Ace Label Tunes In “Radio Gold” and Heads to the “Hall of Fame”

Ace Records has another pair of aces (Aces?) up its sleeve with two recent releases, both of which continue ongoing series for the label.  The sixth installment of the long-running Radio Gold series turns the spotlight on those American records which were Bigger in Britain, as it’s subtitled, while the second volume of Hall of Fame takes in 24 rarities (20 previously unreleased) from deep in the heart of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

The 24 tracks chosen for Radio Gold: Special Bigger in Britain Edition all hail from the pre-Beatles era (1956-1963) of rock and roll and feature some of that period’s biggest names: Buddy Holly, Del Shannon, Bobby Darin, Bill Haley and His Comets, Roy Orbison, and Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers.  It might come as a surprise that Roy Orbison’s beautiful “Blue Bayou” bested its No. 29 placement with a No. 3 showing in Britain, or that Haley’s rather unknown “Rockin’ Through the Rye” (No. 78) also hit that same lofty perch.  Del Shannon’s “Two Kinds of Teardrops” was an intentional sound-alike to his “Little Town Flirt,” but whereas it stalled at No. 50 in the U.S., Shannon’s constant U.K. touring saw it rise to No. 5 there.  (As for “Flirt,” the No. 12 U.S. hit was No. 4 in the U.K.!)

Compiler Tony Rounce hasn’t limited himself to rock-and-roll chestnuts, though.  You’ll find country artists represented, including Conway Twitty (“Mona Lisa”) and Jim Reeves (“Welcome to My World,” later popularized by Elvis Presley) and crooner Perry Como (the rock-ish “Love Makes the World Go Round (Yeah Yeah)”).  Even more surprising than Perry is an appearance by the Velvet Fog, Mel Torme.  His breezy 1956 live recording of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s 1926 standard “Mountain Greenery” didn’t make waves in the U.S., but accomplished an impressive No. 4 showing on the British chart. Rounce helpfully points out in his detailed track-by-track notes that Mel’s recording was the very first live recording to make a major dent on the U.K. survey.

On the R&B front, there’s a track from Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers (“I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent”).  Straight from the Brill Building, Bobby Vee offers Gerry Goffin and Carole King’s “How Many Tears” (No. 63 U.S., No. 10 U.K., 1961).  Two famous television western themes are also included.  “The Ballad of Paladin” from Have Gun, Will Travel only made it to No. 33 at home, but across the pond, “Paladin” hit No. 10.  The occasionally overwrought pop star Frankie Laine specialized in musical tales of the Old West, and he brought his big pipes to Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington’s “Rawhide” from the program of the same name.  Its September 1958 release in America didn’t chart, but when “Rawhide” was issued in Britain in November 1959, it began an ascent to No. 6.

This entry in the Radio Gold series is accompanied by a thick 22-page booklet with plenty of label scans, photographs and sheet music covers.  Duncan Cowell has remastered all tracks.

Hit the jump for the full track listing and discography for Radio Gold, plus the details on Hall of Fame Volume 2!

The Need for Back-Up: Rock Hall Finally Inducts Classic Backing Bands

One of the many, many criticisms of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is their occasional neglect of certain bands in favor of other artists. From the first year of induction in 1987, when Smokey Robinson was inducted instead of all of The Miracles, it’s been a legitimate concern.

Today, the Hall attempted to alleviate some of that concern by announcing five such bands would be inducted alongside the five previously-announced members of this year’s class. The additional bands are:

• The Blue Caps: Tommy Facenda, Cliff Gallup, Dickie Harrell, Bobby Jones, Johnny Meeks, Jack Neal, Paul Peek, Willie Williams (Gene Vincent)
• The Comets: Fran Beecher, Danny Cedrone, Joey D’Ambrosio (a.k.a. Joey Ambrose), Johnny Grande, Ralph Jones, Marshall Lytle, Rudy Pompilli, Al Rex, Dick Richards, Billy Williamson (Bill Haley)
• The Crickets: Jerry Allison, Sonny Curtis, Joe B. Mauldin, Niki Sullivan (Buddy Holly)
• The Famous Flames: Bobby Bennett, Bobby Byrd, Lloyd Stallworth, Johnny Terry (James Brown)
• The Midnighters: Henry Booth, Cal Green, Arthur Porter, Lawson Smith, Charles Sutton, Norman Thrasher, Sonny Woods (Hank Ballard)
• The Miracles: Warren “Pete” Moore, Claudette Rogers Robinson, Bobby Rogers, Marvin Tarplin, Ronald White (Smokey Robinson)

A deserved congratulations to the inductees and a “took you long enough” to the RRHOF. What other backing bands do you think should be inducted?

