Agreed on The Wall - I suppose the only way it would be even more frustrating would be if it were all able to be fitted on one disc…80 minutes-plus would be WAY too much to sit through in one burst. To reinforce your example, it would almost be too much to have two versions of “In The Flesh” sitting in such close proximity, and I think the songs which move the narrative along (as opposed to working as stand-alone single tracks) would lose any appeal they had in that context.
I guess what I mean is, the desire for the average listeners to hear their favorite individual songs would overwhelm the desire to hear the album as a unified work. Taken as four separate chapters, one per side, the story is much more listenable. Just IMO, of course.
Biffy, I didn’t know that the Deluxe Edition had the original mix…I may have to go pick that one up. Something about the touchups applied to “Won’t Get Fooled Again” on the single-disc reissue from 1997 really annoyed me, almost like the soundstage got TOO wide or something. The VCS3 track leading back into the song sounds almost like it’s not as “present” to my ear, like it’s too far away from the center of the mix, or hollow.
Of course, I’m also disturbed by the remix of Simon And Garfunkel’s most recent reissue of Bridge Over Troubled Water album, too. Specifically, the intro doesn’t sound right on “Cecilia,” for the same reasons as The Who’s “I’m One”: the little muttering/humming countoff thing over the percussion and before the first vocal is missing (I confirmed it with my 45 rpm single and with my copy of Greatest Hits, thinking I’d lost my mind when I first heard the new CD).
And, since I’m on this tangent anyway, careful listening to the 2000 reissue of The Band’s Stage Fright indicates that Capitol opted to use the actual vinyl as the source audio, as they’ve apparently misplaced the original tape mixdowns. The first CD of the album in the early 1990s used alternate mixes of practically all the songs, as did the DCC gold-disc reissue a few years later. If you listen closely, you can hear cue burn/vinyl pop on the new CD (most prominently on the intros to “Sleeping” and “Time To Kill”). Nothing on the disc packaging indicates this…the packaging says “all tracks 24-bit digitally remastered” but does NOT mention what the sound source IS, a clever dodge in my book, anyway. Glad to have the original mixes on CD, but I wish the label had been more honest about how they got them.
I’m thinking that must have been only on the single mix to begin with. I can’t detect anything but guitar and percussion in that intro on my original 1970 LP.
I should clarify that I don’t hear numbers at the beginning, more like three measures of percussion, then accompanied in the fourth by a humming, pre-vocal incue that sounds like “mmm-ah, mmm-ah, mmm-ah,” then a beat of percussion on its own, then “Cilia, you’re breaking my heart…”
Just in case I’ve misled you into listening for a numerical 4-count or something.
The other thing I miss about vinyl is the spinning of a record. There’s something so visually pleasing about watching the grooves catch the light as it winds up speed, and then the touch of the needle, the spinning of the label.
Especially the label, the whole look of it, the perfect graphical representation of a body of music. When I was young, it gave me a means of identifying a song or album when I didn’t really know what the words on the label were. bodypoet’s three-year-old has shown signs of that too. If she wants to hear the “apple” song, it’s Badfinger’s “Come And Get It” (on Apple Records, of course), if she sees silver label with an almost art-deco look at the top and the word Atlantic and picks that out of the stack, it’s “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” she wants to hear. The round drawing of a lion on the label is Bobby Bloom’s “Montego Bay” (on MGM, the same black-and-white illustrated version of the logo that graced the MGM Grand Hotel, not the photo of roaring lion), and if its a rainbow at the top of the label with a blue sky in the background, it’s my reissued single of Buddy Holly’s “Everyday.”
I suspect albums will be a little trickier for her to lock onto for a while, but at her age two-and-a-half to four minutes is a long time anyway.
Nope, I definitely don’t hear anything like that. Just four bars of 1-note guitar/percussion/handclaps, joined on the third bar by maracas in the left channel. I wish I had the single or the hits album to compare. (My Simon & Garfunkel single collection consists of just two items: “The Dangling Conversation”/“Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine,” with a cool sleeve photo that looks like it was taken at the same shoot as the Sounds of Silence album cover, and “Fakin’ It” with a dull picture sleeve–a photo of an anonymous model–but with “You Don’t Know Where Your Interest Lies” on the B-side, which used to be a very rare song. There’s another talking point for vinyl lovers: single picture sleeves!)
Crap, I nearly forgot about Sinatra. The whole “concept album” thing starts with the man, and I forget him. A lot of those Capitol albums from the fifties are exceptionally well-designed as vinyl releases. That’s another example of someone whose whole ability to work a mood gets lost on CD sometimes…if you go from the slow, dramatic side-closer to something a little brighter immediately, it’s a little like whiplash.
