Hot Stamper Pressings of Led Zeppelin Albums Available Now
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of Led Zeppelin
I’m so glad this music from the early ’60s does nothing for me because I sure wouldn’t want to try and find any of these old records!
Misc. Content
Living Stereo in 1958 – Still Going Strong After 63 Years
The Beatles / With The Beatles – Original Liner Notes
Original Liner Notes (!)
Fourteen freshly recorded titles – including many sure-fire stage-show favourites – are featured on the two generously filled sides of this record. The Beatles have repeated the successful formula which made their first ‘Please Please Me’ LP into the fastest-selling album of 1963. Again they have set eight of their own original compositions alongside a batch of personal choice pieces selected from the recording repertoires of the American R&B artists they admire most.
The first half of the session gets away to a rip-roarin’ start with John’s powerful treatment of IT WON’T BE LONG NOW. Two more Lennon/McCartney compositions follow with these two remarkably talented tunesmiths handling their own lyrics on ALL I’VE GOT TO DO and ALL MY LOVING. On the first slower number John takes the vocal lead with Paul supplying the harmony. On ALL MY LOVING Paul stands in the vocal spotlight with John and George chanting in the background. Listen to George’s superb, slightly Country and Western guitar solo, an intriguing feature of ALL MY LOVING.
DON’T BOTHER ME marks the disc debut of George Harrison as a composer. It is a fairly fast number with a haunting theme tune. Behind George’s double-tracked voice the rest of the fabulous foursome create some unusual instrumental effects. Paul beats out a lean, hollow-boned rhythm from the claves, John uses a tambourine and Ringo hits out at a loose-skinned Arabian bongo (don’t ask me where he picked that up!) to pound out the on-beat percussive drive.
On a fair number of previous recordings by The Beatles producer George Martin has joined the group to add suitable piano sounds to their instrumental arrangements. His keyboard contributions come a little later in this new programme but on LITTLE CHILD it is Paul McCartney who plays piano. John and Paul join forces for the vocal on this rocker and, whilst Paul was over-dubbing the piano bits. John was standing beside another microphone adding in some neatly-timed mouth-organ phrases.
Those who considered Paul’s interpretation of A Taste Of Honey to be a stand-out attraction of The Beatles’ first LP will be more than pleased to hear him assume the role of romantic balladeer again on TILL THERE WAS YOU, the near-standard hit from the show ‘The Music Man.’ (more…)
10cc Is Not in Love
More of the Music of 10ccReviews and Commentaries for the Music of 10cc
This was my first 10cc album, and I completely fell in love with it.
Played it all the time back in 1975, on the speakers you see pictured below, or the RTR-280DRs I had before then. Both are big and play loud and that’s what this album and especially this song needs to sound their best.
Une Nuit A Paris, the suite that opens side one, is just an amazing demo track. As you may have read elsewhere on the site, it’s the kind of sound that requires a big powerful stereo to reproduce. Even back in the mid-70s I had speakers as tall as me that weighed 300 pounds apiece (the Fulton J, shown below), so playing a record like this was just a thrill.
It still is. I still love it. And I recommend it highly for those who are fans of the band. If you don’t know who 10cc are, this album and this band will probably make no sense to you, but if you have an open mind and like “art rock” from the ’70s, you might just really get a kick out of this one.
More on the amazing album that this song is found on, The Original Soundtrack.
Further Reading
The Far-Out Sound Is Right!
Company Better Records Searches and Sells Most the Best Prints of Vinyl Albums!
Most the Best Prints of Vinyl Albums Available Now!
Years ago we were contacted by a Russian reporter who wanted to do a story on Better Records and our Hot Stampers. How could we possibly turn down the chance to spread the word to our liberated friends on the other side of the world about these amazing sounding pressings?
Note that the key feature of the article is how high the prices are. This is apparently big news in Russia, yes?
