More of the Music of Elton John
- This vintage copy of Elton’s 1973 release (the first to hit the site in over three and a half years) boasts INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish
- Forget the dubby, closed-in and transistory domestic pressings – here is the relaxed, rich, spacious, musical, lifelike sound that only the best imports can show you
- Thanks to Ken Scott‘s brilliant engineering and Gus Dudgeon‘s production savvy, every song here sounds better than you imagined, because finally you are hearing it right
- 4 stars: “His most direct, pop-oriented album… a very enjoyable piece of well-crafted pop/rock.”
The amazing engineer Ken Scott (Ziggy Stardust, Magical Mystery Tour, Honky Chateau, Crime of the Century, Truth, Birds of Fire) is the man responsible for the stunning sound here.
The kind of Tubey Magical richness, smoothness and fullness he achieved at Trident in the early ’70s, as well as here at a certain French country estate, have never been equaled elsewhere in our opinion.
This vintage DJM pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.
If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.
What The Best Sides Of Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player 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 1973
- 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.
The Piano
Pay special attention to the sound of the piano. On the most transparent and tonally correct copies it is clear and full-bodied. The piano in a dense recording such as this often makes for a good test. It’s in there, sure, but how easily can you see it and how much like a real piano does it sound?
When the piano is right more often than not, most every other instrument will be right as well.
If you have full-range speakers, some of the qualities you may recognize in the sound of the piano are weight and warmth. The piano is not hard, brittle or tinkly. Instead the best copies show you a wonderfully full-bodied, warm, rich, smooth piano, one which sounds remarkably like the ones we’ve all heard countless times in piano bars and restaurants.
In other words like a real piano, not a recorded one. Bad mastering can ruin the sound, and often does, along with worn out stampers and bad vinyl and five gram needles that scrape off the high frequencies. But some copies survive all such hazards. They manage to reproduce the full spectrum of the piano’s wide range on vintage vinyl, showing us the kind of sound we simply cannot find any other way.
What We’re Listening For On Don’t Shoot Me, I’m Only The Piano Player
- 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.
Elton John Shootouts
Elton John is one of the handful of artists to produce an immensely enjoyable and meaningful body of work throughout the 70s, music that holds up to this day. The music on his albums, so multi-faceted and multi-layered, will endlessly reward the listener who makes the effort and takes the time to dive deep into the sound of his classic releases.
Repeated plays are the order of the day. The more critically you listen, the more you are sure to discover within the exceedingly dense mixes favored by Elton and his bandmates. And the better your stereo gets the more you can appreciate the care and effort that went into the production of the recordings.
Elton John albums always make for tough shootouts. His producers’ (Gus Dudgeon being the best of them) and engineers’ (Ken Scott and Robin Geoffrey Cable, likewise the best) approach to recording — everything-but-the-kitchen-sink as a rule — make it difficult to translate their complex sounds to disc, vinyl or otherwise.
Everything has to be tuned up and on the money before we can even hope to get the record sounding right. Careful VTA adjustment could not be more critical in this respect.
If we’re not hearing the sound we want, we keep messing with the adjustments until we do. There is no getting around sweating the details when sitting down to test a complex recording such as this. If you can’t stand the tweaking tedium, get out of the kitchen (or listening room as the case may be). Obsessing over every aspect of record reproduction is what we do for a living. Elton’s recordings require us to be at the top of our game, both in terms of reproducing his albums as well as evaluating the merits of individual pressings.
When you love it, it’s not work, it’s fun. Tedious, occasionally exasperating fun, but still fun nonetheless.
Side One
Daniel
Teacher I Need You
Elderberry Wine
Blues for My Baby and Me
Midnight Creeper
Side Two
Have Mercy on the Criminal
I’m Gonna Be a Teenage Idol
Texas Love Song
Crocodile Rock
High Flying Bird
AMG 4 Star Review
Elton John became a true superstar with 1972’s Honky Chateau. He followed that album with Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player, his most direct, pop-oriented album to date… the hits are remarkable — “Daniel” is a moving ballad and “Crocodile Rock” is a sly take on ’50s rock & roll… it is a very enjoyable piece of well-crafted pop/rock.
On the best pressings, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player is nothing less than a Demo Disc for Tubey Magic.
If you’re looking for Hot Stamper pressings of Tubey Magical rock and pop recordings, we usually have a good supply. They are not cheap, but truly great sounding records rarely are.
We’ve also created a Top Ten for the most Tubey Magical rock and pop albums we’ve ever played. What follows is the complete list, in alphabetical order, limited to one album per artist or group.
- The Beatles / Sgt. Pepper (1967),
- David Bowie / Ziggy Stardust (1972),
- Dire Straits / Self-Titled (1977, and clearly the outlier in this group),
- The Doors / Self-Titled (1967),
- The Eagles / Self-Titled (1972),
- Elton John / Tumbleweed Connection (1970)
- Pink Floyd / The Dark Side of the Moon (1973),
- Cat Stevens / Tea for the Tillerman (1970),
- Ten Years After / A Space in Time (1970)
- The Who / Tommy (1969),