Why Archival Releases Fascinate Me (and Should Fascinate You Too)

Reveling in the buried treasure of outtakes, studio chatter and other previously-unreleased goodies

I always admire people who write in a way that I know I can’t. Robert C. Gilbert is one of those people. Gilbert runs Listening Sessions, a weekly newsletter that dives deeper into single artists, songs, and albums than I even thought possible. I know he’s good at what he does because he can open my mind to new perspectives on music that I’ve been listening to for years.

Since I’m away at a wedding in California this week, I decided to give Mr. Gilbert the keys to Can’t Get Much Higher. He wrote about the importance of archival releases, a topic that might seem mundane but whose evolution has been fascinating. If you enjoy this piece, subscribe to his newsletter, Listening Sessions.

Deep Down in the Archives

Two recent archival releases point to the sometimes thorny issue of releasing music previously locked away in the vaults.

The late American soprano Jessye Norman made three recordings for Decca between 1989 and 1998 that were rejected for release. The reasons ranged from a bad note that couldn’t be corrected on a recording of Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs with James Levine and the Berlin Philharmonic to deep tension between the singer and conductor Kurt Masur during a recording of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde that resulted in recording the full opera being abandoned in favour of simply getting the highlights of Norman singing the role of Isolde on tape. The third was a live recording with Seiji Ozawa of works by Joseph Haydn, Hector Berlioz and Benjamin Britten. The recordings came out in March 2023 on a collection called Jessye Norman: The Unreleased Masters after their release was approved by the late singer’s estate.

The New York Times’ chief classical music critic Zachary Wolfe wrestled in a piece with the dilemma of whether the collection should have been released. He ends it with a quote by Norman producer Anthony Freud: “I’m not trying to second guess why an artist might have a problem with a recording. But there are clearly recordings that are of a quality that deserves to be heard, and there are other recordings that aren’t. I suppose, logically, to me, the answer needs to lie in the quality of the result somehow. Is it good?”

For other artists, there doesn’t seem to be as much a dilemma about getting music that had been previously unreleased out into the market. Take Bob Dylan, for example. In a few weeks, a huge tranche of unreleased Dylan is hitting stores: 27 CDs of music from his 1974 tour with the Band. The collection, The 1974 Live Recordings, will include 431 tracks with all but 14 previously unreleased. The collection is part of an ongoing series of archival sets by Dylan both through his Bootleg Series and outside of it. There are practical reasons at work here, including to release authorized versions of long-bootlegged material (the illicit, DIY versions of the recordings Dylan made with the Band in 1967 kickstarted the ongoing underground market for bootleg records) and to secure copyright protection for material before it would have entered the Public Domain. 

Previously unreleased Dylan now released vastly outnumbers his legacy catalogue (already fairly large) of official studio and live releases. Now, I’m a Dylan fan and have a serviceable collection of his music. That includes the 38-CD box set of his live recordings from 1966 that came out in 2016. It’s indisputably important music but I’m not sure I’ve gotten through even half of the set, but I’ll get to it eventually and I’ll tell you why. These kind of recordings have fascinated me for as long as I’ve been a music fanatic.

Back in the mid eighties, when I was barely young enough to be called a kid, the kind of archival dumps that are commonplace today were rare if not entirely unheard of. Dylan’s first Bootleg Series collection was still a few years away but there was the first volume of a series called Essential Elvis, something that, being a precocious fan of Elvis Presley, was music to my ears. It collected the material Presley recorded for his first three movies: Love Me Tender, Loving You and Jailhouse Rock and supplemented it with a selection of outtakes from the sessions including takes that broke down as well as snippets of the chatter in the studio.

Here, for the first time, I had a chance to hear how music was made and to hear songs that I could already recall note-for-note in new ways, whether it was a stab at “Loving You” as a swaggering rocker or a more rollicking approach to the smooth-as-silk “Treat Me Nice.” The final version of a song was what Presley or the record company or the Colonel or whoever had intended to be the final, definitive word on that song. But it was more accurately the final destination of a journey. In that way, the final recording was part of a story and boy, I wanted to know the whole tale.

