to feature all 30 Beatles tracks from the original tapes.
KISS
Wicked Lester
Before they formed KISS with Peter Criss and Ace Frehley in 1973, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons had a different band — Wicked Lester. The five-piece band had a much less rockin’ sound, but actually had two songs which were reworked for Dressed To Kill in 1975 (Love Her All I Can and She).
Wicked Lester signed to Epic Records and recorded an album’s worth of material at Electric Lady Studios between November 1971 and July 1972. They even had cover art picked out. But the project was shelved and the group disbanded. When they reformed and rebranded as KISS, the group signed with Casablanca Records. However, CBS owned the rights to the Wicked Lester recordings and the intended artwork — the latter was used for the cover of The Laughing Dogs‘ self-titled 1979 debut album.
When KISS broke out after the release of Alive! (1975), Destroyer (1976) and a repackaging of their first three albums as The Originals (1976), CBS decided it would be a good idea to release the Wicked Lester material to cash in on the band’s popularity. But Casablanca boss Neil Bogart stepped up and bought the tapes from CBS for just under $140K. This was an effort to maintain the band’s image, as they were worried about appearing soft — not to mention the fact that they also closely guarded their identities when not wearing their trademark makeup. Bogart never released the material, but somewhere along the line, someone made a dub of the tapes and bootlegs began appearing. The most common one was called The Original Wicked Lester Sessions. The band eventually bought out Bogart’s share of the rights to the tapes, finally opting to release three of the tracks (Love Her All I Can, Keep Me Waiting and She) on their 2001 KISS box set.
John Lennon
John Lennon Sings The Great Rock & Roll Hits
It’s hard to imagine an album of new John Lennon music being available via a as-seen-on-TV record, but that was the case in 1975. Lennon started working with Phil Spector in the fall of 1973 on an album of influential oldies in an effort to settle a lawsuit from Morris Levy. Levy owned the rights to Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me, which Lennon was found to have ripped off for Come Together, the opening track on Abbey Road. The deal with Levy involved Lennon covering a bunch of other songs he owned. He did eight tracks with Spector before the batshit producer fled with the tapes. Lennon got back into working on the album the following year. In the midst of this, Lennon was also working on his Walls & Bridges album, which he opted to put out first. Levy was impatient and managed to convince Lennon into giving him a rough mix of the oldies album material, which Lennon did, in the form of a reel-to-reel stereo dub. Levy wasted no time in putting it on wax and selling it on TV via his Adam VIII discount label. Capitol/EMI freaked out and rushed-released Rock ’N’ Roll with its proper mixes and superior sleeve artwork (the Levy album had a fuzzy photo of Lennon from the Let It Be sessions). The whole ridiculous affair went back to court and ended with Levy being forced to withdraw the album from the market, and being ordered to pay damages to both EMI and Lennon.
It’s a coveted collector’s item.
Prince
The Black Album
In 1986, Prince was feeling pressure to get back to his roots. He recorded The Black Album aka The Funk Bible as a followup to the enormously successful Sign O The Times. Weeks before its release, Prince called the president of Warner Bros. Records and claimed he’d had a religious epiphany that the record was evil. He demanded it be cancelled and recalled and issued the album Lovesexy instead. Of course, not all copies could be collected and destroyed, so bootleg copies of the funky, raunchy Black Album made their way into shops. There also were a handful of promotional copies sent to radio stations and industry people. These surviving copies of the original Black Album are extremely valuable. In April 2016, an original promo copy from 1987 was sold for $15K USD. Five pristine copies were discovered in 2017, with one of them selling for $42K. In June 2018, another copy of the original album was found in Canada, and fetched $25K. Prince eventually released the album, with some altered titles, in November 1994.
Voivod
Specimen: The Outer Limits Demos
In 2024, the band’s former bassist Jean-Yves “Blacky” Thériault put out these demos on Minemine Records. The band promptly issued a statement saying he didn’t have the right, nor their permission to do so. “No one in the band was consulted, no approvals were given and this material was never meant for commercial release,” the statement read. Voivod didn’t ask fans to boycott the release, but said they “deserve to know the truth.”
Bob Dylan
Great White Wonder
After Dylan’s motorcycle crash, he entered a period of writing more songs than he released. Following the release of John Wesley Harding in 1967, several artists started getting radio play with songs penned by Dylan which he had not put out himself yet. Bootleggers successfully got someone in a studio somewhere to dub them a reel of Dylan demos which were being sent to prospective publishers for consideration. In 1969, the songs were discretely pressed onto around 1,500 records and sold in a plain white cover, with the title Great White Wonder stamped on the labels. Seven of the 24 tracks were recorded with The Band, while much of the rest dates back to 1961.
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Area Resident is an Ottawa-based journalist, recording artist, music collector and re-seller. Hear (and buy) his music on Bandcamp, email him HERE, follow him on Instagram and check him out on Discogs.
