Folk Rock – Reviews and Commentaries

Workingman’s Dead is Dead as a Doornail on Rhino Records

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Grateful Dead Available Now

This review was written many years ago, shortly after the release of the album in the early-2000s.

An audiophile hall of shame pressing and a Heavy Vinyl disaster if there ever was one (and oh yes, there are plenty. Here are some of the more recent examples we’ve played).

The 2003 Rhino reissue on Heavy Vinyl of Workingman’s Dead is absolutely awful. It sounds like a bad cassette.

The CD of the album that I own is superb, which means that the tapes are not the problem, bad mastering and pressing are.

This pressing has what we call ”modern” sound, which is to say it’s clean and tonally correct for the most part, but it’s missing the Tubey Magic the originals and the good reissues both have plenty of.

Is it the worst version of the album ever made? The pressings on the last WB labels are pretty awful, but this awful? Who can say.

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino bills their releases as pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl”. However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins.

The CD versions of most of the LP titles they released early on are far better sounding than the lifeless, flat, pinched, so-called audiophile pressings they did starting around 2000. The mastering engineer for this garbage actually has the nerve to feature his name in the ads for the records. He should be run out of town, not promoted as a keeper of the faith and defender of the virtues of “vinyl.” If this is what vinyl sounds like I’d switch to CD myself.

And the amazing thing is, as bad as these records are, there are people who like them! I’ve read postings on the internet from people who say the sound on these records is just fine, thank you very much. I find this very, very sad. More proof, as if we needed it, that the audiophile record collecting world has lost its mind.

Their Grateful Dead titles sound worse than the cheapest Super Saver reissue copies I have ever heard. The Yes Album sounds like a cheap cassette as well, a ghost of the real thing.

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Down in L.A. Sits Fairly High Up on Our Difficulty of Reproduction Scale

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Brewer and Shipley Available Now

UPDATE 2025

The commentary you see below was originally written about 15 years ago. Minor changes have since been made. At the time of this posting there is a copy of Down in L.A. on the site, one of the first copies we have had to sell since 2019, and before that I think our last shootout was in 2008.

There are a great many wonderful albums we can no longer offer our customers, for reasons too complicated to go into here, but I am glad to say that Down in L.A. is not one of them.

We’ve mentioned how difficult some records are to reproduce: how the revolutions in audio of the last decade or two have profoundly changed the ability of the seriously dedicated audiophile to get records that never sounded good before to come to life musically in a way previously understood to be impossible.

This is one of those records. But you have to have done your homework if you want to play a record like this, as the commentary below explains.

60s Sound

The problem here is the sound. It’s got a bit of that tinny 60s pop production sound — too much upper midrange, not enough lower midrange and a slightly aggressive quality when things get loud. Still, it’s quite a bit better than recordings by, say, The Byrds or Jefferson Airplane from the era, and I have no trouble playing and enjoying their records.

I can also tell you that if you have a modest system this record is just going to sound like crap.

How do I know that?

It sounded like crap for years in my system, even when I thought I had a good one.

Vinyl playback has come a long way in the last twenty years and if you’ve participated in some of the revolutionary changes that we talk about endlessly on this blog, you should hear some pretty respectable sound. Otherwise, I would pass.

On the difficulty of reproduction scale, this record scores fairly high. You need lots of Tubey Magic and freedom from distortion, the kind of sound I rarely hear on any but the most heavily tweaked systems. The kind of systems that guys like me have been slaving over for forty years.

If you’re a Weekend Warrior when it comes to your stereo, this is not the record for you.

If however you would like to advance in audio in order to hear better sound and enjoy more recordings than you do now, we have plenty of advice on how you can go about doing that. Please consider taking it.

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Letter of the Week – “The instruments fill my room like they would in a live performance.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Crosby, Stills, Nash and (Sometimes) Young

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently: 

Hey Tom, 

I have really been enjoying the Neil Young “After The Gold Rush” and CSN&Y “So Far.” They are like the “Workingman’s Dead” LP. Just a thrill to hear. The instruments on “After The Gold Rush” fill my room like they would in a live performance. Addictive.

AJ

Dear AJ,

Addiction is the name of the game!

If you’re an audiophile who is not addicted to good sound and good music, you may not be one for long.

And if you have been in this game for a very long time like I have, you have no doubt met self-identified audiophiles with systems that haven’t been improved in twenty years, and appear to be rarely used.

I like to think those are the audiophiles who own lots of audiophile records, the ones that are designed to show off stereo equipment and typically hold little interest from a musical standpoint.

The TAS Super Disc List is full of these records. We have no use for most of them and we suspect our customers don’t either.

Audiophiles with vintage pressings of real music rarely abandon the hobby in my experience.

And if you have Hot Stamper pressings, why would you ever give up on hearing music that sounds as good as our records sound?

