Omnivore Succeeds with Reissue of The Posies’ “Failure”

Last week Omnivore Recordings announced their latest title for the late summer: an expansion of the debut album by power-pop idols The Posies.

The Washington-based group, built around singers/songwriters/guitarists Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, earned immediate indie acclaim when first album Failure was released on the PopLlama label in 1988 after Scott McCaughey – leader of The Minus 5 and a constant collaborator with R.E.M. since the mid-1990s – was given a self-released copy of the album on cassette. The album opened the band up for widespread success in the next decade; The Posies ultimately signed with DGC Records, had their modern rock hit “Golden Blunders” covered by Ringo Starr and (perhaps the highest level of power pop ascension you can get) became part of the Big Star story when Auer and Stringfellow were recruited to join a new lineup of the group with Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens in the 1990s and 2000s. The Posies continue to record and tour to this day, no doubt inspiring countless fans of gorgeous hooks and beautiful harmonies to continue the tradition.

Omnivore’s expanded Failure restores the album’s original 12-track running order (preserved on cassette but cut down by one song on vinyl) and adds eight bonus tracks. Many of these are sourced from a long out-of-print 2000 box set and a 2004 reissue of the album proper, but one, a demo of “At Least for Now,” is being heard for the first time on this disc.

The power-pop goodness of Failure is reintroduced on August 19 on both CD and LP (which will feature the original 12-track playlist with the bonus tracks available on a download card). The first pressing of the LP edition will be on green vinyl – hence that green square you see above! Amazon links currently only exist for CD versions, but you can find those, as well as the full track list, below.

Failure: Expanded Edition (Omnivore Recordings, 2014)

CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K.
LP: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K.

1. Blind Eyes Open
2. The Longest Line
3. Under Easy
4. Like Me Too
5. I May Hate You Sometimes
6. Ironing Tuesdays
7. Paint Me
8. Believe in Something (Other Than Yourself)
9. Compliment?
10. At Least for Now
11. Uncombined
12. What Little Remains
13. Believe in Something Other (Than Yourself) (Live)
14. I May Hate You Sometimes (Demo)
15. Paint Me (Demo)
16. Like Me Too (Demo)
17. Alison Hubbard (Instrumental)
18. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (Instrumental)
19. Blind Eyes Open (Instrumental Demo)
20. At Least for Now (Demo)

Tracks 1-12 released PopLLama PL-2323, 1988
Track 13 from At Least At Last box set – Not Lame Recordings NLA-006, 2000
Tracks 14-19 from 15th anniversary expanded edition – Houston Party HPR091, 2004
Track 20 previously unreleased

Review: Hank Williams, “The Garden Spot Programs 1950”

Hello everybody, Garden Spot is on the air/So just relax and listen in your easy rocking chair/Music for the family in the good old-fashioned way/I hope that we can please you, bring you sunshine every day!

That bucolic, peppy introduction opened Naughton Farms’ Garden Spot radio program, “the show that brings you all your favorite folk music singers.”  One such “folk music singer” in 1950 was Hank Williams.  Omnivore Recordings’ new The Garden Spot Programs, 1950 (OVCD-87, 2014) preserves 24 tracks from four of these programs which haven’t been heard since their initial broadcasts.  In fact, nobody even knew these recordings existed until a deejay and author, George Gimarc, found them on transcription disks from Creston, Iowa’s KSIB radio station in 2013.  With the cooperation of the Williams estate, Omnivore has issued these lost treasures on a splendid single-disc presentation.

Radio has always played a key role in the country music story, largely due to the popularity of WSM’s Grand Ole Opry.  Williams was no stranger to sponsored radio programs; he had been pitching items on radio since 1937.  Many of these performances made their way to records, including for Johnnie Fair Syrup and patent medicine Hadacol.  His 1951 shows for Mother’s Best, a flour and farm feed company, also famously survived.  The Garden Spot Programs of 1950 were sponsored by Naughton Farms, a mail-order plant nursery in Waxahachie, Texas.  Despite the company’s Texan origins, the programs were recorded in Nashville, Tennessee.  The format was simple – Williams would perform, and during breaks, a local announcer would appear on-air.  He would inform the audience of the plants for sale and provide instructions to write the station to buy them.  Radio station personnel would process the C.O.D. orders and pass them onto Naughton Farms for fulfillment.

Williams made the recordings featured here at Castle Recording Laboratories in Nashville’s Tulane Hotel, not far from Opry flagship WSM.  Once the recordings were made, they were transferred to the 16-inch transcription disks and sent to radio stations across the country for broadcast; only the KSIB disks discovered by Gimarc are known to survive.  The station apparently preserved the disks well, too.  The clarity of these recordings, as restored and mastered by Michael Graves, is shockingly good.  For the Garden Spot sessions, Williams wasn’t joined by his usual Drifting Cowboy Band, and indeed, there’s no evidence as to who was performing alongside Williams.  Longtime Williams historian Colin Escott, in his typically erudite liner notes, surmises that the steel guitarist could be Don Davis (rather than Don Helms) or more likely, Clell Sumney, and takes a reasoned guess that the fiddler might be Dale Potter.  In any event, though, these musicians bring a different sound to Williams’ songs than the Drifting Cowboys.

This disc, produced by Escott and Omnivore’s Cheryl Pawelski, recreates what it must have been like to listen to the original programs with jingles and between-song banter.  Of the disc’s 24 cuts, 12 are proper songs – other tracks are jingles, brief, hoedown-ready instrumental fiddle tunes, and finale performances of Stephen Foster’s 1848 American standard “Oh! Susanna.”  Stick around after the final listed track, too, to hear a three-minute commercial for Naughton Farms’ rose bushes “that will make your yard the beauty spot this spring!”

We have plenty more after the jump, so stick around, won’t you?