The full newspaper page shows three records, each of which is many hundreds of dollars. Crazy Americans? Maybe so, but we say put that on your revolving object and spin it if you don’t believe these are the most musical records. You will see that each cent spent for them is justified.
SOUND AND COLOR
Selectors from California
Company Better Records searches and sells most the best prints of classical vinyl albums
If still one week ago you I am ready to give the sum for well written down vinylic disk, I, perhaps, have stopped on fifty dollars. The price reissue disks in the catalogue of Company Acousticsunds.com is those at the maximum. But in the same catalogue there are disks and on 20 dollars.
Purchase of disks – not cheap pleasure. But who has told, what the illness, known to us as “audiophilia” – for those who wishes to save? What component of a stereosystem take, fluctuations in the price – thousand dollars. It is possible to get a revolving object both for 500 dollars, and for 50 thousand Difference – hundredfold, thus, I assure you, what is also more dear what for, to limit the most valuable component of a stereosystem – the most musical record?
Recently I have learned, that there are records which cost in tens times more expensively. They for elites, and these elites approve, that each cent spent for them is justified.
It is a question of Californian company Better Records which main goods – Hot Stampers, Is a plate which correspond to the highest requirements of sounding.
[words missing in newspaper scan]… a way – to hear to it. You can trust only to the ears, instead of all those advertising labels which today decorate disks for audiophiles.
– Means, you listen to each disk which you then sell as hot-stamper?
– Only so.
– How many at you leaves on it of time?
– It is enough to hear to 10 seconds to define its quality. If it sounds well – we put aside it. Then we listen to it more closely and we estimate according to ours and after a sink [I think this means record cleaning] will be huge. Therefore the machine for a sink of disks also costs thousand dollars! (more…)
Reviewers Weigh In on The Beatles in 1964 – Who Knew the Band Was This Awful?
“The Beatles are not merely awful, they are god awful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art that they qualify as crowned-heads of anti-music.”
—William F. Buckley, Jr. , Boston Globe, Sept. 13, 1964
“Visually they are a nightmare…musically they are a near disaster…their lyrics are a catastrophe.”
—Newsweek, Feb 24, 1964
“The Beatles vocal quality can be described as hoarsely incoherent.”
—Theodore Strongin , New York Times, Feb. 19, 1964
“The Beatles must be a huge joke, a whacky gag, a giant put on.”
—Donald Freeman, Chicago Tribune, Feb. 19, 1964
“Just thinking about the Beatles seems to induce mental disturbance.”
—George Dixon, Washington Post, Feb 13, 1964
“Not even their mothers would claim that they sing well.”
—Los Angeles Times, 1964
Peter Frampton Shares Guitar Stories: George Harrison, Electric Lady & More
The Music of Peter Frampton Available Now
Peter Frampton Albums We’ve Reviewed
Peter Frampton is one of our favorite guitarists. I discovered his first album, Wind of Change, in 1972 and listen to it regularly to this day.
Please to enjoy. For more videos, please click here.
John Bonham and Buddy Rich
Classic Tracks: “She’s Not There”
More of the Music of The Zombies
Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of the Zombies
If one of the defining characteristics of a Classic Track is its immediate recognition, then The Zombies’ “She’s Not There” is as classic as it comes. One of its atypical characteristics, the distinctive opening bass notes and subsequent line that continues throughout the track, surely helped the band win the 1964 Hert’s Beat Competition, which earned them a recording contract with Decca Records. On the map and on their way.
The band had gotten together when they were 15-year-old schoolmates in 1961 in their hometown of St. Albans, England. Keyboardist Rod Argent recruited some of the members, as lead vocalist Colin Blunstone remembers, based on the alphabet. “We sat in class in alphabetical order, and I had a guitar,” Blunstone recalls.
Then after they won the competition, according to Blunstone, and just two weeks prior to their big recording session, producer Ken Jones said, “You could always try to write something.”
The complete story can be found at this link: “She’s Not There”