Favorite Reissue/Archival Releases of 2015

Here are some of my favorite reissue/archival music releases from 2015 (some of these may have been issued in late 2014, but whatever).

Various Artists - Ork Records: New York, New York
Tons of previously hard to find or unavailable recordings from the dawn of the New York punk scene. Includes tracks from Television, Richard Hell, Alex Chilton, The Feelies, and many lesser known early CBGBs denizens. Includes a fascinating book with insightful essays and great photographs. It provides a deeper insight into the origins of the New York punk scene than was previously available.

The Velvet Underground - The Complete Matrix Tapes
Four CDs of live music from the Velvet Underground at the peak of their powers as a live band, recorded to four track in excellent fidelity. Just incredible. If you want a physical copy of this act quickly as it appears to already be out-of-print.

Game Theory - Real Nighttime
Omnivore Recordings finally gave this classic album the reissue treatment it deserves. The sound quality (whether on LP or CD) is much improved over the somewhat brittle sounding original Enigma LP. Stay tuned for a reissue of the band's 2 LP masterpiece 'Lolita Nation' in February.

Love - Reel To Real
Released in 1974 by RSO, this was Arthur Lee's last shot at mainstream success, and he blew it with his erratic behavior but not with the music he recorded. Dismissed by many at the time, in retrospect it's a great fusion of Memphis soul and Hendrix inspired heavy psychedelia. This release from High Moon Records is a real labor of love (no pun intended), and includes some great bonus tracks.

The Chills - The BBC Sessions
One of the best and most overlooked bands of the 1980s alternative/college/whatever rock scene. These fresh takes from BBC sessions sound fantastic, especially in comparison to the sometimes questionable use of the recording studio featured on their proper albums.

Various Artists - I'm Just Like You: Sly's Stone Flower 1969-1970
Sly Stone was doing some fascinating things in the studio while he was blowing his mind with cocaine during this period. Fantastic stuff if you are a fan of the insular, paranoid sound of 'There's A Riot Goin' On.'

Bob Dylan - The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 12
This one is a lot to dig into depending on which set you get, but there are amazing alternate takes of some of Dylan's best songs, and it is a peak into the creative process of an artist operating at an unmatched level of creativity.

The Rolling Stones - From The Vault: The Marquee Club Live In 1971
I'm sure you can find more technically accomplished and "together" live releases from the world's greatest rock and roll band, but you won't find many with a darker, more menacing vibe. Mick Taylor's lead guitar is amazing throughout. Dark, scary, and for me their most compelling live release to date.

William Onyeabor - Box Set
All of the African synth pop/funk musician's albums lovingly compiled into a single box set with reproduction artwork. It proves Luaka Bop's compilation 'Who Is William Onyeabor' was no fluke, and many of the songs left off it are just as good as the ones included.

Frank Sinatra - In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning (LP or hi-rez digital download)
Previous reissues were cut from tapes with added reverb or were mutilated with unnecessary and excessive digital noise reduction. This is the first time since the early 60s that you can easily purchase a version of this landmark album that sounds the way it was supposed to. The "dry" tapes used for this latest reissue sound far more intimate than the ones with added reverb.

High Moon Records Hits A Home Run With Its Reissue Of Love's 'Reel To Real'

I finally got around to picking up the reissue of Love's 1974 album 'Reel To Real.' Back in 2007 I wrote about how I thought the album deserved to be listened to again with fresh ears. Freed from the burden of unreasonable expectations, it is a very strong album, among the best Lee released post 'Forever Changes.' Eight years later it's finally been reissued by High Moon Records, the same label that gave Love's 'Black Beauty' its first legitimate release back in 2012. 'Black Beauty' began Lee's journey back to his R&B roots and 'Reel To Real' completes it.

I'm happy to report that High Moon has finally given 'Reel To Real' the treatment it deserves. The sound quality of the CD (mastered by Dan Hersch and Bill Inglot) is fantastic (I can't speak to the LP, which I haven't heard). There are fabulous liner notes by David Fricke that draw on interviews with Lee's former bandmates, as well as the Bill Oakes, the executive who signed Love to RSO Records (turns out he was hoping for something more like 'Forever Changes' as well). Best of all, the twelve bonus tracks included on the CD are fantastic. There are four previously unheard, fully produced outtakes written by Arthur Lee that are a genuine revelation. These alone make this release a must-purchase item for any Arthur Lee fan. There's also some alternate mixes that are arguably superior to the ones that appeared on the album and a studio rehearsal of the 'Forever Changes' outtake "Wonder People (I Do Wonder)."

I'm really pleased that this much misunderstood chapter in Arthur Lee's career is getting the fresh look it's long deserved. High Moon's work on this reissue is absolutely unassailable. Highly recommended.

Love's Reel To Real Finally To Be Reissued By High Moon Records

High Moon Records recently announced they will be reissuing Love's 1974 album Reel To Real on LP, CD and Digital Download with 11 bonus tracks.

Real To Real did not sell well on initial release, has never been reissued on CD, and has been out-of-print since for decades. For many years Reel To Real was held in disrepute by clueless music critics who could never forgive Arthur Lee for moving on from Forever Changes. It even made one authoritative "worst albums ever" list. But there has been a critical re-evaluation of it in recent years. I wrote about my rediscovery of of the album, and my realization that it was actually really good back in 2007.

Real To Real is not Arthur Lee's finest hour, but it's a terrific, soulful album that could have been a commercially successful new direction for Lee and his cohorts if things had unfolded a little differently. High Moon does fantastic work, and this will be well worth purchasing for any Love/Arthur Lee fan. My original goal for this blog was to raise the profile of music I thought had been unjustly overlooked, so I'm always happy to see one of the releases I championed reissued, especially when done with such obvious care and respect.

Game Theory - Real Nighttime Pre-order Heads Up

I wanted to give you a heads up that the Omnivore Recordings reissue of Game Theory's Real Nighttime is available for pre-order now. The first 300 copies pre-ordered on LP from Omnivore will include a bonus flexi-disc of "Dead Center" that was originally intended to be distributed with copies of Option magazine. This was something Dan Vallor hinted at in my interview with him when he mentioned a "golden ticket" item, but he made me promise not to mention anything until plans were finalized. I kept my promise, but the cat's out of the bag now.

If you're a digital only person, don't freak out, the flexi-disc version of "Dead Center" was included on the recent CD reissue of Dead Center, this is really for the collector/fetishist types.

"Omnivore Recordings’ re-introduction of the Game Theory catalog continues with the 30th Anniversary reissue of Real Nighttime.

Their first in a long line of albums produced by Mitch Easter (R.E.M., Let’s Active), this version adds an astonishing 13 bonus tracks (10 previously unissued) to the original album’s lauded twelve. From hard-to-find compilation tracks to live and unheard material (including covers of songs by Gerry Rafferty and Queen), Real Nighttime now not only stands as the band’s breakthrough, but as a true document of their emergence into the annals of music history.

Available on CD and Digital, as well as a translucent red LP (with download card for entire CD program), Real Nighttime stands as a fan favorite, and as a truly classic release. Packaging includes rare photos and an interview with Mitch Easter and series co-producer Pat Thomas, as well as notes from Byron Coley (Spin, Forced Exposure) and a remembrance from Carl Newman of The New Pornographers.

The sun has risen once again on the Game Theory catalog. Now it’s time to prepare for the Real Nighttime."

