R.I.P MeatLoaf

 This week we're looking at a legend.

Last Thursday we lost a unique guy.

Born Marvin Lee Aday and later legally known as Michael, the musician died on Thursday with his wife, Deborah Gillespie, by his side.

Rock Singer and actor Meat Loaf has died aged 74 years whose shows were things people looked forward to as they never let up and his operatic gothic rock style of music replete with costumes was in some respects a modern day Wagner for the Rock Generation, telling stories of adolescent life and loves with verve and passion.

Written and composed by Jim Steinman who died last year, Meat Loaf’s 1977 debut album Bat Out of Hell remains one of the biggest-selling albums in history. 

Steinman and Meat Loaf’s 1993 album Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell produced the global hit single I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That). It was his only UK No 1 single, spending seven weeks at the top. 

He completed the Bat Out of Hell trilogy with The Monster Is Loose in 2006. The three albums have sold more than 65m copies worldwide.

He famously stared as  Eddie, an ill-fated delivery boy who sings the song Hot Patootie in the 1975 film make of the stage production The Rocky Horror Picture Show entering on his motorcycle.

All in all he starred in some 50 films including Fight Club, Wayne’s World and Spiceworld the Movie where he played a taxi driver.

The 90125 story

While the politicians are playing the anything you can do I can do bigger game I've been exploring an album I remember buying in late 1983 and have gone through a few versions of over the years

 Home surprisingly enough of two hits the rock disco Owner Of a Lonely Heart that I bought on 45 in November of 193 and It Can Happen from 1984 from a "progressive" rock group regarded as a spent force during the early 1980's that give birth to the supergroup Asia, it was a massive comeback from the dead.

 The last version I bought of it was this HDCD gold version from the sometimes good sometimes so-so Audio Fidelity label which while coming from the actual master tape sounded dull and too smoothed off for my tastes.

 This was the version I first bought, yes a Chrome tape that sounded marvellous and a far bit livelier from that 'audiophile' cd which was replaced by regular cd in the late 1980's .

 When cd's first came out supplies were scare and colour printing options for the disc tops were limited which lead to a colour scheme being set out  with on Warner Bros distributed titles a gun like Target cross hair design too.
That copy was the first European edition made before Warner Bros had their own cd pressing plants and was highly regarded.

During the transition as Warner Bros established a plant in the then West Germany some discs were made their from those original cd stampers which in practical terms means they are identical physically to their so-called target originals, just lacking that design and colour scheme.

That is the rear cover which like all early Warner Bros titles has a potted history of artist  hints at why it was selected for cd issue in those early days when few whole catalogues were available on the fledgling format.
 I recently acquired a near mint  copy as it is the earlier edition I prefer and really like the sound
 no doubt remaking to tape soon enough.

Restoring the vinyl

After the "Broked Edition" we have some restoration edition around vinyl which has been a mainstay of my music collection for a long time even if some went around the late 1980's and early 1990's as I embraced with some reluctance the compact disc.
Belinda Carlisle was an artist who I followed a lot during that era, coming from the Go-Go's to who  I liked in the early 1980's who had hits with Vacation, We Got The Beat and Our Lips are Sealed.
I had bought on record her second  album Heaven On Earth and it's follow up, the magnificent Runaway Horses even though the latter was also bought on cd and I later picked up the cd of Heaven on Earth.
By 1991 however I was starting to wind down on vinyl purchasing and so when later that year Live Your Life, Be Free was issued I bought that straight away on cd.
I had acquired the UK Virgin lp of it a good two decades later but to be honest I was very underwhelmed by it not least because it had vinyl roar not just between songs but so intrusive it obscured many of the quieter passages

 It was reissued in box set and then separately in 2018 by Demon Records who have acquired the rights to her catalogue and good number of other artists.

 They chose to issue it on red coloured vinyl which in reality all vinyl is being normally clear and coated black usually so unlike picture discs it doesn't affect sound quality.
This copy is much quieter and  has improved low notes although personally given one side is long I think a double album with perhaps a remix on the fourth side might of made more sense

In the Fall of 1993 Belinda released her fourth solo album Real or was it written without any punctuation probably as a artistic statement belindacarlislereal which as bought on cd although a very limited vinyl edition was made that usually sells for a lot of money.
As was my want in that era those cds were all taped on Maxell XLII high bias tape and that was no exception for my then Aiwa Walkman using a expensive Technics cassette deck.

 The sheer scarcity of the vinyl edition meant this album wasn't on vinyl in my collection so seeing this also was reissued in 2018 I bought a copy.

