More of the Music of The Eagles
More Records that Are Good for Testing Grit and Grain
This is one of the pressings we’ve discovered with Reversed Polarity on some songs.
The domestic copies of On The Border have many tracks in reversed absolute phase, including and especially Midnight Flyer, a lifelong favorite of mine. The front and center banjo will positively tear your head off; it’s bright, sour, shrill, aggressive and full of distortion. Don’t look at me — that’s what reverse polarity sounds like!
I’ve known for some time that domestic pressings of On The Border have their phase reversed — just hadn’t gotten around to discussing the issue because I wasn’t ready to list the record and describe the phenomenon.
A while back [January 2005, time flies] I happened to play a copy of One Of These Nights and was appalled by the dismal quality of the sound. Last night I put two and two together. I pulled out both Eagles records and listened to them with the phase reversed. Voila! (On The Border is a favorite record of mine, dismissed by everyone else, but loved by yours truly.)
[I don’t think One of These Nights has its polarity reversed anymore, although some copies may.]
I’m of the opinion that only a very small percentage of records have their absolute phase reversed. Once you’ve learned to recognize the kind of distortion reversed polarity causes, you will hear recordings that may make you suspicious, and the only way to know for sure is to switch the positive and negative, wherever you choose to do so.
With the help of our EAR 324 Phono Stage the phase is reversible with the mere touch of a button, a wonderful convenience that we have grown to love, along with the amazingly transparent sound of course. (Hard to imagine living without either at this point.)
The Last Of The Glyn Johns Eagles Records
For their debut the Eagles recorded what we consider to be one of the Five Best Sounding Rock Records in the history of the art form. Of course the Eagles didn’t record anything, Glyn Johns did, and he deserves all the credit for turning that first album into a Demo Disc of the highest order. Halfway through this album, their third, they fired him. (The British ran Winston Churchill out of office after the war, so go figure.) Johns is credited with only two tracks on the album, and of course those two are the real Demo Disc tracks here.
But as I way playing various copies of these original British SYL pressings (the SYL of Desperado is the one on the TAS List), I could easily recognize the fully-extended, harmonically-rich, super-low distortion, Tubey Magical, Unbelievably Sweet Glyn Johns Sound everywhere in the soundfield I looked. Every track has some of it.
Maybe not the full measure you hear on You Never Cry Like a Lover, the standout track from side one, but enough to make you realize that even half of a Glyn Johns recording is head and shoulders better than what was to follow. One of These Nights, recorded by Bill Szymczyk, his replacement, is a step down in quality — if that step is off the edge of cliff. Say what you want about Hotel California — an FM radio staple that wore out its welcome decades ago, but not a bad recording by any means — it can’t begin to compete sonically with the likes of the first three Eagles albums that Johns did.
(And now that you’re familiar with the two main guys who recorded this band, check the dead wax of your Eagles Greatest Hits pressings for a laugh)
This record sounds best to us this way: