Much like the oft-used "I recommend" thread, this is a thread to offer you the opportunity to promote a record that you think is a "lost classic." Obviously, this shouldn't include records that are huge hits or widely acknowledged as classics, but this could be really obscure early records, or lesser-known records by bigger artists, or obscure records by really obscure artists. Take your pick.

Feel free to say as much, or as little, about the records as you like.

I've offered a suggestion of my own in another thread, which is the Go-Betweens' 1988 classic 16 Lovers Lane. Recently reissued, as part of the larger Go-Betweens reissue project, this is an amazing record, one of the first Australian bands I really fell into.

16 Lovers Lane features a mix of uptempo, upbeat love songs (mostly written by Grant McClennan) and downbeat breakup songs (by Robert Forster), including the marvellous "Love Goes On!" and "Streets of Your Town." It ends with the maudlin "Dive For Your Memory," which was the last Go-Betweens recording for quite a while (until the reunion in the late 90's).

The single disc version, still available from Beggars, is a fine choice, although the two-disc reissue (which also features some great lost tracks, including "You Won't Find it Again" and "Rock and Roll Friend", along with the single version of "Love Goes On!") will be released in the US on JetSet this year.

This is one of my "lost classics"...what are yours???

There's a lot of stuff from the 70's that I would have liked to see on CD.

UK label Lemon Recordings just did a re-issue of Stealers Wheel's 2nd album, "Ferguslie Park". That was one of them.

Other old fogie stuff on my wish list....

A) The first two Pezband albums
B) "Baby Grand", a pre-Hooters Eric Bazillian and Rob Hyman vehicle.
C) "Silver" by Tranquility



.

Why not plug the Vibrators "Pure Mania" again? Any band which can write "punk" songs which could almost all have been played on 60s AM radio, at least if the guitars and vocals were turned down to five-to-seven, and all the references to S & M were deleted, has to be damned fine. As it is, there's still some "60s" classics which no one heard back then ("Sweet Sweet Heart", "Baby, Baby, Baby", "London Girls".)

Great topic, Eric! My turn:

Haynes Boys, "Guardian Angel": a fantastic slice of early '90s Midwestern cowpunk (now out of print) featuring the now moderately popular Tim Easton.

Great Plains, "Naked at the Buy, Sell, and Trade": witty, literate, bear-soked new-wave rawk with plenty of farfisa organ, and the underground semi-hit "Letter to a Fanzine".

Lou Reed, "Street Hassle": From 1979, it's his most underrated solo album and is ignored by most folks who should know better. Most of it's as catchy as "Sweet Jane", and the title track will bring grown men to their knees.

Echo and the Bunnymen: What Are You Going to Do With Your Life?

This one is almost uniformly despised by Echo fans, but I think it might be their finest hour. It's a maudlin, mellow, and sweeping set of broken love songs. Will Sergeant, Echo guitarist, seems to hate it. That may be because it really doesn't showcase his guitar work...it's Ian McCulloch's show, and he tears it to pieces. Understated, mellow, sad and yet somehow uplifting: I have probably played this record more in the last five years than any other that I own.

Richard Ashcroft: Alone With Everyone

Another one widely disliked...Verve fans say it's too soft, too much gooey-love stuff. They are wrong. It's a love letter, to his wife and to life, that showcases the grandiose music that Ashcroft's voice was made for. It's considerably less shoegaze-y than the Verve (other than Richard's voice, it doesn't really have that Verve sound) but that's not a bad thing. It's a rich, textured, and orchestrated set of excellent songs.

Lost classics?? Every jazz, funk, underground disco and soul LP never reissued!!

Obviously there are some exeptions but with the amount of forgotten stuff being hidden in the label vaults, the lack of interest in putting it out again is criminal!

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Originally posted by K-Bee:
Lost classics?? Every jazz, funk, underground disco and soul LP never reissued!!

Obviously there are some exeptions but with the amount of forgotten stuff being hidden in the label vaults, the lack of interest in putting it out again is criminal!

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Not to mention, as flem_snopes points out, all of the lost power pop records that have never been reissued or have gone out of print...

