Updating the Beach Boys on cd Pt.2

Continuing backwards I did pick up a number of other newer cd versions of late and we might as well kick off here.

 The Beach Boys albums begins with 1962's Surfin' Safari, a fairly basic set of surf, car and teen scene songs that include the single Surfin' Safari, a remake of Surfin', their first record in 1961, Ten Little Indians, a second 1962 single and the surf instrumental Moon Dawg that showed  promise when it came to playing and arranging a track.
This super audio cd is all mono as there's no stereo mix.

 That was followed by March 1963's Surfin' U.S.A. which included the Chuck Berry re-write title track that managed to mention all the States, the drag racing number Shut Down, a Brian Wilson masterpiece in the form of the Lonely Sea and two surf instrumentals Let's Go Trippin' and Misirlou.

Because this originally had mono and stereo mixes, you get both on this which as it has been ages since I heard them was well worth getting.

Surfer Girl issued September 1963, was a break through as while on the surface it seemed a mainly surf based album when the Surf Sound was riding the charts with Pipeline by the Chantay's and Surf City by Jan & Dean topping the charts, chief writer/composer Brian Wilson was getting the hang of making exceptional arrangements and using jazz influences.

Lyrically In My Room was a breakthrough, exploring what it meant to be alone, Surfer Girl was a paean to female surfers that showed the Beach Boy's amazing harmonies off while Boogie Woodie showed piano based jazz influences.

This also has noticeably different mono and stereo mixes, the Mono surfer Girl with its vocal gi-gi-girl enunciation differing compared the straight girl in stereo. 

 This album emerged one month after Surfer Girl being a protective grab the tracks and release as two tracks had been used by Capitol Records, their recording label for a Hot Rod compilation against their wishes.

Thus it adds 409 from Surfin' Safari with its roaring spin, Shut Down  from Surfin' U.S.A. plus Our Car Club and Little Deuce Coupé from last months Surfer Girl album to eight new songs.

It's almost a car themed album with just Be True To Your School a single whose high school simplistic non questioning innocence soon seemed a part of a different era weeks later after President Kennedy's assassination placed as the first song on the album .
The single arrangement with its wind marching band and cheerleader interjections is very different and all time favourite.

What lifted the subject were the arrangements, vocal harmonies coupled with Roger Christian co writing the lyrics that told stories of cars and riders you could relate to.

Again this has mono and stereo mixes with 409 appearing in Duophonic echo laden stereo as it did on original lp records in the stereo portion

 As America worked its way through the tremendous loss of President Kennedy - something that was just shocking at the time - America adopted and made stars of what had been a little known act in the States that was massive in their native Britain, The Beatles.

Even sharing the same record label, America it seemed embraced that act that offered hope and a new start and in some respects the musical world around American acts prior to that tragic loss just seemed dated to the point the achievements of the Beach Boy's with the Californian surf and car sound had been eclipsed.

Thus that this album would sound in places a bit tired shouldn't surprise anyone but this said an album that has Don't Worry Baby, The Warmth of The Sun, the close harmonies in In The Parking Lot and the high school sunshine of Pom Pom Play Girl can't be all bad.

 Augusts 1964's All Summer Long was however a stronger album whose lead off 45, I Get Around even managed to crack top ten in the Beatles backyard and offered signs the beach boys were back although it was the last time they visited teen car and high school life.

This is the home to "Wendy", the 50's homage We'll Runaway and two pieces of high school life, Little Honda, the two wheels of teen freedom and Drive-In, that american concept where couples would drive, park up and watch a movie in a car.

This album uses the original stereo album masters so I Get Around and All Summer Long appear in Duophonic fake stereo as they always did and the mono portion still has the rough sounding Drive In and Don't Back Down as every copy of the mono lp British or American had.
This is my favourite of the bunch followed by Surfer Girl.

Each disc is a Super Audio cd  with a regular layer for normal cd playing equipment and an extra layer for higher sound quality for those of us with super audio cd players in our stereos.

To conclude this length piece, I hope I have introduced a number of albums, what makes them stand out even over fifty years on from release and what makes these discs  special.

Teenbeat: the Mama's and the Papa's

It's almost a cliché to say the nineteen-sixties produced some of the most memorable popular music of the modern era and growing in the era afterward I was very much in that shadow cast by it cos if your folks and relations didn't have it, then often it was played on the radio.
One trend  amongst many was the fusion between folk music and the emergent rock in the middle of that decade which you see with the Byrds, Bob Dylan and naturally Simon and Garfunkel.