    CD/LP/Digital Track List:
1. HERE COMES EVERYBODY
2. 24
3. WALTZ THE HALLS ALWAYS
4. I MEAN IT THIS TIME
5. FRIEND OF THE FAMILY
6. IF AND WHEN IT FALLS APART
7. CURSE OF THE FRONTIER LAND
8. RAYON DRIVE
9. SHE’LL BE A VERB
10. REAL NIGHTTIME
11. YOU CAN’T HAVE ME
12. I TURNED HER AWAY

     Bonus Tracks:
13. GIRL WITH A GUITAR
14. ANY OTHER HAND
15. FAITHLESS
16. BAKER STREET (Live)
17. THE RED BARON (Live)
18. IF AND WHEN IT FALLS APART (Live)
19. BEACH STATE ROCKING (Live)
20. SHE’LL BE A VERB (Live)
21. CURSE OF THE FRONTIER LAND (Live)
22. METAL AND GLASS EXACT (Live)
23. GIRL WITH A GUITAR (COMPLETE) (Live)
24. I TURNED HER AWAY (Live)
25. LILY OF THE VALLEY

     LP includes download card. 

Dan Vallor On Reissuing Game Theory's Blaze Of Glory

I had the privilege of chatting with Dan Vallor, who co-produced Omnivore Recordings' recent reissue of Game Theory's first LP, Blaze of Glory. Originally released in 1982, Blaze of Glory has been unavailable in its original mix since shortly after its original, limited release. Dan and I chatted about this reissue, the late Scott Miller, and Omnivore's plans for the rest of Game Theory's long out-of-print catalog. Dan's enthusiasm for Game Theory's music and his determination that his friend's music be released with the love and care it deserves was evident at every moment during our conversation.

Could you give me a little background on your involvement with the band?

I met Scott and the band in the late winter/early spring of 1983, shortly after Blaze of Glory came out. I was introduced by a friend of mine who was a DJ at San Francisco State's college radio station, and was friends with Steve Wynn [Dream Syndicate] who was at UC Davis's radio station at that time. Scott was friends with Steve, and so we met through that connection.

And you served as a tour manager for them?

Yeah, I was their tour manager and sound engineer. My first tour was after Distortion was released and shortly after Real Nighttime was recorded, so this was the Fall of 1984. I had done some tours with Tav Falco's Panther Burns, The Rain Parade and The Long Ryders and I had worked with Game Theory around California and after Distortion came out. After Distortion's release we did a cross-country tour that ended rather catastrophically (we sacrificed the return home half of our tour when a better offer was dangled in front of us but that offer never came through…this resulted in a level of stress and poverty that eventually splintered the band). And then we did another tour in '85 with a new line up (just Scott and I from the prior tour) when we recorded Big Shot Chronicles in Winston-Salem. And then I took some time off and didn't do any touring for several years until the last lineup, the unreleased lineup, with Jozef Becker and Michael Quercio. We did a couple brief West Coast trips with that lineup. That was, by far, the best of all of my touring experiences.

I think there might be a track that came out on the Tinkers To Evers To Chance compilation from that lineup.

Right. Scott had mixed feelings about some of the original recordings on some of his older material. At the time, he wanted to re-record an Alternate Learning [Scott's pre-Game Theory band] song. He very much wanted things to be in a perfect state based on where he was at a given time creatively. So he wanted to re-work some of the original tapes, re-record some things, remix other things. He did that for Tinkers To Evers To Chance and for the Distortion of Glory CD that was released on the Alias label.

But Blaze of Glory is coming out now in its original form, re-mastered from the original master tapes?

That's correct. The band formed in August 1982, and I think they recorded Blaze of Glory in December of that year. It was fast-moving because by late winter it was out. And that's what you hear with this release.

I was curious about the artwork. I've never seen a copy of the original album, and I go to a lot of record stores.

You wouldn't have necessarily seen it unless you lived in Northern California, the Sacramento/Davis or Bay Areas. I think Scott sent some out to some radio stations and record stores to try and get greater distribution. But, the album was pretty hard to come by outside of Northern California.

So it was originally packaged in a garbage bag?

It was packaged in a small, white kitchen garbage bag. Inside was a lyric sheet and on the outside were stickers pasted onto the plastic bag. The Omnivore LP reissue is on a plain white sleeve with stickers that are similar to the original stickers that were pasted on. It was their idea but it's pretty much what my original copy looks like now, because storing an LP in a plastic bag is not really ideal. I remember the day we left for the tour in '84, I had a stack of the LPs that were already slightly warped from not being stored in jackets. I gave them all to a DJ friend from Berkeley who had driven up from the Bay Area to see us off.

That can be problem that with innovative packaging for LPs. You'll find that with copies of Public Image Limited’s Metal Box too.

Yeah it's funny, the first Alternate Learning 7" EP, which well preceded Blaze of Glory, was packaged with about ten pages of small inserts of varying sizes inside the sleeve, and some of those warped as well because there was so much bulk inside the sleeve. That imaginative packaging that Scott did was great, but sometimes it was hard on the vinyl.

Whose idea was to get this stuff reissued? Who was the prime mover behind this project?

Well Scott and I had been working on getting things out again for quite some time before he passed. And it was kind of a long process that had become rather frustrating. He had turned the effort over to me to figure out where to get them reissued. After he died it took a while for me to have the strength to revisit the project, it was hard but I eventually continued to work on it…it remained as important to me as it had been to us.

So this is very personal for you?

Yes. Immediately after he was gone I was sort of out of my mind. I couldn't think about reissues. Then in December of last year I tentatively approached a label that I thought he would've been really happy to be on, and they were very receptive but it didn't fit into their release schedule. Essentially we were in the midst of conversations with that label when I got a note from Robert Torin (who was the photographer for Game Theory and Loud Family) saying I should talk to Jonathan Segel from Camper Van Beethoven. They were in the process of reissuing their Virgin albums on Omnivore and Jonathan approached me and asked whether we would be interested in working with Omnivore as well. I knew Pat Thomas from his days in San Francisco (he owned Heyday Records and released albums from Barbara Manning, Chris Von Sneidern, Crazy Horse and many more), so when the discussions with the first label broke down, I went straight to Omnivore and said "let's do this." It was very easy to come to terms with them and they were very enthusiastic. Most importantly for me, Omnivore were in total agreement with Scott Vanderbilt (whose label owns the original albums) and myself about releasing these albums without exploiting Scott's passing and with respect for Scott's family.
I can't say enough good things about Omnivore. I knew we were in the right place when Pat went to pick up the original master tapes from Scott Vanderbilt, and he had all these boxes of tapes in his car, and he called me and said it was emotionally overwhelming for him to have all that stuff with him. To be honest, it was emotionally overwhelming for me to hear his response and to know that the tapes were finally in the hands of a label committed to doing them right after all these years. When you hear something like that you really know you're in the right place.

Were the original master tapes all available and in good shape?

Yeah. So far everything has been usable. We had some trouble finding a few tracks, but ultimately we located everything. We had to bake the tapes to make sure that they were pliable so they wouldn't fall apart when they get put on the machine. We have all of the original recordings and they sound excellent. 

Beyond that, when I was working with the band I sort of obsessively archived and documented them. I would frequently run the sound that I was mixing into the PA and run a sub mix into a tape recorder to record their sets. So I've got a whole lot of live recordings. And Scott had also turned over a whole lot of recordings to me over the years (I suppose he was less sentimental about those sorts of things than me in many ways…probably less of a hoarder too). Scott gave me a lot of recordings that no one had ever heard and we did some recording together as well. Kristine, his wife, and I went through what he had kept, and I'm working on doing high resolution 32 bit digitizations of those tapes for Omnivore. There's a whole lot of unreleased material. Some of it is unusable, and some of it is transcendently beautiful. For instance, for Blaze of Glory we reached all the way back to junior high. We used some little humorous tapes that Jozef [Becker] and Scott made when they were in seventh or eighth grade. He and Jozef would do these little musique concrète kind of things, little experimental vignettes, mashup kind of things. And what I guess you could call little skits. They were sort of done in an Ernie Kovacs style (he was an experimental comedian from the late 50s early 60s). 

