Heh. Yep, as they say, there’s no accounting for (my) tastes. All I can say is that I prefer Revolution 9 over Electronic Sound. 
If you bought the Special Edition of Neil Young’s Weld live album, you got a third disc titled Arc. 30 minutes of distortion and feedback. Filler indeed.
Point taken. I got mine from Amazon, less than a year ago.
I knew when I saw the thread title that this would come up! As I’ve said before, I’m impressed with it as a sound collage, and wouldn’t judge and compare it against songs, or even music itself.
As with the other material subsequently reworked from the aborted Smile album, the original version was better.
In the pantheon of great album filler is the Reverend Horton Heat’s version of “The Entertainer” (from their album “Liquor In The Front”).
(See my post #12) I’m sure you’re not the only one. For me, it’s delightful enough simply as music to sit down and listen to carefully. I think of it as a sort of mini solo album by the de facto fifth Beatle.
You realize that’s why he did it, right? The idea was to force you to listen to it the way he wanted you to listen to it.
Anyway, in spite of the fact that The Doors are my favorite band ever and I think every one of their albums are great even I admit that some songs are much less great than others, and almost all of them can be found on The Soft Parade. Robby Krueger wrote really good pop, but that’s not what people were looking for. “Wishful Sinful” and “Runnin’ Blue”, despite being released as singles, are among the very last songs if you ranked everything The Doors ever did.
An example of good bonus tracks on a CD release would be the Wishbone Ash “Argus” album. The bonus tracks are from a (unreleased?) “Live In Memphis” EP, including a 17 minute version of “Phoenix”.
They Might Be Giants Apollo 18 includes 21 tracks, from 5 to 20 seconds long, called “Fingertips”, little musical vignettes designed to showcase the new “shuffle” function becoming common on CD players.
Have you heard “Sing this all together” from “Their Satanic Majesties Request” lately? When Revolution #9 came up during walks and I forced myself to listen to it, I got what he was doing, and the arc of the song. Sing this all together has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Now, I’ve never listened to it stoned, but I can’t think it improves things.
It might have 45 years ago, but no longer does. The only track that hasn’t aged well, IMO.
Most of the Roxy Music albums* have their fair share of indifferent filler. As an exemplar, how about In Every Dreamhome a Heartache?
Plus it fades out and then back in again. Now* there’s* a song that goes on too long…
j
-
- essentially gave up after Siren
Fingertips is a delightful goofy collection. It really is a cool effect if you shuffle the album.
I was also (if I recall correctly) at the concert where they first successfully played the entire thing live (Urbana, IL in late 2002).
My personal vote is the untitled track of Jawbreaker’s Dear You album. It’s an acoustic number with a slightly more funny vibe than their usual angry punk. It’s interesting to me because Jawbreaker disbanded after that album and the singer’s next project Jets to Brazil had a vibe a bit closer to that song. I’ve always viewed at as the glue between the sound of Jawbreaker and Jets.
Thank God it’s short, because, “Wild Honey Pie,” (The Beatles’ “White Album”) is the worst. I like to think Alan Parsons snuck in to Abbey Road late one night and de-tuned all their instruments and they were too stoned to notice when they recorded it the next day.
Haven’t heard either of those in decades.
Can’t mention Styx without this.
No “they”: it’s all Paul.
Your post inspired me to look it up on Wikipedia, where I learn that “According to McCartney, the song might have been excluded from The Beatles album, but Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, ‘liked it very much so we decided to leave it on the album’”; and that "In 2003, Stylus Magazine ranked the song at number 1 on their list of the “Top Ten Filler Tracks.”
^ Ahh, sweet, sweet vindication.
All that noise in the beginning of Steve Miller’s, “Big Old Chad Had a Light On,” needs to go.
Jethro Tull’s Passion Play, and the Hare Who Lost its Spectacles story. It wasn’t enough that it wasted a third of the album run time. The band had technical studio troubles and much of their session was lost, leaving not enough music to fill an album. The story track was true filler. The story was slightly amusing on first listen, and a chore every time afterwards. On the LP it was split between the first and second sides, making it unavoidable without moving the needle. The early CDs made this even worse by poor track breaks making the story part annoyingly unskippable. Later CD editions corrected this so that it was at least skippable.
The album Jamming with Edward was all filler. It was a series of unused tracks from the Rolling Stones’ Let it Bleed sessions, made up of a bunch of jams with Jagger, Wyman, Watts, Nicky Hopkins, and Ry Cooder recorded when Keith Richards was away. They just jammed while the recorder ran and eventually Jagger found the tapes, gave it a remix, and released it. When released, the Stones didn’t even charge full price for it.
Rumor had it that it was released as a “fuck you” to Cooder, who accused Jagger of stealing “Honky Tonk Woman” from him.
I definitely agree that it’s filler, the moreso because the only way it might fit into the album theme is if the protagonist was hallucinating.
However, I only have Passion Play on vinyl ($5 used and I had never heard it before, thought it was worth it to take a shot) and I don’t dislike TSotHwLhS enough to even want to skip over it, except the sniffling at the end of the first line makes me cringe every time I hear it.