Notes

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R.E.M.

GREEN Demo Sessions and Outtakes (UPGRADE/REMASTERED)
John Keane's Studio, Athens, GA
Bearsville Studios, Woodstock, NY
1988

01 Pop Hit 89 (Pop Song 89)
02 Orange Crush
03 Get Up (instrumental)
04 I Remember California
05 Title (instrumental)
06 (The Eleventh Untitled Song) (instrumental)
07 Hairshirt (instrumental)
08 The Last R.E.M. Song (instrumental)
09 Stand (slower)
10 You Are The Everything (early version with bass, additional backing vocals)
11 The Wrong Child (instrumental)
12 Great Big (instrumental)
13 Untitled instrumental #1
14 Get Up

http://www.dimeadozen.org/torrents-details.php?id=190319 is the unmastered original seed...

So here we are again.

I posted this "session" initially on STG back a thousand years ago, I was the first person to put this material on the internets.

Here's my initial textfile language:

"This boot has an interesting story behind it. I used to go every month, religiously, to a record show at the Holiday Inn in Hillside, IL back in the mid-90s. Usually it would be the same pile of crap at every dealer, with the odd surprise find every now and then. This was one of them.

An elderly lady was minding her son's table, whereby he had about a half-dozen cassettes in a box amongst the Zeppelin bootlegs he was selling. I was quite surprised to see a cassette labeled "Green demos" amongst the crap he had, and for $2.00, snapped it up. I normally didn't buy bootleg tapes but from the tracklisting I could tell this was something special. I never did meet the guy whose table it was, so I was never able to confirm lineage or the source.

This tape not only contained all the previously-known Green demos floating about on various bootlegs, but it ALSO had 3 additional songs that I do not believe EVER appeared on any boots. In fact I don't think that prior to me trading this tape, these three tracks were known amongst collectors to exist as "Green demos".

The three songs are:
09 - Stand --- no wah-wah guitar solo, different backing tracks
11 - The Wrong Child (instrumental) --- much longer than Green version
14 - Get Up (Vocal) --- partially written lyric, with music boxes but different backing tracks

I confirmed the above with Todd Ploharski, owner of Athens, GA's Low Yo Yo record store and one of the scene's biggest REM collectors. If it existed in the REM trader/collector universe, Todd knew about it (if he didn't actually have it himself). He'd never seen these three songs out there anywhere.

I suspect this originated with either a band member late in the Bearsville sessions or a Bearsville studio staff person because of the development stages of the songs (i.e. the music boxes on "Get Up" - the idea came in a dream Bill Berry had late in the day while the band were recording at Bearsville, and the previously-leaked instrumental demo does not have the music box interlude). If the newly-discovered songs were simply tacked on the end of a tape of previously-leaked demos that would be one thing - but since they were interspersed amongst the others I think this is a different source altogether than the one used to seed all the boots containing Green demos ("Sleeping Songs", "Archival Footage", etc...). Furthermore the 4 unreleased instrumental tracks are FAR better quality here than any of the pre-existing bootleg releases.

If any of you were part of the REM Trade Ring in 1999 or so and got these there, I was the source for that. This is from the original CD-R I made for that."

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Now, that CD-R variant (and the 2004-era STG seed) was mucked with in my younger years. Recklessly, foolishly ruined, some would say.

So up stepped a kind soul named Kipco who greatly moved matters forward, posting a previously-unknown second source of this material (also on STG intially, and later on DIME). Kipco notes:

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"NOW.....

The fact is, I know the "elderly lady and her son" who were at the Hillside show that day, and the copy that was sold originated with ME! I traded him a copy not long after I got it, which was like 1990 or so. I got it from a guy I knew from Wisconsin who used to come up with amazing REM stuff.

I mentioned this tape in the original STG comments, and was beseeched by requests to seed it, but didn't know how to do it at the time.

This is at least two generations up from the previously seeded versions of this. It should be an upgrade to everyone who snagged the one before. The track order is also slightly different. My original tape had one track repeated twice (track 12 instrumental). My tape also had
"See No Evil" tacked on the end, but I don't know if it was part of the original demos or not.

Enjoy! Keep your windows open, too!

cass (VERY low gen)/hard drive (sound forge)>flac level 8"

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So, a thousand years ago I downloaded Kipco's tape - being an upgrade, hell yeah! And then I sat on it. For years and years. Always meaning to fix it up. And here we finally are.

This is near release-quality - just check the sample below.

What's different? I didn't include Kipco's "See No Evil" because it's been officially released on a Fan Club single. And I've also taken the opportunity to retitle one of the instrumental tracks per Marcus Grey's "It Crawled From The South" as "The Last R.E.M. Song" - Grey refers to a Green demo track that the band deemed far too typical REM-like and thusly binned it, after naming it "The Last R.E.M. Song" - the one listed here as such certainly is the most "classic" REM-sounding track of the bunch, by far.

LINEAGE:
Kipco's FLACs -> Mastering/EQ tools @ 32bit -> Secret sauce -> Dither to 16bit -> FLAC level 8 -> You

This is at least two generations up from the previously versions.

GREEN Demo Sessions and Outtakes

John Keane's Studio, Athens, GA
Bearsville Studios, Woodstock, NY
1988

01 Pop Hit 89 (Pop Song 89)
02 Orange Crush
03 Get Up (instrumental)
04 I Remember California
05 Title (instrumental)
06 (The Eleventh Untitled Song) (instrumental)
07 Hairshirt (instrumental)
08 The Last R.E.M. Song (instrumental)
09 Stand --- no wah-wah guitar solo, different backing tracks
10 You Are The Everything (early version with bass, additional backing vocals)
11 The Wrong Child (instrumental) --- much longer than Green version
12 Great Big (instrumental)
13 Untitled instrumental #1
14 Get Up (Vocal) --- partially written lyric, with music boxes but different backing tracks