We also took one track off the first Alternate Learning EP, three tracks off the Alternate Learning album, and then a batch of songs that Scott had given to me. And we had some good live takes that were from the original version of the band. These came from a local show in Sacramento and a live in the studio radio broadcast from when the band was first starting out. 

Have you heard of The Twinkeyz? They released two singles in 1977, one was called "Aliens In Our Midst." It was this amazing DIY record and is considered a classic by the DIY crowd, and I agree with that assessment. The band broke up in around 1979, and we included a recording of the leader of The Twinkeyz, Donnie Jupiter, making his first appearance since the band broke up performing with Game Theory. That’s one of the bonus tracks on the album.

Dan shared a lot of information with me about the other upcoming Omnivore Game Theory reissues, but since the details are still in flux out I can't share them with you (yet). What I can tell you is that all of the original Game Theory releases, both EPs and full length albums, will be represented. Current plans include a special "golden ticket" item that will be randomly included with one of the releases. All the albums will be remastered from the original master tapes, and each will include bonus tracks. There will be some unexpected covers, and at least one song will appear as a bonus track in a much longer version than was previously released.

In addition Dan told me:

All the bonus material that was on the Alias CDs of Real Nighttime and Big Shot Chronicles will be on the Omnivore releases. Although there are a couple switches. The Alias version of Real Nighttime was taken straight from the Enigma CD that was very briefly available. So it was basically the same digital master used by both Enigma and Alias. And the mistake that they made on Real Nighttime was they took the cover of Todd Rundgren's "Couldn't I Just Tell You" that was recorded for Big Shot Chronicles and they put it on the Real Nighttime CD. And then they took the song "Faithless," which was actually Fred Juhos' (from the Real Nighttime lineup) song, and they put that on Big Shot Chronicles. So those and one other will be switched back to their proper places. It's the kind of small thing that I think needs to be corrected.

Now that you mention it, sound-wise it's kind of obvious that "Couldn't I Just Tell You" doesn't really fit on Real Nighttime. It does sound more of a piece with Big Shot Chronicles.

Yeah. Particularly the difference in drumming style between Dave Gill and Gil Ray. You know, Scott's work with drummers can't be understated. He picked great drummers with their own styles, and the drummers that he worked with tended to be very interesting and integral to the projects that he was working on. And the recording is also different. Real Nighttime was recorded in Newark, California in the East Bay, Big Shot Chronicles was recorded at Mitch Easter's Drive In Studio in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (where REM's early records and Pylon's wonderful albums were recorded). So it is a different sound with each recording.

Having received my copy of Blaze of Glory (on pink vinyl, of course), I can echo all the positive things Dan said about Omnivore. Every aspect of this reissue has been done right: the packaging, the liner notes, the bonus material, the sound quality. Omnivore even gets the little things like the metadata on the downloadable MP3s perfect. The music was beautifully remastered for LP by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, and the pressing on pink vinyl is noise free.

The music itself is the work of an extremely precocious young man and his talented cohorts who are bursting with melodic ideas and discovering the power of the recording studio. Finally hearing the album the way it went down back in 1982 is a positively electrifying experience. Occasionally, Miller's grasp exceeds his reach, but the home recorded quality has a substantial charm all its own. If this were the last we heard of Scott Miller and Game Theory, Blaze of Glory would be hailed as an obscure masterpiece among those who dig smart pop music. As it is, Miller would go on to create better, more fully realized music, but this Blaze of Glory reissue demonstrates that everything that made Game Theory great was in place from the beginning, just sometimes in embryonic form.

Game Theory - Blaze Of Glory

In one of the earliest posts I made on this blog back in the far off land of 2006 I lamented the sad state of Game Theory's catalog. A lot has happened since then, including sadly the untimely passing of Scott Miller, but one thing hasn't: Game Theory's albums remain ridiculously hard to obtain legitimately and fetch absurdly high prices among collectors.  Fortunately, thanks to Omnivore recordings, that will not be the case much longer. They have just announced a series of expanded reissues of the much loved Davis, CA group's albums.

The first reissue, appropriately enough, will be the band's debut album, Blaze Of Glory. This looks to be something special because it hasn't been available since its initial release in 1982. (It was kinda reissued on CD by Alias years ago, but that version was remixed and some songs were later re-recordings). In all my years of record collecting I've never once seen a copy of this record in a store, and even I, Game Theory devotee that I am, do not own a copy. Omnivore's reissue will be remastered from the original master tapes.

The album will be reissued on CD, limited edition pink vinyl LP (black to follow), and as a digital download. It will feature 15 bonus tracks, including recordings from Scott's pre-Game Theory outfit, Alternate Learning. Omnivore promises reissues of Real Nighttime, Lolita Nation and other Game Theory favorites are on the horizon. Thank you Omnivore!

Dan Hersch On Mastering Love's Long Lost Black Beauty

Love's Black Beauty lineup. Photo by Herbert Worthington III.

As I mentioned previously, I was extremely impressed with the recent High Moon Records issue of Love's Black Beauty, a previously unreleased Love album recorded for Buffalo Records in 1973. It's a strong set of songs from Arthur Lee, a great artist whose 70s output was frustratingly uneven, that remained officially unreleased until earlier this year.

Music aside, I was impressed by how good the record sounds, especially after learning the audio had been sourced from an acetate. I have heard releases transcribed from acetates before and typically it is not hard to tell the audio came from a less than ideal source. Curious to know more, I had a conversation with mastering engineer Dan Hersch of d2 mastering on the restoration process that went into the album's release.

Dan is one of the most respected mastering engineers in the music business. If, like me, you have a sizable CD collection, you will likely find Dan's name in the credits of hundreds of your favorite CDs. He is particularly known for the work he did in conjunction with Bill Inglot on many of the high-quality Rhino Records CD reissues in the 80s and 90s.

Me: What is an acetate?

Dan: I started out mastering in a vinyl disc cutting studio. We would cut an acetate, or a reference lacquer, which is the same cellulose nitrate material that, ultimately, the  master would be cut upon. The difference is that the reference lacquer would be a twelve inch disc (the master is larger) for an LP, so that the artist or producer could take it home, put it on their turntable, give it a listen, and then make the changes they wanted or  just give it the thumbs up. We'd then cut the master lacquer which would then go to the pressing plant where they would make the metal parts and then ultimately stamp out the records for the consumer.

So the reference acetate was the original reference medium for artists and producers. The acetate that came to Diane Lee, Arthur Lee's widow, was one that belonged to Arthur,  that he had come back from the mastering studio with back in the day and then had found its way onto a record shelf in someone's apartment, and had been played repeatedly.

The rule of thumb used to be after a period of time, because this lacquer material was soft, the sound would change a bit over time. Obviously being played repeatedly would not be good, and dirt and dust could get embedded in it.  I own some lightly played reference lacquers that were cut 30 years ago that still sound pretty darned good to me, but generally speaking, acetates aren't usually as hardy as an actual pressing.

Unfortunately the tapes [for Black Beauty] have gone missing, whether they're with someone or unrecoverable, or whatever. The only thing left from the Black Beauty assembled album was this acetate or reference lacquer.

