"Digital Puppies in Cyberspace" (the only legal CDR on this page)| Most Wanted MP3s |
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Axehammer "Axehammer" Steve Dahl & Teenage Radiation "Falklands!" Demon Flight "Flight of the Demon" Pandemonium "Road I'm Traveling", "Radiation Day" Rabbit "Locomotive Breath" (Trevor Rabin's early band) Sheavy "Dirty Women" Swift Kick "Long Live Rock" UTFO w/Anthrax "Lethal" Vanity "Strap on Bobby Ray" (No, really!) Plus there's some parody song called "Pac-Man", based on Rod Stewart's "Passion", that I can't seem to find any information on (no, it's NOT the Weird Al Yankovick song!!!!) |
"Digital Puppies in Cyberspace" (the only legal CDR on this page)I may have created a monster here...okay, here's the story. About ten years ago, there was this thing called the Personics system in all the local record stores, whereby you could record your own "custom tape" of whatever songs they had for sale, at about $1-1.50 per track. They went out of business pretty quick, but not until they got about $500 from me (most of that in the first month!) Oh well, tapes suck nowadays, but I thought it would be a cool idea to resurrect the system using CD format...well, I went surfing by CD Universe (a useless online record store that I check periodically for cover art, and their security breach in Nov. '99 gave me quite a few sleepless nights) and saw they had a "Custom Disc" service!! Let me tell you, though, out of the 170,000 songs they offer, approximately 169,900 are TOTAL CRAP -- and I went through the whole list, believe it or not! (Fans of obscure punk, opera, country music, and third-rate hip-hop would have a field day, however. :-)) Well I did manage to scrape together enough songs to fill a CD, so let's see what we got...
Started off with Ian Anderson (you know, that Jethro Tull guy), a quiet, mellow song taken from a Peter Green (who the hell?) tribute album. The Gary Numan, Bauhaus, Tommy Tutone & Plimsouls songs require no explanation...they also represent the ENTIRETY of their 80's pop selection (which is primarily what I was looking for!!) The rare Prong & Smashing Pumpkins songs were a nice surprise -- "Jackie Blue" comes from some tribute to the Ozark Mountain Daredevils (and it's a pleasantly heavy, noisy rocker, quite a relief after that hippy-hop garbage they dumped out on Adore); I have no idea where the Prong songs came from. For the rest, I basically filled up with some cool 60's rock songs (so chosen because I like how "Animal Zombie Turtles" sounds), that Hooked on Classics disco thingy, and of course, Glenn Miller's big band classic "In the Mood" -- just LOVE that song! (Unfortunately, the version here is pretty low-tech, probly recorded in the 30's, and definitely not the same as the RA sample they had available!) And topped the whole thing off with a Jerky Boys classic. Whew. Ya know, it's a pretty damn eclectic mix, now that I think about it. (Haha...you think that's bad, you should check out my Personics tape collection...my friends say they are going to use it at my committal hearing someday!!)
Unfortunately...or luckily, perhaps...these 21 songs are just about the extent of it. Unless I wanna delve deeper into cheesy 60s/70s "hits", or start picking out classical songs at random. One interesting thing I noticed, however, is they did offer complete listings of a couple very out-of-print albums that I've always wanted (by the Accused and Robin Trower, in particular); also there's about 3 hours of spoken word material by Ice-T, bitching about the riots and all that, hmm maybe I could....NO!!! ... MUST .... RESIST ..... TEMPTATION!!!!! .... MUST ...... RESIST.......
The second in the "Digital Puppy" series, this one is a compilation of various tracks from a bunch of CDRs that my "rare CD connection" kept dumping on me. (Astute readers may notice that a couple galleries are now missing from the home page...) As you can see, cover songs rule the day here: little-known Aussie singer Daryl Braithwaite does an AWESOME version of Peter Gabriel's "I Don't Remember", and Stryper's cover of "Shining Star" (originally by Earth Wind & Fire) is also damn good. I'm not that thrilled with Lenny Kravitz's version of Kiss's "Deuce", however; but the new-wave/rock band Pseudo Echo simply ROCKS on the disco classic "Funkytown" (originally by Lipps Inc.) -- you know, Pseudo Echo played a gig at a dance at my high school before they became a one-hit wonder, isn't that interesting? Hmm, didn't think so.
