More Women Who Rock
- With two seriously good Double Plus (A++) sides, this was one of the better copies we played in our recent shootout
- Most copies we played were too compressed or veiled to involve you in the music, but this one has the kind of rich, big, clear sound this Bay Area band needs to work its bluesy magic
- Turn this one up good and loud (which you can do when the sound is right) and you’ll have a living, breathing Janis Joplin standing right between your speakers
- A tough record to find with audiophile quality sound and clean vinyl, two reasons you rarely see it on the site
This album has got that trippy ’60s San Francisco sound, no doubt about it. Those of you who are familiar with Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow or the early Grateful Dead albums know what I’m talking about. Like you might expect from this mixture of blues and psychedelic rock, the sound can be a bit raw. That’s surely the way the band wanted you to hear it, and this copy gives you, more than anything else, the right sound for this music.
This vintage Columbia pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What the best sides of the band’s self-titled debut have to offer is not hard to hear:
- The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
- The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1967
- Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
- Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
- Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space
No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.
You Can Find One Yourself
(if you’ve got time and money to spare…)
Let me tell you, you’re going to have to clean and play a whole bunch of copies if you want to find one that sounds this good and plays this quietly. That’s gonna set you back quite a bit of dough because clean 360 pressings are scarce and only getting scarcer.
So you COULD find one on your own, or you could save yourself the trouble and take home (what we consider to be) this wonderful Super Hot Stamper copy. Heck, it’s even hard for us to cover our costs on a shootout like this, but its worth the trouble, because we know the folks who take one of our Hot Stamper pressings home are going to get a real kick out of hearing this music sound right, probably for the first time in their lives.
What We’re Listening For on Big Brother and The Holding Company
- Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
- Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
- The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
- Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
- Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
- Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
- Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.
Side One
Bye, Bye Baby
Easy Rider
Intruder
Light Is Faster Than Sound
Call On Me
Coo Coo
Side Two
Women Is Losers
Blindman
Down On Me
Caterpillar
All Is Loneliness
The Last Time