Insanity, Bohemian-Style

Legacy recently hipped their Facebook fans to the pre-order page for the double-disc Legacy Edition of This is Big Audio Dynamite, the 1985 debut LP by Big Audio Dynamite. Led by Mick Jones, who was at the time recently fired as guitarist of The Clash, BAD was quite the stylistic melting pot, fusing punk with reggae and club music and garnishing it with samples aplenty. The new edition, released for the album’s 25th anniversary, includes an extra disc of rare and unreleased remixes.

Have a look at the track list after the jump, and place your orders here.

Re-Meet the Supremes

Although the track list was up and running at Amazon some time ago, Meet The Supremes: Expanded Edition is finally up for pre-order from Hip-O Select. And this two-disc set has a lot of rarities for Motown fans.

The set has the original stereo and mono versions of the LP, a four-song set from the Apollo Theater in 1962 (touted by Universal as “the earliest known Supremes live recording”), seven more live tracks from 1964 and more than a dozen unreleased alternate takes. The packaging looks pretty sweet, too, utilizing the original LP cover for the digipak and packed with photos, notes and the first-ever interview with Barbara Martin, the little-known fourth Supreme who contributed vocals to many of the group’s early hits but left the group right before the album was released to start a family.

The set, limited to 10,000 copies (and claiming to be sold-out already, although according to sources this is not the case), can be found here, and you can see the full tracklist after the jump.

Labelled with Love

It might not mean as much now in an era dominated by digital files (not to mention a music business that is more or less split between four major labels), but there’s a certain beauty in looking at the label on a piece of vinyl. Next to a picture sleeve, it’s the prettiest art you could get in the early days of buying music.

With that label, there would be an image, not only literally but spiritually as well; the image a label projected onto its LPs and singles usually called a certain emotion to mind. Capitol’s unmistakable ringed rainbow added a dash of whimsy to an straightforward company, not unlike how their Beatles brightly cut through the musical landscape. Motown’s road map, with that star in the dead center of Detroit, spoke to audiences of where the music was originating from – a magic place where almost impossibly good R&B came from. Even a label like Casablanca matched their image on the record (decadent, exotic landscapes) to their output (disco and KISS).

It’s a sorely missed art nowadays; most current CDs will just give you a title or an image. There are some exceptions – John Mayer has designed his last few CDs to look like different Columbia labels, and some well-organized reissues replicate those great old designs – but they’re few and far between.

What labels speak to you? And which would you like to see immortalized on reissues? Your thoughts are always welcome.

Reissue Theory: Various Artists – “Soup for One: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack”

There may not be enough positive words to write about Nile Rodgers. The sole surviving member of The CHIC Organization (which included bassist Bernard Edwards and drummer Tony Thompson), Rodgers helped shape the sound of late ’70s and early ’80s pop and R&B, either as a performer with CHIC, a producer – often alongside Edwards – for Diana Ross, Sister Sledge, Madonna and others or even as a sampled artist (see The Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,” two of the best rap records ever).

It’s probably that CHIC stuff that gets the least recognition, it seems, at least on compact disc. A few of the band’s original LPs have only recently been reissued on CD by Wounded Bird Records. Some have still inexplicably never been remastered – notably C’est CHIC and Risque, their two biggest and best albums – but one of the most interesting of their offerings has never been released on CD.

The 1982 film Soup for One was a sex comedy that is, by many accounts, total crap. Far less crappy was the soundtrack, to which CHIC and associated artists extensively contributed. There were ten CHIC performances or productions in the film and eight of them were included on the original soundtrack. None of the songs were “Le Freak”-sized hits in the U.S. – despite some intriguing collaborations with Teddy Pendergrass and CHIC vocalist Fonzi Thornton (the two Thornton songs featured in the film were taken from his never-released solo record Frostbite) – but “Why,” a killer groove track sung by Carly Simon, was a Top 10 hit overseas and is now considered one of her best-loved songs.

Perhaps Wounded Bird will serve up Soup for One someday; until then, though, here’s a look at how it would go down Reissue Theory-style.