5 Famous Albums You Won't Believe You Can't Buy Anymore

I talk about Neil Young in this column like it's still the 1970s, which is his fault for still being alive and doing things at such an advanced age. At any rate, let's talk about him some more! If you don't know any other Neil Young songs, there's a good chance you're at least familiar with stuff like "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold" ...

... which were both huge singles from his most successful and beloved album ever, Harvest. That "classic" is also responsible for spawning what has come to be known as "The Ditch Trilogy," a series of sloppy-but-completely-incredible albums that earned Neil Young a lifetime of reminders that, no matter how many times he's been asked, not once has he cranked out another album even remotely similar to Harvest.

Unless you count all of these.

The albums earned their group nickname by way of this Neil Young quote, taken from the liner notes of the greatest-hits collection Decade.

"['Heart of Gold'] put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch."

I've talked about one of those three albums previously. It's called On the Beach, and it's fantastic, but I almost wrote about another of the "Ditch" albums, Tonight's the Night, in that article instead.

If you've never heard it before, rectify that by picking up a copy anywhere fine music is sold. Also, be grateful that you can, because that isn't the case with all of the albums in this series.

Following the success of Harvest, Neil Young's record label wanted another album just like it and his fans wanted him to go on tour and play every song from it. He gave all of those people none of those things. Instead, his official follow-up to the expert craftsmanship of Harvest was a circus of an album called Time Fades Away, which consisted of completely new songs recorded while on a stadium tour of the United States. By that, I don't mean he used his downtime to hit the studio. No, he literally recorded the songs live onstage in front of scores of fans who'd never heard them before.

It's a mess, but the songs are still mostly in the same vein as the material on Harvest, except with louder guitars and less practice. In that way, it's a natural link between the studio perfectness of its predecessor and the complete and total chaos of Tonight's the Night. Also, it's completely unavailable in stores.

Well, if you're the Record Store Day type, you could have picked up a copy of the album on vinyl, provided you were willing to shell out for a boxed set that also included three other albums. He eventually scrapped that plan, though, in the name of "focusing on other projects." There have been several reasons given for the album's continued absence from store shelves, chief among them being that Neil Young just plain doesn't like it. He calls Time Fades Away his least favorite among everything he's recorded, like he doesn't even realize he was still making music in the '80s.

That's probably just a convenient excuse meant to mask the true and far more hilarious reason why you'll never get to buy a pristine copy of Time Fades Away in your lifetime. To put it plainly, the album doesn't exist anymore. Specifically, the master tapes are missing because, as is stated right on the back cover, the songs were recorded directly to a computer that, as it turned out, made music that kind of sounds like ass. No two-track master tapes were ever made. That makes remastering the album in the traditional sense completely impossible, meaning any new release will sound like the same shit it did back when it first came out. So, if you've ever wondered how Neil Young developed his healthy mistrust for digital music, this album is probably your answer. It's also, all things considered, pretty damn great.

Too bad you can't buy it anymore!

Until then, all we have are interviews from people who may or may not have had intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Prince universe to base our opinions on, and those are available in abundance in that book. One of my favorite involves the reason behind his decision to pull the fabled Black Album off shelves before it sold a single copy.

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It certainly wasn't because he spent too much time worrying about the album cover.

The album was completely finished, promotional copies had been sent around, the whole bit. Then, at the very last moment, Prince just changed his mind. What gives? Well, like anything else music-myth related, the culprit is drugs. According to legend, in the days prior to the release of The Black Album, which would have been the official follow-up to the mega-successful Sign o' the Times, Prince tried ecstasy for the first time. Apparently, it didn't go well. As the story goes, he was so freaked out by the experience he became convinced that The Black Album was evil and needed to be withdrawn immediately. He promptly replaced it with Lovesexy. If you've ever wondered what Prince looks like while in the throes of ecstasy, that album cover is probably a decent representation.

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Exactly the same way he looks any other time, of course.

For his part, Prince blamed the decision on "a religious experience," which I'm assuming means the ecstasy story is true. Anyway, his plan to keep the public from hearing "2 Nigs United 4 West Compton" and other classics wasn't a complete success. Bootleg versions of the album flooded the market, a situation Prince himself subliminally complained about in the "Alphabet St." video.

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How did you miss this?

In time, his fears of demonic possession through '80s pop music must have subsided, because Prince quietly released The Black Album in November 1994 ... and then promptly deleted it again in January 1995. It's rumored that he allowed its release only to fulfill a seven-album contract with Warner Bros., which wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. Whatever the case, aside from those few months, The Black Album never has been and probably never will be available.

I'd say you could just download it from a torrenting site or something, but considering this is Prince we're talking about, that would probably end in you getting your home firebombed by the RIAA. Best to just cut your losses on this one.

It's not for business reasons, either. He believes that albums should be enjoyed in their entirety and not divided up into singles and sold for less than a dollar each. You might recognize that as the exact same stance Radiohead used to take on their music. Who would've put their money on Garth Brooks being the last holdout among those two?

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Everyone in Radiohead, probably.

It's true, though ... for now. He's actually making plans to release his catalog in digital formats literally any day, and when he does he'll probably become the best-selling solo artist of all-time. Not just the best-selling solo artist of the SoundScan era. All-time. Ever. As in, "fuck you, Elvis."

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The original Garth Brooks.

