As the world starts to recover from the pandemic lock-down, the bootleg industry is beginning to pick up again. Most of the new releases seem to come from the same sources with most of them having been taken from torrents. For those of us who prefer silver-disks to hard drive or cloud clogging data, there are a few new things;
The JEMS crew have released their fourth instalment of the ‘Foxes In The Boxes’ collection, a Ronnie Wood solo set of outtakes and alternates for the ‘Gimmie Some Neck’ album. Featuring some of his friends from the rock fraternity, the tapes are all taken from a cassette held by an industry insider and are therefore first gen. The Moonchild Records label are the first to announce their pressing. I’ve also seen a CD-R version produced by a different label but at twice the price. Go figure.
Moonchild have also put out, guess what, another ultimate version of ‘Blueberry Hill’. Goodness knows what they’ve done to make this any more desirable or requireable than the recent Golden Eggs, etc releases, hopefully we’ll get to review this one in time too.
(Edit: Thanks to Jason Gomez for pointing out this is the more recent ‘Nite Owl’ remaster)
Empress Valley have done what they did with their recent Led Zepp and Pink Floyd collections and produced something both for the Stones and Mike Millard.
Their Stones box features the large torrent of the Art Collins’ tapes. A massive 11 CD boxed set that features all of the takes that were dropped as one bunch. If you own any of the Golden Eggs, Goldplate, No Label, Hot Lips, etc releases of this material already, you’ll still need this new box, however, it comes at a much lower price point, being a very basic box.
The Mike The Mike boxes, two volumes so far, feature multiples of the torrents that the JEMS crew have been releasing every other weekend. From Bruce Springsteen to Genesis to Linda Ronstadt, these basic but complete boxes (15 CDs each) are a great way to build up a compilation of these recordings so far, though if you’re not a fan of the other artists in the boxes, the No Label guys have been releasing them as singular releases to their own.
The Dog N’ Cat label also return after a while with two new issues. The first is ‘The Complete Hamburg Tapes’, presumably to coincide with the official ‘Goats Head Soup’ release later this year, DAC-193 has both the October 2nd, 1973 shows over two disks. Nothing to suggest there’s much new here.
DAC-199 is ‘Some Satanic Tour Vol.3’. This collects the two Madison Square Garden shows as released at the very end of 2019. We anticipate nothing new but an excuse for DAC to add another title to their collection.
Finally, the Graf Zeppelin label bring their latest release, ‘Nuremberg 1973’. A double CD from Led Zeppelin’s show at the Messe-Zentrum Halle A, Nuremberg, West Germany, 14th March 1973.
Not much more info about this release but it features an alternate and longer tape of ‘Ramble On / Stairway To Heaven’ at the end of disk one while an edited version is left in the correct concert order on disk 2. But then that’s what streaming from your CD player was invented for ..
