Entertainment For Lively Minds
Pimp My Iconic Classic Album Classic
In a dangerously geeky comment to yet another pervy Mahavishnu piece, I mentioned to Colin H. (Winner: Mrs Joyful Prize For Rafia Work) that I'd tampered with their iconic classic album Birds Of Fire in Audacity, freeing it of an unnecessary drum solo (tautology alert) and improving it vastly in the process. Somewhere else I confessed to adding Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane to Sgt. Pepper's, doing what the fabs themselves had been unable to do (what with album length restrictions, singles-only policy etc.) and actually improving that album no end, too. I also added Only A Northern Song, which was (I think) the first track recorded and finished during the Pepper sessions, and left off because it was a) too long and b) by George, by George. I could have just created a new playlist in iTunes, but I decided to create The Compleat Sgt Pepper as a single (unbanded) mp3 track and deck it out with a new cover so it would (in my sad imagination at least) have the "integrity" of an album. Placing the extra tracks took some uffish thought. I eventually settled on slotting Penny Lane in after Lucy, Strawberry Fields after Mr. Kite, and Northern Song after Rita. The fact that the expanded album sounds totally natural shouldn't come as a surprise; these are all the tracks recorded during the sessions, so they're cohesive. The running order I eventually discovered is smooth as silk, and it's become difficult for me to listen to the official version - it sounds like something's missing. Plus - there's a "new" track each from John, Paul, and George evenly spaced across the album ... very satisfying.
I've pimped other albums this way - I stripped that dog-barking blues thing out of Meddle (come on! it's a freaking b-side at best) and replaced it with Embryo, which is a much better lead-in to Echoes, both musically and lyrically. Result: iconic classic made even iconnier. Encouraged by my success, I bolted Biding My Time into Atom Heart Mother, where it sounds like it's found a home for the first time.
I also cut the title track from Born In The U.S.A., which always gave me a pressure headache (OKAY Bruce, we GET IT awready!), renamed the album Dancing In The Dark and gave it a new cover. Result: result.
Perhaps other readers have kicked other all-time masterpieces into shape? Perhaps not?
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This is a minority view
But I just don't like Five Years, the opening track of Bowie's Ziggy Stardust LP.
I replaced it with Bowie's version of All the Young Dudes and I reckon it's a definite improvement.
Yeah!
Five Years is horrible, All The Young Dudes is fabulous. Nice pimp!
Love Five Years
It blew a hole in my young mind with the weird images.
It Ain't Easy has to go though.
This ^
Is right.
Pimped to fit
I got to know the Stone Roses' first album around the time it came out through a cassette copy from a friend of a friend. What I didn't know was that the FOAF had excised 'Elizabeth my Dear' and 'I am the Resurrection' to fit it on the cassette. It was a couple of years before I discovered the 'extra' tracks, and 'Elizabeth...' still doesn't sound like it belongs there.
My own pimping experience is very limited and not very original as I've seen the same title on a thread here - Kid Amnesiac. I got rid of all the meat-and-potatoes guitar songs and kept all the glitchy, skittery stuff... actually no, it was the other way round.
"The Stones Roses" without "Resurrection" =
Mighty Lemon Drops.
De La Soul Is Dead
Removed the half-hour of tiresome "skits" from it in iTunes and I'm left with a corking 45-minute album.
I love being able to choose artwork. Always preferred the LP cover images of the Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum to the CD images (or indeed those supplied by iTunes), so there they are. Ditto Talking Heads' True Stories, English Settlement, Rain Dogs, Spirit of Eden, the first Clash album... and with albums with multiple sleeves like Catch a Fire and Sister Lovers/Third you can take your pick.
Used Audacity to pump up the volume on the Stereo MC's 33 45 78, which is a fine album but frightfully quiet, and to get rid of that ten minutes of fridge-noise from Wilco's A Ghost Is Born. And the many, many tiresome instances of "hidden tracks" that were on CDs in the 1990s.
Those of us of a certain age remember albums, as Keef mentioned "TSR" above, which were just tantalisingly too long to fit on the side of a C90, no matter how much you edited the gaps between tracks/sides... World Party's Goodbye Jumbo is another.
EDIT: One small pimp (ahem) anyone can do is to replace Revolution 9 with Hey Jude. The effect on the last side of the White Album" is unbelievable.
Is there...