Tracklist v2.0 replaces the Black Sabbath mp3s with the two bonus tracks from Van Halen's Greatest Hits CD, which was supposed to be the start of a reunion with David Lee Roth...back in 1996...hey guys, we're still waiting!! David Coverdale's song comes from a soundtrack, Iron Eagle I think. I also fixed the volume levels on the Gerry Rafferty songs. And speaking of which, I have a real beef with "Right Down the Line", when he sings the lyric, "You're as constant as the Northern Star, the brightest light that shines"...umm, sorry, but Polaris is NOT the brightest star in the nighttime sky, it's like 50th brightest or so, VEGA is #1 brightest, thank you very much!!! (And in fact, due to a slight wobbling in the Earth's rotation, Vega will become the Northern star in 25,000 years, so it's not that constant, either!!)
The first all-mp3 collection in the D.P. series, all various odds & ends collected from the Internet over the past 3 years. With two creations of my own: the first is merely the intro to my former radio show, while the last is...well, I'll let you listen for yourself. :))
Ok, lessee how much money the record companies have lost. :) Well, we've got four Anthrax songs -- the first two (including "Snap", a D.R.I. cover) are b-sides of a two-part single from Vol. 8, and it's damn near impossible to find those on CD since their record company folded. "Ball of Confusion" is the obligatory extra track tacked onto their Return of the Killer A's compilation, and lemme tell ya, I am SICK of that trick! "She" comes from the Kiss tribute, no way I'm gonna buy THAT thing either! (Although hearing Garth Brooks do "Hard Luck Woman" would be kinda interesting...) The next two songs also come from tributes...I'll probably take hell for including that Evergrey song, since they're a PM fave, but sorry, there's NO WAY IN HELL I'm buying a Yngwie Malmsteen tribute!! Same situation applies to "Dream On", from the Aerosmith tribute...bah, everyone has this mp3 already. And if you don't, fire up Napster and GET IT, because it rules!
Next up comes Hear'N Aid "Stars" -- now THIS is a CD I definitely plan to buy, in fact I'd have it already if it weren't so rare & expensive!! In case you're unfamiliar with this song, it's heavy metal's contribution to the "benefit" craze of the mid-80s...ya know, "We Are The World" (blech), Live Aid, etc. Written by Ronnie James Dio and backed by Rudy Sarzo & Frankie Banali of Quiet Riot, the vocalists featured include David Meniketti (Y&T), Rob Halford (Judas Priest), Kevin DuBrow (Q.Riot again), Eric Bloom (Blue Öyster Cult), Paul Shortino (some shitty band called Rough Cutt, who Dio took under his wing but they still sucked), Geoff Tate (Queensryche), and Don Dokken -- likewise, the 3-minute guitar solo is a who's-who of mid-80s metal: Craig Goldy (Guiffria, and later Dio), Eddie Ojeda (Twisted Sister), Vivian Campbell (Dio etc.), Brad Gillis (Night Ranger), Neal Schon (duh), George Lynch (Dokken again), Yngwie Malmsteen, Carlos Cavazo (Q.Riot again again), and Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser (BÖC again); with Iron Maiden's Dave Murray & Adrian Smith providing the melody lines. Whew!!
Tracks 2 and 10-18 are all rare/unreleased, so like hell the music companies are losing any money here. Helloween's "Oernst of Life" comes from the old Death Metal sampler, released around '85 or so, and never made it to any CD I'm aware of (and whoever ripped this track did a helluva job of vinyl mastering, might I add.) Don't have a clue where the 2nd Helloween song came from. The lead singer of Abstract Reality promised to send me free copies of their albums as they were released, but never came through...probably a good thing, because the few mp3s on their homepage sucked! Except "Russian Lovesong" which I thought was pretty damn good, yet they were considering nixing it from the yet-unreleased first album. Dunno if that ever happened and I've long since lost the bookmark, but that's good enough for me I think. "Sausalito Summer Night" is truly a lost gem of the '80s; not a big enough hit to ever appear on any compilation, and NEVER released on CD, this wonderful ode to the Road Trip From Hell was the very first mp3 I downloaded from Napster...at which point, I realized this Napster thingy was the biggest Godsend since that great aunt I never even knew died and left me $10,000 (how do you think I'd been funding my CD collection, anyway? Hehehe...)