Was anyone else out there a fan of record changers, or does that mark me as a philistine? I always loved that I could put four to six album sides on at once and have the whole feel switch every 20 minutes. If you were also into record changers at all, just curious: all the Side Ones first, then the Twos, or mix 'em up?
Thinking about that, the oddest two-record set I recall was some sort of Marty Robbins commemorative from the eighties that a friend of my Mom’s had, maybe a year or two after his passing, which did not have the sides paired 1-2 on one album and 3-4 for the other (for single turntables) or 1-4 and 2-3 (for an automatic changer), but inexplicably as 1-3 and 2-4. Can anybody explain why? I can’t figure it out. (For what it’s worth, they weren’t mislabeled either - all the contents as listed matched up to what was actually audible on the records.)
For a long time I thought that “Your Time is Gonna Come” was the perfect first song for the first album by Led Zeppelin: mellow organ humming a soft rock tune at a low volume, not setting expectations too high – until the cymbals CRASH and the song really begins. Then I learned the vinyl was arranged differently, Im like “well, it WOULD have been a good opening, especially for people who didnt know what the hell to expect.”
Wherefore it didn’t surprise me when people here talk about an alternate makeup to “Who’s Next”. On my cassette version, it opens with Baba O’Reilly and ends with Won’t Get Fooled Again. The opening selection is only so-so, but ending with Fooled is a good choice.
And, this might be due to CD length restrictions, but I’m somewhat peeved that the Aja/Gaucho double album is not available on CD (fwiw, the song “Aja” starts off the first side.)
That’s the one advantage the cassette has over all existing media – ability to have 180 minutes of music on one entity. The Wall I first purchased as a single cassette!
But if I my speak to the OP, I did have vinyl for (literally) a couple years, then changed entirely to cassette by 1984, and my purchase have been limited to CDs since 1998. During the cassette years, I thought of collections of opera as entire “albums” rather than things I could skip tracks on. Which is sort of funny since the '80s were the biggest decade for one hit wonders – you’d think more of the fans would be too lazy to find the right place on the tape
I’m equally peeved, as those albums are a great natural pairing to my ears. When it comes to that catalog, I suspect it has to do with the way the labels pay royalties for full albums…you’ll notice MCA hasn’t paired up a lot of their other artists on CD, either, though they did it a lot on cassette. As for length, I’m pretty sure it’s not that: if I recall, Aja clocks in a shade over 40 minutes and Gaucho comes in around 39. I seem to recall getting both onto one CD-R so I could use it in my old car, anyway.
Almost…that’s why I ended up switching to MiniDisc. True, if you’re using the conventional format, it’s 80:59 in stereo, but in monaural (which I used a lot for early mono singles and the first four Beatles’ albums, for example) it clocked in over 161 minutes with no loss in durability or sound quality (I’m thinking that the 180 minute audio cassettes had tape that was awfully thin and tended to break/stretch really easily if you didn’t stay RIGHT on top of deck maintenance…YMMV, of course). In the new Hi-MD format, it’s two hours and 20 minutes for the high-quality audio on a regular disc, or nearly eight hours on the 1 GB disc - those times change to ten hours and 34 hours on the supposedly lower-quality setting, which to my ear is at least as good as a very, very good cassette or clean FM stereo. (That’s if you’re like me and do real-time transfers; if you have a computer those times and sample rates change to, I think, 13 hours and 45 hours respectively. I can’t tell you how the audio is for the computer version because I’m not set up to record that way at the moment.)
In my cassette days, I usually only trusted up to 110 minute tapes and would occasionally use 120s or 180s if it wasn’t anything I was planning on archiving. And I REALLY didn’t trust my car cassette deck to treat 'em right…
That makes a lot of sense. I tended to treat pre-recorded cassettes of my pop/rock/jazz the same way as vinyl albums: since I didn’t have one of those tape decks that would scan for blank space between songs, I pretty much had to commit to listening to a side at a time, unless I was willing to forward and hear a couple of seconds each of a few random songs trying to find the one I wanted. If anything, vinyl was easier to navigate by simple virtue of being able to see the rill gap between songs. I can’t imagine trying to do that with opera or, really, ANY long classical pieces.
Thankfully, most of the ones which come to my head opened a side on a lot of those tapes…but yeah, point still taken!
Update: Quadrophenia arrived yesterday (Who’s Next is on backorder – I guess between CSIx3 and the J.C. Penney ads, I’m not the only one looking for a copy?), and I listened to it for the first time in probably at least 20 years.
Day-um.
It really holds up pretty damn well. It’s not all brilliant – but the whole last section (“5:15” through “Love Reign O’er Me”) is just wonderful.
