'True' first albums

I've noticed a number of artists have "real" first albums, if you were going for completeness... a distinct album's worth of material recorded before their proper, recognized first album. Which ones can you think of?

* The Beach Boys - "Lost and Found." Weed out the outtakes/false starts and there's a proper first album in there... which, needless to say, has also been released in cut-down form as "Surfin'".
* The Beatles - "The Beatles' First", etcetera. Yes, some non-Beatles Sheridan stuff mixed in, but still a proper album. Note that the old book 'All Together Now' considers the batch of material known as "Yellow Matter Custard" to be 'the Beatles' first album' - it's not. Despite the book claiming it to be from mid-1962, all material in that set was recorded after "Please Please Me."
* P.J. Proby - "Seven Week Hero". More or less the first Led Zeppelin album.
* Nine Inch Nails - the bootleg titled "Purest Feeling". NIN's true first album, recorded (and rejected) before "Pretty Hate Machine". Some sources claim this album was titled 'Industrial Nation', but this has since proven untrue.
* Pink Floyd - "London '66-'67". Two side-long tracks, recorded pre-Piper (as far as I'm aware?).
* Donna Summer - various titles, commonly known as "Shout It Out". I can't quite remember the story of this, but I know it's Donna in a group with a few other singers; was this ever released under a different name than solely Donna's?
* Bloodhound Gang - "Dingleberry Haze." Essentially material remade for "Use Your Fingers".
* Kiss - "The Wycked Lester Sessions."
* Chumbawamba - There's a MOUNTAIN of self-produced cassettes from before their first commercial LP ("Pictures Of Starving Children..."), but the earliest album-length tape seems to be 1983's "Be Happy Despite It All". If you were going even earlier, though, a prototype version of the band called Chimp Eats Banana put out a cassette in 1980 called "Cardboard Box".
* They Might Be Giants - "They Might Be Giants/1985 Demo Tape." Fans seem to overlook that, at the time, this WAS their self-titled debut album; and was displaced a year later by their first 'proper' album of the same name. (The "1985 Demo Tape" moniker sprung up later, for the sake of convenience.)
* Insane Clown Posse - "Bassment Cuts", mainly because the first two album-length Inner City Posse recordings (Enter The Ghetto Zone and Intelligence & Violence) had no involvement by Shaggy.

A special mention goes to the Bee Gees - there is a bootleg called "The Very Early Years" consisting of material from 1960-1964, predating the release of their first album. It does fill in a major gap in their catalogue, and would make a nice proper release if cleaned up some day. (The quality is horrendous.)

 

I always like to think of the Giles Giles and Fripp album as the real King Crimson debut.

 

"Sparks" have a true first album recorded under the name "Halfnelson" using the title "A Woofer in tweeters Clothing", which they later adopted for a Sparks album with completely different songs.
The Bee Gees had several albums before the one they called "Bee Gees 1st".
Not to forget "Kraftwerk" who call "Autobahn" their first album when in fact they had several official albums before.

 

Shiny Toy Guns-We Are Pilots v1

 

jackson browne - i don't think his true first album even had a name.

 

Leslie West - Mountain...was this really Mountain's first? Leslie and Felix. May as well be. I like it more than Climbing.

 

Well, The Wedding Present's second album, is actually a compilation of tracks from singles and sessions, that had already been released before their first album...and it's pretty high quality stuff...Loads of bands would have killed for songs of that calibre...

Thus, I alway tend to look at Tommy as their first album, and George Best as the second...

 

Unless I'm wrong, Kraftwerk only had four albums before they hit big with "Autobahn", "Tone Float" (as Organisation, they were called Kraftwerk but the record label felt they needed a less German name!), "Kraftwerk", "Kraftwerk 2" and "Ralf und Florian".

 

Post-punkers The Sound recorded a true 'was meant to be their debut' album which was later released as "Propaganda'.

 

A lot of metal bands have had multiple demos in circulation before their first proper vinyl or CD offering; the best known of these is probably Metallica's first demo, No Life 'til Leather.