The Amorphis tune comes from some promo-only CD that's just about impossible to find...likewise, Soundgarden's Beatles cover was some promo b-side from Louder Than Love, and I've never found ANY official CD that contains it. Not so sure about KMFDM's reworking of that Madonna song, but I checked their discography on CDNow and never found it, so that's good enough for me. (There's some squeaky distortion near the end, normally something I wouldn't tolerate but with industrial music it doesn't matter as much...) And then there's Violence's "Paraplegic", a demo-only song so rare it's downright impossible to find on ANY format, let alone mp3!! The Tool/Kyuss and Venom songs (the latter being a reworking of Judas Priest's "Hell Bent for Leather") come straight from live bootlegs, and the quality is pretty lousy to begin with. So there you go. How much did the record companies lose? Well...(pulls out calculator) add up unreleased tracks with OOP songs from bankrupt music labels and subtract the songs I'm going to buy on CD anyway someday, which brings the total to: $0.00. Interesting, I thought it would be a negative number...
A collection of songs from CDs and CDRs I didn't want anymore, with some mp3s thrown in. "Only When I Lose Myself" comes from that Depeche Mode 2CD greatest hits monstrosity, and it's not a very good song anyway, so screw ever buying it. "I Disappear", from the Mission Impossible II soundtrack, also came from Napster...did you even have to ask? :) "War is Our Destiny" and "White Stallions" were taken from a defective copy of Saint Vitus' Heavier Than Thou, and they're the only songs from Hallow's Victim ever released on CD; "Darkness", from the EP The Walking Dead, was the only mp3 I could find on Napster from those two unreleased items. Both Great White songs came from that CDR I used to own, and I think they're both unreleased, so I put them on here just in case. "Shock the Monkey" is a Peter Gabriel song, and "Phantom of the Opera" was originally by Iron Maiden.
"Digital Puppy #5: Now That's What I Call Shitty Music!"This is an example of what can happen when boredom, unrestricted file sharing, and various mind-altering chemicals all come together at once. For some reason, I challenged myself to fill up a CD with pop songs from the 90's that I can actually stand to listen to (not counting grunge, industrial, or nu-metal, of course.) In the end, I came up short, and had to flesh it out with a few "gems" from the previous decade. This is also how I learned that Roxio CD Creator 5.0 has a top limit of 79:57 when burning CDRs...the original length was 80:02, and I had to edit out a few seconds of digital silence to make it all fit. At the moment, that's a record.
There's really no point discussing any of the music on here, except the two live tracks. The Elton/Shania duet I ran across by accident while looking for the studio version of "You're Still the One", and it sounds pretty good, so I used it instead. As for the Eminem song, the only reason I allow my music collection to be sullied by that racist, homophobic, cocksucking poseur is because of Elton. (The track is taken from the TV broadcast, so there's quite a few bleeps, although a couple "shits" did make it past the East Coast censors.)
This is also the first (and so far, only) "Digital Puppy" collection for which I bothered to make artwork. It turns out that only ONE song here actually did appear on the original Now That's What I Call Music! Vol. 1 release. Can you guess which one?? Here's a hint...the total age of the performers (at the time) is less than the age I am right now...
