Sly And The Family Stone - Greatest Hits (Of The '70s) (1979)

 

GREATEST HITS (OF THE '70s)

1. I Get High On You

2. Family Affair

3. Crossword Puzzle

4. Time For Livin'

5. This Is Love

6. If You Want Me To Stay

7. Remember Who You Are

8. Blessing In Disguise

9. Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)

10. Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa

_____________________________________________________

    Prepare for some chart chat. Funk pioneer-legends Sly And The Family Stone put out their first single in 1967. It didn't chart (and neither did their excellent debut album "A Brand New Thing"). However, their second single from that year, "Dance To The Music," hit #7 in Great Britain and was in the Top 10 on both the American Hot 100 and the R&B singles charts (where they would come to be mainstays, especially on the latter). In late 1968, they hit the top spot on both of those charts again with the track "Everyday People," a level of success that they repeated once more the following year with "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)." After their set at Woodstock got rave reviews and was said to be the best show of the festival, the band were at the apex of their stardom. Bandleader/primary creative force Sly Stone would forever afterwards be judged by the critics against this period of his career. Side note, their 1969 album Stand! was enormously popular among the Black Panthers, whose growth peaked simultaneously; a teenage member called Nile Rodgers remembered it foldly in his later years. Another side note, a young and in-the-process-of-having-his-childhood-stripped-away-from-him-by-adults-with-dollar-signs-in-their-eyes-leading-to-lifelong-torment-and-severe-social-maladjustment-issues Michael Jackson ripped off Sly's vocal stylings, and his Motown writers Sly's lyrics, on the Jackson 5's first few famous hits, in particular "ABC."

    There was a longer-than-usual gap before their next new releases came out because the band were busy developing their sound (from genre-mashing pop-funk to uranium-enriched pure funk) and changing their lineup (indeed, only Sly and trumpeter/vocalist Cynthia Robinson [a friend with whom he, uh, had a child] would stay in the band for the rest of the decade). Their American label Epic decided to capitalize on the band's '60s successes during said gap by releasing a greatest hits album, which they creatively titled "Greatest Hits," and the demand for this group's music was so great that it hit #1 on the R&B albums chart. When their next album came out in late 1971, There's A Riot Goin' On (the first of their two consecutive masterpieces, and the title of which is a response to Marvin Gaye's excellent What's Going On), it hit the top spot on both albums charts. Its lead single "Family Affair" was a #1 hit on each of the respective singles charts too (and the first such hit ever to feature a drum machine). It would prove, however, to be their last. The following album "Fresh" (the other masterpiece) hit #1 on only the R&B chart, but its lead single "If You Want Me To Stay" peaked only at #3 on the R&B singles (and only hit #12 on the main singles chart, where they were never again to hit the top 30, and never again to hit whatsoever after '75). Forward-thinking musician, producer, and general thinker-type Brian Eno at one point said that Fresh was the first album where the most important stuff was going on in the bass frequencies. Interesting.

Fresh (1973). Sly is actually lying on the floor here. The cover of

Greatest Hits (Of The '70s) is probably from the same photo session.

    Although they kept having top 40 hit singles on the R&B chart for the rest of the decade, the band were definetly in commercial decline. The narrative among music critics (who the author does not suggest should ever be payed a single ounce attention to [pardon the tangent, but in the wise words of musician Jen Clother, "those who can, do, and those who can't, review"]; one gets more out of art when developing one's own opinions about it and/or getting opinions from the actual experts in the field, which are the musicians, and not the crickets who are self-important about their opinions when in reality theirs are no more valuable than your own because their opinions are equally subjective, but they've got job titles and income and platforms and more often than not egos, and are all in a big club and share a lot of the same narratives and ideas and labels and hierarchies [which label subjective art that they're biased against as "bad"] that are almost always based on false premises and more often than not transmit the same societal issues [i.e., racism, sexism, fatphobia, beauty standards, harmful views about addiction and sobriety, etc.] that nobody needs to ingest any further from the mass media machine that has reasons to spew them. So avoid music [and, more generally, art] criticism and read instead about the art your most respected artists love, and/or talk about this stuff with people you meet face to face. Tangent complete. So, the narrative among music critics) is that this commercial decline was based largely if not exclusively on Sly Stone's drug intake.

    While it's not absolutely false, two things about this drug narrative must be pointed out. Firstly (1), the Anglophone music industry in the '70s literally ran on the stuff (and is indeed quite infamous for doing so). In terms of his peers at the top of the rock world of the '70s, David Bowie was using so much cocaine that he briefly became a neo-Nazi, was seduced by "witches," and couldn't even remember recording his magnum opus Station To Station (of two, the second being Blackstar from 2016). The founders of metal, Black Sabbath, even wanted to call their fourth album "Snowblind" because of the number of lines they were crossing on the high-way. Sly Stone wasn't even the only superstar musician in Los Angeles to be in constant party mode, a state of substance dependency, and experiencing profound drug-induced paranoia. There are two primary reasons for his being picked on for the drug issues; the first being that he only got sober in the 2020s when informed by a doctor that his life was in danger; however, it must be remembered that the future is never pre-written, and during the 1970s this was one of only a myriade of possibilities. 

