Beginning To See The Light: 6-CD Super Deluxe “Velvet Underground” Coming In November

For the third year in a row, a classic album by The Velvet Underground will receive the super deluxe treatment from Polydor and Universal Music Enterprises (UMe).

On November 24, 2014, the label will release The Velvet Underground – 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition, a 65-track, 6-CD hardcover book-style box set, following 2012’s release of The Velvet Underground and Nico and 2013’s White Light/White Heat.  The 1969 release of The Velvet Underground introduced Doug Yule to the band, replacing founding member John Cale, and also introduced a somewhat more accessible, melodic sensibility perhaps best described as in a “folk rock” vein.  Not that the group’s experimental tendencies were absent; “The Murder Mystery” employed both spoken-word and musique concrete, proving that Lou Reed (who wrote every track on the album), Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker were still at the vanguard.

The 45th Anniversary set presents two distinct stereo mixes of the original LP on the its first two discs, and a promotional mono mix on the third disc (along with two mono single sides).  The fourth disc features the Velvets’ 1969 session recordings which were to comprise a fourth album; ten of the fourteen tracks are heard in previously unissued mixes (four from 1969, six from 2014).  Tracks from this disc appeared in different form on Lou Reed’s 1972 solo album as well as his classic David Bowie-produced Transformer, as well as on The Velvet Underground’s Loaded album for Atlantic Records  The fifth and sixth discs are devoted to the band’s November 26 and 27, 1969 concerts at San Francisco club The Matrix, featuring new-to-CD mixes and performances.

David Fricke provides the new liner notes for this set.  The remastered “Val” Valentin stereo mix of The Velvet Underground (Disc One of the box set) will also be made available as a single-disc CD release, and as part of the two-CD Deluxe Edition with a 12-track audio bonus disc featuring highlights from Live At The Matrix.  Digital versions of both the single disc “Valentin mix” and the Super Deluxe set will also be available through UMe’s digital partners including MFiT and HD Audio formats.

After the jump, we present the press release for The Velvet Underground: 45th Anniversary Edition as well as the complete track listing and pre-order links!

Any Day Now: Ronnie Milsap’s “RCA Albums Collection” Box Coming In November

Country music superstar Ronnie Milsap is having a great year. The Academy of Country Music has recognized him with a Career Achievement Award at the ACM Honors ceremony in Nashville, and in October, the “It Was Almost Like a Song” and “Any Day Now” singer will be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame’s 2014 class, alongside Mac Wiseman and the late Hank Cochran. Capping this incredible year of acclaim, however, will be the November 4 release from RCA Records and Legacy Recordings of The RCA Albums Collection. This 21-CD box set compiles all of Milsap’s studio and live sets released by RCA between 1973 and 2006. Many of these titles have been long unavailable, while others have never previously seen CD release at all.

The box set contains the following original albums:

1. Where My Heart Is (1973)
2. Pure Love (1974)
3. A Legend In My Time (1975)
4. Night Things (1975)
5. 20/20 Vision (1976)
6. Ronnie Milsap Live (1976)
7. It Was Almost Like A Song (1977)
8. Only One Love In My Life (1978)
9. Images (1979)
10. Milsap Magic (1980)
11. Out Where The Bright Lights Are Glowing (1981)
12. There’s No Gettin’ Over Me (1981)
13. Inside (1982)
14. Keyed Up (1983)
15. One More Try For Love (1984)
16. Lost In The Fifties Tonight (1985)
17. Christmas With Ronnie Milsap (1986)
18. Heart & Soul (1987)
19. Stranger Things Have Happened (1989)
20. Back To The Grindstone (1991)
21. My Life (2006)

After the jump, we’ll take a deeper look at the contents of the box set and Ronnie Milsap’s career!

All The Way To Paradise: BBR Revisits Stephanie Mills, Burt Bacharach, Hal David’s Motown Gem “For The First Time”

Following the commercial failure of the big-budget 1973 movie musical Lost Horizon, Burt Bacharach retreated. Tension over the film had led to a split with his longtime songwriting partner Hal David, and their split had in turn led to a breakup of their “triangle marriage” with singer Dionne Warwick. Lawsuits ensued. Only one new Bacharach song emerged in 1974, Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Seconds,” co-written with playwright Neil Simon for a proposed movie version of the 1968 Bacharach/David/Simon Broadway musical Promises, Promises. A ’74 reunion session with Warwick – in which she sang another new Promises song co-written with Simon and two lyrics by Bobby Russell – was abruptly shelved despite the quality of the material.  (The Warwick session finally saw release in 2013 from Real Gone Music.)  So was another session, also with Russell lyrics, for Glen Campbell. The once-prolific composer was similarly quiet on the recording front in the first months of 1975, only issuing a couple of random songs from the Russell collaboration, one with Tom Jones and one with Bobby Vinton.

