[johnfowles]

Although Crossroads has for me never approached being one of my personal favourites. I too have often questioned what if any justification or even logic there was for including it in this set of demos which were presumably intended to showcase Gord's songwriting talents to Warner Seven Arts Records,when he at the time was under contract to United Artists and had already included Crossroads on the first UA album (Lightfoot!) In fact the first copy of the Demos CD I acquired omitted Crossroads entirely
The question of the inclusion of Crossroads has been discussed here before most fully at:-
http://www.corfid.com/vbb/showthread.php?t=12157
a topic cleverly entitled:-
Warner Brothers 1964 to 1966 Demos Artwork
A topic afflicted with the deadly corfid duplicate posting disease I might add
This was a topic I started over two years ago when I spotted an ebay auction featuring with some different artwork
and in which the track listing is as on this revised CD insert

and where Val in one reply said
"In spite of the fact that most people don't include it, Crossroads is one of the tracks on the WB demos. I have the original records, which consist of two LPs, one of which is a "normal" two-sided record, and the other is only one side (the second side has nothing recorded on it).

There are 23 songs on the first record and 9 on the second, and Crossroads is one of them. Although most bootlegs of the material include only 31 songs, there were in fact 32."
Noting that Tony has found the torrent I checked my hard drive and found that I had saved just Crossroads from it in FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format.
I had then decoded it to a full wav file that is 28.9 MB (30,354,956 bytes) and runs for 2minutes 52 seconds . Since that arch perfectionist Lightfoot is incapable once he has settled on an interpretation of one of his songs of changing it in any significant manner it is no surprise that this "version" is extremely similar to the "original" issue on Lightfoot!, although as Mende said in December 2005 "but it does sound like an inferior sounding version of the album one" and I would add now after comparing both wav files especially in the relative loudness and quality of the harmonica accompaniment with just one other material difference that I can spot without doing an exhaustive acoustical comparison.
The Lightfoot! version runs 2:58 and is therefore rips to a slightly larger wav file:-
30.0 MB (31,547,124 bytes)
There is also the point that the demos are attributed to the November 1964 onwards timeframe whereas Lightfoot! was apparently recorded in December 1964 but not released until January 1966
(as stated by the usually reliable Wayne on:-
http://www.lightfoot.ca/chron02.htm)
so maybe there was some intent to supply WB with a different recording to the one used by UA in case UA failed to release the debut album
As Tony said
"After some early listenings, a couple of these tunes really stand out for me:"
I found that as with all GL albums initially one is relatively unimpressed , but after many listenings you catch on to certain songs in a big way as Tony has already found out.
For me I always enjoy very much
31_Weep_Not_For_Me
06_When_Spring_Was_O'er_the_Land
10_A_Ring_And_A_Secret
Whatever if I can determine the font used on the alternative front insert

I might try to recreate that "Echoes of Heroes" artwork .
I have tried contacting the pedlars of that version of the CD but they claimed not to be able to access the artwork and I do not fancy paying good money to the bootleggers just to acquire a set of artwork
Zoneranger can you have a go at it for us???