High On You (1975). Sly is probably lying on the floor here too.

    The second brings me to my original second point (2), which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, racism (or in other words, systemic and institutionalized human rights abuses at every level of society). By the late '60s, segregation had lessened to the extent that the very, very, very, very, very, very best (like count-on-one-hand-type number of) non-white artists were starting to be allowed to briefly graze the heights of stardom that their generally less talented (because rock music is simply culturally inauthentic for non-African Americans, even when well performed) white siblings (it's a family affair) were permitted to obtain in a more straightforward manner. Along with Jimi Hendrix (who commited suicide at the hight of his fame and was thus immediately diefied), Sly Stone was more or less the first artist since the '50s wave of the initial founders of rock music (such as the king of rock himself, Little Richard) to reach such levels of commercial success and adoration among the commercially-powerful (but sorta segregated) white Anglophone record-buying audience. Non-whites were not (and generally are still not) permitted the same level of nuance and (relative) compassion that whites could be afforded in the public eye, so the solution for many was to flatten themselves and craft an acceptable image, at the cost of authenticity and perhaps even artistry. Sly Stone did not do this, and he suffered the consequences.

    In order to tear him down, to reaffirm his birthright of inequality in its profit-hunting eyes, the mass media machine began picking at what its eager horde of jolly white-collar workers deemed to be his faults and sins (for him it was drugs, but see that list of societal issues above; if he were a woman, it would have been beauty standards or [over]sexualization). This proved to be successful; as written above, he disappeared from the meanstream hit charts after 1975, and still today the vast majority of his white non-musician listeners do not listen any further than There's A Riot Going On or Fresh. The amount of acclaim that the former has achieved has even had a particular effect, similarly to Pet Sounds by those Beach Boys, where it being given such immense praise by the (again, there are far better places to get your information from) music critics has made the one project so popularly beloved that the rest of the discography is denigrated by comparison. But it's not true! Both Riot and Pet Sounds are great and excellent of course, and the ones after are a bit weirder, but they're not bad, and in fact all have the potential to be greatly enjoyed by fans of a wide diversity of guitar-bass-drum-vocal musics.

Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back (1976)

    While Sly And The Family Stone's commercial trajectory over the course of the '70s was inarguably something of a decline (because if you start out at the top of the hill, the only way forward is down), a better description of it would be a shift in audience. They very intentionally developed their sound at the turn of the decade by leaning hard into a funk which would end up appealing more to the African diaspora segment of their audience than the European diaspora one (because of the historic emphases on rythm over melody or vice versa, respectively, in the two culture groups). This shift is revealed by the R&B chart numbers shown above, as quoted from (fingers crossed on accuracy) Wikipedia, and I will now continue where I left off on that count, with "If You Want Me To Stay" peaking at #3. The album highlight (and only cover they ever recorded) "Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be Will Be)" is also included, alongside that number, on Greatest Hits (Of The '70s). After Sly became a father for the first time, Fresh's more relaxed follow-up Small Talk hit the storefronts in '74. Its title track is really cool for using his baby's babbling in a rythmic manner to highlight the groove going on underneath. Apart from a one-off single in 1969, Small Talk is interestingly their first album to be lathered in strings. It's an exceptional release for the band (perhaps because of the softer sounds it leans into) in that it didn't touch the R&B albums chart but hit the top 15 on the mainstream American and Canadian ones. However, its lead single "Time For Livin'" reached the tenth rung of the R&B singles chart, so it stll made a significant impact nonetheless. The angelically beautiful closer "This Is Love" has also been included on Greatest Hits (Of The '70s) as side one closer, and it sounds to me like it could be stright off a Wes Anderson movie soundtrack. 

    What remained of the original lineup of the Family Stone broke up after a concert at a mostly empty concert hall in the winter of '75, whereupon Mr. Stone recorded and released his first and only solo album of original songs, the fantastic High On You. Because he was the lead singer, frontman, composer, virtuoso multi-instrumentalist, and guiding creative force of a band whose lineup had been shiftin anyways, it sounds just like another Family album, and so is included here as such. That LP reached #11 on the R&B charts, while its first single "I Get High On You," reached #3. The album highlight "Crossword Puzzle" has, like "This Is Love," also made the cut. 

The original Greatest Hits album from 1970.

    Following that solo venture, Sly decided to reform the band and was of course rejoined by Cynthia on trumpet and vocal chords, alongside a bunch of fresh blood. For the band's big comeback on 1976's Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I'm Back (which is indeed a run on sentence although I wouldn't know because I've never written one), they made a very special album in the weird vein of funk Sly was mastering. It has what is perhaps Sly's lushest production and most earwormy hooks (something he always had a particular knack for), and departs the relatively straightfordward funk of High On You for a whole mix of genres: do-wop, soul, funk (obviously), hints of latin, and a lot of rock; Peter Frampton even makes an appearance, and there's also a duet with Lady Bianca which alone should show the breadth of the album. Compared to his other records, the melodic aspect of this LP is really brought to the fore, a move which would probably have aligned closer to the tastes of the by-then-largely-disinterested white segment of his audience, if only the album had been better marketed. The lead single chosen was the closer "Family Again," which while fine just isn't the best track on the album for the job (and indeed peaked at #83 on the R&B singles), which is why I chose instead to include the highlight "Blessing In Disguise." The album hit #33 on the respective albums chart, but didn't chart anywhere else.