Soon after Essential Elvis, Volume 1 lit a spark, I tracked down a copy of The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by fab-four expert Mark Lewisohn. And by tracking it down, I mean using the Yellow Pages to call up local bookstores to see if they had a copy. One store did and I soon had the coffee-table book in my hands and it barely left them until I had read it cover to cover.

It was a book that both demystified the Beatles’ discography, setting out the strict chronology of its creation, and spilled the goods of the mysteries that were locked up in the vaults. What do you mean there’s a 27-minute version of “Helter Skelter” and something called “12-Bar Original” that was recorded during the Rubber Soul sessions and what the heck was “Carnival of Light” anyway? Lewisohn’s book also detailed the intricacies of recording in the analog era: laying down basic tracks, creating space on a four-track tape to overdub, painstakingly mixing the master takes into mono and then, mostly as an afterthought, into stereo.

After that came the second volume of the Essential Elvis collection, a series of binaural (a cruder form of stereo) outtakes from Presley’s January 1957 sessions at Radio Recorders in Hollywood. The album was sequenced to follow a series of songs from the initial takes to just before the master was laid down, including “Is It So Strange?,” “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You,” “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” and “(There’ll Be) Peace in the Valley (for Me).”

I played that record over and over again. It honed my instincts on what makes a record and what doesn’t. Of course, these reasons are fairly obvious now to me: a flubbed lyric, an awkward guitar line or downbeat or a general sense that everything has not yet gelled all meant that another take was soon to be slated.

As noted earlier, these kind of records are now commonplace. Every note that Presley recorded that has been preserved on tape has been released totaling days upon days of session material and live performances. The Beatles’ vault has also been slowly pried opened: first, through the Anthology series that included an edited version of “12-Bar Original” and then, about 20 years later, through a series of deluxe editions of their albums starting with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The 27-minute version of “Helter Skelter” remains locked away although the expanded reissue of The Beatles (aka The White Album) to mark its fiftieth anniversary included the take that preceded it which stretched out for 13 minutes. “Carnival of Light” appears destined to never see the light of day.

Deluxe and super-deluxe editions of catalogue albums are now almost an industry of its own in the record business, yet another way to get people to pony up once more for albums they have already bought and sometimes more than once, and part of the reason why there is concern about the dominance of old versus new music.

It’s an enterprise ripe for cynicism yet many artists approach making their library of unreleased music available in thoughtful ways. Joni Mitchell’s ongoing Archives series is a notable example. 

For the past four years, Mitchell fans have been treated to regular releases of five CDs worth of music documenting the eras of her career. So far, three volumes have been released, spanning home recordings she made in 1963 to her eighth album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Live shows—in clubs and then in concert halls—radio recordings, demos and studio outtakes have all been carefully selected and sequenced to tell the painstaking work that fueled Mitchell’s evolution as an artist. Accompanying these releases has been another recurring series collecting her original albums. Both collections engage in a kind of dialogue: one telling what Mitchell created, the other telling how she did it.

Other series fill in holes of our understanding of an artist. Miles Davis comes to mind here. So far, there have been seven volumes released in his Bootleg Series. Almost all have been dedicated to live recordings with the fifth volume, Freedom Jazz Dance, focusing on the studio. It is especially illuminating. 

It is primarily dedicated to the October 1966 session that resulted in Miles Smiles, the second recording by Davis’ Second Great Quintet of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. It is an album heralded for its openness and looseness as well as a rule that was to guide its recording: a take could only be abandoned before Davis had finished his solo; if it hadn’t by then, the rest of the group had to complete the take to create the master. Releasing the full session tape revealed that this accepted fact was actually legend. It turns out there were two completed takes of Shorter’s “Orbits” and the master of Davis’ ballad “Circle” was a splice of two complete takes. In other words, Miles Smiles was more of a run-of-the-mill session than we were led to believe. Does revealing this fact diminish the album’s legacy? Hardly not. If anything, the thrill of hearing just a little more music from an album long memorized was a thrill. It was like finding sunken treasure. 

