It’s great that On the Beach has finally come to CD. For best album that still hasn’t been released on CD, I’d nominate another Neil Young album Time Fades Away from roughly the same period; if not Neil’s best album, it’s certainly in the top five.
Hendrix In The West, a well thought out compilation of live tracks originally released a few years agter his death. I haven’t seen this in America at least.
There’s no American release of Black Sabbath’s Born Again, the album they did with Ian Gillen of Deep Purple on vocals. Maybe Warner Bros. doesn’t like the cover.
Brownsville Station. The album with “My Friend Jack”. I’ve found a few greatest hits CD’s, but none with that song.
This is the ice-age by Martha and the Muffins. One of the ten best eighties albums - and the record company refuses to release it on CD.
AFAIK, Big World by Joe Jackson was never released on CD.
There’s a ton of old comedy albums out there that have never made the cut. Allan Sherman’s been mentioned, and I’ll add the Smothers Brothers. “Think Ethnic” belongs on CD.
I nominate “Travelling Wilburys” Vol. 1, which I’ve never been able to find on CD.
Commander Cody’s 1975 eponymous album is not available on cd. I’ve looked and looked. My brother actually owns the ablum and I have a cd copied from it. It’s not listed for sale even on the Commander’s own website. It’s got some kick ass honkytonkin’ rock and roll and some of the twangiest country /trucker songs ever recorded. And also my favorite song ever, The Boogieman Boogie.
American music at its best people!
The Joy of Cooking stuff has been reissued more than once. The first Traveling Wilburys came out on CD, too, but has been out of print for over a decade.
If we discount bootlegs, one of the greatest caches of (legitimately) unreissued popular music is the Cameo-Parkway catalog. It’s owned by Allan Klein and ABKCO, who refuse to reissue it for whatever reason. That means any CDs you see that contain hits by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell, Dee Dee Sharp, the Orlons, the Tymes, the Dovells, etc, are either re-recordings or bootlegs. There are a number of bootleg labels–Park, Bow, Campark–that specialize in Cameo-Parkway reissue CDs mastered from vinyl.
At The Drive-In’s debut 4 song 7" EP Hell Paso was never put down onto CD format, unlike all of their other records that are available on re-released CD’s from the various labels they’d been signed to before breaking up in 2000.