    Epic dropped the Family Stone after that, but before the decade was up they were re-signed by Warner Records. New label, new comeback (and it had been about 3 years anyways), so it was titled Back On The Right Track (1979), which was a top 40 hit on the R&B charts, both for the LP and the lead single "Remember Who You Are." That would prove to be Sly And The Family Stone's final top-40 single, but was nonetheless a decent end to the '70s. This new label marketed the Family Stone as having the same old early '70s magic, which was a mistake; they don't, because it's a different sort of record. Over the last few years the Dayton, Ohio sound had overtaken funk as its second wave, making it slicker and perhaps even slightly less hard-hitting. Unlike his younger contemporaries though, Sly And The Family Stone were still making heavy early '70s funk by the turn of the '80s, which was, I have heard it said, among the heaviest stuff coming out at the time. Unfortunately, they weren't marketed in a way that would capitalize on it, but Back On The Right Track sold alright nonetheless.

Notice that the cover art of There's A Riot Goin' On

(1971) is not actually the American flag.

    They got to make another album, but both Sly and P-Funk ringleader George Clinton abandoned it partway through; the polished up leftovers were released as the underwhelming-but-far-from-embarassing Ain't But The One Way, which was the final album ever made of new Sly Stone material; he appeared again decades later with an album made up largely but not exclusively of redundant rerecordings of his past hits, I'm Back! Family And Friends (2011); the three new songs on it are, however, very nice. Apart from a handful of singles, his most prolific musical appearances from the '80s onwards ended up being guest spots on other artists' tracks. So, at you can see, it made sense to leave things off at the end of the '70s. I didn't mention it before, but in '79 an arguably unnecessary disco remix album of the Family Stone's earlier hits was released by their old label Epic; it's from there that the cover art of Greatest Hits (Of The '70s) originates.

    So, with the purposes of both mopping up all these truly excellent hits and album cuts, as well as also hopefully helping realize a reappraisal of their '70s catalogue, here, at last presented for your beautiful ears (take care of 'em!), is Greatest Hits (Of The '70s), a much needed follow-up and companion to the original Greatest Hits album from 1970; it even features the same song as the closing track, albeit in a different and even funkier performance, renamed "Thank You For Talkin' To Me Africa." The songs on this compilation are all sourced from the 2007 remasters up to Small Talk, the fabulous 2017 digital-only remasters of High On You and Heard Ya Missed Me, and an old 1992 CD of Back On The Right Track that I liked the sound of. So, all in all, what is there to say except rest in peace Cynthia Roberts, and, of course, the one and only Sly Stone. 

CD-quality down-low'd linc's here.

YouTube playlist here.

Amy Winehouse - Amy Winehouse (The Collection) (2011)

 

AMY WINEHOUSE (THE COLLECTION)

1. Our Day Will Come

2. Between The Cheats

3. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow

4. Like Smoke (feat. Nas)

5. The Girl From Ipanema

6. Best Friends, Right

7. Fool's Gold

8. Half Time

9. Do Me Good

10. Close To The Front

11. 'Round Midnight

12. Valerie

13. Someone To Watch Over Me

14. Body And Soul (feat. Tony Bennett)

15. You're Wondering Now

16. Hey Little Rich Girl

(feat. Zalon Thompson & Ade Omotayo)

17. Monkey Man

18. Cupid

19. What It Is

_____________________________________________________

    When singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse died in her sleep on July 23, 2011, she took her third album with her. It was fully written, and she'd even done a photoshoot for the artwork earlier that year, but only a song and a half had made it into the studio during a brief pause in her substance abuse patterns in 2008. Surprisingly, masses of people were unsurprised; the tabloid factory had been thrashing viciously at her heels for years, uncompassionately feeding her private struggles into the lucrative mass media machine; she couldn't even enter the United States for an industry award event during her aforementioned period of sobriety because the substance abuse was so widely known as to be nearly synonymous with her name, and a disastrous concert less than two months before her departure from the material plane had only garnered her more scathing criticism from the peanut gallery.

    But before the year was out, a new album hit the storefronts. Entitled Lioness: Hidden Treasures, it was a cherry-picked selection of her best studio performances left in the vault, as decided by her two main producers alongside the family that both loved and exploited her. Recorded across Winehouse's entire decade-long career, it comprised of the two numbers from 2008 (with her friend Nas, the rapper, adding two excellent verses to the unfinished song), leftovers from her 2003 debut record Frank, select covers, two early versions of songs on her mainstream breakout LP Back To Black (2006), and her final studio recording, a collaboration with her crooner idol Tony Bennett for his duet album. Despite the amount of love and care put into the record by her grieving producer Salaam Remi, few have found this album to be flawlessly crafted, including myself. My criticisms are as follows; the early versions of the Back To Black songs are inferior to the final cuts and are thus entirely superfluous; the closing track, a cover of "A Song For You," is a complete mess wherein a spontaneous and shambolic home demo with Amy on the brink of sobbing was overdubbed posthumously into a lush production, with the results ending up understandably stilted; and the song flow gets worse as the album progresses. So, because of the unsatisfactory nature of this release, I decided to create a revision. 

