AngieBlue wrote on Mar 11
th, 2010 at 1:37am:
The article implies that Don Was is going to sort through it all. He says there is tons of stuff. It took a year to do Exile alone. The entire mess could take several. I was glad to read they are looking for the tracks the bootleggers don't have. This could be very interesting - not just the Exile re-issue.
I'm hoping listening to the unfinished tracks from time gone by gives Mick and Keith the itch. Either finishing the thoughts on tape or using the old tapes as guides to new tracks.
All the more reason to appoint a band archivist or a team of people to take care of it. Its unreasonable to expect Don Was to do this on a regular basis - he has a career outside of working with the Stones - and naturally its unfeasible for the band to do it themselves, as they all have other things to do (stop sniggering!).
Bob Dylan does this. I would hazard a guess that his input into his 'Bootleg Series' is minimal and at the very most involves nothing more than giving a final nod of approval or otherwise. Jeff Rosen has done a great job in overseeing Bob's archives and the shot in the arm it has given his career in the last two decades despite starting a time when his stock was at its lowest ever ebb has been massive. Grateful Dead fans have been spoiled rotten with the 'Dick's Picks' series, even though the guy who originally selected the recordings for the band's approval died in 1999. I think to date there have been 36 'Dick's Picks' releases between 1993 and 2005, a dozen digital 'Download series' of shows released between 2005 and 2006 - and then the 'Road Trips' series of multiple shows from one tour, which has already seen 10 releases since late 2007.
Consider how little input the Stones must have made into some of their recent releases and doing something like this would hardly take up too much of their time - ie, releasing 'Live Licks, an album that none of them could surely have heard before it was in the shops (otherwise theyd have noticed the horrible editing), sanctioning the release of 'Rarities' (with a track listing which featured a collection of songs, half of which werent even rarities at all, but which featured on still-available albums which had sold milions of copies and which featured sleevenotes which appeared to have been researched by a chimp) and 'Biggest Bang' (a live DVD which included overdubs by two guitar technicians)
Bob, Neil and Bruce have all managed to juggle archives projects with a career in which they still make acclaimed new records and tour regularly - so the notion that the Stones can't or won't do it while still a working band due to some kind of obsession with not wanting their current work to be compared to what they did years ago doesn't really make sense to me.
I can understand the logic of not wanting to spend weeks or months wading through old tapes (although each to their own - it'd be a musical wet dream for me), but it should be easy enough to get a few people capable of doing most of the heavy lifting for them. Hopefully it wont be the 'expert' entrusted with sending Mick a compilation of circulating 'Exile' outtakes to enable him to research the upcoming CD but who somehow managed to provide him with a shitload of bootlegs from the late 70's instead.
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