More of the Music of John Lennon
- Rock ‘N’ Roll is back on the site after a ten month hiatus, here with INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides of this early Apple pressing – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
- And if you think the better sounding pressings would be UK imports, you’ve got another thing coming – they’re usually made from dubs, and they have the dubby sound to prove it
- When we say usually, we don’t mean always, as this excellent UK pressing proves
- These sides are rich, full-bodied, present and spacious with plenty of extension on both ends
- Lennon’s voice sounds just right with lots of texture and startling immediacy – you’re going to have a hard time finding better sounding versions of these songs anywhere else
- 4 stars: “Rock ‘n’ Roll, in fact, stands as a peak in his post-Imagine catalog: an album that catches him with nothing to prove and no need to try… Today, Rock ‘n’ Roll sounds fresher than the rock & roll that inspired it in the first place. Imagine that.”
We just finished a shootout for this fun album, and no other copy we played sounded remotely as good as this one. It’s got exactly the kind of sound we’d want for these old Rock & Roll classics — super lively, clean and clear, tonally correct, and natural. Most copies are edgy and gritty, but this one is smooth, sweet and very enjoyable.
You’re going to have a hard time finding better sounding versions of these songs anywhere else — excepting, of course, Be-Bop-A-Lula, which can sound amazing on McCartney Unplugged.
Credit must obviously go to the man behind the console, Shelly Yakus, someone who we freely admit, now with a sense of embarrassment, has never been one of our favorite engineers. After hearing a White Hot Stamper pressing of Damn the Torpedoes and a killer copy of Crack the Sky’s Animal Notes, as well as amazing sounding pressings of Moondance (his first official lead engineering gig) and Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, we realize that we have seriously underestimated the man.
What The Best Sides Of Rock ‘n’ Roll 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 1975
- 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’re Listening For on Rock ‘N’ Roll
- 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
Be-Bop-A-Lula
Stand By Me
Rip It Up/Ready Teddy
You Can’t Catch Me
Ain’t That A Shame
Do You Want To Dance
Sweet Little Sixteen
Side Two
Slippin And Slidin
Peggy Sue
Bring It On Home To Me/Send Me Some Lovin’
Bony Moronie
Ya Ya
Just Because
AMG 4 Star Rave Review
Rock ‘n’ Roll, in fact, stands as a peak in his post-Imagine catalog: an album that catches him with nothing to prove and no need to try. Lennon could, after all, sing old rock & roll numbers with his mouth closed; he spent his entire career relaxing with off-the-cuff blasts through the music with which he grew up, and Rock ‘n’ Roll emerges the sound of him doing precisely that. Released in an age when both David Bowie and Bryan Ferry had already tracked back to musical times-gone-by (Pin-Ups and These Foolish Things, respectively), Rock ‘n’ Roll received short shrift from contemporary critics. As time passed, however, it has grown in stature, whereas those other albums have merely held their own. Today, Rock ‘n’ Roll sounds fresher than the rock & roll that inspired it in the first place. Imagine that.