The American cover of Back To Black (2006).

    As is hopefully evident from the introduction, this is not her third album because that will never exist in finished form. Amy Winehouse (The Collection) is instead a mop-up compilation of her leftover songs (half written by her and half covers), including her B-sides and much of Lioness. It's a double album's worth of lushly produced Amy Winehouse songs that showcase all sides of her singing, from her usual R&B to jazz, ska, pop, and reggae. As usual, the song flow has been carefully refined and was designed so as to smoothly glide from one genre to the next. There's no song overlap with her two studio albums, because this compilation is intended to serve as a companion piece to them, and indeed the title and cover art were chosen in order to make it abundantly clear that this is not another studio record. So, that all for now; enjoy the music!

CD-quality down-low'd linc's here.

YouTube playlist here.

Buddy Holly - Giant (1959)

GIANT

1. Peggy Sue Got Married

2. Slippin' And Slidin' I

3. Smokey Joe's Cafe

4. Dearest

5. Crying, Waiting, Hoping

6. Holly In The Hills

7. You're The One

8. Slippin' And Slidin' II

9. Wait 'Till The Sun Shines, Nellie

10. What To Do

11. Love Is Strange

12. That Makes It Tough

13. Learning The Game

14. That's What They Say

_________________________________________________________________________

    Hello! This is an album of Buddy Holly's final recordings, made in the weeks before his sudden death in a plane crash in early 1959. In order to make demos for what would presumably be his fourth studio album, he obtained a nice tape recorder and proceeded to record a number of solo (i.e., voice and guitar) performances in his apartment. A little background noise can occasionally be heard, such as clattering dishes or running tap water, but it is otherwise a charmingly intimate set of recordings. Although it was put down around the same time, "You're The One," however, was made at a radio station for a challenge to see if Buddy could write and record a song within an hour. Waylon Jennings, among others, features on handclap duty. All in all, "Peggy Sue Got Married," "Crying, Waiting, Hoping," "You're The One," "What To Do," "That Makes It Tough," "Learning The Game," "That's What They Say," and the unnamed instrumental that I titled "Holly In The Hills" (after a compilation from the 1960s) were all composed by Holly, while the rest are covers (of which "Nellie" was apparently done at his mother's request). All tracks here are sourced from Not Fade Away: The Complete Studio Recordings And More (2008), except for "You're The One" which comes from 2009's Memorial Collection.

    These originals, barring the instrumental, were all overdubbed shortly after his passing by Jack Hansen and released on the second posthumous album, The Buddy Holly Story, Vol. 2 (1960). Most were overdubbed again and released over the course of the 1960s by the New Mexico band the Fireballs, and it was only in the decades after that when Buddy's original raw recordings were gradually released. Since these demos are more artistically authentic to Buddy Holly's art than the overdubbed versions are, and the former also more than enough on their own without any extra musical backing, I decided to create an entire album of these intimate demos which would complement the three albums from his lifetime as well as my already-posted collection of his final studio recordings, Reminiscing. As always, tremendous care was put into the song sequencing; for example, the slightly lower fidelity "You're The One" follows the aforementioned instrumental in order to mask the slight drop in sound quality. Taking it from one of the Fireballs compilations that came out after he died, the cover art and title of this collection were chosen in order to contrast these up-close-and-personal performances with his retrospectively posthumous larger-than-life stature. My personal favourite of the songs is most likely "Dearest," which has made me tear up a few times by its simple, caring honesty. It is perhaps that dimension which the intimacy of these recordings most clearly shows. So, with all of that said, happy listening!!

CD-quality down-low'd linc's here.

YouTube playlist here.

The Beatles - Get Back (1969)

 

GET BACK

1. Dig It
2. One After 909 (Live)

3. I've Got A Feeling (Live)
4. Dig A Pony (Live)
5. Don't Let Me Down
6. Get Back

7. Maggie Mae

8. For You Blue

9. Two Of Us
10. Across The Universe
11. The Long And Winding Road
12. I Me Mine
13. Let It Be

______________________________________________________________________________

    Greetings, internet strangers! Today I present to you Get Back, the penultimate album recorded by the globetrotting rock band who I don't need to name! In essence, it's a revision of the group's partly studio, partly live Let It Be LP, which I argue was faultily assembled (more on that later) in such a way as to leave it lacking when compared to the other albums which the group recorded and assembled themselves. I've made the changes I have made so that the record can finally stand toe to toe (or as close to that as the quality of the songs will allow) with their many other highly (some might even say overly) influential albums.

    I will start with the background. In essence, the band known as the Beatles was a tightly knit group of very close friends who had been making music together since they were teenagers (although it took them a hot minute to find the right drummer). By all accounts, they were as much of a unit as a band can possibly be; they had been playing gigs near-constantly for years, which meant they were performing together, writing songs together, practicing together, living together, hanging out together, eating meals together, jerking off together, and so on and so forther for many, many moons. This was the case up until 1966, when they got so sick of touring that they decided to stop forever, and simultaneously began using the studio as an instrument so couldn't replicate their music live very successfully anymore anyways. Not touring meant that they were no longer spending all that time together, so they naturally began to diverge in their interests and develop in slightly different directions as they grew older. At least they still had their trusty longtime manager, their figurative rudder literally named Brian Epstein, to steer them forward in the right direction, keep their public images peachy, and maintain general harmony within the group!

