Real Gone Music has announced its offerings for the 2019 Record Store Day celebration, taking place at your local brick-and-mortar shop Saturday, April 13, and they include a pair of rarities releases from two beloved bands, and a new-to-vinyl soundtrack.  Check out all three titles below, with descriptions for each provided by the label!

Badfinger, So Fine–The Warner Bros. Rarities (2-LP Red Vinyl Edition) (2,000 copies)

Most folks point to Badfinger as the greatest power pop band of all time. But, with four accomplished songwriters in Tom Evans, Mike Gibbins, Pete Ham, and Joey Molland, and the creative assistance and imprimatur of The Beatles, Badfinger should have been bigger stars than they were. Their four albums for The Beatles’ Apple label get most of the attention, and understandably so, with hits like “Come and Get It,” “No Matter What,” “Day After Day,” and “Baby Blue.” But their subsequent two albums for Warner Bros. represent their true creative peak, reached even as the band–and the lives of the members of the band–fell apart.

In late 2018, Real Gone Music, together with Badfinger biographer Dan Matovina, took a fresh look at Badfinger’s brilliant but ill-fated Warner Bros. albums, Badfinger and Wish You Were Here. Not only did the two CD releases offer the first new remastering of the original albums since their maiden release on CD, but they also each boasted an extra album’s worth of unreleased bonus material featuring alternate mixes and newly-discovered songs. The releases caused a flurry of fresh interest in the band, and a furor among Badfinger fans, who to this day rank as some of the most passionate in all of rock and roll.

Now, exclusively for Record Store Day, Real Gone Music is bringing the previously unreleased material that premiered on its Badfinger CD releases to vinyl for the first time. Each disc on the 2-LP set, So Fine–The Warner Bros. Rarities, presents the alternate versions of the songs on each album in the order they originally appeared, followed by one previously unreleased song (in the case of Badfinger, “Love My Lady”; in the case of Wish You Were Here, “Queen of Darkness”). Along with piquant quotes from producer Chris Thomas, Matovina’s liner notes include for the first time track-by-track breakdowns of the differences between the alternate and original mixes.   John Golden has cut the lacquers for these releases at Golden Mastering.

Cheap Trick, The Epic Archive Vol. 3 (1984-1992) (Limited 2-LP “Flame Red” Vinyl Edition) (2,000 copies)

Real Gone’s third and final package of Cheap Trick Epic rarities just might be the best yet. At least their legendary drummer Bun E. Carlos thinks so: “It really is a nice package!” he exclaims in the liner notes. Indeed, The Epic Archive Vol. 3 pulls off the unlikely feat of being simultaneously something of a greatest hits collection and also sonic catnip for deep Cheap Trick collectors. On the hits side, you get the single version of the band’s lone No. 1 hit, “The Flame,” plus rare single versions of “It’s Only Love,” “Tonight It’s You,” and “Don’t Be Cruel” (labeled as the “Big New Mix”).

Then come the soundtrack-only songs, which have never appeared on a Cheap Trick studio album before and come from some big-time films: “Mighty Wings” from Top Gun, “Money (That’s What I Want)” from Caddyshack II, “You Want It” from Say Anything, and “I Will Survive” from Gladiator. Alternate mixes of “Little Sister,” “She’s Got Motion,” and “Can’t Stop Fallin’ into Love” and alternate versions of “How About You” and “All We Need Is a Dream” will quicken the pulse of collectors, as will “Big Bang” from the Japanese version of the Busted album.

The whole thing starts with an a cappella intro to the theme song from the 1984 movie Up the Creek, and we also found room for one of the great lost Beatles covers of all time, the band’s version of “Magical Mystery Tour” that only appeared on their Greatest Hits release. The liner notes feature track-by-track commentary from Bun E. Carlos, Rick Nielsen, and Robin Zander via interviews with longtime band biographer Ken Sharp and Timothy J. Smith, the Epic Archive series compilation producer; once again, band lensman Robert Alford has contributed photos to our beautiful gatefold package.

The Basketball Diaries: Original Soundtrack (2-LP “Basketball Orange” Vinyl Edition) (2,000 copies)

High school basketball star, junkie, street poet sensation, rock star, Jim Carroll packed a lot of life into the 60 years he spent on this planet. The 1995 film The Basketball Diaries, based on his 1978 memoir, captures him at the beginning of his odyssey, juggling private school, poetry, hoops ‘n’ heroin, a timeless antihero set-up if there ever was one. That allowed the filmmakers to bring the movie into the present, and to assemble a soundtrack of all-star alternative rock stars with only one nod (The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm”) to the period of Carroll’s actual youth. The result: one of the best alternative soundtracks of the ’90s with some off-the-beaten-path finds.

For example: not only do you get Carroll’s rendition of “Catholic Boy” with Pearl Jam, but you get his classic “People Who Died” with The Jim Carroll Band, a song from an album that’s currently in contractual limbo and unlikely to be reissued any time soon. There are also Carroll’s own spoken word pieces with accompaniment by composer (and ex-SPV leader) Graeme Revell to lend a little Lower East Side grit to a soundtrack featuring such heavyweights as PJ Harvey, The Cult, and Soundgarden. But perhaps the real dark horse track is Massive Internal Complications’ “Strawberry Wine,” which has built up quite a following over the years and isn’t up digitally except for excerpts of the film on YouTube.

Now, in what would have been Jim Carroll’s 70th birthday year, Real Gone Music takes great pride in releasing the original soundtrack to The Basketball Diaries for the first time ever on vinyl, exclusively for Record Store Day.