- Mick Jagger has been hitting the promotion trail to hype his upcoming SuperHeavy album (a group consisting of Jagger, Joss Stone, Damian Marley, Dave Stewart and A.R. Rahman) which is due in stores on September 20. But the moonlighting Rolling Stones frontman let slip the news of a deluxe edition of the band's 1978 classic Some Girls, in the style of last year's revamp of 1972's Exile on Main Street. That news has since been made official. (Thank you to the dynamite folks at MusicTAP for the heads-up!) A remastered and expanded Some Girls will arrive in the U.K. on November 21 and most likely the following day in the United States. Like Exile, it will be available in numerous formats, including a Super Deluxe box set and "standard" Deluxe Edition, as well as digitally. Jagger told German television network ZDF that "I've just been in the studio finishing some outtakes from 1978 ... They're going to be released [on] a rerelease of Some Girls. So these are going to be some 10 extra tracks from that time [that] were never released. Some of them had no vocals, so I had to do the vocals again. I did the same thing on Exile on Main Street." The expanded Some Girls reissue will follow the release of the concert film Some Girls Live in Texas 1978, previously announced to arrive on DVD and Blu-Ray on November 21, 2011, on DVD and Blu-ray. Deluxe versions of the DVD and Blu-ray releases will include CDs, and the film will be shown for one night only in cinemas in October. Stones fans, start counting those pennies!
- Tomorrow sees the arrival of the long-delayed Bob Seger reissues Live Bullet (1976) and Nine Tonight (1981), but these titles also mark the first Seger releases to be made available for digital download on both iTunes and Amazon.com. Also making its iTunes debut is Early Seger Vol. 1, a collection of rare material circa the early 1970s. Seger told USA Today that the rest of his catalogue "will come out in dribs and drabs," and promised that he will use the digital realm to debut more vault music. "There's just so much of that stuff," he told the newspaper. "I'd love people to finally hear it." On both the physical and digital editions, Live Bullet will feature a version of Albert King's "I Feel Like Breaking Up Somebody's House," performed in 1976 by Seger and his Silver Bullet Band at the Pontiac Silverdome, as a bonus track. Nine Tonight will be expanded by a 1980 version of the song "Brave Strangers."
Hit the jump for some Beatlenews!
- And here's one final tantalizing tidbit: We're just weeks away from the television premiere of Martin Scorsese's George Harrison documentary Living in the Material World. As previously announced, the film's debut will be accompanied by a lavish coffee table book as well as home video releases currently scheduled for the U.K. only (though American release dates are likely to come soon). Most eyebrow-raising, though, are the reports that Giles Martin (of The Beatles' Las Vegas spectacular LOVE) was engaged to oversee "5.1 audio remix[es] of dozens of included Fab Four and Harrison tunes." It's already a surprise that no soundtrack has been announced for the film, which also promises to air unheard Harrison demos. Could such a release finally be the entrée of the Beatles catalogue into the world of Blu-Ray Audio? Sound off below!
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For Nine Tonight, it's obvious that Bob chose to put Brave Strangers as a bonus track instead of restoring the full length version of Let It Rock so that listeners would get something new and because the CD time constraints wouldn't allow for both. Kind of splits the difference so I understand.
Not sure when, then, if ever we'll get the whole version of LIR but perhaps for the interim, it could be available as a digital download?
More tinkered-with Stones outtakes... I'd rather hear the tracks as they are, without the vocals, rather than hearing 2011 Mick singing over 1978 music. I felt the same way about the Exile outtakes, so I stuck with my old copy of that album and I will do the same here. Release outtakes that are completely finished or nearly finished, so long as they're good enough for release. That's far more interesting than hearing something reworked three decades later.
I am, however, interested in the concert DVD that's going to include CDs? Will it be a complete show?
I hope this "deluxe version" isn't some ridiculously overpriced set (think back to some of the McCartney and Dylan sets in recent years) just to get the CDs. Of course, the trend towards releasing live DVDs and no stand-alone CDs is troubling. I can't play a DVD in my car or rip it to my iPod. I'll simply get more use out of the audio-only.
So... Is Seger suggesting that he's finally going to reissue some of his really early (pre-Live Bullet) stuff? That would be pretty cool. I haven't listened to Seger much in quite some time, but his early stuff is pretty damned cool and pretty damned rare.
Certainly I would love to see Bob finally reissue Back In 72, the LP where the original version of Turn The Page is on and Rosalie which Thin Lizzy covered.
I buy most anything I can get my hands on in 5.1. The Anthology DVDs have several tracks in true 5.1 and the are wonderful. Also, the Lennon and McCartney DVD video collections are mixed in true 5.1. Any Beatles in 5.1, I believe, will sell huge. Bring it on!!