 

A popular sound often leads to others getting on on the genre and the other essential act you really need to listen to was the Mama's and Papa's who through a career that only spanned from nineteen sixty-five through nineteen sixty-eight, releasing seventeen 45's and five albums.

They comprised of John and Michelle Phillips, Denny Doherty  and Cass Elliot and were signed to Dunhill records in 1965 .

The combination of close harmony singing and relatively sparse instrumentation coupled with the dreamy quality of the songs lyrics is a core reason these productions stand out among many others.

Imagine not hearing such songs as Monday Monday, California Dreamin' that summarized that era, Dedicated To The One I Love, Creeque Alley and Dream A Little Dream Of Me before they made their separate ways? To anyone around it would be unthinkable and even when I was growing up, their records were always played on oldies but goldies shows on the radio which trust me I heard a lot of being ill during my childhood and reliant on the radio to cheer me up, it was was left for me to listen to.

Their have been a number of compilation albums of their music issued over the years as while there's a bit of me that loves the original studio lp jackets, in truth their always was a bit of filler on those albums and like many sixties albums seldom run much beyond a half hour or so making a well compiled compilation a sensible option.

The strength of two thousand and five's Mama's and Papa's Gold  is it offers many of the songs from the individual albums in addition to the hit 45's on two well filled compact discs avoiding the mistake of including solo recordings that featured on the nineteen ninety-one Creeque Alley package so there's a clear focus and it can act as good alternative to a full set of albums.

Best of all, this is an inexpensive double in Universal Musics Chronicles series negating any need to consider single cd sets completely.

Recommended

More G.O * fiction

I've been busy removing the modern re-written Famous Five and Secret Seven editions ready to go to a charity as they're in good condition but the text is so altered the original art is out of sync with the altered text!
With the Secret Seven's so far I have the first ten plus the three that came after it so in time they'll all be in hard back original texts.

This lesser known author wrote Jill At Hazelmere in nineteen sixty-four and Jill Investigates both borrowing from the Girl comic strip series Wendy and Jinx school based adventures where both are Forth Formers.
It's the very sort of book I love and actually it's the first time I've owned a copy - mine's from nineteen sixty-six  although I'm sure saw a copy at boarding school in the Seventies.
Sadly the Girls Comic site which had extracts from many British girls comics including Girl that was published between nineteen fifty-one and nineteen sixty-four has disappeared as has the middlescommonroom.com site where mainly older  junior fiction was discussed.
Trying to find a G.O* or mainly G.O discussion board where such staples of the junior fiction I read back then is proving difficult.

*G.O = Girls Only, the very girl centric type of novel or comic writing usually about schools, horses and princesses.

Pinafore dress patterns

Hi, Hi peoples after a few days with a really bad migraine,I suppose you can say expect the unexpected cos I'm feeling very little at the minute with a few chunks of memory temporarily M.I.A. after that.
But anyway I felt like posting a little about dresses (gasp!).

 Most of these patterns are from the late 50's and the 60's and starting from the above while all are really nice, two stick out as potentially me rolled back to the age, the bottom left plaid one and especially the lower middle one in blue with the red ribbon.
I'm not really into 'fussy' designs that probably has something to do with finding dressing at times difficult by myself.

 From the second picture top right panel, that blue dress with the bow looks more the kind of thing I could worn at a party, Alice style as there's just about enough 'pouf' in the skirt to make a pleasant change from school dresses.

 This next set is from 1964 and I think it's the blue one with the detail on the bodice and again I like how the skirt hangs on it.

 Same era and it could be either although I suspect the blue check just edges in with a classic cut preferring an A line to a tube shape.

Fast forward to 1969, and it's the one on the left, bring out the white tights and the ribbon and I'd be in seventh heaven apart from feeling definitely little. And little I am!

And there with have it with aid of missing bits of memory to cut out any internal fighting, I, Joanne, do admit to being a girl who loves dresses.
Darn it the secret's out!
Is there gonna be  a cry of "Can you please sow my button back on please?" next.

