Nothing More to Give

Decades after Beatles fanatics spent their hard-earned cash buying bootleg albums in search of the Great Lost Beatles Track, the band finally allowed for the release of that three-volume Anthology series. The series confirmed that, with the exception of a few well-known alternate takes, The Beatles had nothing more to give. There was not a treasure-trove of cool, unreleased original tracks.

Fans of The Kinks and The Who have been treated to some cool rarities and demos over the years. Some believe Bruce Springsteen's unreleased tracks are as good as his released ones.

The Rolling Stones never faced this question. Each new album since Black and Blue contains tracks that were revived from some aborted recording session in Jamaica or the Bahamas, circa 1974. A hundred years from now they will still be able to release a new album of material culled from one of those late-night jam sessions. And don't think they won't.

With each new reissue of the back catalogs of Elvis Costello and David Bowie, new previously unreleased tracks emerge, most of which are of better-than-current-day-release quality of either artist. The other night, however, I was thinking about one major band with excellent studio chops that seems to have nothing more to give: