The Who - Who's for Tennis? (1968)

 

Side A:
1. Someone's Coming
2. Early Morning Cold Taxi
3. Glittering Girl
4. Girl's Eyes
5. Melancholia
6. Pictures of Lily
7. Doctor, Doctor

Side B:
8. Glow Girl
9. Little Billy
10. Faith in Something Bigger
11. Magic Bus
12. Call Me Lightning
13. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
14. Dogs

After the release of their album A Quick One, The Who's next album was planned to be called Who's Lily? after their recent single Pictures of Lily. However they had an idea to create an album that sounded like a pirate radio station, full of fake commercials and unrelated songs, and from that they developed the Who Sell Out album and the Who's Lily? idea was dropped. I've seen blogs try to recreate Who's Lily? I've also seen blogs try to make a double album version of The Who Sell Out. Both albums seem possible to recreate, but they basically use the same songs so it has to be one or the other. I tried to make a double album version of The Who Sell Out once but felt like I didn't have enough songs to choose. Maybe this idea will fare better.

Who's Lily? seems to be if they took just the songs from The Who Sell Out and combined them with other songs from the era like Pictures of Lily. Though apparently they also had plans to release an album in 1968 that didn't get finished either. I realized that if you combined the non-album songs from 1967 and 1968 together it would be enough for a full album.

One criticism of the Who Sell Out is that the pirate radio idea disappears midway through the second side although the band recorded more jingles that they could've used. Some outtakes included covers like Summertime Blues and In the Hall of the Mountain King as well as instrumentals like Sodding About and... In the Hall of the Mountain King. In fact there were plans around this time to release an instrumental EP but it never got released.

The Velvet Underground and Nico - White Light / White Heat (1968)

 

Side A:
1. White Light/White Heat

2. Lawns of Dawns

3. Lady Godiva's Operation

4. Here She Comes Now

5. Facing the Wind

6. I Heard Her Call My Name

Side B:
7. Stephanie Says

8. Julius Caesar (Memento Hodié)

9. Temptation Inside Your Heart

10. Evening of Light

11. The Gift

Last year I listened to the unreleased fourth Velvet Underground album but didn't think I could change it beyond the track listing I found for it online. However in the comment section of a different post, I saw someone propose a question, "What if Nico never left The Velvets?" Well this is an interesting one because was Nico ever really in the Velvets? She was brought in by Andy Warhol to be a chanteuse but he also wanted to be their producer and manager. She only sang on three of the songs but after the album became a commercial flop, Warhol was fired as manager and Nico became a solo artist, and she left the group as casually as she entered it. 

The year before the unreleased album though both the Velvets and Nico recorded an album. The Velvets released White Light / White Heat and Nico released The Marble Index. WLWH had a couple long tracks that I could take out and I can also include both sides of a single that I couldn't on the other album. And Nico's album is only half an hour long so I thought I could use a couple tracks from her album and combine them with the Velvets album.

The Who - Magic Bus (1968)

 

Side A:
1. Disguises
2. Glow Girl
3. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
4. Faith in Something Bigger
5. Little Billy
6. Call Me Lightning
7. I'm a Boy

Side B:
8. Magic Bus
9. Someone's Coming
10. Doctor, Doctor
11. Dogs
12. Pictures of Lily
13. Substitute
14. In the City

I've been wanting to make a second post about the Who during my classic rock marathon. So when I heard that they put out a compilation album to promote a newly released single with the word bus in it, I was like hey that's what the Hollies did but two years earlier! And while I didn't think I had enough material to make a new version of Bus Stop, I had more than enough material to make a new version of Magic Bus. I took out songs that previously appeared on albums and one song that was a cover and included a few new songs. 

The Hollies - Listen to Us (1968)

 

Side A:
1. Open Up Your Eyes
2. Do the Best You Can
3. Relax
4. Tomorrow When It Comes
5. Man With No Expression
6. Like Every Time Before
7. Everything is Sunshine

Side B:
8. Jennifer Eccles
9. Wings
10. Try It
11. Water on the Brain
12. When Your Light's Turned On
13. Pegasus
14. Listen to Me

The last album I talked about by The Hollies was Bus Stop, an album that's American in origin but combines tracks that didn't get issued on American versions of their albums. Well they actually do have an unreleased album which would've been their last before Graham Nash left the band and joined Crosby, Stills, and Nash. If we're to assume that this album will be American too then we can't use tracks that were already on American versions of albums but we can use tracks that didn't make it onto them. I also didn't wanna use tracks from the first Crosby, Stills, and Nash album cause it would've been out of our timeframe but I think we have enough tracks without it.  

