More Paul Revere
More Sixties Pop Recordings
- Both sides here are full-bodied and Tubey Magical, the right sound for America’s answer in 1966 to those pesky Brits and all their chart-topping songs
- 4 stars: “The Spirit of ’67, Paul Revere and the Raiders’ third gold-selling, Top Ten album to be released in 1966, marked the triumph of the group’s in-house writing team of lead singer Mark Lindsay, Paul Revere, and producer Terry Melcher… Paul Revere and the Raiders were riding high.”
This vintage Columbia 360 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 amazing sides such as these have to offer is not hard to hear:
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- 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 1966
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- 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.
What We Listen For on The Spirit of ’67
- 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.
Vinyl Condition
Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)
Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful originals.
If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.
TRACK LISTING
Side One
Good Thing
All About Her
In My Community
Louise
Why? Why? Why?
Oh! To Be A Man
Side Two
Hungry
Undecided Man
Our Candidate
1001 Arabian Nights
The Great Airplane Strike
AMG 4 Star Review
The Spirit of ’67, Paul Revere and the Raiders’ third gold-selling, Top Ten album to be released in 1966, marked the triumph of the group’s in-house writing team of lead singer Mark Lindsay, Paul Revere, and producer Terry Melcher. “Hungry,” the Top Ten follow-up to “Kicks,” was written, like the earlier hit, by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, but Lindsay-Revere-Melcher then hit the Top 40 with “The Great Airplane Strike” and the Top Ten with “Good Thing.” (Actually, Revere was not a writer on “Good Thing,” as subsequent releases indicated.)
Those hits anchored this collection, which was filled out by showcases for bassist Phil Volk and drummer Mark Smith (guitarist Drake Levin had been replaced by Jim Valley), plus some secondary material by the group’s leaders. As usual, they were listening closely to their peers, and much of the material had the twangy guitar-rock sound common to 1966, though some of the experimental eclecticism that would lead to the elaborate productions of 1967’s Sgt. Pepper psychedelic era was also apparent in songs like “Oh! To Be a Man” and “Undecided Man” (the latter a near-copy of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”). This stylistic trend following did not bode well for the future, but for the moment, Paul Revere and the Raiders were riding high.