Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

There are five or six James Taylor records that I would happily nominate as Desert Island Discs.

His albums set a standard that few other singer/songwriters’ albums can meet. Joni Mitchell comes to mind, and, like our friend James here, she explored many different styles of music throughout her career, the mark of a true artist.

After her, though, I would be hard pressed to name anyone with a body of work as extensive as Mr. Taylor’s.

And just to be clear, this would include all pop and rock artists from the 60s right through to the present. He is one of the greats in my book, and many of his albums are Must Owns, or at least they should be.

And this is especially true for us audiophiles. The sound quality of the better pressings of most of his albums is consistently superior to the work of others from that time. Peter Asher deserves most of the credit for that.

Don’t try to start with the first album, which we can’t find for you because only the British pressings sound good and they are just too hard to find in clean condition [even though we did manage to do the shootout in 2022].

Instead go right to Sweet Baby James and JT.

The next group to pursue would contain Mud Slide Slim, Gorilla and In the Pocket.

Follow that up with One Man Dog and Dad Loves His Work (so underrated!).

Back to JT. As audiophiles we all know that sound and music are inseparable. After dropping the needle on a dozen or so copies, all originals by the way, you know when the music is working its magic and when it isn’t

As is the case with any pop album, there are always some songs that sound better than others. But when you find yourself marvelling at how well-written and well-produced a song is, you know that the sound is doing what it needs to do. It’s communicating the musical value of the material.

The most important of all these musical values is energy, and boy do the best copies have plenty of it.

Side One

Your Smiling Face

Our favorite test track for side one. The best copies have punchy bass and drums that are hard to beat.

There We Are
Honey Don’t Leave L.A.

One of the toughest tests for side one is the sax solo in this song. You want the sax to be breathy and full with just the right amount of bite. If it doesn’t have enough bite, the sound is going to be overly smooth elsewhere.

Another Grey Morning

You’ll almost always be battling at least a bit of surface noise on this quiet track. On the best copies the sound will be Tubey Magical, with plenty of warmth, richness, and sweetness.

Bartender’s Blues

A personal favorite.

Secret O’ Life

Side Two

Handy Man

The strings on Handy Man are a key test for us in our shootouts. Most of the time they are smeary and hard, lacking the rosiny texture of the real thing. When you chance upon a copy with good string tone it’s pretty obvious, and sure enough most everything else — vocals, guitars, drums — will tend to sound better as well.

On the better Hot Stamper copies, which typically means those with the most transparency, Leah Kunkel’s background vocals will be clear and breathy-sweet, allowing you to follow each of her multi-tracked vocal lines.

I Was Only Telling a Lie

Another personal favorite.

Looking for Love on Broadway
Terra Nova
Traffic Jam

Another personal JT Favorite [of Tom’s!] On the hottest copies it has absolutely Demo Disc quality sound.

If I Keep My Heart Out of Sight

Val Garay Is The Man

Val Garay is the man behind so many of our favorite recordings: James Taylor’s JT (a Top 100 title), Simple Dreams (also a Top 100 title), Andrew Gold, Prisoner In Disguise, etc. They all share his trademark super-punchy, jump-out-the-speakers, rich and smooth ANALOG sound.

With big drums in a big room — can’t forget those. (To be clear, only the best copies share it. Most copies only hint at it.)

I don’t think Mr Garay gets anything like his due with audiophiles and the reviewers who write for them. This is a shame; the guy makes Demo Disc Quality Pop Records about as good as those kinds of records can be made.

If you have a Big System that really rocks you owe it to yourself to get to know his work. This is truly a KNOCKOUT disc if you have the equipment for it.

We do, and it’s records like this that make the effort and expense of building a full-range dynamic system worthwhile.

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Further Reading

• We didn’t know how good we had it in the 70s
• For our first Sweet Baby James shootout we had to work through 67 copies
• JT is one of the titles we relied on to test and improve the quality of our playback

The picture in the bottom right hand corner is fairly contrasty. That’s a dead giveaway that it contains a reissue, not an early TML pressing. Don’t bother to look at the record. None of the reissues that have that cover have ever sounded even passable to us, and we learned that the hard way as you can tell from the picture above. They are a complete waste of money.