Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Captain Beefheart Available Now
We did this shootout many years ago, so many years ago that I cannot find a record of it.
I remember we thought the German pressings were perhaps a bit boosted on both ends and not as natural sounding as the domestic pressings.
After a multitude of improvements in our cleaning and playback, we would agree with our previous understanding that the German pressings are often wrong, but now we also know how right the right ones can be.
It turns out tha some German pressings are not particularly good, another piece of the puzzle that fell into place during our most recent shootout, as painful as that turned out to be considering the money wasted on them.
Did we have the bad German stamper pressings last time around? Who knows?
The producer, Ted Templeman, (Doobie Brothers, James Taylor) brought his mainstream talents to bear on this music, and when the Captain’s free-form tendencies smashed into Templeman’s conservatism, the result was this musical supernova — out there, but not too far out there.
(Play Trout Mask Replica sometime if you miss that feeling from your old hippie days of being on acid. With that music, drugs are entirely superfluous.)
I don’t know how many audiophiles like Captain Beefheart, probably not too many, but if you’re ever going to try one of his albums, this is the place to start: his masterpiece.
I’ve been listening to this album for 30 years [now 50+], all of my adult life. I still have my original copy in the clear plastic sleeve even. [Not any more, now that I know it doesn’t sound good it’s going to Ebay to find a new home.]
It never grows old and it never grows tired. I have the CD in the car and return to it regularly.
I’ll be disappointed if few of you try this one, but probably not too surprised.
Credit also must go to Donn Landee for the full-bodied, rich, smooth, oh-so-analog sound of the best copies of Clear Spot. He’s recorded or assisted on many of our favorite albums here at Better Records.
Checking the Boxes
Clear Spot is an album we’ve been playing since it came out, and we think we know it well,
It checks off a number of key boxes for us here at Better Records:
Seventies Analog
Produced in 1972, the best copies of Clear Spot are rich, smooth and sweet in the best tradition of vintage ANALOG.
It would only be ten years or so until the warmth and richness of analog recordings would be out of style. Those later years were a difficult time for audiophiles such as me who liked the pop music of the day but not the pop sound of the day.
Heavy-handed processing as well as the overuse of synthesizers and drum effects, with the whole of the production sometimes slathered in digital reverb, have resulted in many of the albums recorded after 1980 being all but impossible to enjoy on a modern high-end system.
For some reason, the 70s, the decade before, seems to get little respect from audiophiles, when in fact a high percentage of the best recordings we know of were made in that ten year period. A rough count leads me to think that more than half of our Top 100 Rock Albums were recorded in the years spanning 1970-79, which is very unlikely to be a statistical accident.
The pool of well-recorded albums was simply wider and deeper. Great sounding records like this one were made by the hundreds. Those numbers fell off precipitously in the decades that followed. Fortunately for us Old School audiophiles — hard core analog holdouts — we have easy access to the best of the 70s recordings, still widely available in their original format: the vinyl LP.
Like many of our favorites from the 70s, this one is not well known in audiophile circles, but we hope to change that with our wonderful sounding Hot Stamper pressings.
Both the sound and the music are well worth your time, and if you find that you don’t agree with us about the music or the sound, feel free to return the record.
More on the subject of the pop and rock recordings of the Seventies here.
Further Reading