Teenbeat XV - The Beatles in mono

The genius of this entry goes back three weeks ago to September 8th at least in the UK as  that was when a rather special set of vinyl lp records was issued in both individual and boxed set form with the box set featuring a big book with a history of the records , pictures of tape boxes and naturally enough, the artists themselves.
It is also a follow one to November 2012's Teenbeat special that was timed to do with the stereo vinyl re-issues and how that slotted into my collection started in my earlier life.

The first thing to say is in this set there are 11 albums, the first 9 UK titles, the American compiled but later adopted in the UK Magical Mystery Tour and the new Triple Mono Masters compilation.
I opted to buy them individually as with a bit of searching I could get the whole set for much less than I anticipated and it's not every day you can get a set of brand new mono albums made directly from the tapes, the way they did in the 60's with not one jolt of digital processing involved.

An indication of the attention to detail in this set is the label above being a copy of the one used on the very first copies of the Please Please Me album from March 1963, the other UK original albums through Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band have period Yellow and Black labels with the White Album (aka "The Beatles") and the new Mono Masters triple having dark green Granny Smith Apple designs.

This one being American in origin has a replica Capitol colourband rim design as original Capitol lps did back then. Originally the songs from the film were issued in the UK on two 7 inch singles in a book and the stereo lp was eventually issued in November 1976 for that territory.
The sleeve construction owning a few originals is the same although the way the glossy lamination is achieved is different.
The White Album has individual issue numbers stamped on the front to each copy and top opening slots for each record, the four pictures and poster just like the originals did.
I have just one of them left to arrive but overall these sound at least as good as in number of instances better than my originals such as of the UK Revolver or early 80's extremely limited edition mono issues (the so-called '81's) like my copy of With The Beatles while I've never owned the White Album and Magical Mystery Tour in their mono  forms.
It seems using the tapes directly and altering the sound slightly per track while making the lacquers used to make the records has given them a transparency that has never been on any previous lps and in comparison with the Beatles in mono cd box set  is lacking from that.
While not  much processing  to the tone was done on the cd box set, it's obvious some tidying up like editing and click removing  was done digitally when you compare the actual records to the cds but it doesn't undermine the value of the cd set for those who prefer that media.
Why mono? Because for much of 60's the final mix was done first to mono, the one speaker systems most people had taking a lot of care with the impact and critically with the Beatles they were present during that process.
In the UK All the singles from Love Me Do to Get Back were only released in mono so the original mixes were the mono ones although from 1970's many compilation albums featured only stereo mixes done later.
In so far as original studio albums go the stereo mixes were done later usually by engineers in a half hour or so with no input from the Beatles so these mono mixes were more what they wanted their fans to hear and there are a good number of significant differences  between them with Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club band sounding more finished, nay arresting as a listening experience compared to the stereo.
It's important to note the first two UK albums were not recorded with any aim of making a stereo record so much as using two tracks to fine tune the balance between vocals and instruments later on which why in 'stereo' you have that odd backing in one speaker, vocals on the other effect.
The final album in this series, Mono Masters is a triple album that has those singles with flip sides and other tracks not originally  released in the UK on album form from the original single mix of Love Me Do to You Know My Name from the b side of the Let It Be via such singles as I Want To Hold Your Hand, I Feel Fine, Day Tripper, Hey Jude and the last UK mono single Get Back. It also has the entire Long Tall Sally EP plus dedicated mixes made a projected EP of songs from the Yellow Submarine that were never issued given a separate lp side meaning if you don't need the stereo versions, the Yellow Submarine album isn't really needed as there were only two other songs that are on it by the Beatles and they were issued on previous albums anyway.
Like most people who bought it, I feel compared to the 7 inch singles the sound is that much fuller for having more vinyl space to accommodate the full range of loud and soft passages and low notes in this unique compilation. It also is more convenient too than flipping 45's every two and half to three minutes with the 6 sides covering fairly well defined eras in the group.

The records:
Please Please Me
With The Beatles *
A Hard Day's Night
Beatles For Sale
Help!
Rubber Soul
Revolver
Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band
Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles (better know as the "White Album"**
Mono Masters.
*= Known to Canadians as Beatlemania with the beatles, the first album we had!
** not issued in mono in Canada and the States, ever.

This set slots nicely into my collection replacing a number of copies whose sound I wasn't so happy with and enabled me to remove a couple of albums whose contents are now totally replicated in better sound, generally tidying matters up.