Album cover for Black Beauty. Photo by Herbert Worthington III.

Me: From what I understand there were actually three acetates that were located. Did you handle them yourself or did someone else do the analog-to-digital conversion?

Dan: I don't know if you're familiar with Bill Inglot, he's a reissue producer who worked at Rhino for a long time. Bill has a very good record cleaner in his production studio, and he did the initial transfer of the acetate to digital files. Originally all I received was a reference audio CD-R of that transfer that sounded to me like someone  had tried to do a quick and dirty denoising. I think the original intent was just for Diane Lee to listen to the acetate and  try to find a label that would be interested in releasing it.

So I got that reference CD. It sounded kind of swirly, it just sounded a little weird, so I asked them to send me over the original files. I got the original files of the acetate, and, in comparing the raw transfer and the first CDR I heard, I could sort of hear the process of what they had done in an attempt to minimize the noise and to make it a better listening experience. But they had totally changed the stereo image, and had done a few things that I felt were inaccurate and unrealistic sonically.

Arthur Lee. Photo by Herbert Worthington III.

Me: When you take noise out, it's easy to take music with it, isn't it?

Dan: Absolutely, but I think in this case, there was some damage in the left channel of the acetate, and rather than attempt to deal with the damage, they just took the right channel and then put the mono signal through some stereo effect device to bring the stereo back. So in my mind it was not how I would do it, and it wasn't something I wanted to perpetuate. And again, I don't believe the person who originally worked on this had the intention of releasing it like that. I think it was just a quick and dirty job to get Diane a reference disc. So I thought it best to get back to the original transfer and figure out another way to present the material.

Me: Was the original file hi-res digital? ["Hi-res" denotes digital audio with greater bit depth and higher sampling frequency than the 16 bit/44.1 kHz CD standard.]

Dan: I can’t recall. Probably 24 bit, maybe 48khz or 96khz. The source was obviously pretty low-fi.

Me: What did those raw files sound like? How noisy were they?

Dan: There were some scrapes that were kind of bad. Ticks and pops are pretty easy to deal with, but when you have long duration scraping noises, those cause the most noticeable effect when you try to process them because you have to deal with a larger sample. Ticks and pops are usually fine. It's inner groove distortion, scraping, things that take a few frames of information that are hard to process. But I'm never sure what the de-noising and de-crackling software is going to do. Sometimes I'll send a sample through and I'll think it's going to be a problem, and it will come back totally clean. And then sometimes something I think will be simple doesn’t work out. Then it’s back to the drawing board with a different approach to the problem.

Me: What was your approach to dealing with that noise?

Dan: A little bit of background…in the remastering business you run into all types of labels and all types of budgets, and the budget dictates how much work you can do. Some labels aren't willing to spend the money or the time to do that. And then you have to budget your time and say "we'll do the best we can." But High Moon was very interested in trying to do the best they could. They didn't mind spending a little money on this. They never said to me "can you do this for x amount of dollars." So that allowed me to do a lot of hand de-clicking and really get in and spend some time with each song. That's really what it takes. It takes time.  As an engineer there's only so much you can do when you're on a tight budget. But High Moon allowed me to do whatever was necessary to do the best job possible. The song that starts the second side, "Beep Beep," has a lot of dead air and little quiet parts in the arrangement which can really expose the noise of the storage medium. It was quite a battle. I think when you listen to "Beep Beep" maybe you can still hear that it was an acetate source, but you're not totally smacked in the face with it.

The nosier more raucous tracks, it's easier for the noise to be masked. But it's always better to go in and manually deal with that stuff rather than just hitting a button that says "de-crackle." Not to overly toot their horn, but High Moon was really willing to spend the time and money to really do a high quality job. They've shown that with their vinyl pressing and by having Doug Sax cut it. They also went with the heavier vinyl. I know they did a lot of test pressings, they even switched pressing plants a couple times so that they could really put out a high quality product.

Me: You can see and hear the care that went into this on every level, the stock of paper they used for the cover, all the photographs from the period they included in the booklet, it's clear they didn't hold anything back.

Dan: Hopefully consumers will respond positively and encourage High Moon to continue doing things in this manner. Hopefully, more labels will follow suit.

Me: It helps to do research. You can't assume a newly remastered title is going to sound better than previous issues.

Dan: That’s true. Sometimes you are buying a copy of something previously released with a bonus track added or something. Perhaps knowing whether the remastering was done from the original tapes would be helpful to the consumer.  I've seen labels do releases on the same artist over and over again. When I first started doing CDs in the early 80s, we would receive an EQ'd copy of the (vinyl) master to use as our source for the CD. That  vinyl EQ really didn't hold up with the new possibilities of CD. But they (the labels) really didn't want to go back to the original master tape. The fear was somehow the original “mastering” was being undone: "this is what the artist had approved, this is what the producer had approved, this is what we're putting out." I think that's what really hurt early CDs, the consumer was getting vinyl cutting EQ'd copies, just digitized. We hadn’t had the opportunity to go back to the master tape and really take advantage of what they did in the recording studio.

A lot of times the first time an album got reissued on CD it was from a copy like that. And then the second time around, maybe they got the original master tapes and hopefully they got a guy like Bill Inglot or Andrew Sandoval, someone who really understands the recording process and really understands the original intent of the artist, who would get the original vinyl pressing vinyl to compare, make sure speeds are right, make sure levels are right, make sure the sound is in the spirit of the original vinyl. And then the reissues were done correctly.

As the same albums are released again and again with new marketing gimmicks, consumers really need to look sharp before buying. As is true with any product, “new and improved” isn’t always the case.

So when you have a label like High Moon that comes to me and says "sorry all we have is an acetate, can you make something good from it?" And you tell them, "it's gonna take me a week, and maybe I can," and they don't blink and say, "Fine, do it,” then the consumer is going to benefit. That allowed me to make something listenable.

Unfortunately, sometimes tapes go missing. Sometimes someone gets sticky fingers, or things get thrown away. There are some very famous bands where, once stuff got digitized in the 80s, they discarded all their original analog tapes. It's hard to imagine, but at the time a lot of people thought "now it's perfect" we don't need this old, crappy analog tape anymore.

I know George [High Moon owner] searched high and low for where those Black Beauty tapes might be, but unfortunately they couldn't be located.

Photo by Herbert Worthington III.

If you haven't picked it up already, Black Beauty is an essential purchase for any Love or Arthur Lee fan. Dan's observations about High Moon are spot on. It is obvious that a lot of love [no pun intended] and care went into this release. For those of you who don't have a turntable, there is a CD release coming from High Moon, although no release date has been announced as of yet.

Neil Diamond - The Bang Years 1966-1968

Neil Diamond's recordings for Bert Berns' Bang Records label have a tortured release history, so it is good to see the release of the 23 track The Bang Years: 1966-1968 CD on Sony Legacy, a long-promised, but much-delayed, collection. The set presents nearly all of Diamond's Bang recordings in their original, rockin' mono mixes (but omits two Bang era tracks, "Shot Down" and "Crooked Street," for reasons I am not entirely clear on).

I primarily know these songs through a 2 LP set released by Bang in 1973 called Double Gold. Double Gold, while containing some great music, is a fairly thorough butchering of Diamond's early hit records. It features a couple mono recordings, some of the inferior stereo mixes, some horrible sounding fake stereo remixes with annoying panning effects, and some mono recordings that have had (unnecessary) stereo overdubs added to them.

