Restored & remastered by Patrick W. Engel at „Temple of Disharmony" in September 2010
Trouble's recording history in the '90's began with two albums for Def Jam, namely "Trouble" followed by "Manic Frustration". After that, Rick Rubin, Def Jam's owner, got into some serious financial trouble. And Trouble found themselves with no deal. This was the time, 1994, when the legendary "One for the Road" demo was published. Guitarist Rick Wartell tries to reconstruct the whole story: "When we recorded 'One for the Road' in 1994, the deal for the 'Plastic green Head' album was already in place. So why did we record that? Pre-production?" His colleague Bruce Franklin knows better: "Yeah, I think we were just seeing what we had. Every tour we do, we see all these people with different kinds of bootlegs. We thought, what the hell, man, all these people are making money off us. We were not making money, so we decided to bootleg ourselves. We recorded a demo, printed 1,500 copies, sold it for cash right there on the road, and for once we made money ourselves. The record company did not make money, the bootleggers did not make money, we did." Was it all "Plastic green Head" material on "One for the Road"? Bruce: "Two songs ended up on 'Plastic green Head', I think. 'Requiem' and 'Going home'. No, 'Going home' was on 'Simple Mind Condition'. 'Another Day' was the other one." "The rest would be exclusive then", adds Rick. "The songs were recorded in a studio, it wasn't a great studio, so it wasn't album quality, but still good. A good demo - that's all." The mentioned "One for the Road" demo was also published on the two CD's "Demos & Rarities", part one spanning 1980-1995 and part two 1984-1994. What about those CD's? "Actually, we took those CD's from the bootleggers", laughs Rick Wartell. Bruce explains: "It was literally a bootlegger's release. We got in touch with him and basically said: 'If we see you, we will kill you'. He said: 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry'. And then he sent us all the copies he had." So White Stallion Records was the original bootleg label? Bruce: "Yes. We talked to the man and told him how unhappy we were." Rick: "And then we heard that he started bootlegging someone else. There is some very early stuff on there." Talking of bootlegs, the earliest ever Trouble bootleg must probably be the live Chicago vinyl recorded in 1983, the one with the fantasy artwork on coloured vinyl. "Oh yeah, I've seen it", remembers Bruce Franklin. "I think that is a bootleg of our live recording." Rick: "Ah, that's a good one." "We have the original tape of that", states Bruce. "It is not a bootleg from a fan, it is from us." Rick: "Wow, we should put that one out on vinyl, too. We used to sell that tape, the tape was around everywhere. So somebody out there must have decided to do it on vinyl." There is some exclusive stuff on there, Trouble covering Accept's "Son of a Bitch" and even "Confused" by Angel Witch. "Yep, that's it", finds Bruce. Rick: "On that same tape we also did 'Children of the Grave'." Bruce knows better: "No, we played it at the show but it was not recorded because we were running out of tape. That was the very last song of the set."