Thanks for your letter.

TP

This Is Why We Love Hippie Folk Rock from the 60s and 70s

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

This has long been one of our favorite Hippie Folk Rock albums here at Better Records.

If you like Crosby, Stills and Nash’s first album or Rubber Soul — and who doesn’t love those two albums? — you should much to like on Down in L.A.

Here is how we described our most recent shootout winner:

These are just a few of the things we had to say about this amazing copy in our notes: “fully extended from top to bottom”…”vox and guitar jumping out of the speakers”…”big and tubey and weighty”…”HTF [hard to fault]” (side one)…”serious bass and energy”…:”rich and 3D and lively.”

Both of these sides have the smooth sweet analog sound we were listening for – they’re rich and tubey, with clarity and freedom from smear that make it the best of both worlds.

The notes for the top copy from our most recent shootout can be seen below. It us six years to get this shootout going, but the best copies we played were so impressive that they made all the time and money it took to pull it off worth the effort.

Side one was HTF – Hard To Fault.

Brewer and Shipley’s first and only release for A&M has long been a Desert Island Disc in my world. I consider it one of the top debuts of all time, although it’s doubtful many will agree with me about that since I have yet to meet anyone who has ever even heard of this album, let alone felt as passionate as I do about it.

To me this is a classic of Folk Rock, along the lines of The Grateful Dead circa American Beauty, surely a touchstone for the genre.

It’s overflowing with carefully-crafted (B and S apparently were obsessive perfectionists in the studio) inspired material and beautifully harmonized voices backed by (mostly) acoustic guitars.

The Beatles pulled it off masterfully on Help and Rubber Soul.

All three are built on the same folk pop sensibilities. Tarkio, album number three, is clearly the duo’s Masterpiece, but this record comes next in my book, followed by Weeds, their second album and first for Kama Sutra. After Tarkio it’s all downhill.

“Of all the many folkys to make a transition to electric folk-rock in the 1960s, Brewer & Shipley retained more of the wholesome, strident qualities of early-60s folk revival harmonizing than almost anyone.”

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Half-Speed Masters – Stopgaps and Benchmarks

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Joan Baez Available Now

Mobile Fidelity released a version of Diamonds and Rust on Anadisq in 1995, and if you want to hear a pressing that’s not murky, compressed and opaque, you would be wise to avoid their remastered pressing.

To be fair, MoFi has made some reasonably good sounding records too. For those of you whose budget is on the limited side, if you find an affordable copy of any of these MoFis, you are probably not completely wasting your money.

Stopgaps and Benchmarks

Our advice for the longest time has been that, while you are actively improving your stereo, room and setup, the best way to use your remastered audiophile pressings is as stopgaps and benchmarks.

As you make more and more progress, eventually you will find the vintage pressings that can show you what your audiophile pressings don’t do well, or at the very least, not as well as they should.

The unfortunate reality — considering how much money you had invested in them — is that they were falling short in many ways for all the years you had been playing them, but until you improved your playback, those problems were hidden from you.

Charting Your Success

As your stereo improves, you can actually chart your success by how many of these kinds of records you are able to eliminate from your collection. Once you can count the number of modern reissues you still own on one or two hands, there is a good chance you have reached a much higher level of playback.

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The Donovan You Don’t Know – In Concert

Hot Stamper Pressings of Our Favorite Hippie Folk Rock Albums

We discovered a while back just what an excellent recording this is and now we know how magical the best copies can be. Only the very best copies delivered the kind of natural, immediate sound we were looking for.

There are a lot of Donovan records out there, but not a lot of them that sound like this! On top of that you get a great set of songs, including Mellow Yellow, Isle Of Islay, Celeste, and First There Is A Mountain (the song that became the main riff of the Allman Brothers’ famous Mountain Jam).|

Get in touch with your inner flower child and spin a copy of this album full of trippy hippie magic.

Tubey Magical Guitars

Rich, smooth, sweet, full of ambience, dead-on correct tonality — everything that we listen for in a great record is here. You could certainly demonstrate your stereo with a record this good, even one that’s not nearly this good, because this one is outstanding.

But what you would really be demonstrating is music that the listener probably hasn’t heard, and that’s the best excuse to show off your stereo.

Midrange presence and immediacy are key to the sound. Get the volume just right and Donovan himself will be standing between your speakers and putting on the performance of a lifetime. This early Epic stereo pressing is the only way to hear the Midrange Magic that’s missing from modern records. As good as the best of those pressings may be, this record is dramatically more real sounding.

Donovan’s no longer a recording — he’s a living, breathing person. We call that “the breath of life,” and this record has it in spades. His voice is so rich, sweet, and free of artificiality you cannot help but find yourself lost in the music, because there’s no “sound” to distract you.

Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with the richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and remasterings).