| "Digital Puppy #6: Double-Sided Puppies" (tracklist revised: 6/27/03) | |
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This D/P collection is one of the longest in the making, as I've been working on it even before Napster existed...it's all comprised of B-sides, unreleased, and otherwise rare tracks from bands that I have more or less complete discographies of, if you haven't figured that out already. :) The tracklist has recently been revised a bit, so let's see what we've got:
We start off with a whole bunch of Slayer tracks, mostly from Japanese imports which I've given up trying to track down, as well as a few soundtracks. "Memories of Tomorrow" (from the Jap version of Undisputed Attitude) is a Suicidal Tendencies cover, and "Sick Boy" is also a cover, but I don't know who did it originally. "Witching Hour" was originally done by Venom (and appeared on a 3-track sampler that was packaged with some copies of Undisputed Attitude...but not MINE, of course!!) "Human Disease" is from one of the Child's Play movies, I forget which one, except to note that NOBODY seems to have this soundtrack available for download! Seriously, I got this 160k/s copy from a friend (who forgot to use LAME encoding, so the compression really sucks), and after YEARS of searching, I've yet to find one single copy of this mp3 that's compressed any higher than 96k/s!! What the hell is WRONG with you people?!? Oh, and "No Remorse" comes from the Spawn soundtrack, which used to be on my buy-list, but got crossed off since it's got Metallica songs on it...sorry, that's the breaks, folks.
Originally I had all three Iron Maiden outtakes from The X Factor, but the recent box set contained two of them, so I cut it down to just "I Live My Way", which was only released on crappy vinyl (as well as a super-rare Japanese import with a bonus 3" mini-CD, but I've given up looking for that thing.) Replacing the two other songs are "Kill the King" by Megadeth (from their Capitol Punishment greatest hits CD, and was made exclusive to that compilation against the band's will!) as well as "Gardenroad", another rare live Rush track which I ran across just days after burning the original version of this Digital Puppy volume...ack, oh well it's fixed now. :)
The Fates Warning tracks were actually HOSTED by Audiogalaxy, so in effect they are perfectly legal (of course, that wasn't good enough for the RIAA, who shut down AG's operations completely; I guess they really have no regard for artists who give permission to distribute their material without pay, eh? If it's not 'Nsync or Britney Spears, it deserves no protection, that is their twisted mindset...) "Suspended in Dusk" was released on an alternate version of Bloody Kisses, which I've seen used many times but never got around to purchasing, and obviously there's no reason to now. :) "Two Miles High" is on a Queensryche DVD. And the Rush tracks represent the ONLY unreleased material by the band -- "You Can't Fight It"/"Not Fade Away" was their first single, and the three live tracks come from 1974.
The "collector's mix" of AC/DC's "Who Made Who" was an interesting quest...I got so frustrated with my inability to find an mp3 version, that I actually bought the CRAPPY VINYL 12" SINGLE from an Australian trader! Now THAT is true desperation, my friend! I also own on crappy vinyl both Foreigner and both Metal Church songs, as well as the long version of Jethro Tull's "17", and I think I've got the Whitesnake song on cassette single, too. Of course, the RIAA would have you believe that it's illegal to download mp3s of songs you already own! Twisted, eh? Like I've said, George Orwell was on to something. "Baby Please Come Home" comes from the second Led Zeppelin box set, and while it may be a good song, it ain't worth spending $70 for. Conversely, "Woman is a Devil" does NOT appear on the Doors' box set, but instead on a collection called Essential Rarities.
I do feel a little guilty about the Ayreon song, which was added to the second edition of Actual Fantasy, but since I have the original pressing with the "Stranger from Within" video, I'd rather not upgrade, thank you very much! (I'm still looking for the CD single that this song does appear on, however.) The two tracks by Great White (or "Burning Down Rhode Island", as they are now known...OUCH, that was very bad, sorry...) are very rare, released only on a limited edition version of Twice Shy with some live concert as a bonus disc (which sells for over $150 on eBay, yikes!!); I do have "Bitches and Other Women" on cassette single, though. (That one's a semi-acoustic medley of "Bitch" and "It's Only Rock and Roll" by the Rolling Stones and "Women" by Foreigner.) I'm not sure what the story is for "Tonight We Murder", it was cut from one of Ministry's albums (because of the title, I assume) but I have no clue where it eventually surfaced. "Long Hard Road Out of Hell" also comes from Spawn (see above.)