Their debut album Please Please Me (1963).

    Wait... Oh no! He died the following year. Yikes. The band was ill-equipped to manage itself, and equally ill-equipped to find anyone better to do the job, yet successful enough as musicians that they thought they could pull anything off, so they started a hippy-dippy company and soon enough bankrupted it, hired an inventor who couldn't actually do anything useful, self-wrote, directed, and acted in an experimental film (it flopped hard), got spiritual and took a bunch of celebrities to an ashram in India before running away and making a bunch of vague accusations about their guru, and so on and so forth. Although it's never black and white and they still loved each other very much, the group began fracturing as a unit in the studio during the protracted sessions for their 1968 self-titled double album to the point where their baked beans-loving drummer Ringo Starr (who was really the soul of the group), as well as their longtime producer George Martin and chief engineer Geoff Emerick, all walked out of the sessions at various points. The gap in time between the completion of that album and the beginning of the sessions for this one was less than three months, and the various egos, tensions, and wounds within the quartet were far from being healed over by the tie they reentered the studio. On top of that, all of them were very emotionally immature (not to mention repressed), which didn't help them work anything out either.

    They spent the entirety of January 1969 on this album despite being very rusty, but nonetheless rehearsed every day (with cameras rolling non-stop for a semi-conceptualized documentary that added a whole bunch of stress to the proceedings), and by the end of the month were laying down the master takes live-in-the-studio which this album would be built off. They even capped it off with their last-ever live performance, where they played on the roof of their studio/office until the pigs shut them down. Very little in this universe is black and white, and indeed there were both good times and bad. In terms of the former, musician Billy Preston, the best musician out of all of them (save for Paul McCartney at his very best on the bass) was brought into the fold and played the roof off on the roof with them. He brought that old good-time spirit back that the group was sorely missing by this point, and so very nearly got made a member of the band. In my opinion, had they decided to, it would have a) drastically improved the music, b) drastically improved the relations between the members, likely allowing them to exist for longer while also allowing more room for solo projects, and c) caused a massive racist backlash, although it may, in the long run, have been a net positive for racialized musicians in the music industry at large. But anyhow, Billy Preston is all over this album at least.

"Let It Be" single cover with some of the text and logos removed by me.

    But, there were good times and bad. Lead guitarist George Harrison walked out and made his return conditional, rythm guitarist John Lennon was losing interest in the band while simultaniously deep in a herion-addicted co-dependant releationship with the absolutely inimitable multidisciplinary artist Yoko Ono (by far the best artist anywhere near the Beatles' circle, if you have good taste; jazz legend Ornett Coleman literally guested on her debut solo album in 1970, and she remains influential to this very day in both music and poetry, not to mention visual and performance art. In case you ever wrote her off, she wrote the lyrics to "Imagine." Check out her music from the 1980s if the avant garde scares you.), and bassist Paul McCartney was taking his spot as unofficial bandleader, not to mention producer and manager, all the while just being very domineering and not listening to what the others had to say (not that he was the only one doing so). If you want any more detail on the January sessions then just go and watch the Let It Be film (1970) and/or the Get Back documentary (2021) that show the making of the film (and a whole lot more), both of them culled from all the afformentioned camera footage.

    It didn't take long for them to have wrapped up recording before human brains do what human brains do best and began warping memories of past events. The band collectively soured on the project to the extent where they didn't even want to put the album together, and so handed it off the a series of different people so they wouldn't have to compile it themselves. In hindsight, more so than any single other factor whatsoever, it was this decision not to put their own album together (as they had been doing with much love, care, and attention to detail for years at that point, to astounding critical acclaim) which decided the unsatisfactory fate of every official release of this material to come. How could they expect any person other than themselves to finish their own art exactly as they wanted? It doesn't actually make sense if one thinks about it. I wouldn't be making this post if they had put the album together themselves, or at the very least worked closely with those who they appointed as the compilers. But alas, they did what they did. Maybe hindsight is 20/20 after all...

Let It Be (1970)

    Firstly they handed it off to Glyn Johns. He was their well-dressed sound engineer during those January sessions. The band dumped unto him the mountain of tapes, and just told him to put the darn record together, so he spent ages combing through all of them and picking out what he thought were the best performances, and then compiling those into an album. In some cases, he was on the money and chose the best take. In many cases, however, he was completely off and chose one that was, for whichever reason (such as an incomplete performance), the wrong one. McCartney was the only one who corrected him and pointed him towards the right version of one or two of his songs. George Harrison helped him add studio chatter between the tracks. A lot of studio chatter. Far too mch studio chatter. A single overdub, for the flubbed guitar solo on "Let It Be" was added on April 30, 1969, the same day where Lennon brought out a wacky and unfinished two-year-old song which vocals were added to. This number, "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)," would eventually become the B-side of the "Let It Be" a year down the line, but I included it on my expanded version of Magical Mystery Tour (1967) that's featured elsewhere on this blog. 