Confused? That's okay, someone named K.F. Louie has done an admirable job of sorting out the whole mess with a handy chart and track-by-track analysis. Many of the tracks were also re-released on Early Classics on the Frog King label and Classics: The Early Years on Columbia. These LPs featured remixed stereo recordings (also with added overdubs), and while they sound good in their own right, they're identifiably different from the classic "hit" versions of the songs. The In My Lifetime box set corrected some of these errors by presenting 11 Bang era tracks, plus an alternate take of "Cherry, Cherry" in their original mono mixes with no overdubs, and sounding very good indeed.

Despite its sonic flaws, Double Gold presents a very compelling portrait of the artist as a young man. "Cherry, Cherry," "Solitary Man," "The Boat That I Row," "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon," "I'm A Believer,"  "Red, Red Wine," "Kentucky Woman," and others are classic tracks, strongly rooted in the Brill Building tradition, but also seriously rock and roll as well. Even if you think (as I do) that Diamond went off-track later in his career, the greatness of this material is hard to deny, and Diamond more than earned his reputation as "The Jewish Elvis" with these recordings.

As much as I would like to say this new Sony/Legacy release finally rights all the historical wrongs done to Diamond's Bang recordings, I can't quite bring myself to say so. The music has been mastered too loud and too bright, as if the producer decided the material needed to sound more "contemporary." Despite these flaws, it still sounds much better than most of the material on Double Gold, but unfortunately not as good as the same material on In My Lifetime.

It looks like I'm going to need to track down mono versions of the Bang LPs, The Feel of Neil Diamond and Just For You, if I want to hear this material sounding its best. I guess there are worse things I could have to do.

Update: The more I listen to this, the less enamored I am with the sound quality. There is a very hard, edgy quality to it that I do not find appealing at all. It sounds to me like the upper midrange has been boosted a lot, creating a sound that is excessively bright. I picked up a few 45s and they sound much nicer. The CD is more dynamically compressed than the 45s, but not by a huge amount (typically around 2 to 3 dB louder on average).  I guess it was too much to expect them to get this 100% right after such a long wait, especially given the checkered release history of this material.

Neil's liner notes are very thoughtful and frank. He talks at length about the critical role Ellie Greenwich (RIP) and Jeff Barry twice played in getting his career started, showing faith in his abilities when no one else did. He also gives them the credit they deserve for the critical role they played in the studio to help shape these songs into hit singles.

Nick Lowe - Labour Of Lust Reissued At Last

It was nearly three years ago that I lamented the fact that Nick Lowe's impossibly perfect second solo album, Labour Of Lust, was out-of-print. Since that time Yep Roc has continued reissuing classic Nick Lowe albums, and now I am happy to report a historic injustice has at long last been rectified as Labour Of Lust gets the deluxe reissue treatment:

As the bassist and primary songwriter for Brinsley Schwarz, Nick Lowe was one of the catalysts of the pub rock phenomenon in the early 1970s. As the co-founder and house producer at Stiff Records, he would help create the blueprint for the modern indie rock label and usher in British punk and new wave, helming historic recordings for The Damned, Elvis Costello, and The Pretenders. Here, his landmark second solo album Labour of Lust gets the deluxe reissue treatment, sporting an expanded 12pg. booklet with period photos, new essays and artwork by groundbreaking graphic artist Barney Bubbles.

The reissue also includes Nick's biggest US hit "Cruel To Be Kind," the originally U.K.-only "Endless Grey Ribbon" and U.S.-only "American Squirm" plus bonus B-side "Basing Street." Labour of Lust is the only of Lowe's solo albums to hold the distinction of featuring Nick's Rockpile cohorts Dave Edmunds, Billy Bremner and Terry Williams on every track. Originally released in 1979 and out of print for nearly twenty years, the album has been remastered from the original source, reintroducing this masterpiece to a new generation of pop music obsessives.

It's hard to believe an absolute classic album such as this could have been out-of-print for so long.  CD reissue date is 03/15/2011 with an LP reissue to follow on 04/12/2011.

Soft Boys/Robyn Hitchcock Reissue News

IMPORTANT UPDATE (09/16/11): Please see my update on the reissue of Underwater Moonlight before considering purchase.

I have a couple items of news to report on The Soft Boys and Robyn Hitchcock reissues front.

As many of you probably know, The Soft Boys' two proper albums A Can Of Bees and Underwater Moonlight have been reissued by Yep Roc. The CD versions of both are currently available for sale.

I was a little disappointed to learn that all the bonus tracks for the two CDs are being made available only as lossy compressed (192 kps MP3) downloads. I understand making the bonus tracks download only, The Feelies did this with their recent reissues in order to retain the artistic integrity of the original albums, and I approved of the idea. So while I'm fine with download only bonus tracks in concept, I do wish Yep Roc had also made lossless audio versions available as an option (as was the case with the Feelies albums). Also, none of the bonus tracks would have been new to me, which is probably a good thing since I would have wanted to hear them in better than 192 kps quality.

None of this should prevent anyone who doesn't already own both albums from buying them in this configuration, but it does make them less attractive to long time fans and obsessive collectors of all things Hitchcock, Robyn such as myself.

But that doesn't quite close the door on The Soft Boys reissue front. Originally the vinyl reissues of the two albums were to have been sourced from 1993 DAT copies of the masters that had been prepared when the albums were reissued on CD by Rykodisc. But it appears that the resulting DAT sourced test pressings were judged sonically lacking by the golden-eared former Soft Boy and current vinyl enthusiast Morris Windsor. As Hitchcock relays in an email:

Hello dear vinyl-hunters,

Many apologies for the delay in getting the latest A Can Of Bees and Underwater Moonlight out to you. The LP test-pressings were sent over for Morris Windsor to check (as he has both a record-deck and ears that work well) and he felt that the cut was inferior to the originals (which he also has). We had been mastering from the 1993 DAT tapes, as the best reference source for these old recordings.

However, in the course of our conversations, Morris discovered an original production master (copy of the original mixes) of UM deep in his attic. This transpired to have the long-missing version of Old Pervert that graced the 1980 release of UM, amongst this uniquely surviving set of 1/4" mixes. This was like finding an ashtray in a pub these days: enchanted and wicked. So Morris FedExed (yes, it's a verb) the tape to the management office in LA where Richard Bishop (who had released the original UM 30 years ago on Armageddon Records) had the tapes baked. They go into a kind of pizza oven to prevent the ferric oxide falling off like liquorice.

At this point we decided to re-cut A Can Of Bees from a pristine vinyl copy. This was supplied by Geoffrey Weiss, a long-term music supporter in the quagmire of showbusiness; Geoffrey also kindly supervised the cut, along with Richard. The re-cuts were FedExed back to Morris who pronounced them very good. Morris is not given to hyperbole, and I have always favoured his judgement, when he gives it, over my own.

YepRoc have patiently waited for the improved LPs, and done their best to reassure anxious purchasers of these items who paid for them a while back and have seen nothing yet for their money. If you are amongst them, please again accept my apologies on behalf of the former Soft Boys, and I hope that the quality compensates in some way for the delay.

Best wishes from the old country,

Robyn Hitchcock

So, in short, the LP reissues of Underwater Moonlight and A Can Of Bees will be sourced from an original production master and a pristine vinyl copy respectively. For those not familiar with the terminology, a "production master" is a (typically first generation) copy of the original master tape that would have been used to cut the original LPs. I believe the original master tapes for both albums were lost long ago, so the discovery of a production master for Underwater Moonlight is very good news, especially in light of the fact the original LP version of "Old Pervert" has not to my knowledge graced any previous Underwater Moonlight reissue.