My first and foremost lost classic is sadly not an album, but an entire catalog. For nearly ten years from '78 to '87, saxophonist Arthur Blythe recorded for the Columbia label. Blythe's early Columbia recordings were made at a time when jazz had little voice on a major label. His later Columbia recordings came at the beginning of Wynton Marsalis' ascendence in the jazz world that would result in his becoming the genre's chief revisionist.

But I digress.

With the exception of a single recording, Put Sunshine In It (this is truly one of the exceptions you are referring to, K-Bee), Blythe's Columbia catalog represents not only some of his best work, but some of the best work of the time on any lable, much less one of the bigs. Sadly, with the exception of two Koch Jazz reissues, they all languish in the vault including one of the great post-bop collections of standards, 1978's In The Tradition and his excellent Monk tribute, 1983's Light Blue.

Now Playing: "Better Dead Than Lead" Ted Leo & The Pharmacists Shake The Sheets (Lookout) <-- apparently this is my breakthrough morning for this album...up until now I've been a bit indifferent, but this morning I'm really digging it!

LinnTate,
Now you actually made me put on my old Arthur Blythe "Da Da" LP from 1986. Truly a great album fully deserving a reissue. A line up consisting of Geri Allen, Vincent Henry, Cecil McBee, John Hicks and others really speak for itself.
I suppose Sony must own the rights to these Lp's now. Blythe is a very well respected artist so why they're not reisuing them is beyond me.

robot's recent acquisition reminded me to pull out Ride's Nowhere, and I was immediately sucked back in.

Ride, for those of who don't know them, fall roughly in the middle area between shoegaze (My Bloody Valentine and Lush were contemporaries, as were Chapterhouse and Slowdive) and Britpop (although Ride's influences pushed away from Oasis and Blur and more towards the 60's mod-dy stuff, like label namesakes The Creation). The early singles and Nowhere were more on the shoegaze-y end, while the later records tended more towards the Britpop end.

Adjectives like "Shimmering" and "effervescent" are often used, and I guess that's appropriate. Maybe the ubiquitous "waves of sound" is a propos as well...given the ocean waves on the cover of the record. "Taste" might be one of my favorite songs of the 90's, and was a left-field dance club hit when I was in college.

There's a pretty good Ride best-of out there (OX4) but I'd start with this one.

yes i just got Nowhere and it is very very addicting. "Polar Bear" is such a beautiful song...as io come to think of it every song on the album is beautiful. if you do not have this album buy it immediately.

Great topic, but oh poo, I'm gonna show my age by rattling off a few early 70's classics which I've been revisiting lately...

"Out Here" by Love - the classic "Forever Changes" always gets the kudos, but I really like this forgotten gem.

"A Wizard / A True Star" by Todd Rundgren - OK so he was doing too much acid, but hey, what a psychadelic masterpiece.

"Burnin Red Ivanhoe" - self titled 2nd album. If you happen to be into Danish prog rock from the early 70's you're gonna be in heaven here, but seriously folks ... good stuff.

"The Road to Ruin" - John and Beverly Martyn. John went on to do bigger and better things, but this 2nd of the 2 albums he did with his then-time wife remains, for me, a classic. Has been on and off my playlist for 34 years. So there.

"Lizard" - King Crimson. The least regarding of their output and different form anything else they did before or since.

If you're feeling adventurous, keep an eye out and an open mind for any of these.

That's a terrific list, CopyCat. I have copies of the Love, and King Crimson albums, but I'm going to have to track down the John and Beverly Martyn and Brunin Red Ivanhoe.

I'm starting to think that Todd Rungren is another artist whose entire back catalog (well '83 and earlier, anyway) could fit the subject of this thread. In the late 80s and early 90s, it seemed like Rundgren was in the press pretty regularly. Since the mid 90s, not so much.

Perhaps it's just me.

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I posted this in the wrong place, I think, when I dropped it in the "Heads Up" thread.

It belongs here:

After recently picking up the most recent Blue Nile album, High, I have revisited their rather skimpy canon (four albums in 21 years!). I had copies of Peace at Last (an easy bargain bin pickup) and 1989's Hats, but I had to find a used copy online of A Walk Across the Rooftops. Fastnbulbous' assessment of it, and of all of the Blue Nile's records, is spot-on: lush, symphonic, and also dramatic and gorgeous.