The Second Disc Buyers Guide: The 100 Greatest Reissues of All Time (Part 2: #95-91)

Welcome to our brand-new, exhaustive feature to take us to the end of another great year for reissues and box sets: our first-ever official Second Disc Buyers Guide! From now until Christmas, we’re taking you on a delightful trip through the 100 greatest albums of all time, as selected by Rolling Stone in 2003, through the filter of when and how these classic albums have been reissued, remastered and repackaged. If you’ve ever wondered to yourself which versions of these albums to buy for certain bonus tracks and the like, wonder no more.

In our second installment, you’ll travel from the bayou to the Yellow Brick Road, and everywhere in between.  We’ll journey from the 1950s through the 1980s with a group of true legends: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Miles Davis, Prince, Buddy Holly and Elton John!

95. Creedence Clearwater Revival, Green River (Fantasy, 1969)

If you tuned into the Thanksgiving Day parade coverage on CBS last week, you might have found a sight that had nothing to do with Macy’s, giant floats or cartoon characters.  That sight was one John Fogerty, late of the band Creedence Clearwater Revival , playing many of his classic hits for an appreciative audience that Thanksgiving morning.  Fogerty hasn’t always had such a warm relationship with his back catalogue, the result of acrimony between the singer/songwriter and both his bandmates and his original label.  Though tensions have since cooled, with Fogerty even indicating to Rolling Stone that he would be open to considering a reunion (“It’s possible, yeah. I think the call would maybe have to come from outside the realm … [But] I haven’t really wasted mental energy being angry for quite some time.”), only one thing has remained a constant in all of these years: the vitality of Fogerty’s so-called “swamp rock” created with Doug Clifford, Stu Cook and his brother Tom Fogerty in Creedence.

The band’s third album, 1969’s Green River, crystallized the sound of its predecessor Bayou Country.  Both albums have a number of similarities: an all-Fogerty line-up of original songs supplemented by one cover version (“Good Golly, Miss Molly” on the earlier album, “Night Time is the Right Time” on the later one), a powerful title song, a blend of evocative, haunting imagery with good-time rock.  But the songs on Green River were tighter, more focused and more idiosyncratic.  (The entire album is barely thirty minutes long.)  “Lodi” exposed Fogerty’s fear of becoming a musician stuck playing dead-end dives in a town such as Lodi, California (some 70 miles away from Fogerty’s Bay Area home), while “Bad Moon Rising” was the most perfect expression yet of the songwriter’s darkness-meets-light ethos.  The elegiac “Green River” painted an evocative picture of a South that might have never been, but now always will be, in song.

Green River has been issued numerous times on CD, and all editions save the most recent edition have featured only the original nine-song track listing.  The original Fantasy CD (Fantasy 4514) was upgraded by the label with “20-Bit K2 Super Coding” remastering (FCD24-8393) in 2000, but some listeners might prefer the limited edition 24K Gold CD released in 1994 by DCC Compact Classics (GZS-1064) as remastered by Steve Hoffman.  Hoffman himself revisited Green River for Analogue Productions in 2003 as a hybrid stereo SACD (Analogue Productions CAPP 8393 SA) with amazingly crisp sound or a 180-gram vinyl LP.  Green River was also included in full on the 2001 box set Creedence Clearwater Revival (Fantasy 6CCRCD-4434-2) with the 20-bit “K2” sound.  Fantasy, under the new ownership of Concord Records, mended fences with John Fogerty after his clashes with former label boss Saul Zaentz, and issued definitive 40^th Anniversary Editions of the Creedence catalogue.  Green River (FAN-30878, 2008) was expanded by five bonus tracks: two instrumental test tracks recorded prior to the sessions which yielded the album (“Broken Spoke Shuffle” and “Glory Be”) and three live renditions (“Bad Moon Rising” from Berlin on September 16, 1971, “Green River/Suzie Q” from Stockholm on September 21, 1971 and “Lodi” from Hamburg on September 17, 1971).

94. Miles Davis, Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970)

If Miles Davis’ groundbreaking work with his Second Great Quintet was far-removed from his early bebop days, or his Gil Evans-arranged orchestral albums, nothing could have prepared listeners fully for 1970’s Bitches Brew.  On this sprawling double album, Davis embraced electric instrumentation and an improvised rock spirit that wouldn’t have fazed fans of Jimi Hendrix.  The gambit paid off when Bitches picked up Grammy Awards and gold records.  Entirely self-composed by Davis with the exception of Joe Zawinul’s “Pharoah’s Dance” and Wayne Shorter’s “Sanctuary,” Bitches Brew featured use of the studio itself as a musical instrument, with its lengthy tracks spliced and edited to their final form.  Davis’ trumpet playing had become more aggressive and he shares the solo spotlight with the soprano saxophone of Shorter.   Tracks featured up to 12 musicians playing at any time, including Zawinul,  Shorter, Ron Carter, Airto Moreira, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Don Alias, Bennie Maupin, Larry Young, and Lenny White.  Bitches Brew is a landmark recording not simply in jazz-rock or fusion, but in jazz itself, inspiring countless imitators and proving that Davis circa 1970 remained a restlessly inventive artist who refused to be relegated to music’s back pages.  Critical reaction was divided as to Davis’ polarizing, innovative new style, and the album is still much-discussed today.