Some might be disappointed to learn that A Can Of Bees will be sourced from LP, but I do not find it hard to believe that a pristine copy of the LP would be the best sounding surviving source, easily surpassing the quality of a DAT copy made 17 years ago. If transferred using good quality equipment, the new LP should sound excellent (within the limitations of the original recordings, obviously). There is a certain stigma attached to sourcing reissues from LP, but I applaud Yep Roc and The Soft Boys for choosing the best sounding available source rather than relying on dogma to produce these LP reissues.

I also wanted to note that Wounded Bird Records is reissuing Robyn's 1996 solo album Moss Elixir as a two CD set with its companion album Mossy Liquor. This will mark the first time Mossy Liquor has been made available on the CD format, having been originally released only as a vinyl LP, and subsequently made available for digital download. I'm glad to hear that Mossy Liquor will be made available on CD in advance of the format's complete extinction. Personally, I will be holding onto my vinyl copy of the album until my own complete extinction.

In other, completely unrelated, Robyn Hitchcock news, my eight year old son Will spent the better part of the day yesterday in his bedroom listening to "The Man Who Invented Himself" over an over. He now has all the lyrics memorized, as do the other other occupants of our house, including our two cats. He also took a break from Scooby Doo and Gamera videos to watch the I Often Dream of Trains in New York DVD with me. He declared "Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus" his favorite (or perhaps favourite) song on the album. I'm thinking if he memorizes the lyrics of that one, he can perform them for his grandparents this Christmas.

Fables Waveforms

It's been a while since I posted any waveforms here, but with the controversy over the mastering of the 25th Anniversary Edition of R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction, I thought I'd give it another crack.

The first waveform is a screen shot of the track "Cant Get There From Here" taken from my needledrop of the original 1985 LP. (For technical details, see comments).

"Cant Get There From Here" (1985 LP Needledrop)

The next waveform represents the same song taken from the original 1985 IRS/MCA CD.

Some have criticized me in the past for comparing waveforms taken from LP needledrops to those taken from CDs. The argument against doing so is that the manifold noise and distortions inherent to LP playback make any such waveform comparisons invalid. But as you can see below, the needledrop and CD waveforms look remarkably similar. In terms of dynamic range, I found less than 0.5 dB difference between these two tracks, so whatever distortion LP playback adds to the picture here, it is of a low enough order not to have a tremendous impact on the track's dynamic range.

"Cant Get There From Here" (1985 IRS/MCA CD)

That is not to say the two tracks sounded identical. While similar in terms of dynamic range, to my ears the CD track sounded somewhat thin and bright compared to the LP sourced track. This is not to say that the CD sounded bad, but to my ears it lacked the depth and fullness of the needledroped track.

Finally, we come to the remastered 2010 version of "Cant Get There From Here." As expected, the remastered version is louder than the other versions, around 8 dB louder on average. With an average RMS value of approximately -12 dB, this is hardly the most compressed remaster I have seen (that distinction belongs to Iggy Pop's remixed Raw Power, which averages around -4 dB). For a more reasonable point of comparison most tracks on the recent Deluxe Edition of Exile On Main St. average around -10 dB.

"Cant Get There From Here" (2010 Capitol Remaster)

So, how did the remaster sound in comparison to the other tracks? Well, most obviously it was louder. A lot louder. I had to turn my stereo way down when switching to the new remaster. In order to precisely match sound levels I needed the help of my computer. Once I matched levels and compared tracks it seemed the remaster had a slightly hollow sound compared to the other tracks, and tonally I thought it was brighter than either the older CD or the LP. I also noticed that Michael Stipe's vocals seemed to be boosted slightly in relation to the instruments. The remaster did not sound bad, but I did prefer the two earlier versions.

It's been my experience in listening to compressed remasters that the most regrettable consequences of compression only reveal themselves over time, not in quick back-and-forth comparisons. As I have noted before, heavy compression tends to take a sense of excitement out of the music, resulting in albums that do not hold up to repeated listening.

So while the remastering of Fables could have been worse, it also could have been better. A lot better. Ironically, in 2010 if you want to hear a really good sounding digital version of Fables Of The Reconstruction, you'll have to digitize your old LP.

Newsweek Calls Out R.E.M.'s "iPod Ready" Fables Reissue

I was very surprised to see the so-called "loudness war" get a mention in Newsweek, where Seth Colter Walls criticizes the recent 25th Anniversary deluxe reissue of Fables Of the Reconstruction for having been mastered too loud (Shiny Happy Remaster?). Colter Walls rightly points out that the atmospheric Fables is not the sort of album that particularly lends itself to today's pumped up, super-compressed mastering aesthetic.

Having compared the remaster to my original LP, I agree that the remastering was louder than it should have been, and I definitely preferred the sound of the original LP. (I have never heard the original CD, so I can't offer any insight on that). That said, I also thought the differences I heard were more subtle than is often the case with contemporary remasters, and this album is far from the worst remaster I have heard. As I noted in my original post, "I suspect only the very pickiest of audiophiles would seriously object to the sound quality of the remaster." It seems I was wrong about that, as Colter Walls clearly does not consider himself an audiophile but nonetheless had serious issues with the sound quality of the reissue.

There are a couple things I would take issue with in the article. First, I disagree with the author's contention that recently remastered CDs are typically the safest bet when looking for good sound, and Fables represents something of a special case exception. In general, I have found that the more recent the remaster, the more likely it is to sound bad, although there are enough exceptions that I would hesitate to take things on anything other than a case-by-case basis. Second, I'm not so sure that the increasing loudness of CDs can be so tidily pinned on the iPod. After all, the iPod does feature a "sound check" function that normalizes the volume of all songs on it without effecting dynamic range (although I have no idea how many people use it). Beyond that, the movement toward louder CDs predates the iPod, it's just that we've seen a steadily escalating situation.

For what it's worth, here is my take on why we are seeing louder and louder remasters: There is a strong incentive for labels to produce remasters that sound "different" from what has come before. And making a release 6 or 7 dB louder than previous CD issues will give a lot of people an initial "wow" factor if they don't understand the need to carefully match volume levels in order to make a valid comparison. If you compare the exact same track but only turn the volume up, 9 out of 10 people will immediately say the louder version sounds "better" even if there is no difference at all. So a louder remaster can initially "grab" the listener and give him or her a false sense that what they are hearing is "better," when really it is just louder.

With careful work and using the best current analog-to-digital converters and other equipment it is certainly possible for today's mastering engineers to create remastered CDs that surpass the sound quality of CDs produced ten or twenty years ago. However, if the original CD was well done (not a safe assumption) the improvement in sound tends to be subtle, and not the type that will hit you in the face immediately. To hear the improvement you'll need a decent stereo system and have to know what to listen for. But let's face it, that describes a tiny percentage of the possible market for a reissue like this. It's so much easier for a record company to just to make a remaster louder. Most people (music critics included) will hear that difference instantly and assume it is a change for the better.

In other words, you can fool most of the people all of the time, and the the rest will just complain about it endlessly on blogs and internet discussion boards in such an arrogant and dismissive manner that the rest of the world will assume they are the equivalent of coffee connoisseurs who will only partake of coffee beans that have been crapped out by animals.

That's the unfortunate reality, and I don't see any way around it. I try to educate on my site, but I think that can only help at the margins, and maybe help people who already understand these things to make an informed purchasing decision. So it's good to see the problem being addressed by someone outside the confines of blogs and audio discussion boards, and I hope Colter Walls continues to listen carefully and draw attention to this problem.