    Anyhow, between the dollops of chatter, the often-rickety performances, and mixes themselves (Glyn had not quite yet mastered the art), the album was finished. A cover photo was shot (the one I used, featured at the top of this post), a title was picked (Get Back), a single was released ("Get Back"/"Don't Let Me Down," the latter a better take than appeared on the album itself), and the first little bits of promotion began to hit the newsstands. But when the actual product was handed the the Beatles for approval, they all (rightly) rejected it, because it was very much not up to par with regards to the level of quality that they had become known for. It was more of a fly-on-the-wall experience than an actual finished album. It was an early mix.

Reissue cover for the "Get Back" single from 1989.

    While Glyn had been holed up for months figuring out how to put the thing together, however, the quartet had recorded some new tracks. This had begun in February as they put a few finishing touches on the single version of "Don't Let Me Down," and it seems that they were thinking of adding a few more songs to the roster of those they had already finished. As time progressed, however, these new songs began to grow into their own seperate project. A few days after the "Get Back" single hit the shops (and topped the charts), they were already back in the studio recording their next one, "The Ballad Of John And Yoko"/"Old Brown Shoe," which will feature on a different assemblage of mine soon it come. This new album kept progressing (especially over the summer), and came to be their big, polished, carefully-crafted last hurrah Abbey Road (1969). The last time Johnny, Georgie, Richard, and Paul ever stood in a room together was during the final session for that project in August 1969. Lennon played a solo gig in Toronto at the start of the next month, and at a business meeting not long after announced he was leaving the group forever, but that he wanted it hush hush so the press didn't eat them alive. With that, the Beatles were no more. He then promptly mixed and edited two of their outtakes and prepared to release them as a solo single ("You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)"/"What's The New Mary Jane") until literally anybody found out about that, which they did, whereupon he was forced to scrap it. Maybe he left the group just so he could steal their songs? I wonder why nobody asked him that in interviews...

    I've expressed it before and I'll express it again; there is nothing like the power of a contractual obligation to bend the eternal cycle of death and rebirth, and bring entities out of non-existence. While all these shennanigans has been going on, that heap of film footage from January had been in the cutting room, where people were busy assembling it into a piece of mass media. The exact form of mass media which it had come to take was a documentary film that was gonna be screamed in theatres, and the film contract stipulated that the band were on the hook for the soundtrack (yes, dear reader, this is the contractual obligation mentioned above!). So, with this new directive from high command, Glyn Johns spent months and months revising and reassembling Get Back into something releasable. Just kidding! He nixed one song that wouldn't be in the film, added a two-year-old track which would be ("Across The Universe," which was being put out, in a very different mix, on a charity compilation around the same time), removed a sliver of the studio chatter, flipped the stereo image on a few songs, put them in a slightly new order, and called it a day.

The album cover that's on all those T-shirts and stuff.

    Sorry, I lied. He didn't actually call it a day, he called the Beatles. Now a threesome (I wonder if they'd ever had any of those), they re-entered the studio a few days after New Year's 1970 (the exact days that their buddy Jimi Hendrix recorded his last album live in New York, but that's neither here nor there) to make their final recordings. A rehearsal of George Harrison's number "I Me Mine" was slated for the movie, so they spent a day recording that one, and then returned the next day to add orchestral overdubs, a new guitar solo, and backing vocals to "Let It Be," which was now gonna be released as a single (with the orchestral parts, it must be noted, mixed relatively low). A few days after that, Harrison returned to the studio all by his lonesome and redid his vocal on his other song, "For You Blue" from January (the full live-in-the-studio take of which is shown in the Get Back doc for those curious). With those updates in place, Glyn submitted the album again for approval. This 1970 version didn't really fix the issues of the 1969 version, and it was once again nixed, and Glyn was booted out of the project. New hands were needed, because, again, the band finishing their own art was for some reason unthinkable.

    A Spector was haunting Europe. For his most recent solo single (which was not a stolen Beatles song), Johnny had brought the massively influential girl-group producer Phil Spector (who was also a drugged up gun-obsessed madman who would eventually die in prison a convicted murderer) out of a self-imposed retirement (which he also forced his wife Ronnie, of the Ronettes, into against her wishes) after a song he worked hard on wasn't as big a hit as he'd hoped. Johnny then suggested to his bandmates that this twerp assemble Get Back, which they agreed to because, yet again, the very idea of them doing it themselves was as foreign to them as food spicing. If you, reader dearest, can recall, the original intention for Get Back was a stripped down album with as few overdubs as possible intended to show the band going back to their roots and recording songs together as they once had. So in order to achieve this, they brought in a pop producer with a signature style termed "the wall of sound," where he would have so many instruments added onto a song that the listener wouldn't be able to tell one from the other. What an excellent idea.

The inimitable Spector during his murder trial.

