Wednesday, 26 September 2007

Collecting

When I first started collecting mp3's a mate gave me the complete Beatles collection on 3 cd's, all the commercial albums plus some other stuff.
So although I was never really a fan of the Beatles, everytime I saw something on the net labelled "rarity, never available" etc I downloaded it to keep the collection going.
I nearly gave up a couple of years ago after downloading a mis-labelled 12 album set of out-takes and demo's, but I spent days listening to them and renaming them for posterity.
Including all the solo projects by the various ex-Beatles it runs into thousands of tracks, and at the end of it I'd struggle to put together a 20 track compilation CD of tracks that I'd really want to play more than once a year!!
I've just been browsing the blogs and seen a 22 album set of "lost" John Lennon tapes, and the first thought was I must download this in case there is something I haven't got, but luckily the other part of my brain has kicked in and said "is there anything here you'd actually listen too twice", and the answer is a big no, so I'm not going to bother.
Easy to justify when you think about it, as previous lost tape, live, demo versions of Lennon's music have been bloody awful especially with Yoko doing her cat being choked impressions in the background.
Just got to wean myself off anything I find from The Sex Pistols, Clash, Stranglers, Queen, Elvis, David Bowie and all those other bands and artists who seem to have been recorded at all points of their life, and have a never ending supply of unreleased, recorded in the bathroom tracks.
Elvis Presley a prime example, although I like about 90% of the stuff he put out I've ended up with sometimes over 100 versions of the same song due to there being 20-30 takes at the original recording session plus 24 years worth of live versions and multiple takes of anything in a movie etc etc.
As far as I can find out he only sung just over a thousand different songs in his career, and I'm sure I got all of those years ago, but it doesn't stop me checking the Elvis newsgroups every couple of weeks for more?

Something that upsets me when thinking about Elvis is that I had a superb collection of Elvis singles and EP's back in the day when the record collection was massive, and due to lack of money I had to sell them all, usually for a fraction of the actual value :(

1 comment:

Nuzz Prowlin' Wolf said...

some right good writings there Lee.