This is a tricky category. Most artists are rejected time and time again at the beginning of their careers, no matter how good they are. But once they’ve finally signed a record deal and recorded an album? It’s a bigger gut-punch than ever when the label declines to release their work.
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If an artist records for a record label and the label doesn’t like it, they aren’t going to simply let that artist walk out the door with their album for some other label to release. In this situation, most artists are forced to repurpose those songs and re-record them for future releases (if they don’t abandon them altogether). As a result, most rejected albums never see the light of day—at least in the way they were originally intended to be seen (or, heard).
1. The Toadies, Feeler (1998)
In the immediate aftermath of Interscope rejecting Feeler, Toadies’ follow-up to their 1994 hit debut album, Rubberneck, the band decided to take the next two years off. (They also ran into financial issues that led to legal action against their ex-manager.)
They returned in early 2000 to record Hell Below/Heaven Above, returning to Rubberneck producers Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock in pursuit of a live, less mechanical sound than Feeler got from producer Paul Leary (Butthole Surfers). Three Feeler songs—“Push the Hand,” “Doll Skin,” and “What We Have We Steal” (originally called “Best of Three”)—made it onto the album.
Interscope failed to promote the album, however, only making things tougher on a band seven years removed from their first release. When bassist Lisa Umbarger heard from a label insider that Interscope was done marketing the record and there would be no second single, she quit. Frontman Vaden Todd Lewis subsequently broke up the band.
[RELATED: The Toadies Talk 27 Years of ‘Rubberneck,’ Lost Songs, and Making Coffee and Comics]
Toadies reunited five years later, releasing No Deliverance in 2008. By that point, bootlegs of an unmastered, unsequenced version of Feeler were floating around the internet, prompting the Toadies to rework and re-record the songs (after Interscope, predictably, refused to license the original masters to them). They finally released the official version of Feeler in 2010.
2. Neil Young, Hitchhiker (1976)
This album was recorded in a single night by Young, “pausing only for weed, beer, or coke,” as he explained in his 2014 memoir, Super Deluxe. What’s even more extraordinary is that he composed them on the spot according to producer David Briggs. “I’m not talkin’ about sittin’ down with a pen and paper,” Briggs said. “I’m talkin’ about pickin’ up a guitar, sittin’ there lookin’ me in the face and in 20 minutes: ‘Pocahontas.’”
The album includes early versions of other classics as well, such as “Powderfinger,” “Captain Kennedy,” and “The Old Country Waltz.” The label told Young to re-record the songs with a band, that they sounded like demos. (It didn’t seem to occur to them how these “demos” weren’t far removed from Young’s massive hit “Heart of Gold” stylistically.) Young released three Hitchhiker songs on 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps. But the original Hitchhiker tracks weren’t released together as an album until 2017.
3. True Believers, Hard Road (1987)
Alejandro Escovedo started True Believers in 1982 with his brother Javier, just as the cowpunk movement got started. The brothers had cut their teeth in punk bands like The Nuns, Rank and File, and The Zeros, but when Jon Dee Graham joined, he brought with him a potent three-guitar attack that veered more toward countrified rock.
They signed to Rounder Records and recorded an eponymous Jim Dickinson-produced 1986 debut album to modest response. EMI had a distribution deal with Rounder and loved the album enough to buy them out of their Rounder contract and offer $100,000 to record their second album—which would be ten times the cost of the first.
They recorded with Jeff Glixman, who’d had success producing The Georgia Satellites and Kansas. The album was two weeks from shipping when EMI shelved it as part of an internal reorganization in 1987. No label was willing to pay the $100,000 EMI insisted on being reimbursed for in exchange for the rights to the record, so it sat on the shelf and True Believers languished in limbo.
Javier quit a year later, which led to the band officially imploding. Hard Road was finally released in 1994 by Rounder, although only in the form of additional tracks tacked onto the CD release of their debut.
4. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001)
On some level, Wilco‘s leader, Jeff Tweedy, had been racing to separate himself from his country/folk past in Uncle Tupelo, first with the sun-kissed Sixties-inflected Summerteeth, and then with its troubled follow-up, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Tweedy was anxious to push the musical envelope, even as he and main collaborator Jay Bennett’s drug abuse spiraled, like the album, into excess. During recording, drummer Ken Coomer was cast aside, and Bennett’s input was marginalized before he was eventually fired. The turmoil was captured in the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.
Producer Jim O’Rourke was ultimately able to clarify the dense, layered effort. “After grinding it out in the studio for so long, it was like he took what we’d done and let a million flowers grow,” said bassist John Stirratt. The album expressed both the beauty and difficulty of connection; noise and static were used as a proxy for the way the world and our own frailties complicate that task.
Executives at Reprise Records were not impressed; they wanted their hook-laden alt-country band back. They asked for changes. Wilco told them it was finished, and like a house guest who’d outstayed their welcome, Reprise suggested maybe it was time for Wilco to take a hike.
In a rare development, Wilco was allowed to buy back the album for $50,000 and shop it to other labels. They went to Nonesuch—like Reprise, an arm of Warner Brothers…so they effectively ended up paying for the album twice. It went to No. 13 on the Billboard albums chart and is Wilco’s only gold-certified record. Last year Nonesuch released an 8-CD box set of the sessions featuring 82 unreleased tracks.
5. Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On? (1971)
Gaye was going through a crisis of the soul during the time surrounding the making of and release of what would be his most famous and revered album. His marriage to Anna Gordy, sister of Motown founder Berry Gordy, was collapsing; his frequent duet partner Tammi Terrell had died after a three-year struggle with a brain tumor; and his brother Frankie returned from Vietnam with stories that shook him to the core. When Al Cleveland shared an idea for a song questioning what was going on in our world today (an idea he’d gotten from Four Top Obie Benson), Gaye responded.
Gaye envisioned a concept album with sumptuous, varied arrangements outside the usual Motown mold, along with songs that segued directly into each other, just like the overlapping issues they were tackling lyrically. Along the way, he started multi-tracking his vocals. He was so energized by the results the he called a vacationing Berry Gordy in the Bahamas, only to have Gordy ask, “Why do you want to ruin your career [with a protest song]?”
“Quality Control,” the internal board that vetted Motown singles, rejected “What’s Going On?” outright. Berry Gordy called it the worst thing he’d ever heard, and shelved the entire album. But Motown executive Harry Balk and sales executive Barney Ales sent 100,000 copies of the single to stores without Gordy’s knowledge. When it became a hit and Motown’s fastest-selling single, Gordy had no choice but to eat crow and release the album. It remained on Billboard’s album charts for over a year, and is generally considered a masterpiece by music critics.
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns
