Rarebird's Rock and Roll Nest

For Record Store Day Black Friday 2022, a vinyl LP containing blues recordings by The Doors -- both live and studio-recorded -- was issued in a 10,000-copy limited edition in the United States, with a total of 17,000 copies made available worldwide. Paris Blues was pressed in translucent blue vinyl, with cover art by guitarist Robby Krieger, and it came with a colored insert advertising the Jim Morrison book set A Guide To The Labyrinth , which was also a limited edition item . The title track, "Paris Blues", is a studio recording, a long-lost band-written blues song believed to have been recorded during sessions for either The Soft Parade in late 1968, or L.A. Woman in late 1970 or early '71. I would guess the latter scenario is more likely, since the lyrics seem to refer to Jim Morrison's plans to move to France shortly before he died. According to the LP packaging, "Paris Blues" is the last known unreleased Doors studio track. The master tape of the ...

Dave Grohl (of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame) made his first released recording in 1985 at age 16, as part of a hardcore punk band from Springfield, Virginia called Mission Impossible. The track, titled "I Can Only Try", was part of a six-song 7-inch vinyl EP titled Alive & Kicking , which was issued by the Washington, D.C.-based punk label WGNS and the D.C.-area hardcore fanzine MetroZine. This EP compiled six tracks by various underground bands from the D.C. hardcore scene. It makes for a potent 13-minute listen. Mission Impossible's track "I Can Only Try" is basically a minute-and-a-half of primitive hardcore fury. But as an early showcase for the teenage Grohl, it doesn't disappoint. Grohl played drums on the track, and already proved himself to be forceful and formidable, showing the same fierce energy that he would later bring to Nirvana and to the first Foo Fighters album. He was well matched by the repetitive guitar riffs, although the band...

Last month, in December of 2022, Pink Floyd quietly released 18 full-length concert recordings from 1972 to streaming services, along with a five-song EP containing alternate versions of songs from their landmark 1973 album Dark Side Of The Moon . Why have they done this? Reportedly, the release of these recordings extends copyright ownership for a longer time, whereas the legal rights to the recordings would expire and fall into public domain if the owners did not make use of them before a certain date. A Sony representative told Rolling Stone magazine in 2013: “The copyright law in Europe was recently extended from 50 to 70 years for everything recorded in 1963 and beyond. With everything before that, there’s a new ‘Use It or Lose It’ provision. It basically said, ‘If you haven’t used the recordings in the first 50 years, you aren’t going to get any more.’” Pink Floyd did something similar the previous December in 2021, when they digitally released concert recordings from 1971...