Buddy Holly in Stereo: 30 Classics cd review

 Over the years, the decades even on this blog we have looked at "Golden Oldies", the stuff the ill in bed with bucket me would with just the radio on low for company would hear new to me music and how that shaped some of my musical likes.

Sometimes these have taken the form of various artist compilations that may of been by year or record label or taken the route of a single performer.

An interesting subset of such releases is those that offer previously unissued recordings or mixes as after all once you've got a bunch of recordings by artists or a specific era you are likely set to go for your life.

Many recordings from the Rock and Roll era to the late nineteen sixties came out in mono, aimed for teens with shoe box record players or AM Radio and over the years people have tried to find the session tapes to mix them into stereo, the current standard, unused stereo mixes or make via many techniques such mono recordings into stereo.

In the past the attempt by crudely adding echo, splitting the high and low notes and so on made things worse - those of us who bought records in the seventies and early eighties recoiled in horror to how many of those attempts sounded.

That reaction lead the "Back to Mono" movement that has influenced many modern re-issues where anything in  mono is left that way and for original mono hit singles to be used in compilations over stereo remixes made for albums.

In more recent years attempts using computerized technology and advanced very narrow filtering of sounds has lead to some new attempts at the holy grail that is turning mono into recognizable stereo.

Buddy Holly is an artist that via those oldies radio shows and fifties nostalgia I've always loved, teens of my generation were amongst the biggest buyers of 1978's "Buddy Holly Lives: Twenty Golden Greats" recognizing how he influenced many of our heroes.

In the mid nineteen eighties MCA Records in the US, the arm of which did b******** all to promote him and his legacy leaving to MCA in Great Britain where he's more respected put out a couple of compilations that used the real master tapes, mixed from the sessions and mastered by one Steve Hoffman.

Cd's such as 1985's From the first time from the original masters" remain the gold standard of Holly releases because someone cared to find the proper unadulterated tapes.

Recently Hit Parade Records in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, issued this thirty track cd that uses "Digitally Extracted Stereo" utilizing three programs with much human intervention to ensure every track is in stereo.

Previous albums only had his last songs such as "It Doesn't Matter Any More" and "Raining In My Heart" and the unreleased at the time songs overdubbed  by The Fireballs" such as "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" which was a big hit in the UK in true stereo coming out as stereo became a thing on record.

The vinyl edition of Buddy Holly Lives had the others in fake stereo while the cd version followed the mono stays in mono convention of today.

When I got this cd I wasn't sure how this was going to work out having heard some good examples of this modern technique - much of the Beach Boys Wild Honey album of 1967- and the bad "Do You Wanna Dance?" from same groups Today album in the "stereo portion" of the cd.

The extent to which each sound is clear in that original mono mix does seem to affect how well these techniques can work and in Buddy Holly's case Norman Petty's recordings at Clovis, New Mexico, were amongst the finest of that era.

I'd even say they are better than a good number that came out decades later actually.

This does mean that actually the "stereo" is surprisingly good, stable across the image and adds that missing dimension although had a "proper" stereo mix been attempted at the time it would of course be preferable for capturing everything by design.

Hearing tracks like Rave On and Not Fade Away which was covered on 45 by the Rolling Stones no less in what is a good example of the illusion that much popular recordings in stereo are not being recorded with each instrument as a stereo pair in space.

The insert notes while not revelationary, are comprehensive outlining Buddy's life and career which is what he deserves.

I would not toss aside those cd's Steve Hoffman remastered mainly in mono back in the mid nineteen eighties but would put this along side it as an alternate form of hearing these songs as the actual mastering is better than some of Universal/MCA's current cheaper compilations and this having 30 tracks on it is great value.