It has come to the point with CD reissues where I pretty much just ask myself if I am willing to pay the price of admission for the bonus tracks, because I assume in the end I will not like the remastered sound as much as what came before, especially if I have a decent copy on LP already. The 25th Anniversary reissue of Fables of the Reconstruction is hardly the worst offender in the ongoing loudness war, but there is no doubt in my mind that it would have sounded better had the mastering engineer applied less compression than he did. Perhaps with journalists like Seth Colter Walls drawing more attention to the problem we can have reason to hope for a better sounding deluxe reissue of Lifes Rich Pageant.

R.E.M. Fables Of The Reconstruction 25th Anniversary Edition

In his excellent (albeit brief) liner notes to the new edition of Fables Of The Reconstruction, Peter Buck attempts to clear up the misconception that the members of R.E.M. do not actually like the album that was yesterday honored with a 25th Anniversary deluxe reissue:

"Over the years a certain misapprehension about Fables Of The Reconstruction has built up. For some reason, people have the impression the members of R.E.M. don't like the record. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's a doomy, psycho record, dense and atmospheric. It creates its own strange little world, illogical but compelling. It's a personal favorite, and I'm really proud of how strange it is. Nobody but R.E.M. could have made that record."

Fans of R.E.M. might be forgiven for thinking the band held the album in less than the highest regard given all of the ambivalent to negative comments certain band members have made about the album over the years. But Buck goes on to make the very important point that the way the band feels about the album is inextricably tied to the circumstances surrounding its creation:

"All four of us were completely out of our minds at the time. We had just spent four straight years on the road; we were tense, impoverished, certifiable, and prime candidates for rehab. And it was cold. My main memory of that period is making the hour commute to Wood Green on the Tube and then walking for twenty minutes through invariably inclement weather, usually sleet."

Likewise, how the average R.E.M. fan feels about Fables Of The Reconstruction is no doubt inextricably bound to the circumstances under which they first heard it, and their memories of that time period.


I had just turned 16 when I picked up Fables at my local Sam Goody. I have a memory of listening to the album on my walkman as my Mom drove me home. I can still smell that "new cassette" smell if I concentrate hard enough when listening to the opening chords of "Feeling Gravitys Pull." Personally, Fables is my favorite R.E.M. album. But then it was also the first R.E.M. album I bought, and the strange and compelling "dense and atmospheric" music contained within it opened up a whole new world of music for me.

Soon after I purchased Fables, I picked up R.E.M.'s earlier releases. After that, there was a virtual cascade of intriguing new music finding its way into my walkman. Peter Buck played mandolin on "I Will Dare" by The Replacements, so I picked up Let It Be. He produced The Good Earth by The Feelies, so I got that. I heard Wire and The Soft Boys were an influence on R.E.M., so albums by those bands were soon in my collection as well. Those purchases drove me in a hundred new directions that I am still branching out from today.

But for me, R.E.M.'s Fables Of The Reconstruction is still there at the root of it all. I don't think it is any kind of exaggeration to say that the album changed my life. And I still regard Fables Of The Reconstruction as one of the finest rock albums ever made. I like it as much or more than anything recorded by The Beatles, or anyone else.


The 25th Anniversary edition adds a bonus disc of demos that were recorded in Athens, GA before the band left to record Fables with famed producer Joe Boyd in London. Buck remembers the band as being hard up for new songs after exhausting their stockpile of songs on the first two albums, and feeling "dangerously unprepared" as the band departed to London, a view he was forced to revise upon listening to the demos again. Maybe R.E.M. really were exhausted, drugged-out and low on inspiration at the time, but from the audio evidence available from the demos they sound like a band in complete control of their destiny and bursting with musical ideas. Perhaps they were receiving divine guidance. Most of the arrangements for the songs were already worked out, and I suspect Boyd's role in shaping the album was minimal, more along the lines of helping the band realize the sound they were searching for than providing direction.

R.E.M. would never again record an album remotely like Fables Of The Reconstruction, and for me personally their music would become less compelling over the years as their commercial fortunes expanded. Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed much of the music they've created since Fables, it's just that I never again loved it or was fully captivated by it in quite the same way. Perhaps that would have been asking too much, especially considering that their music could never again be new to me in the same way.

The remastered sound of the new CD is yet another example of the trend toward excessive dynamic compression of reissues. The reissue is around 7 to 8 dB louder on average than the original, although it sounded fine to me while listening to it in the noisy environment of my car. However, I'm a little skeptical that the sound quality will hold up as well for me on my home stereo. Perhaps the best part of the beautifully executed box that the remastered set comes in is that there is room in it for a CD-R needledrop of the album.

Update: After listening to the album on the stereo I suspect only the very pickiest of audiophiles would seriously object to the sound quality of the remaster. Despite the fact that it is more compressed than what I would consider ideal, the overall result is still very good.

Public Image Ltd. "album"

I've updated Public Image Ltd.'s 1986 album artwork especially for your iPod or other portable player. This seems appropriate since the collection of songs known as "album" on LP, "cassette" on cassette, or "compact disc" on CD is currently available as an mp3 download, but appears to be out-of-print on CD. Rhino recently reissued album on LP and did quite a nice job of it to my ears. Elektra's vinyl tended to be quite noisy toward the end of the LP era, so it is good to finally have a really nice sounding copy of this on LP.

I think this is the only album I own that features Steve Vai on guitar, and I still find it really weird that Lydon played with Ginger Baker, considering that in 1981 NME published an "April fool" announcement that Baker had joined PiL. Despite the strange (one could argue inappropriate) cast of musicians producer Bill Laswell chose to surround Lydon, album holds up. No, it's not as adventurous as Metal Box or Flowers Of Romance, but it is a strong set of songs and nice time capsule of the sound of "alternative rock" circa 1986.

Of course it's well known that John Lydon nicked the concept of a "generic" album from Flipper, whose 1982 debut was called Generic Flipper (or possibly Album or Album Generic Flipper).


Anyway, while Flipper obviously did it first, it should be pointed out that from a design and conceptual standpoint, Lydon did it better. And Flipper did get some measure of revenge by titling a later release Public Flipper Ltd.

The Jayhawks (aka The Bunkhouse Album) Finally Reissued

Lost Highway recently reissued the Jayhawks long-lost, self-titled debut on CD, LP and as a digital download. This marks the first time the album has been available in any form since its initial release on Bunkhouse Records in 1986 as a 2,000 copy limited-edition LP.

I hadn't heard anything about the reissue, but spotted the LP for a mere $10.99 in the new arrivals bin at my local record shop and picked it up. Honestly, I wasn't overly excited by the find and the record sat in my "to be vacuumed" pile for a week or so after purchase (yes, I even vacuum clean my new LPs). Why wasn't I excited to finally hear this lost-classic that is highly regarded among Jayhawks fans? I guess mostly because I wasn't aware that it was a lost-classic that is highly regarded among Jayhawks fans.

I first became aware of the Jayhawks in 1989 when I was serving as music director of my college radio station and Twin/Tone sent a preview copy of The Blue Earth. It's fair to say I liked the album. I immediately put it into heavy rotation and regularly played a few of the tracks on my own radio program ("Two Angels," "Five Cups Of Coffee," and "The Baltimore Sun" definitely caught my ear at the time). I liked the album enough to buy a copy for myself, but not enough to buy it again when Restless reissued it with bonus tracks several years later. And I didn't like it near as much as the albums the band released later on Rick Rubin's American imprint both with and without Mark Olson.

