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Originally posted by thewhitewingedd
When did all the demos/outtakes start appearing. Were they around ever since the 70's when Stevie first poped up? Did more and more just come out with every Stevie release. Or was it something that just happened all at once?
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In terms of the "Rumours" incarnation, the first batch appeared in 1979 on a two-vinyl 33 called "Almanac." These included "Watchdevil," "Cathouse Blues," "Sorcerer," "Designs of Love," "You Could Forget," "Storms," "Secret Love," "Nomad" & the cut-up King Biscuit. I had "Almanac" before I had "Tusk" & I wore it out.
Other songs started to surface on cassette tape around the time of "Bella Donna." There were acetates of "Think About It" & "After the Glitter Fades" & "Leather & Lace" that people got their hands on around that time. They transferred those to cassette & began to circulate them with the "Almanac" material. "Smile at You" circulated at this point, too (I still have my acetate of this one, which I consider a 1976 recording).
Small batches of demos would usually start circulating before albums were released. "Battle of the Dragon," for example, a duet with Tom Petty, got circulated before "Rock a Little" was released. I remember hearing it over the phone from a guy who once posted on this board under a pseudonym (his real name was Rob). "Battle of the Dragon" was intended for "Rock a Little," but word that it had got out got back to Stevie Nicks & that was that. The song was ditched & later wound up on a movie soundtrack.
In the late 1980s, some enterprising bootlegger transferred a lot of the demos that were already being traded around onto colored vinyl, & sold those all over the place -- record conventions like the Hollywood convention at the old Roosevelt Hotel & collector magazines like Goldmine. This stuff is the "Uncirculated Rumours" & "More Uncirculated Rumours" packages. The bootlegger didn't bother finding low generation copies for the transfer, so the vinyl copies sound especially bad -- a lot worse than cassette tapes of the same songs back then.
More & more demos & old studio takes & other crud through the years ... it picked up speed, I think, some years. Many of the fans (including me) have always had large numbers of live concert recordings; these tend to keep pace with the tours themselves & get circulated almost immediately (only in those days you didn't have the Internet to buy from or to help locate who had what). You had huge networks of fans that would keep in touch by mail, organized or led by "arch-fans" like Roland Benoit back east. People in various cities were designated to tape the tour stops in their cities -- the Wild Heart tour, for example -- & those tapes were immediately duped & distributed.
But I think that the amount of demos & other unreleased recordings grew amazingly after "The Dance," when people started burning their own CD-Rs & online auction sites enabled new fans to amass huge amounts all at once, which used to take fans years & years to collect.
Nobody knows for sure where most of the stuff comes from. Everyone's got a conspiracy theory: some people think it was Paul Fishkin or Chris Nicks or even Mick Fleetwood. Stevie said that a batch of demos was stolen from her in the 1970s; I think she was referring to the "Almanac" batch. She works with such a huge group of people on every album she makes that it would be impossible to try to pinpoint where the studio leak is. A clue is that she has frequently admitted that, because she doesn't play instruments, she spends a lot of studio time just sitting & writing, recording herself. God knows who in those studios snags those recordings ... but somebody does.