Much like Davis’ 1959 modal jazz breakthrough Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew has been reissued with great frequency.  Early CD issues (such as Columbia C2K 40577 under the “CBS Jazz Masterpieces” banner) replicated the original 6-song track listing, while Legacy’s 1999 remaster (C2K 65774) added one bonus track to the second disc, Wayne Shorter’s “Feio.”  That track was recorded in early 1970 with much of the same personnel as the core album.  However, the Legacy remaster featured a remix of the album; the original can be found on older Japanese issues such as CSCS 5151-2 or 50DP 703-4 as well as on the 1996 Japan-only SRCS 9118-9.  Sony’s ace engineer Mark Wilder explained the remix as follows: “[The] two tracks [i.e. the actual stereo mix down master tape] had not aged well. So we could either work with inferior tape copies from other countries, or go back to the original eight tracks and remix them, and so save ourselves a generation. The decision was made to remix from the original multitracks.”  The remix became the norm for subsequent reissues.  Bitches Brew has also been released on SACD in its remixed form as SIGP-20/21 in 2003 and SICP 10089-90 in 2007.

1998’s The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions (Columbia/Legacy 65570) is the sixth in a series of chronological “complete” box sets chronicling Miles Davis’ Columbia Records career.  That 4-CD set compiles all tracks Davis recorded between August 19, 1969 and February 6, 1970, including Bitches Brew in its entirety.  At the time of its release, some questioned the curating process for this set.  Outside of the tracks which originally appeared on Bitches Brew, none of the other tracks on the box were recorded during the same August 1969 sessions that resulted in the final album. Some material recorded for, but not used on Bitches Brew, was not included, primarily rehearsal takes and unedited performances of the six album tracks.  This box set was reissued in 2004 with new packaging as Columbia/Legacy 90924.

The Bitches Brew saga continued in 2010 with both a 3-CD/1-DVD/LP Super Deluxe Edition (Columbia/Legacy 88697 70274 2) and 2-CD/1-DVD Legacy Edition (Columbia/Legacy 88697 54519 2) in commemoration of the album’s 40^th anniversary.  The first CDs include the original album (albeit in remixed form) plus six bonus tracks: two previously unreleased alternate takes of “Spanish Key” and “John McLaughlin” as well as the single edits of “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” “Spanish Key,” “Great Expectations,” and “Little Blue Frog.”   The third CD captures a live gig at Tanglewood from August 1970 with August 1970, with Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira and Gary Bartz.  The 71-minute DVD Copenhagen Live 1969 preserves a complete performance by a quintet that includes Shorter, Corea, Holland, and DeJohnette.  The Legacy Edition included the first two CDs and the Copenhagen DVD only.   Bitches Brew Live (Columbia/Legacy 88697 81485 2) appeared in early 2011, with nine rare performances recorded at festivals nine months before Bitches Brew‘s release (Newport Jazz Festival, July 1969, the first three tracks, previously unissued) and four months after (Isle Of Wight, August 1970, the final six tracks).

Hit the jump for the scoop on entries from Prince, Buddy Holly and Elton John!

Release Round-Up: Week of March 1

James Brown, The Singles Vol. 10 1975-1979 (Polydor/Hip-o Select)

The Godfather of Soul’s penultimate complete singles compilation from Select. One more to follow! (Hip-o Select)

Carole King and James Taylor, Troubadours: The Rise of the Singer-Songwriter (Hear Music)

A new documentary on the California singer/songwriter scene of the 1970s, coupled with a bonus disc of some of the best songs from that period. (Amazon)

Various Artists, Icon (UMe)

Budget compilations from artists across the Universal spectrum, from Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly to War and The Four Tops. (Original post with Amazon links)

Metallica, Garage Inc. (Vinyl) (Warner Bros./Rhino)

A three or six-LP audiophile reissue of the band’s covers compilation, featuring newly recorded takes on Metallica’s favorite bands and previously released B-side covers from the ’80s and ’90s. (Official site)

More “ICON” Titles on the Way

Universal has another batch of Icon titles coming your way.

The next wave kicks off with a tribute to recently-deceased Motown luminary Teena Marie on February 15; the rest of the titles are set for a March 1 release. They run the gamut from country (Loretta Lynn, Billy Ray Cyrus) to soul/funk (The Four Tops, Kool & The Gang, The Gap Band) and some rock-oriented surprises (Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, joke-rockers The Bloodhound Gang).

Are there many surprises? Not really, although the presence of a double-disc Icon set for War is apparently the prelude to a catalogue expansion for the funk outfit. Amazon’s product description corroborates this notion with the mention of more War reissues coming this year and the next.

All the track lists can be viewed after the jump, with links to all of the sets on Amazon therein.