Bonus Tracks, Vol. 1: Jerry Garcia, Gram Parsons, David Bowie

The compact disc era brought with it endless reissues of old albums — and to entice us all into buying those old albums for the second, third or fourth time, they often included bonus tracks. Was there a fair amount of barrel scraping as the years went by? Oh yeah. But there were also plenty of completely awesome sounds that gave us fresh perspectives on classic LPs and artists. In this new, ongoing Aquarium Drunkard column, we’ll be diving back into our CD collections to highlight some of the very best bonus tracks …

Iggy Pop & David Bowie :: Shades (1986)

While tracing the collaborative history of Iggy Pop and David Bowie, you inevitably end at Iggy Pop’s 1986 album, Blah-Blah-Blah and its third single, “Shades.” According to the liner notes, the album was produced and co-written by Bowie, but the larger story – the one dipped in gossip and swirled in rock ’n roll folklore – is that Blah-Blah-Blah is a repurposing of throwaway material from Bowie’s ill-fated Tonight sessions, calling into question the classic Bowie/Pop paradox: is it Iggy Pop singing a David Bowie song? Or is it David Bowie producing an Iggy Pop song?

The Unofficial Bowie: The Later Years

In the late 1970s, after getting his financial house in relative order, David Bowie had a firmer grip on his studio recordings than many of his contemporaries. While Bob Dylan’s outtakes and demos would keep trickling out on bootlegs for years, the “unofficial” Bowie releases, 1976-2016, with some exceptions (see below), are greatly confined to concert tapes.