Barbra Streisand's Just For The Record, a box set of four CDs spanning thirty years of her extraordinary career, was an elaborately packaged collection of music and milestones, over four hours long, that became a must-have for her legions of dedicated fans.
The set contains 94 tracks, 67 of which are previously unreleased performances. From her first recording at age 13 of “You’ll Never Know” through her discovery on Broadway in I Can Get It For You Wholesale. From Oscar, Emmy, Grammy and Tony Awards to her growth as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, back to Broadway and into the future, it's all collected on Just For the Record.
Some of the highlights of the box set include:
- Her first recording of “You’ll Never Know” at age thirteen, which opens the set.
- Her first TV appearance on the “Jack Paar Show.”
- Funny Girl’s closing night on Broadway when the audience sang their farewell to Barbra with “Auld Lang Syne.”
- A home recording of Barbra’s mother singing “Second Hand Rose,” which segues into Barbra singing it on her Emmy-winning special “My Name Is Barbra.”
- The demo of “Evergreen” in which Barbra accompanies herself on guitar.
- Her first Academy Award acceptance speech as she greeted the statuette with the famous quote, “Hello gorgeous.”
It was 1983 when Streisand first mentioned Just For the Record publiclly. She told Gene Shalit during an interview for Yentl, “I'm working on a retrospective album that's called Just For the Record... This record will open with my demo at 12 years old.”
Barbra recorded “You'll Never Know,” the duet with her younger self that is the last track on Just For the Record, in April 1988 during studio sessions with Rupert Holmes. “Warm All Over” was recorded then, too.
Streisand's manager Marty Erlichman took out ads (one was placed in the back pages of American Film magazine) asking for fans to contribute rare material to the project. Tapes, kinescopes, and even an old wire recording were sent. “A lot of the old TV shows, like Johnny Carson and Mike Wallace's P.M. East, were all erased,” Erlichman told Entertainment Weekly. “So the only way to get them was if fans had them.”
Even finding some of the older, rarer tapes at Streisand's label, Columbia Records, proved to be a treasure hunt. “There were an awful lot of tapes that we knew existed that we couldn't find. And [Columbia has] big vaults in mountains.”
“If someone hadn't already taken the title, we'd have called it ‘Act One,’ " said Marty Erlichman. “The intention of the set is to give a ‘you are there’ quality. The project meant a lot to Barbra. When we first sat down to listen to the tapes, it was a very emotional experience for her. It brought back all kinds of memories.”
Karen Swenson, credited as Project Coordinator, assembled many of the recordings for Just For the Record. Barry Dennen's tapes, made when he and Barbra were friends, circa 1961, were considered. Dennen said he had early private recordings, as well as live recordings from The Lion and the Bon Soir. Marty Erlichman tried to work with Dennen so that the tapes could be included on JFTR. Eventually he gave up. “We did have plenty of material,” Swenson explained. “Obviously, money also factors into this. But it would have been a nice gesture on Barry's part to share a copy of the tape with Barbra—just to have it for her own archive.”