The Black Sabbath tracks (all Martin-era) were by far the most difficult to track down; in fact, "Some Kind of Woman" (the rarest of them all, as it was only released on crappy vinyl) was one of the final songs I downloaded from Audiogalaxy, before they got shut down! I should point out, that if only they had included all four songs on The Sabbath Stones (a compilation covering the Gillan/Hughes/Martin/Dio reunion era), I would have bought that instead of downloading them all. But nooooo...they aren't even included on the remastered CDs!!! And finally, well the last two songs used to be "Ride Easy" and "Daylight" by Asia, but after upgrading to that "20th Anniversary/Geffen Years" thingy, I've replaced them with two super-rare Metal Church mp3s. Which works better, I think. Whew, that was a lot of typing.
| "Digital Puppy #7: Puppies Undercover" | |
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All cover songs, duh. I'm going to break character and NOT list all the original artists, as I assume any normal rock fan can figure them out, except to mention the following:
In case you don't know what "eponymous" means, take a close look at the majority of song titles and how they relate to band names, I'm sure you can figure it out. :) Anyways, this collection came about when I was putting together my own "eponymous" tape collection, but came up short on tape #2 -- so I posted on PM begging for others to come up with ideas. Well, two great friends stepped up to the plate: Ralf & boB (or should that be "Neil & Bob"? Hehehe...) Ralf came up with a full CDR, including many tunes that are still on my "Need It" list (in fact, I bought Iced Earth's Days of Purgatory just days after getting this in the mail.) The free space was filled with selections from Ralf's Cardinal's Collection: Covers I: "Ghostbusters" is such a downright BAD song, I just HAD to have it! Morgana Lefay, on the other hand, contributes the best ABBA cover to date. I've always imagined what a heavy metal version of Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" would sound like, and although Heir Apparent's version isn't quite as heavy as I pictured, it's still a nice effort. (Check out Nevermore's version for a real tour de force!)
boB could only come up with 5 tracks, plus he doesn't have a CD burner, so I had to get him to send me some high-quality mp3s. Gamma Ray's song is a mighty powerhouse...dang me, these guys really ARE good!! Stratovarius also delivers a brilliant instrumental tune, very unlike their normally derivative style, so I can safely say I've heard TWO Stratovarius songs now. :)) Manowar is...well, Manowar; loud and pretentious as hell. Vociferation Eternity was a nice surprise, crunchy doom-thrash. However, Soulz at Zero (formerly known as Wrathchild America) puts forth an abyssmal offering...so much for getting into that band.
The "revised" tracklist adds about five more eponymous songs that I've managed to collect, including the highly sought after "Hurricane" -- yippee!!! (Seriously, YOU try searching for "Hurricane" on KaZaa and see how lucky you get! Go ahead, try it right now...lotta results for "Rock You Like a Hurricane" by the Scorpions, eh?) I filled up the blank space with the three "Listen with Nicko!" bits missing from my collection, plus a few Anthrax demos which seemed to fit quite nicely.
| "The Heavy Metal Reject Song Shop" | |
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This was originally going to be a Mixed Puppy release, but since all the appropriate volume numbers have been reserved, it got it's own special title. Based loosely on the tape collection of the same name, this all-Napster collection is filled with many obscure metal songs from the 80's...or, in the case of Poison, Warrant, and Bon Jovi, not-so-obscure songs by bands that otherwise totally suck! (With Bal-Sagoth thrown in as a joke.) The last 4 tracks are unreleased or rare bonus tracks from albums I already own on CD.
Some trivia here...the Bodine song "Wild Fire Queen" was one of my favorites, mostly because it was so BAD! Quite a surprise when I found out the guitarist was Arjen Lucassen, mastermind of the brilliant Ayreon project. On the other side of the coin, I was actually going to buy Fifth Angel's debut CD, until I got into a vicious online argument with their guitarist (who shall remain nameless, because I don't want JAMES BYRD to sue my ass...) I ultimately told him I would never, ever spend money on any recording he appears on, but then I found out that Sony totally screwed his old band and never paid them a dime in royalties, ever. Oh well, sucks to be him I guess. "Herman ze German" is Herman Rarebell from the Scorpions -- I don't think I need to tell you what band Paul Dianno originally sang for. :) Cover songs featured here are "Radar Love" (originally by Golden Earring), "Rip Ride" (Venom), and "Wipe Out" (umm...the Surfaris?) -- the Trust and Plasmatics songs have been covered by Anthrax and Destruction, respectively.
