More of the Music of Al Kooper
More of the Music of Stephen Stills
- With solid Double Plus (A++) grades or close to them from top to bottom, this 360 Label pressing will be very hard to beat
- Engineered by Roy Halee, the man behind one of the best sounding rock records of all time (the self-titled Blood, Sweat and Tears album), the oh-so-analog sonics here are especially dynamic and spacious (particularly on side one)
- Our most recent shootout was a tough one: we had six clean 360 pressings, but only two copies earned White Hot grades and one of them was too noisy to sell
- Even worse, none of our Supers earned even two pluses on both sides, so those of you looking for anything better than what we’re offering here are going to be as disappointed as we are
- When we talk about some records being hard to find with top quality sound and audiophile playing surfaces, this is the kind of record we have in mind!
- For fans of BS&T’s first album (and everybody else), Super Session is a Must Own
- “Season of the Witch” is quite good here on this original Stereo 360 pressing
- 4 1/2 stars: “This is one of those albums that seems to get better with age… This is a super session indeed.”
- If you’re a fan of any or all of these guys, this vintage pressing of their 1968 classic belongs in your collection
Here’s a copy that gets the midrange right. Nice and open with lots of space around all of the instruments, tight punchy bass, and an extended top end. The energy level is right up there with the best we played.
“Man’s Temptation,” track 3 on side one, has got some seriously bright EQ happening (reminiscent of the first BS&T album), so if that song even sounds tolerable in the midrange you are doing better than expected.
What The Best Sides Of Super Session 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 1968
- 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.
Watch Out For
Bright, gritty, spitty, edgy, harsh, upper-midrangy vocals. The Red Labels tend to have more problems of this kind, but plenty of original 360 pressings are gritty and bright too. Let’s face it, if the vocals are wrong this album pretty much falls apart.
Most copies are far too bright and phony sounding to turn up loud; the distortion and grit are just too much at higher volumes. On the better copies, with more correct tonality and an overall freedom from distortion, you can turn the volume up and let Super Session rock.
What We’re Listening For On Super Session
- 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 — Roy Halee in this case — 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.
Mobile Fidelity
We used to like the Mobile Fidelity pressing of this record, but without one around it’s hard to say what the comparison would be like today. I can tell you this much: there is deep bass on this recording. That means that the Mobile Fidelity is not going to be able to reproduce the bass the way the real pressings can because MoFi bass is almost always wooly and never goes deep.
There are no doubt other reissues of this album available now. The cheap Columbia 180 gram version is terrible; the other ones we haven’t played. That said, we wouldn’t expect them to sound very good.
A Must Own Rock Record
This Demo Disc Quality recording should be part of any serious rock collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.
Side One
Albert’s Shuffle
Stop
Man’s Temptation
His Holy Modal Majesty
Really
Side Two
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train…
Season of the Witch
You Don’t Love Me
Harvey’s Tune
AMG 4 1/2 Star Rave Review
As the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) had done a year earlier, Super Session (1968) initially ushered in several new phases in rock & roll’s concurrent transformation. In the space of mere months, the soundscape of rock shifted radically from two- and three-minute danceable pop songs to comparatively longer works with more attention to technical and musical subtleties. Enter the unlikely all-star triumvirate of Al Kooper (piano/organ/ondioline/vocals/guitars), Mike Bloomfield (guitar), and Stephen Stills (guitar) — all of whom were concurrently “on hiatus” from their most recent engagements… This is one of those albums that seems to get better with age… This is a super session indeed.