Recently reading the book ‘Neil and Me’, Bargepole discovered the final verse of the song Cortez The Killer was lost after a power outage and was never recorded.
Are there other songs with ‘lost’ verses that never made it to the final recording, or even songs where a particular verse was substituted by an alternate effort?
Missing
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There’s a section in Garden by The Fall that disappears and reappears depending on which version you’re listening to, and it goes a little something like this…
“This entails explosive charges left to me by a dead sailor from Bury being wired up under every windowsill in close proximity to my ears. When phones ring and are inconvenient to the ears, I just press table lamp light button next to my bed and they blow up. I got the idea from a book. Yours sincerely, Mr Reg Varney”
There’s also a verse on the RPTLC album that was present in the promo but missing from the official release. It was quite an interesting one because MES talked about his Renegade ghostwriter Austin Collins but I can’t for the life of me remember which one and a hurried perusal of the online lyrics hasn’t turned anything up.
Wasn’t there also an extra verse to Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others by The Smiths. Oh for a memory, but I’m sure I had a version on a cassette single that had an extra bit.
“On the shop floor there’s a calendar / As obvious as snow / As if we didn’t know / Some girls are bigger than others”
Extra track on the “I Started something I Couldn’t Finish” cassette single (or “cassingle” as they tried and failed to get us to call it. Surely the least-loved musical format, apart from maybe DAT or whatever it was called). Why do I remember these things?
Didn’t I read that Hallelujah had about 94(!) verses in its written form, this coming to light when John Cale sought permission to cover it from its author, with the entire unabridged being sent over, rather than the few verses Cohen had himself performed on record.
Three verses were ‘lost’ from Woddy Guthrie’s most famous, standard recordings of “This Land is Your Land”. They were verses of a more directly political nature than the rest of the song, and they were only included in one 1944 recording, currently held by the Smithsonian Institution:
“There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said ‘private property’;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
This land was made for you and me.
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?”
At the celebration concert before President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen reinstated these verses and sang them loud ‘n proud.
There that extra verse of The Boxer that I don’t think appeared until 1981.
http://youtu.be/MXIBB0QjkQU
The ‘after changes we are more or less the same’ verse is on Live Rhymin’ from 1974. I love that verse.
Grateful Dead. I read somewheres that songwriting circa 1970 was so fast and furious that Hunter would be still writing verses as the recording was going on. Friend of the Devil’s last verse goes:
You can borrow from the Devil
You can borrow from a friend
But the Devil give you twenty
When your friend got only ten
Robert Hunter read this to Garcia who supposedly replied “We finished it yesterday. I’m not re-doing it again”
Here’s the full version on Robert Hunter’s solo album Jack of Roses
Didn’t a similar-ish situation arise on Terrapin Station where Hunter’s solo version contains more verses than the Dead’s?
Here you go.
“Ivory Wheels on a Rosewood Track” at 5:15 is fantastic.
Not sure if this wasn’t written for the original or written later, but Richard Thompson added this to later live versions of Hokey Pokey. The song about using ice cream as a lewd metaphor (as I recall from an interview)
Lick it on the bottom, lick it on the top
Suck it just hard enough
Open up wide when it drips down the side
You want to catch all that good stuff
Is the book ‘Neil and Me’ worth reading? I’m aware his Dad was a respected journalist, so I’d presume it would be well-written, but what’s the content like?
It can only be better than Neil’s abysmal effort.
It’s not bad – obviously he’s not an impartial observer, but it’s worth a read esspecially if you can pick it up cheap.
Stiff Little Fingers instrumental “Go For It” was originally intended to have lyrics,
Indeed, Gordon Ogilvie wrote some in the studio whilst recording. Either (a) they weren’t very good or (b) they ran out of time.
The words were ultimately filed under ‘B’ for Bin
“Come Back” by The Mighty Wah! had almost the entire lyric and the song’s subject matter changed, after Pete Wylie’s label refused to release the original version he recorded.
In the original version, subject matter an artistic comeback, later released on an NME cassette “Department Of Enjoyment”, he sings:
“We’ll give T-shirts and videos.
We’ll bribe the charts and pay DJs, ’cause money talks.
We’ll get you on The Sooty Show.
Exposure is no nemesis…
…come back, even Yes can have hits, come back.”
Beggars Banquet didn’t fancy trying to promote that one.
I always loved that version – and didn’t remember where it was. Thanks
“don’t mention Deaf School”
The Who
The Sisters Of Mercy’s “Never Land” was always subtitled “(A Fragment)” on the Floodland LP. The full version didn’t emerge until the 2006 reissue, and not only were there extra lyrics, those lyrics changed the entire meaning of the song – I’d always imagined Never Land as a place, but it’s actually a verb (“we will never land”).
that would have been a great choice for the stoner thread, wouldn’t it?
And back to Neil Young. The version of Don’t be Denied that appears on Time Fades Away omits a verse included on other nights in that tour:
Oh Canada
We played all night
I really hate to leave you now
But to stay just wouldn’t be right.
Down in Hollywood
We played so good
The HJH’s Anthology 3 revealed a rather clunky extra verse about the whole world being a stage or something in ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.
If those Anthologies told us anything it was that the HJH’s were, more often than not, fantastic editors of their own work.
Off hand, I can only remember ‘She Came In Through The Bathroom Window’ being (arguably) better than the released version.