About those leaked McCartney outtakes ...
As many of you already know, a digital deluge of unreleased Paul McCartney music hit the Internet last week, with nearly 70 tracks made available for free via various download sites by unknown parties. Included were alternate takes and mixes and live tour rehearsals, with the highlights including a take of "Silly Love Songs" in which McCartney scats what will be the horn part; a 1980 Wings version of "No Values," later re-recorded for the "Give My Regards to Broad Street" movie; and an early version of Wings' "Must Do Something About It" with McCartney handling the vocal rather than drummer Joe English, who ended up singing it.
It was an unprecedented flood of unauthorized material — and fans didn't even have to buy bootlegs to get it!
The fact that these tracks started showing up the day after it had been announced that McCartney had signed a deal with Concord Music to begin putting out remastered reissues of his album catalog with bonus tracks appeared to be no coincidence.
One rumor had a disgruntled member of the project's team sending out the tracks in protest of the box being put on the back burner by the new Concord deal. Fans also speculated that some of the tracks (mainly the rehearsals from Wings' 1976-76 tour) were from cassettes auctioned in 1998 that had belonged to the late Trevor Jones, the band's original roadie.
Since a Beatlefan contributing editor received the outtakes directly in e-mails (just prior to them showing up on download sites) from a London source who had last year leaked information about work on the rarities box set, we were pretty sure these were tracks culled during the selection process, probably taken from test CD-Rs.
We published a Beatlefan/EXTRA! this week detailing all of this that's still on its way to subscribers. Just after that report had gone to press, our contributor received confirmation of the above scenario from the London source, who says that the flurry of tracks that hit last week were indeed culls from what had been listened to and rejected from the boxed set that has been worked on for almost three years.
The London source said that McCartney's MPL company knows about what happened last week and is furious about it and they are investigating, but since the tracks he sent were indeed done on CD-Rs and passed around, they were in others' hands as well as his, so he feels safe at the moment. Some of that material was indeed on the so-called Trevor Jones tapes, but he said that MPL had the originals and what was auctioned off were second- or third-generation cassette copies.
The source is indeed very frustrated about the decision to delay the box release (which had been planned for late this year or early next year) in favor of the Concord remasters, and he said that they were indeed pulling some of the material from that project to use in the remasters series.
But he said that the Concord reissue series will please fans and probably will not lead to the box set being canceled. Rather, he thinks it will force the box set's release due to demand.
He also said that one thing that is being seriously considered is a deluxe package for "Wings Over America" that will include the remastered "Rockshow" DVD. (He noted that the entire film was redone during work on "The McCartney Years" DVD set project and is ready to go.)
None of this has been confirmed, of course, but the source sent along a handful of additional MP3 treats, including a recording of Michael Jackson working on "The Girl Is Mine" with McCartney.
So the flow of unreleased music apparently is not finished yet ...
http://billking.livejournal.com/47935.html