Despite some excellent songwriting, I found the consistently slow tempos dragged the album down, and some of the songwriting struck me as indistinct and too beholden to the band's obvious Gram Parsons influence. For me, The Blue Earth remains an embryonic version of the kind of music The Jayhawks would do with far more confidence and individuality in later years, and I assumed The Bunkhouse Album--recorded a full three years before the Twin/Tone release--would sound like an even more embryonic version of that. Also, let's face it, when a limited-edition first album by a band that eventually gains a sizable following like the Jayhawks stays out-of-print for nearly a quarter century, it's usually because the band has good reason to leave it collecting cobwebs in the attic. For all these reasons I had relatively low expectations for The Jayhawks. I assumed the album would be a curiosity worth a listen or two and little more.

All of which is to say that I was not prepared for the energy that comes pulsating out of the grooves of The Jayhawks' feisty debut record. Mark Olson's songwriting is already surprisingly sharp; highly tuneful county-tinged rockers like "Falling Star," "Let The Last Night Be The Longest," "People In This Place On Every Side," and "Let The Critics Wonder" quickly found their way into my head and stayed there. There are a few places where Olson succumbs to easy country cliches ("The Liquor Store Came First") and some tracks sound like filler ("Cherry Pie"), but these tracks never slow things down enough to blunt the album's overall impact. Olson and Louris had already found a comfortable way to harmonize, although at this point Olson is clearly the group's leader (a fact reinforced by the cover photo that depicts Olson standing in front of the rest of the band lounging on a porch behind him) with Louris confined to the role of guitar picker and back-up singer. The production is predictably rough, but it never gets in the way of the music either.

What struck me the most however, is the fact that Gary Louris' guitar playing positively rips, and drummer Norm Rogers (later of The Cows) keeps things moving along at the kind of peppy pace that is altogether absent from the more contemplative The Blue Earth. To my ears, The Jayhawks has more in common with an album like The Long Ryders' raucous Native Sons than it does with the overly-mannered Blue Earth, and I regard that as a very good thing. If I had been one of the lucky 2,000 to hear this album when it was released in 1986, I probably would have become a big fan of the Jayhawks sooner than ended up being the case.

I admit that this is still a somewhat embryonic effort, and The Jayhawks would find a better balance between fast and slow tempos on Hollywood Town Hall and Tomorrow The Green Grass. Also, both Olson and particularly Louris' songwriting would mature in the passage of time, and Rick Rubin at American would spend a lot more money recording their albums than their then manager Charlie Pine could muster at Bunkhouse Records (a label he founded specifically to release this album). Nevertheless, The Jayhawks (aka The Bunkhouse Album) is a very promising debut album from a great band that can also proudly stand on its own merits twenty-four years after its initial release.

Update: No Depression is running a contest to win a signed copy of the LP and CD. You must be a registered No Depression user and leave a comment listing your five favorite Jayhawks songs in order to enter.

Exile In Pixelville

Do you see anything wrong with the image below?


I see plenty wrong with it, and any visual artist I know would absolutely hit the ceiling if their work were reproduced in this way. The image is, of course, the iconic cover to the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main St album that features a Robert Frank photograph of a photo collage that he discovered on the wall of a tattoo parlor. This is a scan of the new deluxe edition artwork. Resolution issues aside (which are partly the fault of my scanner), the first thing I noticed about the new cover is that the color balance is off. The whole cover has a reddish tint, while the original LP had no tinting whatsoever. To my eyes the tinting looks "wrong," although I admit it could be considered a legitimate artistic choice. But as you will see below, there are some other things about the way the image was manipulated that are very hard to understand.

More annoying to me is the fact that to fit the original square-shaped cover to the rectangular dimensions of a digipack, someone has done a Photoshop hack job on the image. Take a look at the blue highlighted selections below. Do they look familiar?


They should, as they've simply been cropped out of the original image and repeated. See the areas highlighted in red below to see the parts of the image that have been duplicated.


Once I noticed this repetition of images, I found it incredibly distracting. My eye is continually drawn to the elements in the image that are repeated. I understand that they needed to do something to fit a square image to the rectangular dimensions of a digipack, it's just that I feel they found the worst possible way to do it.

Here is a photo I took of my Exile On Main St LP cover using nothing more than a Canon Digital Rebel SLR camera with stock lens:


I cleaned up the image slightly in Photoshop then cut the text to a separate layer. Next, I used the "desaturate" adjustment to make sure the cover was truly black and white. This probably took me around ten minutes.

Once I started looking at the original cover, I noticed something interesting: I had originally assumed the repetition of images for the deluxe reissue was needed to prevent cropping the image, but in fact someone cropped a significant amount of material out of the original image to create the deluxe artwork. See the highlighted areas below to see what was cut out:


This makes the choice to repeat material even more mystifying to me. Somebody actually chopped off some of the horizontal information, which makes no sense if you are trying to transform a square image into a horizontally aligned rectangular one.

If they had merely cropped the image in the way you see it below, it would have fit the dimensions of the digipack perfectly with no need for repeating images. Yes, some of the original cover would have been lost, but no more than was cropped out anyway.


If they wanted to keep the entire original album cover intact, they could have added some sort of sidebar, as I often see on such deluxe reissues. I created a possible example below, although I am sure someone more creative than me could do something much more interesting. But at least this way none of the iconic album cover is lost.


I didn't spend very long manipulating any of these images, and I admit they are far from perfect. If I had better equipment, a better source, and more time I could have done a lot better. Nevertheless, I think the options I've presented here would have been preferable to the very strange and unappealing artwork that was created for this deluxe reissue. Of course if they had chosen to go with standard jewel case packaging, none of this manipulation would have been necessary in the first place. I personally don't believe digipacks are mandatory for deluxe reissues, although they do seem to be the norm.

Okay, I realize there are bigger problems in the world than botched CD reissue artwork. I'm honestly more puzzled by this than anything: the more closely I looked at the artwork, the more questions I had, and the less sense any of it made to me. I'd be interested to hear possible explanations for what I consider some very strange choices. But considering how iconic this album cover is (John Lydon has admitted that it was a huge influence on the visual aesthetic of punk rock), I think it is a real shame to see it treated with so little respect.

If I haven't said anything about the music on Exile On Main St yet, it's because I assume you know it's great: a near perfect fusion of rock, blues, country and gospel. It is the fullest realization ever of what Gram Parsons envisioned as "Cosmic American Music" despite the fact that it was (mostly) made by five Brits living in France.

The deluxe reissue is worth picking up for the bonus disc, but not, in my opinion, for the remastering. Target is selling an exclusive "rarities edition" that is just the bonus CD for $10. It's refreshing to have an option not to repurchase the original album but still be able to get the bonus tracks for a reasonable price.

I know Exile is supposed to be a "bad" sounding recording, but if you find a good copy on LP and play it back on a decent system, it is actually a very lively and real sounding recording. The warts and all sound shocked a lot of people back in 1972 because the Stones chose not to adhere to the post-Abbey Road norm of slickly produced multi-track rock music. The album sounds all the more vital today because of that fact.

Unfortunately, the new remaster does adhere to today's norm of dynamically compressing older recordings, which to my ears ends up emphasizing the murkier aspects of the recording. For the best sounding Exile on CD I recommend finding a used copy of the 1994 Virgin reissue that was remastered by Robert Ludwig. Better yet, find an Artisan pressed original UK or US LP, as none of the CD reissues have bettered it sonically.

Update:

I looked at the non-deluxe edition CD in a record store today, and the cover art on that also features some strange repetition of images, even though the image is rectangular. Some of the images that were cropped from the bottom of the original cover reappear, but there is another band of repeated images at the bottom. Weird.