This was issued on clear vinyl which natively all vinyl is and actually sounds more open and less compressed than the cd which was louder than many but sadly others where much louder still a year later due to the so-called Loudness Wars.
I think having this edition was well worth it as it helps in enjoying it.
 
One of a small number of albums affected by the PVC sleeve issue was my original 1982 Eye Of The Tiger album by Mid-Western rock band Survivor which is a classic of the genre. The inside of the lp jacket smelt badly of the gas from those sleeves and it had started to 'fog over'.

Seeing it had a number of marks that resulted in clicks too I bought a mint original of the very first pressing over here which is a lot better and replaced the rubbish plain poor quality paper inner with a lined one.
It also had the lyric insert which my original had lost over the years.

The return of The Hollies on vinyl

This week we're going back to a series of posts from 2011/2 while I'm recovering from this darn heat.
That series of post explored the sixties and early 70's output of The Hollies from a compact disc angle but one problem is a number of Hollies compact discs remain in grey sounding highly compressed issues from the late 1990's and to which using records is presently the only sure fire way to get past that fork in the road. 
 In 1967 as I remarked in an earlier post the group and specifically Graham Nash were moving in a more experimental direction that resulted in two albums and a Graham leaving the band.
They issued at the same time as Sgt Pepper, their own pop psychedelia album, Evolution with trippy original sleeve but this album hard to find in original stereo form was re-issued in 1972  as "The Hollies" which was kinda silly "Stop Right There!" would of worked better  with a new sleeve and liner notes.

Interestingly, it used the very same stampers to make it as the first issue of Evolution and so it was for a mere £2.99 and a clean I replaced a so-so mono re-issue with something that sounds better.

 By years end the "Oh wow" factor was raised considerably after the "King Midas in Reverse" 45 showing on this album that includes the U.S. single Dear Eloise but as much as some of this love this album it bombed saleswise at the time making it hard to find in its original mono and stereo forms.
Thankfully Parlophone released in September 2016 a twin mono and stereo remastered lp that sounds better than the EMI cd or critically the 2011 Spanish Guersson mono lp re-issue that used it as a source.
This apart from not having Dear Eloise with a chopped off intro sounds noticeably clearer with fine high frequency detail although it is not clear if used a digital source or not.
It is in any event much better sounding.

Supertramp

In a week that's been rather warm, drinking a lot and trying to keep cool, in the cooler late afternoons I have been playing some classical music to help relax by.
Last week we talked about the demise of one specialty compact disc and lp label, Audio Fidelity  and as if by co-incidence a disc by one its competitors is here, delayed a little which isn't uncommon.
Perhaps unfairly seen as typifying a nineteen-seventies style over substance trend, Supertramp tended to do albums around concepts, house individuals of some professional musical merit as performers and attract producers who liked to make recordings that had an 'oh wow!' technical feel to them.

Probably the best known studio album is Crime Of The Century which as a lot of hifi worthy production points thanks to producer Ken Scott but another was nineteen seventy-nines Breakfast In America with it's clutch of singles such as 'The Logical Song', 'Goodbye Stranger' and the title track a kind of statement about complacency and corporate values in the States.

 One problem with the albums production is the recording equipment was not that good at capturing quick bursts of high frequencies and it tends to sound over bright on good quality equipment which has lead to a number of attempts to fix that and put the emphasize on  the vocals.
This issue by Illinois based  Mobile Fidelity on Super Audio cd that is also playable on regular cd has managed strike a good balence between keeping in detail and bring out the vocals. A job well tacked by mastering engineer Rob LoVerde who has really pulled it off.
As with all their issues on 5cm disc, this comes in a mini lp form with a gatefold featuring the full album art and inner for the disc which looks and feels great in the hand so I'm mightily pleased with this disc that joins my collection.
It also comes with a full colour insert in one of the two pockets which is a nice touch.
When it comes to compilations while not perfect, 1986's The Autobiography of Supertramp easily found used is the best sounding with a very wide dynamic range taking their recordings to 1985's Brother Where Are You Bound and the Cannonball single.

Early 70's favourites

There's a post planned for next Friday which will be published even though by the time you see it I'll be on a train making my way back here.
Recently I had a couple of new discs arrive here - so new they've only been out for a week from announcement - and train comes into it for one act's title.
The Hues Corporation come into it as they were on Soul Train, the black music tv show a lot during the mid 70's during the soul and 'disco' explosion of the summer of 1974 when what was played and danced to in underground clubs broke out to clubs and as I remember vividly even the children's dances in seaside resorts.