    The Spector made a lot of decisions. To an extent, he took what Glyn Johns had done and refined it into commerciality without changing the fundamentals. What I mean to say is that he cut down on the studio chatter, but still included some on most of the songs (some, it must be noted, is far more than on any other of the group's albums), chose most of the right takes (though he still missed the mark on "The Long And Winding Road"), and even kept the jams "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae," though shortened them to interludes less than a minute long each. As well, he boosted the orchestration on "Let It Be" massively, and left off "Don't Let Me Down" because it's one of their best songs. Unlike Glyn though, he removed certain elements of the album, primarily a perfecly good guitar performance on "For You Blue," and the lovely coda that features on the single mix of "Get Back." He did all of this, but the album, in his eyes, was still not quite finished. On April 1 of all days (though it went into the early hours of April 2), the final ever Beatles session was held, where Ringo Starr added drum overdubs to "I Me Mine," "Across The Universe," and "The Long And Winding Road." Playing alongside Ringo were 18 violins, 4 violas, 4 cellos, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 acoustic guitarists, 1 harp, and 18 choral singers. Spector tried to get the 50 musicians to overdub a third song (when only two had been agreed to) without extra payment, but thankfully others twisted his arm until he agreed to compensate them for their work. Further mixes and edits of these songs were made later on April 2, after which the album was completed, and it was renamed Let It Be, the title of the documentary film to which it was technically the soundtrack.

    Scheduling conflicts with Paul's McCartney (1970), his saddest solo debut, meant that Let It Be was released in early May, several weeks after the film's world premiere in the new York. In a press release for McCartney McCartney announced that he was parting ways creatively with his old chums. This public announcement started a media fiasco, and within days the entire white population of the United States of America were on their knees grovelling for a reunion, remaining in such painfully contorted positions until Mark David Chapman did Lennon a favour one decade later. They also started insulting each other through the medium of song, the interview, and any other way that they could get the word out. So much for "give peace a chance" I guess. All of this means that because it was only a few weeks after Pauline's departure announcement that the record-buying beings set their sensory organs upon the band's new documentary and musical album, the reception of it was shaped enourmously by this news. The documentary showed the band having lots of fun. It also showed one or two brief creative conflicts, and the tone could get a little bit sullen at times, because that's simply how the sessions were. Imbued with the context of their unitary demise however, many found it a horrid and miserable watch in which they could see the band fracturing before their very eyes. If only, if only. 

The Beatles' self-titled double album from 1968, during the making of which

the band fractured considerably.

    Needless to say, the album far outsold the film. Few if any of the music crickets saw it as being up to par with their earlier work as an entire piece, despite having a good few songs comparable to any they ever wrote. Phil's additions were criticised, because they really do exist in total opposition to the ethos of everything else on the album. But it's still the beetles. It still won a Grammy (because those awards aren't based on the quality of the art in the first place). It still topped both the singles and album charts. It still sold like hotcakes, and unlike the film, it has remained in print until the present hour. 

    But not all were satisfied, least of all Paul. He got his way not long after the millenium, and had the album reworked into a remix called Let It Be... Naked (a reference to Yoko's "if you become naked" from "Revolution 9," perhaps?). It removed all orchestration (even on "Let It Be," which includes a fabulous guitar solo from the following January 1969 take that fits the song better than all the other solos), all studio chatter, all jams, used all the right takes (except for the subsititution of an inferior live version of "Don't Let Me Down"), although all of the ambiance was removed from the rooftop performances and the song flow was still shoddy, if only slightly better than on the 1970 album. The movie was going to get rereleased around that time too, but little came of it. Just over a decade later, their lucrative business began their still-ongoing full-discography remix project, and with it both the single versions as well as the album itself were given wonderfully modern yet never revisionist mixes. It is from these, as well as Naked, that this edition of Get Back has been assembled.

The Hey Jude album from early 1970, which featured "Don't Let Me Down."

Stay tuned for something relating to it here on the blog.

    In terms of piecing it together, I wanted to make it cohesive in a way that lets each song shine propely, while simultaneously getting the album to be more than the sum of its parts (the new mixes were in fact used for purposes of sonic cohesion), and it ended up as something of a middle ground between the various official versions of this album. With its opening fade-in, the 2021 mix of "Dig It" serves as introduction to the album, until Lennon's falsetto says "and now we'd like to do Hark The Angels Come," whereupon the loud opening guitars of "One After 909" comandeer the ears of the listener. With that begins the album's live portion with that song, "Dig A Pony," and "I've Got A Feeling," all recorded on the rooftop and all 2021 remixes because of their ambiance. I labeled them all "(Live)" because I wanted to make clear that this is a half live/half studio album since that's a central aspect of the record which is seldom highlighted. After these comes the 2021 remix of the single version of "Don't Let Me Down" (because this version of the song is the most emotionally effective), which in turn is followed by the 2015 remix of the single version of "Get Back" because the single version includes that wonderful coda not present elsewhere. Concluding side one is the little transitional addendum of "Maggie Mae," also a 2021 version, which is a traditional Liverpudlian folk song that the group never got around to recording a finished version of. 