"Mixed Puppy #1"
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Unofficially titled "Napster's Greatest Hits", this collection represents the best & brightest of all the songs I've downloaded over the last eight months. All of these can be considered to fall under the category of "Bands With One Great Song That I Have Absolutely No Further Interest In". Some of these (David Bowie, Cheap Trick) should have appeared on their respective greatest hits albums, but didn't. The Duran Duran song is the original crappy vinyl version and was NEVER released on CD (and believe me, I've checked!!! No, it's NOT the same as the Night Versions mix...) Devo is on the "buy list", but most of their albums seem to be out of print at the moment. And one thing that keeps me from buying the Rod Stewart box set (which I have on tape) is that songs like "Passion" are the edited single versions.
Case in point, The Smiths "How Soon Is Now?" (which has been covered by Quicksand.) Amazing song, gives me freakin' chills every time I hear it. I might have even bought the original CD, Meat is Murder, if it ever turned up used (it never did.) However, I absolutely loathe every other song I've heard by Smiths/Morrissey. To say nothing of the fact that my days of buying a CD for one song are long, long over.
It should go without saying that I'd gladly spend $30 or so on an official compilation containing these songs, such as one of those "Make Your Own CD(R)" services. Unfortunately, THE SERVICE DOES NOT EXIST! The greedy record companies hold back on the licensing of these songs out of hope that you will spend $14 per song by buying the full CDs. Until Napster, that was their trump card. Now the playing field has changed. The record companies must adapt or die!
(BTW, it's only coincidence that I've got three guys named "Stewart" on disc two. Lotta guys named "Dave", too...)
"Mixed Puppy #2: Big Dumb 80's"
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I kinda screwed the pooch on this one. Originally, "The Heavy Metal Reject Shop" was positioned for #2 in the Mixed Puppy series, but at the last minute I decided to make it a new wave compilation instead. Well, once I got down to doing the track list, it was clearly going to take up FOUR 80-minute discs, which caused a problem since Mixed Puppy #3 already existed. So I pared it down to three discs, but that didn't work because storing three discs in a single case is pretty much impossible. Finally I just trashed the third disc entirely.
Most of disc one comes from mp3s I use as background music for the computer game The Sims (used as replacement music for the Country Music Station, which makes it odd when my sims start line-dancing to Billy Idol!) Disc two was more or less randomly thrown together. Special thanks go out to MP3 Trim, a very handy mp3-editing utility that I used to balance out the different sound levels!
"Mixed Puppy #3: 'Re-Napstered' Edition"I have the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to thank for this one. :) "Mixed Puppy #3" is one of the most legendary archive tapes in my collection, so naturally I got the idea to "upgrade" the compilation to CDR using mp3s downloaded from Napster. However, in the early days, pickings were quite slim, and as most of the songs here are so obscure, I was only able to find the two or three most popular tunes. Then...in July 2000, a federal judge ruled that Napster must shut down. The injunction was overturned a few days later, but during that time, Napster activity EXPLODED -- and naturally, with a much larger mp3 pool to search through, more and more obscure songs became available, and in fact I was able to find ALL these songs in a single night of downloading. Thank you, Lars!!!
In order to fit on CDR, I had to alter the original track listing somewhat, although all I had to do was cut the 3 songs I'd already bought on CD, as well as the 2 Dio/Livgren songs which are on the buy-list. (I also decided to replace Blackfoot's cover of "Living in the Limelight" with Peter Cetera's original version, just because...I could.) Once again, it was a near-perfect fit at 74:00. :) As I said on the Mixed Puppy page, the songs here flow together almost magically; even Berlin & Corey Hart, which normally would make me cringe, sound excellent in this context. Or maybe I'm just nuts? The cover art was adapted from a banned Carcass cover.
Here's one of those European progressive bands that's been praised widely on the Internet, although they're more of a power-metal band with progressive tendencies. All the songs here come from their albums "Moving Target" and "Paradox" (which I was going to get at one point, but my interest has long since faded.) Lead singer D.C. Cooper also has a solo album.
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