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Artisan Let Us Down on Some of the Early Green Label Pressings

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

Our most recent Shootout Winner was a very special copy indeed:

A wonderful copy of JT’s classic followup to Sweet Baby James with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides.

This early Green Label pressing demonstrates the Tubey Magical midrange that modern records almost never reproduce. The sound of most of the tracks on the better pressings is raw, real and exceptionally unprocessed.

The only pressings we put in shootouts these days are cut at Artisan, on transistor equipment we should note, but the kind of transistor gear that, to the best of our knowledge, no longer exists — the kind that transforms the Tubey Magic found on the tape into Tubey Magical grooves on the record.

Bernie Grundman used to have equipment like that back in 1971. The evidence is there for all to hear on records like this one. Oddly enough the two titles have remarkably similiar qualities.

But not all Artisan cuttings are equal, as our stamper sheet from the shootout makes clear.

-1/-1 earned 1.5+ Hot Stamper grades, which means the sound is good, not great.

1.5+ is four grades down from the top copy. That’s a steep dropoff as far as we’re concerned. 1.5+ only hints at how good a recording Mudslide Slim can be on the best vintage Green Label Artisan-cut pressings. (For those who might be interested, there’s more on our grading scale here.)

1B/1C, the worst pressing from our shootout, is what we would consider passable. It’s not a bad sounding record, but it’s not good enough to qualify as a Hot Stamper.

The world is full of records that sound like the 1B/1C cutting of Mud Slide.

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Listening in Depth to James Taylor’s Forgotten Classic

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

Mud Slide Slim is one of those albums that we think should be more popular with audiophiles, at least the ones looking for timeless music with top quality sound.

It has some of the man’s strongest material:

  • You’ve Got a Friend;
  • You Can Close Your Eyes;
  • Hey Mister, That’s Me up on the Jukebox;

and one of his best and most underrated,

  • Love Has Brought Me Around.

If you’ve got a top copy of the album, this song, the leadoff on side one, can really rock. It’s yet another in the long list of recordings that really comes alive when you Turn Up Your Volume.

Side One

Love Has Brought Me Around

One of my all-time favorite James Taylor tracks. When you get a good copy, this music comes ALIVE! This is not your typical sad sack, touchy feely James Taylor song. This song ROCKS!

You’ve Got a Friend

Listen to Carole King’s piano. On the best copies the transparency allows her playing to be heard clearly. Her style is unmistakable.

Places in My Past
Riding on a Railroad
Soldiers
Mud Slide Slim

Side Two

Hey Mister, That’s Me up on the Jukebox

As good as any James Taylor song ever written.

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James Taylor / Mud Slide Slim

More James Taylor

  • A wonderful copy of JT’s classic followup to Sweet Baby James with KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them on both sides
  • This early Green Label pressing demonstrates the Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records almost never reproduce
  • Some of old JT’s strongest material: “You’ve Got a Friend,” “You Can Close Your Eyes,” “Hey Mister, That’s Me up on the Jukebox” and more
  • The sound of most of the tracks on the better pressings is raw, real and exceptionally unprocessed
  • 4 stars on Allmusic – it destroys the recent reissue, which lacks the texture and warmth you get in abundance on these killer originals
  • If you’re a James Taylor fan — and what audiophile wouldn’t be? — this title is clearly one of the best releases of 1971 and a true Must Own for the audiophile

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This Mud Slide Slim Rocked Like No Other Pressing We’d Ever Heard

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

This Shootout Winning copy from 2008 or thereabouts showed us a Mud Slide Slim we had no idea could exist.

We have a name for records like this. We call them breakthrough pressings. They are one of the reasons we play so many thousands of records every year. We’re looking for records that sound as good as this one does, even for titles that no one thinks are particularly well recorded.

Especially for those titles. Experience has taught us they can only be found by playing lots of pressings and looking for whatever needles might be hiding in the haystacks. (The haystack for One Man Dog can be seen at the bottom of this post.)

As you will see from our commentary, the first track on side one, Love Has Brought Me Around, is a great test for energy.

If your copy does not seem very energetic to you, then we recommend you keep buying every green label original you see until you find one that does.

Our commentary from the early days of shootouts can be seen below.

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Is Mud Slide Slim in a Booth or Isn’t He?

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of James Taylor Available Now

One thing we noticed this time around was that for some tracks James’ vocals are recorded in a booth and for others they are not. Listen to the first track — there is no ambience, no room around his voice whatsoever. He’s in a padded booth, and they sure padded the hell out of it. Now play Long Ago and Far Away on side two. No booth! Lots of studio space around the vocal. MUCH more natural acoustic.

We don’t have the luxury of playing every track on both sides for these shootouts. We pick two or three songs that have specific qualities we know to look for and play them on every copy. (Shootouts like this almost always involve at least a dozen pressings, sometimes more, and it’s impossible to keep them all straight with more copies than that.)

So here’s a potentially fun exercise — assuming you find this sort of thing fun — that we thought about doing but just don’t have the time to devote to at present, with so many other shootouts waiting in the wings. Take your own copy, assuming you have at least a decent one, and play each track listening for only one thing: does James sound like he is in a booth, or does he sound like he is in an open space in the studio? If you have the typical original WB pressing you will probably not be able to get very far and will be quickly tempted to give up, the frustration of a murky midrange being more than most of us audiophiles can bear.

But maybe you have a good copy; the possibility certainly exists. And if you find much success with this exercise we encourage you to drop us a line, we will be more than happy to print it.