...a particular technique for "pumping up the volume" using audacity ? I have two or three favourite albums that were just mastered (presumably) at low volumes for whatever reason that I'd love to get louder without messing up the quality.
Select the track, go effects > amplify, then you can choose
how far you want to go. There's a pre-set one that is often good enough. I don't have it to hand, so I may have misremembered.
The Clash
Many years ago a friend recorded London's Calling onto casette to play in his car. He took out the godawful Guns Of Brixton and replaced it with Armagideon Time. Result: happy motoring.
Now why didn't they think of that?
The original 9-track "Meat Is Murder"
With the then two-year-old "Barbarism Begins At Home": pretty good.
With the more recent "How Soon Is Now" instead: world-beating.
"Barbarism" should have been stuck on the 12" of "William" as a mop-up, and HSIN should have been saved for the lead single from MIM.
Or alternatively:
keep both BBAH and HSIN (both mighty fine), and drop the title track off the album? I didn;t bother ripping it, it's vastly inferior to the rest, and clunkingly cloying too, IMHO.
Two pimps
Neither of which are on "iconic albums", but the Kaiser Chiefs album from last year allowed you to download the album and make your own, when they actually released it on CD, they missed off a song called "Back In December", which I'd put first on the CD. More fool them, a great song.
The other one was I've re-EQed and mastered Scott Walker's "Til the Band Comes In", which as a CD released a few years ago sounds flat and really doesn't reflect the quality of the music, which I think is equally as good as his first Phillips 4 records. "Time Operator" in particular with additional EQ and compression really emphasises the soaring strings. A forgotten classic maybe, but a classic nonetheless.
The Limb of Kings...
... the 6 most recent non-album Radiohead tracks have been added to TKOL to turn, IMO, a slightly underwhelming record into a 5 star classic. The new running order was decided during a 6 hour debate in which I pretended to be all 5 Radiohead band members, is:-
The Butcher
Bloom
Morning Mr Magpie
These Are My Twisted Words
Little By Little
Feral
The Daily Mail
Lotus Flower
Codex
Supercollider
Give Up The Ghost
Separator
Staircase
Harry Patch (in memory)
Imagine
I Don't Want To Be A Soldier, not that I listen to it much anymore, but when it first came out, and I played it a lot, I just thought, what is this mess? Is he trying to be clever with some weird time signature? If it ever comes up on shuffle, I have to skip it.
The William Tell Overture
It's 12 minutes long FFS!
So I ditched all that slow shit at the beginning and got straight into the Lone Ranger Theme.
Brilliant!
Jeff Beck
already did that, didn't he?
Infidels
'Infidels' could have been the album of the 80s. Yes even better than 'Document' or 'The Queen is Dead'. Take off Union Sundown, Neighbourhood Bully and Man of Peace and include the tracks left off the album plus Angelina from the Shot of Love sessions and you have a masterpiece.
Jokerman
Someone's Got A Hold Of My Heart
Sweetheart Like You
Foot Of Pride
License To Kill
Blind Willie McTell
Tell Me
I And I
Lord Protect My Child
Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight
Angelina
Young Americans - Bowie
Across The Universe is awful. Fame is great but not really in keeping with the rest. They could be the B side and A side of a stand alone single.
Replace those tracks with Who Can I Be Now & It's Gonna Be Me (with strings) & you have Bowie's most personal album ever (including Low) and a true soul masterpiece (not a plastic one).
C90 Tapes
Back in the days when home taping was killing music, it was quite common to have to trim songs off of albums if they were longer than 45 minutes, so that they could fit on one side of a C90.
When I was a student, a friend of mine taped me his Dylan albums, and to fit Bringing it all Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited on one tape, he had to lop off Outlaw Blues from the former and Queen Jane Approximately from the latter. I played that tape to death, and even today when I play the CDs of those albums, it seems like these songs are bonus tracks.
Great bonus tracks!
.
Tanx - T.Rex
I like this game & am having another go!
T.Rex were my first love. I adored Electric Warrior, The Slider was not as good but elevated by the fabulous singles opening both sides (imagine it without them) but Tanx was baffling.
Short songs like Shock Rock & Country Honey can easily be lost. Mad Donna and Life Is Strange are rubbish and Born To Boogie belongs to a different album. Start each side with a cracking contemporaneous single, throw in a couple of quality B sides (Jitterbug Love & Free Angel) and you have a dazzling album with all the soul inflections and musical progression Marc Bolan was seeking. It would have sold squillions in America. It's a pity he wouldn't listen to my advice.