And that's just if he sells 1 million copies of his back catalog, which he totally will. He put out a bullshit four-disc set of covers as a Walmart exclusive recently and sold a million copies of that. Because he's offering these downloads exclusively through his website, he can charge as little as $3.49 per album and still have it count toward his album sales, and he's promised that people who buy the entire catalog will get it for "a stupid price" and that what he's doing will be mistaken for "giving it away." Also, and as always, they won't be available as individual songs. He'll sell a million albums. He might sell two million. If he does that, he'll be the best-selling music act ever, surpassing The Beatles.

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Sounds about right.

Still, until that happens and up until this point, throughout the entirety of the digital music era, Garth Brooks' catalog has been completely unavailable for download online. I mean, it's available, obviously. No one can stop a person from ripping a CD to a hard drive and uploading it to the Internet. That's exactly why almost every other act in existence (excluding Tool) has relented and allowed their music to be sold or otherwise distributed online in some form or another. People will just take it if they don't.

So, hate his actual music all you want, but at least give Garth Brooks some credit for being the only major artist who never stopped telling Apple to completely and totally fuck off.

Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are fairly well-known as a duo, is what I'm getting at, which makes it all the more strange that, for almost four decades now, the only album they ever recorded as a pair has been out of print. It's called Buckingham Nicks, appropriately enough, and holy shit, check out Stevie Nicks on the cover.

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Lindsey Buckingham looks pretty great too.

So, what gives? Is this a terrible album? Is this just another case of musicians not wanting their embarrassing early recordings to see the light of day? Not at all. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham have both included songs from the album in their subsequent releases and live shows, and one of them ("Crystal") was re-recorded and released on the 1975 self-titled Fleetwood Mac album where the two made their first appearance with the band. The music is just fine.

As far as I can tell, the reason it's never been re-released is ... because it just hasn't. There were rumours that it would happen last year, seeing as how it was the 40th anniversary of the release and Fleetwood Mac was back in the studio and planning to tour anyway. There was even talk that a previously unreleased song from the Buckingham Nicks sessions would be included in the release. Instead, that song ("Without You") ended up on an iTunes-only EP, the cleverly titled Extended Play, and 2013 came and went without any more talk of releasing the album.

So, for the better part of four decades now, a perfectly listenable album by one of the most well-known music duos in history has been locked away, just waiting to be sold to Fleetwood Mac's Catholic church-like following, and it's probably going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Ahoy, mateys!

It always surprises me that in the timeless "Beatles vs. Stones" debate, fans of The Rolling Stones almost never pull the most obvious card you can play in that argument: Who's the better live band?

That's not even sort of a contest. There has never been a time in history when The Rolling Stones would not have completely annihilated the The Beatles in a live setting. Granted, a lot of that has to do with the fact that The Beatles stopped touring altogether about halfway through their career because the screams from adoring fans made playing music in their presence a completely pointless effort, but still, they stopped and the Stones didn't. Facts are facts.

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Feel free to stop whenever you want, though.

Even with that being the case, isn't it still sort of weird that a Beatles live album doesn't exist? Yes, there are technically a few releases of varying degrees of legitimacy that consist of live recordings you can purchase, but there is no official recording of The Beatles playing music in front of the sea of screaming girls that halted their growth as live performers. At least, it doesn't exist anymore.

In the years following the band's demise, fans demanded a live album of some sort, and they finally got one in 1975 when Sir George Martin (the band's producer, often referred to as "the fifth Beatle") was handed tapes from a few different live performances at the Hollywood Bowl. The resulting album sounded like shit, but they released it anyway. When it came time to re-release everything on CD, though, The Beatles' only live album wasn't invited to the party.

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There's probably not a market for Beatles stuff anymore anyway.

On the one hand, it's understandable. If you've heard Live at the Hollywood Bowl then you know it's not exactly a pleasant listen.

The crowd sounds like a million rape whistles being blown at once, and because it's compiled from a few different performances it even contains a Hollywood movie-style continuity error that involves the band referring to both A Hard Day's Night and Help! as their "new album," when the two were actually released more than a year apart. Bringing the album to life was a process plagued with all sorts of mishaps and glitches, the most hilarious among them being that part of it involved using a vacuum cleaner to blow air into a piece of recording equipment to keep it cool enough to transfer the original recordings to a usable mixing board. Nevertheless, fans ate it up. The album debuted at No. 1 in the U.K. and at No. 2 in the U.S.

Again, I do understand the thinking behind not making this available today. It does sound terrible. On the other hand, though, that's exactly why it should still be in print. The Beatles were a phenomenon that will be discussed for a long time, and a huge part of the mystique surrounding them as a band has to do with those deafening screams from the crowd that basically ruined every attempt at putting on a decent concert.

The start of that video looks like a fucking soccer riot.

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Hooligans.

It's not like The Beatles were the only band making music people liked at the time, but they were the only band that elicited that kind of reaction from the general public. What's happening in that video is not fandom, it's an illness. Beatlemania was a plague that infected the United States. It's all well and fine to explain that part of the legend to someone, but wouldn't it really drive the point home if you could throw on the band's lone attempt at an official live album for future generations to hear while we bore the shit out of them by talking about the Beatles?

I'm not saying we need this album for entertainment purposes, but as far as documents of noteworthy moments in American history go, we could do a lot worse.

Adam would like it a whole lot if you'd download the latest episode of his podcast and/or watch him tell jokes at Rooftop Comedy. Then come see him do that in person the first and third Tuesday of every month at Westside Comedy Theater in Santa Monica. Once you have all of that out of your system, follow him on Twitter and Facebook.