John Etherington wrote:Bizarrely, this has reminded me of a rare unreleased LC record that was mentioned in the Daily Mail in the early Seventies. I seem to remember Virginia Ironside saying that she had gone off of Leonard after hearing a record by him that was not intended for public consumption. I always wondered what she was referring to, but never found out (an early version of "Don't Go Home With Your Hard On"?...something from "Beautiful Losers" set to music?). I have long accepted the fact that I will never have an answer to this mystery. Oh, by the way, I'm not a "Daily Mail" reader...my parents used to read it. Honest!
John, it's Songs for Rebecca, the follow-up album to New Skin For the Old Ceremony. It was produced by John Lissauer, who co-wrote some songs, but they abandoned it in mid-1975. But they performed some songs on late 1975 tour in the US (Lissauer was playing in the band), and the mp3s were available for years on greg's website. It's the famous concert in Bryn Mawr, USA, and the audience recording contains early versions of Don't Go Home with Your Hard-On, The Traitor, The Smokey Life (titled I Guess It's Time), Iodine (titled Guerrero), and Came So Far For (Her) Beauty ("her" later dropped).
These songs are still available around, maybe even on DrHGuy's downloads at his blog, and full 2CD Bryn Mawr show is also circulating around.
It was mentioned few times since 2006, here on the Forum, we also had the note from John Lissauer (in his interview with our Dick in occasion of Blue Alert release) that the original tape was destroyed by mistake, because he and LC didn't know how to handle the antique tape when they wanted to listen to it years later. Dick gave a copy of the show to Mr. Lissauer, as there was talk, at the time, about the Leonard Cohen box-set, or the re-releases with the bonus tracks (the logical way would be to include these songs to remasters of New Skin... and Death of a Ladies Man). But the release of next three remasters was stopped by LC.
Btw, the another lost album is the follow-up to Recent Songs - its producer Henry Lewy produced Leonard's reading of Book of Mercy, with strings and background music, somewhere in early 80s. Leonard send message to Forum, via Jarkko, that the recording is in too bad condition to be ever released.
Tom
