More Electric Blues
- Born Under A Bad Sign returns to the site for the first time in years, here with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades on both sides of this original Stax pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
- These are just a few of the the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “big and tubey and 3D”…”jumping out of the speakers”…”very full vox”…”weighty and rich”…”great energy”…”so much room and detail”
- No other copy came close to this one, and we had a bunch, many of which earned grades of 1.5+ because, on this record, you really have to know what to look for in the dead wax
- Incredibly dynamic, rich and full, with lots of texture to the guitars, this copy brought the music to life right in our listening room
- Accept no substitutes – no reissue of the album can ever give you the energy, size and you-are-there presence that’s on this disc
- 5 stars: “It was immediately influential at the time and, over the years, it has only grown in stature as one of the very greatest electric blues albums of all time.”
A Must Own Record
We consider this album a Masterpiece. It’s a recording that belongs in any serious soul, blues, and R&B collection.
Others that belong in that category can be found here.
What The Best Sides Of Born Under A Bad Sign 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.
Learning the Record
For our shootout, we had at our disposal a variety of pressings that had the potential for Hot Stamper sound. We cleaned them carefully, then unplugged everything in the house we could, warmed up the system, Talisman’d it, found the right VTA for our Triplanar arm (by ear of course) and proceeded to spend the next hour or so playing copy after copy on side one, after which we repeated the process for side two.
If you have five or more copies of a record and play them over and over against each other, the process itself teaches you what’s right and what’s wrong with the sound of the album. Once your ears are completely tuned to what the best pressings do well that the other pressings do not do as well, using a few carefully chosen passages of music, it quickly becomes obvious how well a given copy can reproduce those passages. You’ll hear what’s better and worse — right and wrong would be another way of putting it — about the sound.
This approach is simplicity itself. First, you go deep into the sound. There you find a critically important passage in the music, one which most copies struggle — or fail — to reproduce as well as the best. Now, with the hard-won knowledge of precisely what to listen for, you are perfectly positioned to critique any and all pressings that come your way.
It may be a lot of work but it sure ain’t rocket science, and we’ve never pretended otherwise. Just the opposite: from day one we’ve explained step by step precisely how to go about finding the Hot Stampers in your own collection. Not the good sounding pressings you happen to own — those may or may not have Hot Stampers — but the records you actually cleaned, shot out, and declared victorious.
What We’re Listening For On Born Under A Bad Sign
- 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
- Born Under A Bad Sign
- Crosscut Saw
- Kansas City
- Oh, Pretty Woman
- Down Don’t Bother Me
- The Hunter
Side Two
- I Almost Lost My Mind
- Personal Manager
- Laundromat Blues
- As The Years Go Passing By
- The Very Thought Of You
AMG 5 Star Rave Review
It was immediately influential at the time and, over the years, it has only grown in stature as one of the very greatest electric blues albums of all time. Initially, these sessions were just released as singles, but they were soon compiled as King’s Stax debut, Born Under a Bad Sign.
Certainly, the concentration of singles gives the album a consistency — these were songs devised to get attention — but, years later, it’s astounding how strong this catalog of songs is: “Born Under a Bad Sign,” “Crosscut Saw,” “Oh Pretty Woman,” “The Hunter,” “Personal Manager,” and “Laundromat Blues” form the very foundation of Albert King’s musical identity and legacy. Few blues albums are this on a cut-by-cut level; the songs are exceptional and the performances are rich, from King’s dynamic playing to the Southern funk of the MGs.