That all changed, however, in autumn of 1975 with the release of Stephanie Mills’ For the First Time, a Motown LP written and produced by the team of Bacharach and David. What brought the team together after two years of acrimony? How did they end up at Motown? Was Bacharach actually involved in the day-to-day recording and production of the album? Before those questions were ever answered, For the First Time disappeared without a trace. The reunion was sadly short-lived; another new Bacharach/David song wouldn’t be heard by the public until 1993. But the music stays, as always – and it speaks volumes. Big Break Records has just reissued For the First Time paired with Mills’ 1982 Love Has Lifted Me, an album of Motown outtakes. This splendid release, part of BBR’s month of Motown reissues,  is the first remastered edition of For the First Time since the early days of CD.

For the First Time was Stephanie Mills’ Motown debut, following the teenaged Wiz star’s LP debut on ABC Records in 1974 with Movin’ in the Right Direction. Following its disappointing sales, she didn’t record another album until 1979, when What Cha’ Gonna Do with My Lovin’ solidified her place in the pop and R&B realms. Happily, this new edition allows the song cycle – featuring ten Bacharach/David songs, eight of which were newly-written and six of which would never be recorded by any other artist, to date – to take its rightful place in the pantheon of Stephanie Mills and of its renowned writer-producers.

Though Stephanie Mills at eighteen was roughly five years younger than Dionne Warwick was when Bacharach and David helmed her 1963 debut Presenting Dionne Warwick, the team didn’t make many concessions to her youthful age in crafting a set of immaculate, adult pop-soul narratives. The first sound you hear on the LP is an atypically searing guitar introducing “I Took My Strength from You (I Had None).” This deeply soulful ballad is graced with subtle orchestration and the slightest hint of blues, and gilded with one of Bacharach’s signature instruments – the tack piano – to create a sound unlike on any other record in 1975. Mills brings a sense of control to the deliberate verses, contrasting them with sheer exultancy in the chorus. The singer’s sense of joy in discovering the source of her strength and support is palpable.  (Disco star Sylvester made his own mark on the song in 1978.)

Lyricist David called on Mills’ theatrical gifts – which had been on display in Broadway musicals including Maggie Flynn, starring Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy, and The Wiz – to bring to life some of his most multi-layered lyrics. “No One Remembers My Name” epitomizes the mature themes contained on the album. The singer is a success who “really made my dreams come true,” and then returns home only to sadly find that “there’s no one to tell it to” in her hometown: “The people I once knew don’t seem to live here anymore/I feel like a stranger outside the house where I was born…” It’s one of David’s many ruminations on the fleeting nature of fame (most famously, “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”) and a sequel of sorts to the Bacharach/David “Send My Picture to Scranton, PA,” in which BJ Thomas’ narrator imagines writing to the people who taunted him in his youth, not to throw his fame at them but because with his success, “maybe now they’ll give kids a helping hand! That’s how it really ought to be, not like the way it was with me…” But the song is also, perhaps moreover, a universal reflection on the theme that you can’t go home again. Mills acquits herself beautifully as a precocious singer with a wisdom and interpretive skill beyond her young years. Much of her style on this song recalls the vocal influence of Diana Ross; now just imagine how heartbreaking it would have been to hear Miss Ross admit, “The past is just a memory/I belong where people smile back at me/They know me and show me they care/That’s why I’m so happy there/They all remember my name…” The singer of the song is most comfortable living in the past, despite the supposed trappings of fame and fortune. It was heady stuff for a pop song sung by an eighteen year-old in 1975.

“There goes the greyhound/I guess I missed the bus again,” sighs Mills in another excitingly complex tune, “Living on Plastic.” The singer explains her philosophy – “living on plastic: living now, and paying later!” David’s lyric is sufficiently empathetic to her situation, but the dramatically twisting-and-turning, thumping melody gives the lie to her sunny outlook as it contrasts pensive verses to a desperate, driving chorus. Despite her repeatedly-stated faith that she’ll “get by,” we’re not so sure. Bacharach adroitly incorporates a dash of funk into his arrangement, sung deliciously by Mills.

Don’t miss a thing; hit the jump for more!