I'm glad Neil didn't erase the recordings. Sometimes bands have gems that stay in the vault for a long time. I remember reading about Nirvana's "You know you're right" years before it was released. I still remember the excitement I felt when it turned out the recording was real. Audioslave is another band that apparently has some good stuff in their vault. What was going to be the first single off of Revelations was shelved after their drummer decided he didn't like the track - but everyone else apparently loved it. Hopefully one day that sees the light of day.
I feel this. One of my favorite artists, Ray LaMontagne, has entire albums that he has apparently (due to essentially rumors and, at some point, wikipedia) worked hard to completely remove from the internet. They're from his early days and a little different in terms of his style and voice, but I never found anything definite about the reasoning. However, these albums have some of my absolutely favorite material of his, far more than what you can find on even YouTube now and I was fortunate enough to get some of the tracks digitally years ago and hang onto them. Some of them have even been covered more recently and become pretty popular.
So that's what happened to those. I knew I wasn't completely crazy and that I'd heard and/or "bought" some early Ray LaMontagne music, but last year when I was trying to find it the tracks I was thinking of were nowhere to be seen. Just "Trouble."
A guy I knew in high school released seven or eight albums with a co-conspirator and also felt the same way about their early work. Some of it was admittedly a bit rough, but some was also very good. He eventually relented on his opposition to re-leasing any of it, and those early songs have long since made it onto iTunes (and basically every streaming service). So I can definitely understand artists not wanting to see or hear their earliest works, worried that people will hate it and judge them based on who they used to be.
It's interesting that there are many different trajectories for musical artists, the ones that this particular narrative most applies to are the ones that become more polished as they get older but whose creative genius was spent in the early years. And there are quite a few of those. Listen to early recordings of 'The Police' and what they - and Sting - put out later for some nice examples of that. The early stuff was definitely rough, but it has so much energy and originality.