That feeling compared to what the long-awaited release of the Beach Boys’ SMiLE in November 2011 felt like. Included with an as-close-as-possible approximation of what SMiLE would have been had Brian Wilson completed rather than abandoned it in the spring of 1967 were four CDs of music from the album sessions. The work of laying down backing tracks to such classics as “Heroes and Villains,” “Cabin Essence” and “Good Vibrations” is presented in composite form, condensing the often-endless series of stops and starts into an overview that selected the moments that provided insight into how Wilson made records. There is, conversely, also something to be gained from hearing the whole process such as for “California Girls” but being judicious is a recognition that the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach may be something to listen to once or twice but that it’s then usually filed away and possibly for good.

How much or how little to open the curtain of the artist’s creative process or work-a-day life is ultimately, or at least it should be, up to the individual artist. A few months ago, Chris published a post on this Substack that distilled how his song “Move On Up” went from a vamp quickly laid down in the studio to the final product. It was an illuminating read.

---

---

Some artists squire away their previously-unreleased goodies. The Rolling Stones are a good example. Super-deluxe editions of such classic albums as Aftermath, Between the Buttons and Beggars Banquet exist only as pipe dreams. Same with Simon & Garfunkel and yet, in the recent documentary of Simon, In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon, snippets from their sessions are used to help tell the narrative of their partnership.

My eyes lit up when I heard them. My heart danced to the idea of a sturdy, coffee-table sized box set of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme or Bookends. I told my wife, who was watching the documentary with me, that such a set would be, for me, an instant buy. She countered by wondering if there would be demand for such a thing. I replied that it didn’t matter. I want to hear more. I want to be transported to the Columbia studio at 799 7th Avenue in New York to hear what it was like when the music was being created before anyone else did and before a gradual consensus formed around its importance.

I suspect this wish will never be fulfilled as it likely won’t be for an act like the Mamas & the Papas (recently unearthed footage of them recording “Boys and Girls Together” will have to do) and many others. For me, I think the plethora of releases focusing on previously-unreleased music fulfils an important function. It reminds that music making is not a calling but a job and that it’s a job that’s almost always done very, very well.

A New One from Robert Gilbert
"Zhivago" by Kurt Rosenwinkel
2024 (Recorded in 1996) - Jazz

A new archival release that’s probably already been lost in the shuffle is jazz guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel’s The Next Step Band (Live at Smalls 1996). The album brims with youthful promise as Rosenwinkel with tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Ben Street and drummer Jeff Ballard play a series of edgy compositions full of lyricism on a gig during the early day of Smalls, one of the great New York jazz clubs.

The highlight of the recording for me is “Zhivago,” a kind of homage to the modal workouts of John Coltrane and Charles Lloyd with the added bonus of pianist Brad Mehldau sitting in. It’s a hypnotic and daring wonder. To have been there to hear it in person.

An Old One from Robert Gilbert
"A Big Hunk o’ Love (Take 4)" by Elvis Presley
1997 (Recorded in 1958) - Rock n’ Roll

First issued on Platinum: A Life in Music to mark the 20th anniversary of Presley’s passing in 1997, the fourth and final take of ‘A Big Hunk o’ Love’ is a ferocious performance. While the complete take was stuck in the vault for 39 years, part of it was used to create the master (along with the third take) of what was to be Presley’s final chart-topper of the 1950s. It is, to my ears, his finest performance of the decade with a mighty lead-guitar part by the great Hank Garland. Presley’s energy level is off the charts and over and over again throughout the take, he is heard off-mike egging on his backing band, primarily composed of Nashville's A Team. This is rock and roll at its most primal.

---

Want more from Robert Gilbert? Check out his incredible newsletter Listening Sessions, where he dives deeper than almost anyone else into the music you love. Check out this recent piece about Curtis Mayfield if you want a sample.