20th Century Boy
Tenement Lady
Rapids
Mister Mister
Broken-Hearted Blues
Electric Slim And The Factory Hen
Children Of The Revolution
Jitterbug Love
Free Angel
The Street And Babe Shadow
Highway Knees
Left Hand Luke And The Beggar Boys
All you need is the CD which contains all the singles & B sides
Sorry...
Sorry, but I think Sergeant Pepper is just perfect as it is.
In my opinion, the fabs / George Martin got it absolutely right
(maybe unintentionally) by releasing SFF & PL as a stand alone, double A sided single, ensuring its status as the greatest single ever released. (IMHO - OOAA)
(anyone under 35 - ask your Dad what a bouble A sided single was)
Likewise, Ziggy Stardust & London Calling both sound just fine & dandy as they are.
Kinda Kinks
Get rid of Look For Me Baby (which is good, but no way an album opener) and the two servicable covers, Naggin' Woman and Dancing in the Street. Instead have the album begin with the classic Everybody Gonna Be Happy and end with the great unreleased Kinks song I Go To Sleep - make sure it's as sparse as the demo version.
You could make an even better version including the stand-alone singles which were released between this album and Kinks Kontroversy: Set Me Free, See My Friends and A Well Respected Man.
Everybody Gonna Be Happy
Got My Feet on the Ground
Nothing in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' Bout That Girl
Wonder Where My Baby is Tonight
Tired of Waiting
Don't Ever Change
Come On Now
So Long
You Shouldn't Be Sad
Something Better Beginning
I Go To Sleep
Lost The Golden Calf
off Prefab Sprout's From Langley Park To Memphis down the back of the Sonic Sofa ages ago and never once wanted to retrieve it. Result - top album start to finish.
For those who don't like black bits in their banana
lose Black Angel Death Song off the Velvets first album. Does it wonders, I'm tellin yer.
The Wall +1
Pink Floyd - The Wall: add "When The Tigers Broke Free", probably as the first track
Sex Pistols - Never Mind The Bollocks: add "Satellite"
Stiff Little Fingers - Nobodys Hero: remove "Bloody Dub". Add "Straw Dogs" and/or "Back To Front"
Years ago I recorded Quadrophenia onto tape. As is often the case there was some spare space at the end of side one. For reasons unknown I placed Dr. Feelgood's "Lights Out" in this gap - now whenever "I've Had Enough" finishes, I'm expecting Lee and the boys to start.
(on side 2, the gap at the end is filled by "Party Til You Puke" by Saxon)
Great suggestion for The Wall
That really fits well: I never liked In The Flesh as an opening track, but it would sound really good kicking in just after When The Tigers Broke Free.
Do you know they DID add When The Tigers Broke Free... to The Final Cut remaster? I love the song, and it fits the mood of the album, but I think it killed the fantastic transition between One Of The Few and the one after it I can't remember the name of.
Brilliant decision
The album you describe sounds absolutely right to me.
I made a for-car-cd a while ago that cut out Within You Without You and added several tracks from Magical Mystery Tour -- Hello Goodbye is an all time favourite pop song -- as well as Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever. Suits me just fine.
Tom Waits
I love his latest album Bad As Me. It has plenty of hollering blues and plenty of aching balladry, but it's missing Tom's third ingredient: the weirdy bits.
So, you take The Black Rider: this is all just weirdy bits without any hollering blues or aching balladry (apart from Lucky Day: great song). And you just randomise all the tracks from Bad As Me and The Black Rider together. Result: a brilliant hotchpotch of hollering blues, aching balladry and weirdy bits that rivals Bone Machine or Orphans!
Please Please Me Ee Pee...
Please Please Me is an iconic debut album, yeah yeah yeah yawn...
It would be much better as an EP with just the opening and closing tracks of each side:
- I Saw Her Standing There
- Please Please Me
- Love Me Do
- Twist And Shout
I would add "Chains" in there somewhere just because I love the ensemble singing so much.
Dark Side Of The Moon
I've squeezed 'Echoes' in between 'Money' and 'Us & Them' to make a rather fetching CD full of music.
Likewise, my single CD edit of The Wall has 'If' from Atom Heart Mother as the last song. And it works rather well, IMHO.