AMG Review

Flow in a Donovan concert is important, and here, presented as it occurred, listeners can drift right into the tidepool of magic. The band is a quintet with Harold McNair on flute and saxophones, Loren Newkirk on piano, Andy Tronosco on upright bass, Tony Carr on drums, and John Carr on bongos. Donovan plays acoustic guitar throughout.

The hippy mysticism and flower power poet is everywhere here. This isn’t rock star excess at all, but an organic, drenched-in-sunshine concert full of gentleness with a premium on good vibes… (more…)

Old Ways – After The Gold Rush This Ain’t

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Neil Young Available Now

Notes from an early shootout.

I may be stating the obvious here, but After The Gold Rush this ain’t.

If you’re looking for a big and bold Neil Young rock record, this is not the one for you. This is Neil heading out to the sticks with friends including Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and other authentic country music figures, doing what Neil loves to do — making the music that HE wants to make, not the music that anyone else wants him to. Old friend Ben Keith (a huge part behind the sound of Harvest) shows up with his pedal steel guitar on a couple tracks.

Side one has big, open sound with exceptional presence, something we didn’t hear on too many copies. The overall sound is warm, smooth and sweet.

Side two is even better, with all of those same qualities and more. There’s an extra degree of energy here and the clarity is off the charts.

This probably wasn’t anyone’s favorite Neil Young album, but when it sounds like this it sure makes a lot more sense than it did when we heard it on the average pressing.

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If Only I Could Remember My Name – Hand Claps Are Key

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of David Crosby Available Now

Note how Crosby’s voice is “chesty” on the better sounding copies. Some make him sound like he’s all mouth and no diaphragm. When his voice is full-bodied and solid, that’s when he sounds more like a real person and less like a pop recording of a person.

All credit must go to Stephen Barncard.

Harry Pearson put this record on his TAS List of Super Discs, not exactly a tough call if you ask us. Who can’t hear that this is an amazing sounding recording? 

Listening Test

One of our key test tracks for side one is Cowboy Movie, and one thing that separated the best pressings from the lesser ones was the sound of the hand claps. It’s a dense mix and they are not easy to hear, but on the best copies there is audible echo and ambience around them, with a richer “flesh on flesh” quality to their sound.

Not many pressings had it, and the ones that did tended to do most other things well also.

Which is what makes it a good test! (more…)

Letter of the Week – “Un******believable that any record could sound that good.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of America Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased not long ago:

Hey Tom, 

I want to tell you I bought America’s 1st LP from you some couple of years back. White Hot designation at that time. I don’t know if you have found one better since then.

Paid big dollars and I still cannot believe the sound. Worth every penny. 

When I play that LP, I cannot avoid getting goose bumps or getting totally enveloped with the music. The guitars and vocals are flat out surreal.

It is just as amazing as the Eagles 1st LP Hot Stamper. Un******believable that any record could sound that good.

Bill 

Bill,

Thanks for your letter. I know exactly what you mean. In 1971 or 1972 I got my first copy of America and it quickly became a record I could not get enough of.

I didn’t discover how hot the first Eagles album could sound until about 2000. That’s how long it took me to stumble upon the original white label Asylum pressing.

Before then all I had heard were the blue label reissues, and most of those are unimpressive to say the least.

Since then we have written in some depth about the album, which you can read all about here if so inclined.

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Fifth Dimension – More Dead as a Doornail Sundazed Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Sixties Pop Recordings Available Now

This review was written probably more than twenty years ago, back in the day when we actually would order up the latest Sundazed title in the hopes of finding something worth offering to our customers. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine a bigger waste of our time. So few were any good and so many were terrible, why were we bothering to fish where there weren’t any good fish?

Through it all, through the worst of those dark days, somehow we managed to learn some important lessons.

The main lesson we learned was that there was no record with sound so bad that it could not be released.

Even worse, there was no record with sound so bad that it would prevent the better known reviewers from raving about it. (If you think anything has changed, just pull up the latest TAS Super Disc list. The bad souding Heavy Vinyl pressings to be found there far exceed the good sounding vintage pressings they’ve nominated for inclusion over the last 50 years. A small sample.)

Our days playing and selling even the best of these kinds of modern reissues are long gone. By 2007 everything had changed.

Our Old Review

The best stereo copies are rich, sweet and Tubey Magical — three areas in which the Sundazed reissues are seriously lacking.

If anyone still cares, anyone besides Michael Fremer, that is. He seems to like some of their remastered records. We can’t be bothered with mediocrities such as this and the rest of their sorry output, but apparently people are still buying these records. The label is still in business and cranking out more dreck with each passing year. 

And none of the Columbia monos we’ve played did much for us either. Congested and compressed, with no real top, who in his right mind could possibly prefer that sound?

Audiophiles? Record collectors? What in god’s name are they listening with, or for?

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