Before They Were Famous

No one is born a rock star…well, maybe in terms of their attitude but not in terms of vocation…you gotta have the talent and you need to put in the work if you want to achieve actual rock star status…

But that takes a lot of time and a lot of effort…and before you get to the stage where people acknowledge your rock star-ness, there are lots of twists and turns, false starts and dead ends…

Later, when you’re rich and famous, these early attempts become part of your archeological record…some of this stuff may be found in shallow graves…the rest may be buried very, very deeply and need serious excavation work…

Finding this material used to be hard…tapes were locked away in vaults…other early music on tape was erased, recorded over in order that this tape be reused…

Cassettes were placed in shoeboxes and lost in closets…music that was released went out of print and was no longer available for sale…

There were fires that destroyed archives…storage sites were wrecked with water damage…and then there were all the legal disputes…who owned all these old recordings…which member of the band?...the record label?...someone else?...until that can be sorted out, this music remained unheard…

Some of this material did leak out and was released on bootleg albums and CDs, but they were very hard to come by…

But then the internet hit…slowly, first through file-sharing sites like Napster, these demos, alternate takes and long-lost recordings started changing hands…and then came YouTube…that’s a treasure trove of old music…

Finally, there are box sets and reissues…as physical music sales, record labels are looking deep into the catalogues to find stuff that might entice fans to buy high-margin physical product…

The result is that today, a lot of the heavy archeological excavations have already been done for us…and I think it’s time we sifted through the results, don’t you?

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