These days it can be surprisingly easy to find the original demo of a song. Sometimes because the 28th Anniversary Special Edition Boxed Set of something or other is padded out with a few – so if you want to own them, you have to buy all the other tracks for the third time (Grrr!). These might end up on YouTube. Sometimes demos just mysteriously appear on YouTube, provenance unknown.
Whatever - I’m increasingly fascinated with what’s out there. Some are good, some – uh – less so. But usually they are at least interesting, and sometimes they join dots that you weren’t expecting to see joined. Examples:
Elvis Costello – The Angels Wanna wear My Red Shoes. I’ve posted this before – it’s just a fine recording of a great song, by a (then) nobody who for years had a real hard time getting heard.
Part of the OP title asks what the demo tells you – maybe it tells you nothing much, but hey, post the demo anyway, I’d like to hear it. But some are real dot-joiners, like Chance Meeting by Roxy Music (provenance unknown). The received wisdom re their first album was that it was let down by “unsympathetic” production, with this song usually being cited as the worst example. Having heard the demos*, I now think that the production was at the very least a yeoman effort. All the elements that made Chance Meeting such a great song are already there in the demo. But taking that wandering, unfocused mess and rendering it down to a fine recording (I largely disagree with the received wisdom) was a job well done. I have a new appreciation of the album’s production
For reference, the finished album track.
So go on, play me a demo. And maybe tell me a story.
j
* - there are apparently 5 songs on the demo tape: Chance Meeting, 2HB, and Lady (became Ladytron) I have found on Youtube. One other was apparently The BOB (Medley); haven’t ID’d the last one yet.
I really enjoy demos. It’s fascinating to hear the process that went into creating a song you likely heard the final verison of a thousand times already. I also just enjoy ‘unplugged’ style acoustic, stripped down versions of songs. You know a song is really good if it holds up with vocals and minimal instrumental accompaniment.
Here’s an early demo of the Stone’s “All Down the Line” from "Exile on Main Street, before they had come up with all the words, so Mick is just singing gibberish at some points. I don’t know what it tells me other than it’s a very nice, mellower acoustic version of the final cut that I’ve always liked a lot. (Take 1 that is; take 2 is getting much closer to the final version). Sha-la-ley:
Here’s a demo of Van Morrison singing “Brand New Day” where he utters a very self-pleased sounding “yeah” after a particular phrasing (at about 2:25). It tells me that Van the Man was always his own biggest fan:
The Stones demo lead me to wonder if I could find a demo of my favorite Stones song, and indeed I did - here it is:
What strikes me about this is that it really shows up the bluesy roots of the song - I think it’s very obvious. The other thing that occurs to me is that Tumblin’ Dice has an odd structure, and this is present in the demo, so it looks as if the song was just written like that, rather than it being built into the song during recording sessions.
How about a bit of Dylan? When he was playing around with early versions of Like A Rolling Stone it was being played in 3-4 time. Here’s a demo which sounds distinctly waltz-ish.
In these studio rehearsals the time signature is even more pronounced.
You have to wonder at what point there was a lightbulb moment - Hey guys, you know…maybe this really isn’t a waltz?
Wow, thanks for that! I had no idea “Like a Rolling Stone” was originally attempted in 3/4 time. The vocal version really sounds like trying to shoehorn a 4/4 song into 3/4 time.
Apparently after 2 days of trying:
During a difficult two-day preproduction, Dylan struggled to find the essence of the song, which was demoed without success in 3/4 time. A breakthrough was made when it was tried in a rock music format…
I shared this recently in the “Post the Original Versions” thread, but it works well here. “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”, made famous by Cyndi Lauper, was originally written by a singer-songwriter named Robert Hazard, who composed it as a New Wave song sung from a male perspective. It’s amazing how differently the lyrics hit in his version compared to Cyndi’s, even though only one line has been altered for the gender flip (“All of my girls are gonna walk in the sun” becomes “I wanna be the one to walk in the sun”).
That’s just … a strange, strange story. But that George Harrison – a nice guy or what?
Yeah, I remember thanking you for posting it, because I had no idea it was out there. Now I come to think about it, that might have been what started me thinking about creating this thread. I ought to acknowledge that right now .
More demos. You could write a thesis on Velvet Underground demos – I imagine someone already has. Until we see that in print, here’s a fascinating collection of – count ‘em – 25* VU demos. It’s worth spending the time to go through them, or at least take in a sample. With that latter point in mind, here is a sample.
Ocean. Most of Lou’s first solo album was made up of recycled unreleased Velvets songs. I guess it shows you that Lou was a prolific writer, but he didn’t waste much. But mostly what this tells me is that I know three versions of Ocean, and they’re all great. That, I think, is the mark of a great song.
Some recycled songs didn’t make it onto Lou’s first solo album. Satellite Of Love appeared on the second. (Real Good Time Together - not in this collection - didn’t reappear until Street Hassle in ’78.) Anyway, this version of Satellite is very much in its infancy, compared to the finished masterpiece. (And of course, having Mick Ronson around never hurt anyone.)
