Scavenger Hunt

On the Download: Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot tops crits' year-end lists, but its illegitimate stepsister is even better: Somewhere on the Web lurk two discs' worth of YHF demos, which contain not only enormously altered versions of official tracks (a hard-rocking "Kamera," say) but a mess of tracks inexplicably left off the Reprise-to-Nonesuch release. I'd pit "Magazine Called Sunset" and "Not for the Season" against anything on YHF, and dare say they'd win without breaking much of a sweat. Wilco should make like XTC's Andy Partridge, who's pocketing short green by selling two volumes' worth of new and old experiments, the Fuzzy Warbles series, at www.xtcidearecords.co.uk; for no extra quid, they arrive with Mr. P's autograph.

Also found on the Net, free for the taking with permission: some 16 demos from the forthcoming Weezer album (tops: "Modern Dukes" and "Hey Domingo!," which prove Rivers C. isn't quite over Pinkerton, blessedly); Redd Blood Cells, Steve McDonald's thunderous bass-hit version of the White Stripes' outta-nowhere hit record; dozens of odds and sods available from Pete Townshend's eeelpie.com, including plenty of Who live (when John E. lived), low-fi demos, a sweet "Goin' Up the Country" and the for-Web-purchase-only twofer Scoop 3; and the r.e.m.ix collection, wherein R.E.M. let the likes of Her Space Holiday and Chef tinker with a handful of bad R.E.M. songs, none of which were saved nor slaughtered in this tepid incarnation. Best of all: On bobdylan.com, Mr. Mumbles pays in-concert homage to the dead (George Harrison, "Something") and the dying (Warren Zevon, "Mutineer"), and only the moribund won't feel their heart skip a beat.

And There's a Magazine, Too?: Reason No. 3,274 why British music magazines will always be more relevant than their American counterparts: They come with compilation CDs worth more than the price of the mag itself. Uncut provided two of the year's best collections: the two-volume Hard Rain set, wherein the likes of Paul Weller, Paul Westerberg, Johnny Marr, the Charlatans, Sonic Youth and 25 other estimables do mighty justice to Bob Dylan; and Instant Karma 2002, which gathers rare and exclusive tracks by Weller, Roddy Frame, the Pretenders, Mercury Rev, Ash, Robert Wyatt and a dozen others bending knee to John Lennon. Stuck to the front of Mixmag's September ish was The Mongo Hotline, on which Earl Zinger reduced "Song 2" to a dubbed-out blur. Mojo's June issue arrived with The Score, which gathered 20 tracks from swinging, "ultra-cool" and hard-to-find soundtracks, among them Quincy Jones' "Something's Cookin'" (The Italian Job) Elmer Bernstein's "Frankie Machine" (The Man with the Golden Arm) and Roy Budd's "Get Carter."

Love You Live: Never did go in for live bootlegs; you just had to be there, dig? But I'll make exceptions for these two direct-from-soundboard scores, highlights of 2002's biggest tours. The Rising Tour 2002, recorded before and after MTV cut away from Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's Video Music Award performance of "The Rising," bests the official release and then some; the falling rain rinses the material of its pretensions, and you're left attending not a memorial service, which is what The Rising sounds like, but a wake among good friends. Appropriate the setting is the Museum of Natural History as Boss and band play fast and loose with new and old cuts, among them the string-Steen "Lonesome Day," "Thunder Road" and "Darkness on the Edge of Town." A close second is Live Licks, plundered from the August night the Rolling Stones played to a thou in Toronto and rescued from the dustbin such gems as "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" and Otis Redding's "I Can't Turn You Loose"; turns out Mick's not as old as he looks after all. Same for Keef, who died in 1994.