ALBUMS THAT GOT SCREWED: They Found Themselves in Times of Trouble

To close out Albums That Got Screwed Week, I've chosen a record that has never been released. We're all familiar with the Beatles' Let it Be. Many of us are even familiar with the album's troubled history. In brief: the Beatles were falling apart, and decided to record an album live in the studio in the hopes of rekindling the excitement of their early days. It didn't work, and Phil Spector was brought in by John and George to overdub the hell out of the results. McCartney threw a fit, critics hated it, and the group broke up before it could even hit the shelves.

(Personally, I don't find Spector's contributions to be as horrifying as some. His graceful work on "I Me Mine" and "Across the Universe" sound just fine. He did go too far with the strings and choir he piled onto "The Long and Winding Road," but when you listen to the original track, it does sound awfully flat.)

What a lot of people don't know is that engineer Glyn Johns, later a superstar producer, attempted to shape the basic tracks into an album before Spector was brought in. The album Johns wanted to compile was the anti-Sgt. Pepper's; it was raw and a little sloppy, much like some of the songs it contained, namely "Don't Let Me Down." It was a simple, unpretentious rock and roll album. Twice Johns presented the group with a potential track listing, painstakingly culled from hundreds of hours of tape. Both times they rejected his proposal.

So the Glyn Johns version of Let it Be will never be heard. Some of the unadorned original recordings popped up on the Anthology, others on Let it Be... Naked, which was closer to Johns' vision but with a very different track listing. Johns later became famous for his work with Led Zeppelin and the Eagles, and was even mentioned briefly in the film Almost Famous. But I'll bet it still burns him up that his version of Let it Be never saw the light of day. And the title probably doesn't bring him any comfort.

TODAY'S RECOMMENDATION: "Don't Let Me Down" by the Beatles
AVAILABLE ON: Past Masters Vol. 2

ALBUMS THAT GOT SCREWED: What's Big and Purple and Torments Captain Ahab?

The story of Moby Grape is one of rock's great cautionary tales. It involves so many elements a great Tragic Band Saga has to have, including a greedy manager, incompetent executives, and mental illness. Before they were completely undone, though, the Bay Area's Moby Grape did manage to complete one underheard classic: their self-titled 1967 debut.

Moby Grape was a hugely promising young band. So promising, in fact, that Columbia Records promoted them with the unusual stunt of releasing five singles at once. It backfired, and the singles sank. The group's disappointing second album further led to accusations of empty hype. Unstable lineups and LSD-related breakdowns followed, until the group finally gave up sometime in the mid 1970s.

Moby Grape made one of the greatest debut albums of all time, and were rewarded with obscurity. Guitarists Jerry Miller, Peter Lewis and Skip Spence, drummer Don Stevenson, and bassist Bob Mosley all wrote and sang, and they all did it pretty well. Miller and Stevenson's "8:05", along with Spence's "Omaha," became country-rock cult classics and inspired dozens of covers. The album is so good, even its minute-long novelty "Naked if I Want To" works. (Inexplicably, the band reprised the song on a later album, a sign of a creative nose dive if there ever was one.)

It was Spence who lost his wits to LSD. Since he was a former member of the Jefferson Airplane, nobody should have been surprised. Though the group had plenty of singing and songwriting talent, they had lost their creative rudder, and never recovered from his bad trip. In later years, the group would wrangle over ownership with their former manager, and were even reduced to gigging under the name Maybe Grope, which is very funny and terribly sad. But they left behind one album as good as any by their contemporaries the Buffalo Springfield or the Grateful Dead, and we all owe it to ourselves to give it a spin. And tell two friends.

TODAY'S RECOMMENDATION: "8:05" by Moby Grape
AVAILABLE ON: Moby Grape; iTunes

ALBUMS THAT GOT SCREWED: With Brian in Bed, is it Al Jardine's Time to Shine?

It would be a shame, during Albums That Got Screwed Week, not to mention Brian Wilson's Smile. Smile is best known as the album that Wilson lost his marbles trying to make, while his fellow Beach Boys and Capitol Records waited impatiently for the genius to come up with something. Wilson recorded the album in bizarre fragments and spent months trying to make them fit together, a puzzle his LSD-addled mind couldn't quite make sense of.

