I love arcane rock snob endless re-release trivia so hard.
The other week when I was picking out spy songs I ran through the Austin Powers soundtrack, which included Liverpool alternative band The Lightning Seeds’ decent cover of The Turtles’ classic 1969 single You Showed Me. As a fan of the original I decided on running it for the song of the day, but after a little research I learned it was in fact actually written by Gene Clark of The Byrds (going as The Jet Set at the time) in 1964, and some demos were recorded but the song never made it to their debut album. So, The Turtles’ were introduced to it by their producer Chip Douglas, who had actually played it a few years prior in The Gene Clark Group BUT his harmonium was busted so he had to play it all slow for them. Of course, it’s that slow pace that made it so psychedelically great and that’s the way The Turtles recorded it, amplifying the mood by adding those signature strings.
A few months later a compilation album of early Byrds material surfaced called Preflyte (get it?), with an incredibly bad cover that reminded me of my high school girlfriend’s bedroom art projects (see above). This included the original faster version of You Showed Me. Now in 1973 the album was reissued with AMAZING SCI-FI ARTWORK by comic book artist Barry Windsor-Smith (Conan, Weapon X, Archer & Armstrong [which, speaking of high school, was the comic I named my then pet iguana after]) which looks like, speaking of high school for the final time, the best colored pencil high school notebook drawing of all time:
Then Rhino (of course) went and released In the Beginning in 1988 (with a boring cover photo), which was sort of like a reissue of Preflyte except they used alternate takes for a bunch of the songs, including an even faster electric guitar version of You Showed Me, which is the one I’m including here. Not as good as The Turtles, but interesting nonetheless. Anyway, obviously this hybrid re-re-release made rock snobs itchy, so Sundazed released the 2-disc The Preflyte Sessions in 2001 (with a different equally boring cover photo) which included everything. Well, almost everything, there was a limited 7″ with a couple extras. But hell, not to be outdone by themselves, they went ahead and released a remastered version of the original Preflyte as well in 2006, cause you can never have too many versions of god damn demo songs. Now excuse me while I finish meticulously annotating all of these in iTunes.