 

Emmylou Harris. Gliding Bird was her real first album, although she and most other people regard Pieces Of The Sky as the first.

 

Wicked Lester was a band, it wasn't KISS. Maybe I'm missing the spirit of the thread but I don't in any way consider that album to be the first real KISS album!

 

Matt Johnson's 1981 album "Burning Blue Soul", later re-released as a The The album.

 

Not surprised that somebody would make that claim, but the music suggests otherwise. Maybe the Brondesbury Tapes but definitely not the Cheerful Insanity would fit this profile.

 

Soft Machine - the Gomelsky recordings with Daevid Allen
Residents - Warner Bros. Album and Baby Sex (and the two previous albums that apparently were mentioned in interviews but don't actually exist)

 

I would be interesting to see how history would judge it if they'd decided on the 'King Crimson' moniker in 1967 - it would be their equivalent of 'Piper At The Gates Of Dawn' or 'The Magnificent Moodies'.

 

Can's Delay 1968 was recorded prior to their official debut, Monster Movie, though it didn't get released until much later.

 

Greg Lake & Ian McDonald were too important of contributors on ITCOTKC. They developed their reputation and standing through their live shows. The Cheerful Insanity is interesting more as a curio. If you know the history, it was really the Giles brothers looking for a singing organist and they wound up with a non-singing guitarist.

 

I think of the 10 or so early Rolling Stone single and comp sides as a "first album," though I don't know if they've ever been compiled in one place that way. Distinctive, rawer sound. I prefer it to their official debut.

I like many of the crude gray-market Becker-Fagen demos that precede Steely Dan's "Can't Buy A Thrill." Some of them are a lot weirder than the stuff they released on their first album: more drug-oriented, yet (in the less successful ones) aiming for a more conventional vocal sound. 10 of the best ones first appeared on a 1984 LP called "The Early Years." They are assembled most completely on "Catalyst." A handful of them are wonderful as is, and others are interesting variations on performances that showed up later. (Less so their soundtrack to "Walk It Like You Talk It," from the same time.)

Liz Phair--the 4-track "Girly-sound" demos preceded "Exile in Guyville" and got her signed. Only parts of it have been officially released, but it's out there. Plus, 21 of its songs have ended up on her albums.

 

Agree. Frehley and and Criss weren't part of WL. Of course, they're not part of Kiss now either, but that's a different circumstance!

 

Sex Pistols - Spunk was recorded as released as a "bootleg" before Never Mind The Bollocks, it had an official release many years later.

 

There is a full album's worth of otherwise unrecorded songs among the Byrds' Preflyte sessions.

John Coltrane's amateur session with a Navy group in 1946 produced enough tracks for a 10" album.

The amateur demos collected on the Spacemen 3 CD For all the ****ed Up Children We Give You Spacemen 3 predate their first album by several years; in between, their professional demo tapes, recorded in Northamption in 1986 and released as Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs To, are also extensive enough to form a first album.

 

I realise that the King Crimson sound was firmly established on In The Court, and that it's very hard to draw any direct musical links from Cheerful Insanity to that, (other than maybe Fripp's two closing instrumentals), and I don't with any seriousness consider it a KC album. I'm just saying that it would be interesting if, for whatever reason, they'd stumbled on the King Crimson name earlier and fans had been forced to consider Cheerful Insanity as part of the main catalogue. From a personnel POV, Giles Giles and Fripp are the same line-up that recorded the backing tracks of In the Wake of Poseidon.

 

Just curious: does "several" in english mean more than "just four" ?

 

Well knock me sideways with a large pole:

1.
more than two but not many.
"the author of several books"
synonyms: some, a number of, a few, not very many, a handful of, a small group of, various, a variety of, assorted, sundry, diverse;
literarydivers
"several people arrived early"

And for years I thought 'several' as a word simply meant seven! Ha! (Yes, I did just admit that on a public forum, but hey, at least I'm honest!)