Disc One: 1. Down In The Bottom #1, 2. Trident Jam, 3. Wally’s Whistling Saw (on cover Tune), 4. Hide Your Love, 5. Time Waits For No One, 6. Chuck Berry Blues, 7. Don’t Mess With Cupid, 8. I’m So Weak, 9. Truck Driver Blues, 10. Undercover Of The Night (on cover Undercover), 11. Muscle Boogie, 12. Crushed Pearl, 13. Dirty Work Blues.
Disc Two: 1. Alright Charlie, 2. Don’t Want Somebody Else, 3. Fragile (Like China), 4. Jump On Top Of Me Baby, 5. You Got Me Rocking, 6. Saint Of Me, 7. I’m Cured (I Don’t Need You Anymore), 8. Might As Well Get Juiced (on cover Juiced), 9. Low Down, 10. Paying The Cost To Be The Boss, 11. Head In The Toilet Blues, 12. Watermelon Man.

This release from Empress Valley is based upon a recent upload on a Stones message board of these tracks in flac format, however we are talking of mp3 reencoded in flac. Just to point things out, let me reprint a post from the Stones message board: there is absolutely a loss when you convert Flac to Mp3: Flac is like a house that has 10 rooms, Mp3 is a house that has 3 rooms. You cannot fit the Flac house into the Mp3 house without squishing it all into squishy bits and converting the Mp3 house to the Flac house just means you’ll have 3 rooms of sound and 7 empty rooms taking up space.

Anyway, here are misses 2 important ones from Nicky Hopkins: Good Morning Everybody (early take of The Loveliest Night Of The Year) and Pommes De Terre, which featured the Stones anyway, let alone High Or Low. The title of the discs is Hidden Stones Recording, on the front cover though is VSOP which refers to Very Superior Old Pale, a classification for cognac brand or rum aged in oak barrels at least 4 years (the acronym means also Very Small Outline Package, but it doesn’t seem the case here). These tracks are much older though, Wally’s Whistling Saw is the instrumental version of Following the River,

Truck Driver Blues was also known as Looking For Trouble, Muscle Boogie has both guitars playing a fast instrumental boogie backed by Ian Stewart’s piano; Crushed Pearl here is the version sung by Jagger. All in all another good compilation of outtakes that recently surfaced.