There are, apparently, unremastered UK reissues of the first two albums available, but they are deleted in the US. Not that they're hard to find. If you like the lush pop of Prefab Sprout, Deacon Blue, Lloyd Cole, or Del Amitri, this might be a good find for you.

"Classic" is perhaps a bit strong, but I found myself thinking of the self-titled 1988 album from Longhouse, which featured sometimes Golden Palominos vocalist Lisa Herman. It featured splendid vocal harmonies, great songwriting, and sank without a trace. Pity.

And derivative as they might have been, I really enjoyed Voice of the Beehive's 1991 sophmore outing Honey Lingers. It featured a completely unselfconscious cover of of "I Think I Love You." My copy sadly disappeared into my brother's CD collection, never to be heard from again.

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The Hormones: Where Old Ghosts Meet (V2 Records, 1998)

Here's one that REALLY got away. I think I read a capsule review of this in Mojo or Q, and we brought it into the indie store where I was working. It never got a US release. As I recall, we also brought in, at the same time, the first two independent records by Cosmic Rough Riders, so this was a pretty good haul.

What to say about the Hormones...a tremendous mix of Brit-pop sensibilities, power pop hooks, and Celtic folksy-ness from a really cool Dublin band. 4 singles were released from this record, I think, and I have them all. "Mr. Wilson" might be the best...a tribute to Brian Wilson, quoting his lyrics, with an unstoppable chorus and great, buzzing guitars.

More on the Hormones...they probably got their only US recognition by being on an episode of "Friends", playing a band at the wedding of Ross and Emily in England.

They broke up, at some point, and lead singer/guitarist Marc Carroll forged a solo career, with two releases, Ten of Swords and All Wrongs Reversed in 2002 and 2003. Both releases are great, carrying on the tradition of the Hormones, but a little more folky.

The Distractions "Nobody's Perfect", released in 1980, is an awesome collection of power-pop, Elvis Costello-ish tunes and heartfelt lyrics. The music and lyrics are so witty, they make Fountains of Wayne sound like a George W. Bush campaign commercial ( and I really do love FOW, even if hal was right about "lose the wife", pE.) When will anyone re-release this honest-to-God lost classic? Thank God for vinyl and turntables! I'm playin' this in July, LT, if you haven't heard it before.

quote:

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Originally posted by mark f:
The Distractions "Nobody's Perfect", released in 1980, is an awesome collection of power-pop, Elvis Costello-ish tunes and heartfelt lyrics. The music and lyrics are so witty, they make Fountains of Wayne sound like a George W. Bush campaign commercial ( and I really do love FOW, even if hal was right about "lose the wife", pE.) When will anyone re-release this honest-to-God lost classic? Thank God for vinyl and turntables! I'm playin' this in July, LT, if you haven't heard it before.

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That sounds really good, mark! I'd love to hear it...

Another power pop-py/Costello-esque early 80's band that it (I think) without CD release is The Jags. "Back of My Hand (I Got Your Number)" is a great tune that surfaced on Rhino's DIY comps in the early 90's...

My wife is a big fan of Taj Mahal. This past week she was asking me about an album he appears on from a group called Rising Sons. Their sole, self-titled release says "...featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder," so I kind of assumed it was a relatively recent collaboration.

No. Not so much.

Apparently Rising Sons was a band for about one year in the mid-60s boasting not only Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, but Kevin Kelly and Ed Cassidy. They released one single before breaking up, but recorded an album's worth of material that wasn't released until 1992. It took me another thirteen years to happen upon it and I'm glad I have. With great versions of "Dust My Broom," "Statesboro Blues, and ".44 Blues," this may be my favorite unexpected find and the very definition of a "Lost Classic."

Now Playing: "Baby, What You Want Me to Do" Rising Sons Rising Sons

I think the Nico album 'Chelsea Girls' is fantastic. It features three members of Velvet Underground, and the songs are written by Lou Reed and Jackson Browne, so I can't really call it a 'Nico' album. But, it came out before Velvet Underground, and has the same sort of approach with a more ethereal ecclectic sound.