Monday, September 25, 2017

Radish- Discount Fireworks (Unreleased)



Every once in a while your wishes can true. I'm not talking big lottery wins or fame and fortune, no, I mean the small stuff that make life interesting and sometimes it's simply just plain luck. I've lived to see my beloved Chicago Blackhawks win the Stanley Cup, not once, but three times and I've been fortunate enough to see many of my favourite artists live (The Replacements, Young Fresh Fellows, Scruffy The Cat, Ray Davies, Elvis Costello etc...). Through this blog I've been made aware of and have been given a lot of cool music that I might not otherwise been aware of. Some bands I hadn't heard of before, as well as live material, demos and unreleased songs and albums from musicians I admire.

A few years back, I made a reference to Ben Kweller's band, Radish and an unreleased album, Discount Fireworks. I posted a couple self-released Kweller EP's (Freak-out It's Ben Kweller and Bromeo) and some of these recordings were holdovers from the proposed Fireworks album. Many of the songs from the Discount Fireworks sessions went on to appear in different versions on these EP's as well as Ben Kweller's debut album, Sha Sha. Kweller originally self released Sha Sha in 2000 and in 2002, ATO Records re-released a different version of the album with a different track order, new recordings and more songs. I don't know the exact timeline of these songs, but I know the Radish versions on Discount Fireworks are very hard to find. Several tracks have been floating around the web in some form or another and this has been one of the most requested items on this blog. I never ever expected to hear or get a copy of the album, but lo and behold, over eight years after that post I received an email from a reader and I was offered up a copy of Discount Fireworks. The rip unfortunately is 128k mp3, but for the opportunity to hear the album in it's entirety this was too good to pass up and I was very excited to finally hear it. I've listened to it several times and it's well worth a listen. Some of the versions that appear on Sha Sha are different recordings and slightly different versions, so if you're a fan of Radish and/or Ben Kweller, this is a must hear!

A special thank you to Johnny Spork for the album and for creating some amazing (unofficial) front and back covers included in the file. The sound quality is pretty damn good and it baffles me why this was never released, but for more information and background about the Discount Fireworks fiasco, Johnny sent me a link for an article from 1999:  http://www.dallasobserver.com/music/free-radish-6400889
 And remember your wishes can come true!  Now if someone has a uncompressed version of the album...
Enjoy!

  • PLEASE DO NOT SELL!
  • This is in lossy format, so please share as mp3. (Don't try to convert to WAV or FLAC, it doesn't work that way) 
  • If there is any issue sharing this recording (Mercury, Seagrams, BK?), please send me a PM first.

RADISH
Discount Fireworks

(Unreleased Album) 1998
mp3 (128k)

01. Launch Ramp
02. Next Time
03. Drink Me Away
04. How It Should Be (Sha Sha)
05. Silent Scene
06. What It Is Like To Live In Commerce
07. Wasted And Ready
08. Harriet's Got A Song
09. Here Is Dissonant
10. Cally
11. Orange Tic-Tacs
12. In Other Words
13. Panamainian Girl
14. For Forever
15. Bill W. Is My Friend
16. Girl In Between
17. 4.40 (Episode 2)
18. Super Neat (64k mp3)\

RADISH- Discount Fireworks 1998 mp3.rar

6 comments:

johnnyspork said...

You're quite welcome for the album. Great post! Oh, and this short film by Trey Parker and Matt Stone is probably my favorite thing to come out of the Seagram's/Universal merger of 1997/1998.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaVYZJxaxP4

djstorm said...

Thanks!This is awesome!Maybe some want to find a similar samples to these tracks, i left link here - www.lucidsamples.com

binky said...

Thanks Johnny for the link to the video! Never seen this before, hilarious! This sucked me in to a wasted hour of Trey Parker/Matt Stone related videos on YouTube. Yikes!

Anonymous said...

Wowza. This is such a special, rare thing to finally hear. Thank you so much for sharing!!! Loves me some Ben K.

AHAW said...

Wow this has just made my day …….after managing to get hold of Hello and Dizzy (Radishs 1st 2 albums)sum years ago I never thought id manage to hear this but here it is ……..many thanks

Pedro Almeida said...

I cannot believe this is true. I never thought I'd see the light of day I would find Discount Fireworks online. Amazing. Thank you so much.

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