As it was the fantastic 70's, that wasn't all, these recording were issued in Quadraphonic 'surround' sound on SQ record and Q8 tape for tape players like Dad's in car one and this disc comprises of their second album Rockin' Soul that contained their smash hit Rock The Boat the title track of which was released in  November 74 as a 45 and Love Corporation, the 1975 follow up that apart from having the title track issued on 45, also contained tracks such as Follow The Spirit that reminds one of the O'Jay's.
The first album contained Freedom For The Stallion written by Allen Toussiant issued in 1973 which I associate more with Edward Bear who covered it in Canada,to  which I have ordered the regular cd in mini lp form. That album had the original version of Rock The Boat that was reworked for the 45 and featured on their second album.
Some artists start out as session musicians, some move to it from being in groups and in Rick Derringer's case he was a McCoy who had a big hit with Hang On Sloopy and a part of the group the Strangeloves who performed I Want Candy but by the early 70's was doing session work for Edgar Winter Group, Todd Rundgren and Steely Dan amongst others.
This lead on the back of that to be given a chance to do solo recording for Columbia.

All American boy was his first successful rock offering from 1973 that had Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo  written by him originally for Johnny Winter and included on their album and it's 1975 follow up Spring Fever whose lead off single was a reworking of Hang On Sloopy is included as like the other these are 2 on 1 re-issues.
Rick managed to get some great session folk playing on these albums  a number associated with to become Eagle Joe Walsh formally of James Gang, who in style this was a slightly more poppier version of which sold well and which I had the 8 track of as a kid.
The chance to get this on Super Audio cd as fan of early 70's rock was too much to miss especially as it too has the stereo and original Quadraphonic mixes we loved back then on the  sacd layer.
For £11.99 each with two albums in stereo and Quad on them they're a bargain.

The Dark Side Of The Moon

For some of us the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon was one of those pivotal albums that as we went beyond more simplistic pop tunes usually in the form of 45's (aka "Singles") we explored usually with some support by older siblings to more deeper lyrical concerns and musicianship not that I didn't love (and still love) my Mud and Bay City Rollers 45's.

Sooner or later you move from hearing it a few times back then from tape to buying yourself the whole package and this album was such a thing being in a gatefold sleeve with lyrics, two posters and stickers.
The album explores the nature of the human condition specifically loneliness and mental illness using what were start of the art tape and electronic instrument techniques of the early 1970's.
My copy was a Canadian Capitol pressed edition with different posters I learnt several years back that Brits had in their own which to limit wear I taped to cassette for portable use and open reel tape for home use. You're welcome to try lugging such a machine and changing 7" tape reels on the move!

In the ever so fantastic plastic 1970's it wasn't enough to be thinking about sound from two speakers but four so a special four channel "Quadraphonic" mix was made and by some quirky math based science you could get four channels into the two channels of a stereo lp and (paws crossed) get four channels back out to impress the neighbours by surrounding them in  sound! 
They called it SQ standing for Stereo/Quadraphonic.
That lp jacket is of the UK Quad edition Q4 SHVL 804.

Quad had to everywhere like in our car so we had a Q8 eight track four channel tape player that was pretty swell and special four channel tapes were issued that offer better separation between the four channels than the fancy four into two and back as four electronics could manage from lp record and radio.
This is the UK tape, Q8 SHVL 804 that used the actual four channel mix direct as Capitol in making theirs took that funny 4 to 2 processed version for the SQ lp and decoded it before putting that on their tape which was silly as the actual four channel master existed and technically poorer but hey it's Capitol Record USA and they do stupid stuff at times.

Roll on March 31, 2003 and it's the thirtieth birthday of Dark Side of the Moon in an era that has seen the establishment of the compact disc as the pre-eminent sound carrier and the start of attempts to improvement on the sound it's had since the early 1980's.
It was decided to issue it in the Super Audio CD format that I mentioned on "the other blog tm" in the form of one disc with a regular stereo cd layer and a Super Audio cd (sacd) layer for both stereo and an improved form of surround sound called 5.1 often used for movies with a special remix being done for that version.

At the time only a few people had sacd players and because of this few heard that layer of the disc so when so-called audiophiles started debating all the 5 cm disc versions of this album all they heard the slightly compressed when it comes to the loudest and softest sound regular layer which has become a common trend since the mid 1990's and dismissed it.
I bought this sacd at the time and was very much encouraged to ditch it for a much older version by a certain forum but that ignored one thing. The regular cd layer and the super audio cd stereo versions were done separately and actually the stereo sacd layer sounds better than any of the cd only issues when played back on a machine like mine.
That ironically is why a decade on I ended up rebuying this disc and believe me its fantastic with clearer instrument sounds and effects like the heartbeat and chimes in "Time".
One moral of this story is don't let others tell you what to like and buy as they may be wrong.