The 100: Oasis, MORNING GLORY B-SIDES (BOOTLEG)

I often say I miss record stores, but that’s not entirely true. There are plenty of record stores. I have access to a bunch of them, and many of them cater to my very specific tastes. But those stores traffic almost exclusively in vinyl, a medium I fetishize and adore but has nothing to do with my own musical history. When I was growing up and getting fully invested in media, vinyl was dead as Dillinger—I very vividly remember Pearl Jam released Vitalogy on vinyl a week before it came out on other formats, and that was treated as a slightly silly novelty. I was born into the CD era, and when I yearn for the music-buying experiences of my youth, what I’m really mourning is the death of CD culture.

Compact discs had a lot going for them. Their size allowed for significantly more product to sit on shelves (particularly after they jettisoned the old longboxes), which in turn made the selection that much more diversified. For certain acts, it also facilitated an entire shadow industry where high-quality bootlegs could sit next to official releases. Your national chains and mall stores didn’t carry these, but independent record stores could turn a tidy profit selling copies of high-quality captures of radio broadcasts, European television appearances, or cobbled-together leftovers compilations. Some of these operated as an entire subset of a band’s catalog: In the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death, there was a whole series called Outcesticide that attempted to collect everything Nirvana ever laid down on tape and treated them like official b-sides; long before they got into the business of selling recordings of every concert they played, live Pearl Jam shows were pressed onto CDs and hawked next to brand new copies of Ten. Some of my most prized possessions during my teenage years were recordings of this type. I remember I had an early Foo Fighters live set called Fighting the N Factor that collected a British TV broadcast from their first European tour alongside selections from Dave Grohl’s Pocketwatch demos and rehearsal versions of In Utero songs Nirvana performed on Saturday Night Live. I had several of the aforementioned live Pearl Jam sets, including an amazingly low-fi copy of their legendary acoustic set at the Bridge School Benefit in 1992. I had a version of Nine Inch Nails entire hour at Woodstock ‘94 that I imagine was captured from the pay-per-view broadcast of that event. And one of the best albums I have ever owned was a collection of Oasis b-sides from the What’s the Story (Morning Glory)? sessions I picked up years before some of those tunes were collected for The Masterplan.

I really fell hard for those first two Oasis albums, particularly Morning Glory. What I was not aware of at the time was that Noel Gallagher was on one of the biggest heaters in the history of songwriting, and in the process of crafting that album he threw away basically an entire second album of songs just as good (if not better) than the stuff that made it on there. My first inkling of this came during the broadcast of Oasis’ infamous MTV Unplugged performance, which found Noel fronting the band thanks to Liam’s sore throat (though Liam still smoked, drank, and heckled from the balcony of London’s Royal Festival Hall). There were two songs played on that show I did not recognize: the spartan torch song “Talk Tonight” and the rousing “Round Are Way.” Those songs had been released as b-sides to various Morning Glory singles, but they were only available as European imports and cost like 30 bucks a throw.

So I was very excited when I found somebody had simply stacked all of those b-sides together onto a single disc for my enjoyment. Because everything was written around the same time and because Noel was in such a groove, it weirdly holds together as Morning Glory’s slightly more aggro cousin. It has “Talk Tonight” and the hippie-dippie campfire song “It’s Better People,” but it also has a speedball called “Headshrinker” and the metal-adjacent “Acquiesce” and their Godzilla-sized cover of Slade’s “Cum on Feel the Noize.” I was also amazed as how much had clearly gone into the making of these songs only to have them get left behind, like the staggeringly fleshed-out orchestrations of “The Masterplan” and the studio-buggery psychedelia of “Underneath the Sky.” Some of this stuff ended up compiled together on the official b-sides release The Masterplan in 1998, but the whole collection wasn’t in one place until Morning Glory got a deluxe reissue in 2014.

I loved these songs because they were exceptional, but I loved them even more because they felt like mine. I don’t think it ever actually happened in real life, but I felt good knowing that if I encountered somebody who loved “Wonderwall” I could comfortably blow their mind with top-secret stuff from the files of Noel Gallagher. That feeling of potentially introducing someone to their new favorite thing is one of the driving forces behind my entire career.