Misc. Content

10cc Is Not in Love

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of 10cc Available Now

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

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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…)

The Hurdy Gurdy Man – “Donovan’s hardest-rocking hit”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Psychedelic Rock Recordings Available Now

The 1968 sound here is GLORIOUS — rich, sweet, Tubey Magical and very, very Analog.

Side one is where you will find The Hurdy Gurdy Man and it is crazy good sounding here. No wonder: Hurdy Gurdy was engineered by Eddie Kramer and produced by none other than John Paul Jones.

Donovan records tend to be hit or miss affairs, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that we could not find a bad track on either side of the album. Most are in fact quite wonderful.  Both Yellow Label Epics and Orange Label Epics fared well in our shootout.

Some of these tracks may remind you more than a little of Pentangle. Danny Thompson, that band’s amazingly talented and unusually well recorded double bassist, just happens to be the bass player on the album. Go figure. Tony Carr does most of the drumming as he has on many of Donovan’s albums from the period. Needless to say, the rhythm section is first rate.

Song Review

“Hurdy Gurdy Man” was undoubtedly Donovan’s hardest-rocking hit, though mystical folk-rock was still at the core of this 1968 number five hit single.

Certainly it started in as gentle a frame of mind as the typical Donovan song, with a hypnotic wordless vocal hum which reached back to the very roots of Celtic folk music, sounding like a prayer from a devotional ritual. The hum was then joined by a gentle acoustic guitar strum, and when Donovan began singing lyrics, set to one of his more beguiling tunes, some slight distortion made it sound as if his voice was traveling through time. When he got to the latter part of the verse, though, the hard rock bass, drums, and guitar piled on like gangbusters.

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“This BBC film on audiophiles in 1959 is a masterpiece”

Here is a link to the video itself.

“Do they like music? Or are they in love with equipment?”

The excellent BBC Archive account on Twitter has unearthed an audio gem.

A 1959 film called ‘Hi-Fi-Fo-Fum’ purports to reveal the burgeoning audiophile scene, with more than a little tongue-in-cheek humour for good measure.

“There is a man in Wimbledon who will go on adding to his equipment until he can hear the sigh of the conductor as the piccolo misses its entry,” says the introduction. He sounds like our kind of man.

“Is it a religion or a disease? An American psychiatrist calls it ‘audiophilia'”, reveals the voiceover, as men – and it’s largely men – shuffle in and out of hi-fi shops before rushing home for earnest listening sessions. It was ever thus.

“Do they like music? Or are they in love with equipment?”, wonders our narrator, as one excited punter buys a new tweeter for “6 pound 4 pence”.

And while much has changed – you don’t see many shops with individual listening booths nowadays – much has stayed the same. “A dream of perfection… of machines more sensitive than the ears they play to,” reminds us that arguments about audio frequencies that the human ear can’t hear are nothing new.

The video also shows the early music critic. “With a dozen different recordings of every work, how do we find the best?” wonders the voiceover. “Rely on the critic, nothing escapes him,” comes the reply.

His verdict? “Comparisons are odious but inevitable…”

Well, I guess they are!

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.

Classic Tracks: “She’s Not There”

More of the Music of The Zombies

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of the Zombies

BY Robyn Flans

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”