    If somewhat loosly defined, this record has electric and acoustic halves, and with side two commences the latter. Naked mixes of each song on side two (barring the closer) are used because there is no orchestration nor studio chatter, and, in the case of "For You Blue," all of the instruments are present. I must admit that this version of "Across The Universe" is easily my favourite version of the song, as the unconcealed frailty to John's voice adds a deeply emotional dimension to what is perhaps his best lyric. It's made me cry a few times, it's very vunerable in a straight-from-the-subconscious sort of way. The sparseness of this version of "The Long And Winding Road" adds an emotional element that was before that missing as well, at least to my ears. Their final song "I Me Mine" that is fittingly about their bickering egos is from Naked too, and the album is closed out by the far-from-overblown single version of "Let It Be," featured in 2015 remix form. For a few final notes, I must admit that the cover art is not totally accurate because it says that there are 12 songs total, whereas there are in fact 13 here; count "Dig It" and "Maggie Mae" as one song I suppose! As well, I labelled the album as being from 1969 because, although overdubs were finished in 1970, it much moreso represents where the band were at, artistically-speaking, the year prior. So that's that, happy listening!

Across The Universe

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup

They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe

Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind

Possessing and caressing me

Jai guru deva, om

Nothing's gonna change my world

Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes

They call me on and on across the universe

Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox

They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe

Jai guru deva, om

Nothing's gonna change my world

Sounds of laughter shades of life are ringing

Through my open ears inciting and inviting me

Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns

It calls me on and on across the universe

Jai guru deva, om

Nothing's gonna change my world.

CD-quality down-low'd linc's here.

YouTube playlist here.

Buddy Holly - Reminiscing (1958)

 

REMINISCING

1. Raining In My Heart

2. Early In The Morning

3. Fool's Paradise

4. Think It Over

5. Love's Made A Fool Of You

6. Well Alright

7. Come Back Baby

8. That's My Desire

9. It Doesn't Matter Anymore

10. Heartbeat

11. Now We're One

12. Reminiscing

13. It's So Easy

14. Take Your Time

15. Wishing

16. Lonesome Tears

17. Moondreams

18. True Love Ways

_________________________________________________________________________

    By the time his warm corpse lay motionless on a snowy Iowan cornfield in the dark early hours of February 3, 1959 (after being thrown out of the airplane he was inside as it smashed into the frozen dirt), 22-year-old singer-songwriter Buddy Holly had three studio albums under his belt and on record store shelves. However, over a year had elapsed since recording had wrapped on the most recent of these LPs, and he had been developing musically by leaps and bounds over the course of what ended up being his final year with the living. From January through October he had been putting new songs to tape on a regular basis, and from this batch of material had been drawn five new singles and an extra B-side. These tracks are some of the most musically adventurous of his entire career, and are among a total of 18 songs that he had completed by the time his plane took off from the runway. Whereas all of his previous albums were only 25 minutes long (being 11 to 12 songs apiece), this batch comes in closer to 40. Reminiscing is intended to serve as the follow-up to his self-titled classic Buddy Holly, as well as to mop up all of the finished tracks from this era of his career. However, it's not the last Buddy Holly record I'll be posting, and is not even the final one he recorded, chronologically speaking, although it is the final one to be recorded in the studio.

    So, what happened to all these songs after he left the material world? Not so much as a month had gone by before his first compilation, The Buddy Holly Story, hit the charts to, it must be noted, widespread acclaim. It contained no new material, but six of those songs from the singles were slotted in next to earlier hits; indeed, the LP opens with the exact same two songs as Reminiscing does here. By the 1960s though, things got a lot more questionable, and the quality began to drop off considerably. Several different producers came in and started overdubbing new instruments onto these (already-finished) songs as well as various demos (this was completely needless, to my ears, but especially when it comes to the former). The Buddy Holly Story, Vol. 2 (1960) contained the first of these creations, alongside a few more finished-but-unreleased studio recordings. A few years later came another LP, this one called Reminiscing. It has the best cover art of all these posthumous records by a long shot, which, along with the fact that I included the title track in my album, was my reason for taking its artwork and title for my own project. The official one, however, is made up of that title track and a bunch more overdubbed demos. A pretty similar ratio of material was maintained on the other three albums of new material that followed: 1964's Showcase, 1965's Holly In The Hills, and 1969's Giant. My intention is to more or less replace all these disjointed compilations with strong albums featuring nothing recorded after he died (as, while I'm not against posthumous overdubs universally, I do believe they should only be done if actually necessary in the first place). I might skip over some of the demos from really early in his career that got included on these LPs, though. Stay tuned to see, I guess!

Buddy Holly (1958)

    Anyhow, it took a surprising number of years for me to nail the song flow on this thing, but now that I have, I'm very happy to post it. I'll make a few final notes before closing off. The first track to be recorded was "That's My Desire," if I'm not mistaken, and it was recorded immediately following (during the same session as) "Rave On," which was the last track recorded for his self-titled record from 1958 (pictured above, and released in February, curiously). That's just an interesting little tidbit which links these two albums together. Also, the four songs where Holly is backed by an orchestra are featured here in mono mixes, just like everything else on the album, but were actually recorded to three-track tape, making them his only stereo recordings ever. I decided to stick with the mono ones for cohesion purposes, but the stereo mixes can be found on a large variety of other releases. They were mixed after he died, however. Oh, also the two sides of (imaginary) vinyl are exactly the same length, which I'm pretty happy about. All songs are sourced from the Not Fade Away box set that was released in 2009. Well alright, that's it from me! I hope you enjoy this album as much as I do: happy listening, everybody!

CD-quality down-low'd linc's here.

YouTube playlist here.