The Monkees - Head (1968)

 

Side A:
1. Porpoise Song (Theme From "Head")
2. Circle Sky
3. Can You Dig It?
4. As We Go Along
5. Daddy's Song
6. Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?

Side B:

7. If I Ever Get to Saginaw Again
8. Some of Shelly's Blues
9. The Crippled Lion                                       

10. D.W. Washburn                                           
11. Tear the Top Right Off My Head
12. Laurel and Hardy
13. How Insensitive

This is the soundtrack to the movie Head which The Monkees put out in 1968 after their TV show got cancelled. It would be the third album they released that year and the last to be considered part of their main canon. It contained a couple songs and a couple tracks that sampled dialogue and sound effects from the movie. I cut out the short tracks but needed a side's worth. 

Around the time the soundtrack was released, they were working on a new TV special called 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee, but Peter Tork left the band at the end of the year and the special wouldn't air till the following year. I thought of using songs from the special since they were apparently released as bonus tracks on reissues of their albums, but I can only find the versions of them from the TV special, so I'm reluctantly forced the include the country songs I cut out from the last album. I did however exclude one track and replace it with a new Davy track.

The Monkees - Monkee Spectacular (1968)

 

Side A:
1. Rosemarie
2. My Share of the Sidewalk
3. Party
4. War Games
5. St. Matthew
6. Come On In

Side B:
7. Changes
8. Someday Man
9. Hollywood                            
10. Look Down                     
11. Smile               
12. It's Nice to Be With You        
13. I'm Gonna Try                                              

The Monkees released two albums in 1968, yet had enough material to release another one this year. The album cover plays on the band's teenage fandom at the time, yet Mike's songs were starting to sound full blown country which called the band's longevity into question. Indeed, bassist Peter Tork left the band at the end of the year, and it marked the end of their peak of success despite only being two years long. Mike's country sound seems to leak into Micky's songs like D.W. Washburn and Peter's songs like Tear the Top Right Off My Head, meaning Davy's the one that takes charge of the album. 

The Kinks - Four More Respected Gentlemen (1968)

 

Side A:
1. She's Got Everything
2. Mr. Songbird
3. Polly
4. Days
5. Berkeley Mews
6. Misty Water
7. Did You See His Name?
8. Autumn Almanac

Side B:
9. Susannah's Still Alive
10. Act Nice and Gentle
11. This is Where I Belong
12. Dead End Street
13. Wonderboy
14. Mr. Pleasant
15. Big Black Smoke

Four More Respected Gentlemen was originally an album that was supposed to be released in November 1968, but about a month beforehand, the label dropped the project and released the album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society instead. The album was submitted as a 15 track album but the label planned on releasing an 11 track version of it cutting out the last 4 tracks. Village Green Preservation Society included 5 of the songs but had 15 tracks in it. The European version of it included 2 exclusive tracks but had 12 tracks on it. Following the album's cancellation, Reprise released all of the tracks on two compilation albums, The Kink Kronikles and The Great Lost Kinks Album. 

Reprise began assembling an early version of the latter compilation in 1969 or 1970 which they planned to call Four More Respected Gentlemen. The eventual title The Great Lost Kinks Album references Gentlemen, though it's been described as misleading since there are only two songs in common between the albums. So the idea is to see if I can take the exclusive songs from the original version and combine it with other songs to make a complementary album out of it. Taking a look at the rest of the Kinks Kronikles track listing, it has 7 non-album songs to choose from but two of them are from 1969. This gives us an even 5 tracks to include. But then I also took out There's No Life Without Love and replaced it with Act Nice and Gentle which didn't get included.

The left cover is what was planned to originally be the cover. The right cover is an alternate European version of the cover to VGPS that I've seen used in some reconstructions of the album. The cover I use is one I just found on the internet. I take no credit for these covers.