BEASTIE BOYS Country Mike's Greatest Hits - RARE, OOP, SEALED

$

275

This is a brand new, sealed copy. This was an extremely limited release back in 2011 I believe.

Country Mike's Greatest Hits is the legendary full-length country album recorded by the Beastie Boys. Never officially released, it was originally only given out to family and friends of the Beasties as a Christmas gift back in 1999, and bootlegs started showing up a few years later. It has proven to be a very hot collectible, supposedly fetching as much as $400 on eBay.
The only official reference to the album appears on the Beastie Boys compilation The Sounds of Science, which also includes two songs, "Railroad Blues" and "Country Mike's Theme". In the liner notes, Adam Yauch explains:
"At some point after Ill Communication came out, Mike got hit in the head by a large foreign object and lost all of his memory. As it started coming back he believed that he was a country singer named Country Mike. The psychologists told us that if we didn't play along with Mike's fantasy, he could be in grave danger. Finally he came back to his senses. This song ("Railroad Blues") is one of the many that we made during that tragic period of time."


Highly collectible!

I've gotten a few questions about whether this is an original or bootleg pressing.  From a Beastie Boys discog site about bootleg vs original releases:

• The original has a 1/4 inch white border around all four sides of the front picture sleeve, while the bootleg has no border. The bootleg's front image extends to the edge causing the picture and text to be slightly larger than the original.
• The bootleg image has a slight yellow tint to it when compared to the original.
• The spine of the original reads "Country Mike's Greatest Hits The Round-Up Factor/ Grand Royal" and this is not present on the bootleg. The back cover of the original also has a scripted font saying "The Round-Up Factor" written across the bottom, which again has been removed on the bootleg.
• A Grand Royal logo present on the back sleeve has also been taken off.
• The vinyl-labels are vastly different with the original having full color images and text where as the bootlegs simply have black text printed on plain white labels.
• The catalogue number for the bootleg is "CN 005". For the original it is "CM-001".
• The etchings in the runout groove of the original Side-A are: "CM-001-A-4", "READIN' YOU THE NEWS" and "L-52482". Side B has "CM-001-B" and "L-52482X". The bootleg simply has "CN 005 A" and "CN 005 B1".