Record Store Day projects prompt artists to take creative liberties, explore new outlets

Record Store Day is a holiday that’s been going since 2007. As you might imagine, the holiday centers around record stores. It’s celebrated twice a year, on Black Friday and in April. The idea is to try and make a bit of cash for music stores to stop them from shutting down in our increasingly digital world.

To do this, a bunch of artists put out special physical releases to try and drive interest. What started as a project involving ten bands is now huge. Most Record Store Day projects are now released digitally simultaneously nowadays, which largely defeats the purpose of the original holiday.

Still, the holiday gives artists an excuse to put out a bunch of wacky or unreleased stuff that likely would otherwise be left rotting in a junk drawer somewhere. I thought it’d be fun to go over some of this year’s highlights. Every release mentioned in this article is on either Spotify or YouTube, and there’s probably still physical copies left over in your closest record store.

Live albums have historically been a great way for record labels to make a bit of cash in a pinch or fill a slow season. One such artist to drop a live album this year was Ringo Starr. Ringo’s post-Beatles career has been perhaps the least conventional out of the fab four, which is saying a lot when you look at John Lennon’s career, especially how it ended – I don’t think anybody was expecting that. Ringo’s got enough money that he can kind of do whatever he wants, and, apparently, much of what he wants to do consists of making art in Microsoft Paint. Not a joke, look it up.

When he’s not gripping the mouse like a second grader in the school computer lab, Ringo exercises his creative muscles in a different way. His All-Starr Band is a cover band where Ringo gets various members of famous bands to go on tour with him.

They play a mixture of Beatles songs, Ringo’s solo stuff and the biggest hits from the various artists Ringo ropes into playing with him. For this Record Store Day release, they put out a live album based on a performance from 2019, creatively titled “Ringo Starr and his All-Starr Band Live At the Greek Theatre 2019.”

Ringo’s material both alone and with the Beatles makes up the bulk of the run time, but the guests help to keep things interesting. They got one of the guys from Toto, so there’s three separate Toto songs—one of which, thankfully, was “Africa.” Weezer must be trembling.

Another Record Store Day tactic is to put out box sets, remastered versions of your entire discography, B-sides or unreleased material. David Bowie’s estate opted for the last option and put out a compilation of outtakes from the “Hunky Dory” recording sessions.

While the music contained in the package is available on streaming services, there’s a bunch of cool collector’s items you have to buy the collection to get. That includes a reproduction of the notebooks Bowie kept around at the time and a 100-page-long coffee table book full of photos. In addition to a remaster of the original album, there are 48 additional pieces of unreleased material.

That’s pretty cool, but most of what’s here is demos or alternate versions of songs rather than scrapped songs that have never seen the light of day. I’m not saying I expected to find four or five albums worth of lost David Bowie songs, but I hoped to see at least a bit of variety.

I’ll give you an example: between the original song, a remix and a handful of live iterations. there are four separate versions of “Oh! You Pretty Things.” This is a multi-CD release, by the way, and two of those versions are on disc three while the other two are across discs two and four. Disc one is left without a version of “Oh! You Pretty Things.”

In short, it’s a mess digging through this thing, and there’s a lot of junk. That’s kind of the fun of box sets, I guess. You’re looking for treasure amidst the duds. It’s not something I would buy.

Retailing at $120, it seems Bowie’s estate is confident that someone out there is into this stuff. My vote for the best track on here is “Shadow Man,” demoed for this album but never released until it was rerecorded for Bowie’s 2002 album Heathen over 30 years later. Hearing the original is kind of cool. There’s also a bunch of tracks Bowie recorded in a San Fransisco hotel room, really lofi acoustic stuff. I’d hunt that stuff down on Spotify and maybe gloss over the rest.

Perhaps the most exciting release of this year’s event has been the long-lost Doors song “Paris Blues.” I’m a medium Doors fan so I can’t appreciate the gravity of this, but I guess for those guys it’s a big deal. Apparently, this song is kind of like the Beach Boy’s “Smile” album, except for even more obscure in that we didn’t even have bootlegs. And like how “Smile” was eventually released, “Paris Blues” has finally come to light.

I have to say, seeing such a coveted piece of rock history be turned into a throwaway trinket for a commercial holiday does kill the magic a little, but that’s the business for you. Most of the Door’s music was released back when the Vietnam War was still a legitimate political debate and not something we made memes about, so there’s certainly a novelty in getting to see new material unearthed after all this time. The actual song is pretty underwhelming.

While “Smile” is sometimes referred to as the best Beach Boys album that never was, “Paris Blues” is just a typical Doors song. It’s good, but nothing mind blowing. Much like how producers used “creative editing” to save the song, the Doors seem to be using the same tactic to creatively edit history. Expect future pressings of Krieger’s book to have those passages conveniently rewritten to praise “Paris Blues” as a lost masterpiece. Regardless, the song isn’t the only thing the Doors put out. They managed to track down enough live stuff and studio covers to fill out both sides of a vinyl with fresh material.

The strongest part of this release isn’t the music but rather the vinyl cover, which was painted by none other than Robby Krieger himself, which I imagine he painted in his downtime when he wasn’t writing books that would later come back to haunt him.

This has been a somewhat underwhelming end to the hunt for one of rock’s holy grails, but at least this story has an ending. To this day we have yet to see some of the lost Michael Jackson-Freddie Mercury collaborations. Maybe next Record Store Day we’ll finally be blessed.

This might seem like a pretty cursed year for those unfamiliar with the tradition, but the truth is that this is pretty par for the course. Record Store Day rarely leads to anything really good. Stuff like Weezer’s “Six Hits” makes up most of what you’re likely to find.

Still, I guess I have to applaud the effort. Anything that keeps struggling music stores afloat is a-okay in my book, even if that means hipsters end up paying through the nose for vinyl copies of mediocre outtakes from bands that don’t exist anymore. This is probably the best we could have reasonably asked for from this year’s event. Happy Record Store Day, everybody.