POX -- Unreleased Prince

YESSS!!!!!

The best guide on the web:

http://www.smallclub.org/

The ones you want (I'm old school so anything beyond SOTT is sorta not worth it to me)

#1 - The Avenue (2 discs) is the debut show in August of 1983 by Wendy Melvoin. A fucking awesome show, and some of the live tracks formed the basis of the tracks on Purple Rain. A must.

#2 The Work (Volumes 1&2, 8 discs total) - studio outtakes that run from 1976 or so through 1988. Fucking totally amazing. Read Posssessed and you can hear what's on them. Awesome.

#3 Small Club 2nd Night. Legendary aftershow.

#4 SOTT Rehearsals. Awesome quality, hear how Prince runs the band through the songs before they hit the road.

#5 Purple Rush - Purple Rain tour rehearsals in 1984. Amazing.

As far as live: I'm partial to my Lovesexy rehearsals. SOTT rehearsal collected as "Now's The Time" is better (!) than SOTT itself, in parts. And cinniblount is OTM about City Lights Providence. It's one of the freakiest Prince sets I know. Prime 1999-era electrofunk sleaze.

"Wake up Wendy!"

I have the first two (out of the five!) 4 disc sets of The Work and that's basically where the better portion of my POX list came from. There's so much good stuff in there. It's sad that he hasn't released proper _legal_ versions of it.

And since this summer will mark the 20th anniversary of Purple Rain, wouldn't it be a great time to commemorate that event with an expanded, remastered reissue?

Just listening to "The Line," which is cold hard urban speedfunk, Prince's early contribution to the Wipeout XL soundtrack. A new favorite.

(Um... I'm reading it again, and now I think I should stress that "the Line" was not, in fact, actually written for the XL soundtrack but rather sounds like he was anticipating its sound way back in '87. Still, I can supply a not-perfect-sounding copy of it, if need be.)

I have 9 Prince cds...obviously I like the man's work, but the farthest forward I go is The Gold Experience, which did not impress me at all. It seemed too much like him trying to "adapt to the 90's" and the "hip-hoppy" tracks sound extremely dated and stereotypical rather than authentic. Not to say the album is awful, it's got some bonafide great tunes on it, but it falls flat. Which is too bad, cuz "Most Beautiful Girl in the World" rules...

The bits I've heard of Musicology haven't impressed me much, but I have heard no entire songs, and as we know, real audio samples don't tell you shit about an album.

To let you get some idea what i'm looking for, tho, I was a biggest fan of Prince on these albums:

Around the World in a Day (too "white"? Is that a real criticism?)
Dirty Mind
1999
Purple Rain
Lovesexy

umm...

Needless to say, awesome. A couple of cameras, maybe three. Can't figure out why Prince keeps it locked up.

Performance is awesome. Wendy's first show, this is the one where base tracks for several of the Purple Rain songs were recorded.

is this soulseek-able? love it!

It's from August 1983 (date and details excape me but if you google "The Avenue" bootleg you can get all the gory details.)

I didn't know there was a video out there but have had the bootleg CD for years. I found it in alt.binaries.multimedia.prince. As for it being on SoulSeek, I have no idea.

The amazing thing (to me) was not only the quality, which is excellent, but seeing the fans at the First Avenue. They aren't dancing at all, just watching.

the best box sets of prince are the bootleg boxes called 'the work'.

Lisa
Tick, Tick, Bang
Feel U Up / Irresistable Bitch
Moonbeam Levels
Electric Intercourse
Others Here With Us
Data Bank
A Place In Heaven (Lisa version)
Teacher, Teacher
In A Large Room With No Light

no rebirth of the flesh?

i haven't heard any of this stuff ;_;

rebirth of the flesh is so fucking good.

Finally got around to hearing the show with the "Just My Imagination" cover. I'm not as knocked out by the guitar as Eric and Matos are, but, boy, can the little man sing. Awesome version of "D.M.S.R." too.

that temptations cover has a few brilliant sections but the synth hasnt dated well.

didnt know where else to put this.

trent reznor on prince bragging about all his amazing unreleased material:

"I’m not Prince or Rivers Cuomo who brags about having hundreds of great songs,” Reznor said. “And to that I would say, Prince, if you have a hundred great songs or a thousand, how about picking a few and putting them on your record that you’ve put out because your last several have sucked. Same for you, Rivers. I say that constructively, you know.”

Hahaha where did THAT appear.

some interview or twitter maybe?

he's got a point about how there's kind of a 'put up or shut up' thing w/ artists who constantly allude to huge backlogs of unreleased material. but Prince is really kind of the wrong guy to make that argument to, since he does have a huge number of great unreleased songs (which he wouldn't put on a new record just because they're mostly pretty old).

he could put out some archive releases if he wanted to... prob a good thing he doesnt though, going from crystal ball.

well supposedly that's one of the aims of the lotusflow3r site, but i guess time will tell if that pans out.

he could put out some archive releases if he wanted to... prob a good thing he doesnt though, going from crystal ball.

― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2), Friday, May 8, 2009 3:24 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Sell back 'Crystal Ball' and download a copy of 'The Work Volume 1, 1976-1984'

Then check yourself

This thread is way too short

wonderful ass = my favorite prince song

There's a few 1 minute snippets floating around of some songs he was shopping to labels in the 80's as possible demos for their artists. Some of these are pretty 0_0. Search "Traffic Jam" or "Cosmic Dream" for more reasons to bemoan his relative suckiness nowadays.

xpost Wonderful Ass is truly wonderful

"Then check yourself"

ive heard most of the tracks on those work albums (theyre not self-released btw, so i dont need to check myself), the quality starts to drop off quite a bit after the 80s. but yeah, around the mid/late 80s, he had at least about 5 albums worth of quality stuff to release. i wouldnt mind seeing him do a dylan style official bootlegs series. but i know he wont. and if he does the packaging would be awful.

Prince and Springsteen, just to name a couple of broke-big-in-the-'80s workaholics, have at least a handful of quality albums they could craft out of the archives, but likely never well. Sadly, those ships have sailed, I think.

around the mid/late 80s, he had at least about 5 albums worth of quality stuff to release

pardon my silly comment, prince reverts me to high school and I misread your comment as thinking Prince was only bluffing -- I absolutely agree with you, Crystal Ball is only evidence that Prince has no idea which of his unreleased songs are worth putting out. drag yourself down to our fanboy level and post your 10, why not

Crystal Ball's almost worth it for 'Cloreen Bacon Skin' though