So, then, Smile was screwed by its own troubled creator, not by a record company. But I've always wondered why some helpful person- a bandmate, a concerned record exec- didn't check the clearly schizophrenic Wilson into a mental hospital. The man actually thought Phil Spector was bugging his room to steal ideas. And we all know it's crazy to think Phil Spector could ever do anything illegal.

Wilson and lyricist Van Dyke Parks did finally finish Smile in 2004. The results were wondrous, but, frustratingly, not as fascinating as the fragments of the original Smile that have trickled out over the years. Many have been bootlegs, although the Beach Boys did officially release a few of the album's tracks in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They are beautiful, strange, and feature Wilson at the peak of his vocal talents. For all the poignancy his ragged voice now carries, it no longer achieves the choirboy perfection it used to. I guess dealing with record companies and Mike Love for forty-five years will do that to anyone.

TODAY'S RECOMMENDATION: "Heroes and Villains" by the Beach Boys (original version)
AVAILABLE ON: Sounds of Summer: The Very Best of the Beach Boys; iTunes

ALBUMS THAT GOT SCREWED: Mayday

Here's a tricky one for any accounting department: how do you explain your company giving something away, then buying it back? The good folks from Warner Brothers are probably still scratching their heads over that one. But it worked out in the end, because Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has gone gold.

Back in 2001, Wilco were just a scrappy alternative band out of Chicago that had charmed the critics (and Nora Guthrie) but had failed to find a large nationwide audience. After they finished work on their highly experimental new album, Warner Brothers rejected the tapes, claiming the new material to be uncommercial. Finally, Wilco asked to be released from their contract. Warner Brothers offered to sell the YHF master tapes to the group for $50,000. This bit of pointless greed brought the company some mighty negative press, and they eventually agreed to let Wilco have the rights, providing the band got lost.

While the band contemplated their next move, Wilco fans began flooding the MP3 world with poor-quality bootlegs of the new material. Wilco decided to release the entire album on their website, and it became a great success. Soon Nonesuch Records, a division of Warner Brothers, signed the band, boughtthe album and released it to great acclaim and success.

I have to admit, I didn't fall in love with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot at first. I thought Jeff Tweedy and right-hand man Jay Bennett (who quit after the sessions were complete) had gone too far. Too much ambient noise. Too many long, spaced-out interludes. But it grew on me, and I eventually came to appreciate the album's strangely cohesive weirdness. Tweedy has described this approach as giving the album "space," instead of making it a compact, too-tight collection of songs.

Warner Brothers should just be glad they still have Wilco in their family. They've proven to be one of rock's most popular live acts, and their last two studio albums have debuted in the top ten. Not commercial? Who says?

TODAY'S RECOMMENDATION: "Jesus Etc." by Wilco
AVAILABLE ON: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; iTunes

ALBUMS THAT GOT SCREWED: Not to Be Confused With the Album by Pink Floyd (That One Made a Profit)

If record company executives made all the music, nobody would want to listen to it. And if artists made all the business decisions, every new release would be a double album that cost $4.6 million to record. It seems these two groups are just going to have to find a way to get along, because they need each other. (For a particularly one-sided view of this relationship, consult Willie Nelson.)

This week we're going to highlight some particularly dumbass moves by record companies over the years. Some of the best albums ever made almost never made it to release, either because the suits didn't get it or because greed got in the way.

Badfinger were victims of the latter. In 1974, after a series of smash hit singles ("Come and Get It," "No Matter What," "Day After Day") the group teamed up with producer Chris Thomas to record Wish You Were Here. The album was a blast of catchy power pop, a reminder that the genre hadn't died with the Beatles. It was their best work. Too good, in fact, to get into the hands of record buyers.

The album was released, but was almost immediately pulled because of a lawsuit between Warner Brothers Records and the group's shady manager, Stan Polley. This began the chain of events that brought Badfinger to a tragic end. Guitarist Pete Ham and bassist Tom Evans both committed suicide in the decade that followed, and the surviving members traded lawsuits for many more years. Wish You Were Here has never been released on CD in the U.S.

But thanks to our best buddy iTunes, you can enjoy the whole thing for $8.91. Any fan of great pop music shouldn't think twice about the purchase. Let's hope none of that money goes into the hands of Stan Polley and his ilk.

TODAY'S RECOMMENDATION: "Meanwhile Back at the Ranch/Should I Smoke" by Badfinger
AVAILABLE ON: Wish You Were Here; iTunes