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Brilliant hit, appalling production!


rasputin1963

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From the annals of popular recording after, let us say, 1960, what records strongly come to mind as being brilliant, popular chart hits... :thu: DESPITE having surprisingly abysmal production values (lifeless recording, nasty artifacts, glaring edits, bizarre stereo appropriation, ghastly EQ'ing, et.al) :eek:

 

 

I'll get the ball rolling... how about "California Dreamin'" (1965) by The Mamas And The Papas?

 

Oh yes, and how 'bout one of my personal fave 45's, "Sally, Go 'Round The Roses" by The Jaynettes (1963)

 

 

ras

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Interesting thread. I have thought about this in the past.

 

A few that come to mind:

Most of the Animal's hits..

Dont let me be misunderstood,

Gotta get out of this place etc.

 

Buffalo Springfield: "Learning to Fly" in particuolar ( not a big hit but a great, very poorly produced song IMHO)

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Oh yeah and..

 

The Rascals: Good Lovin, Aint gonna eat out my heart anymore

 

Jefferson Airplane: Its no Secret,

 

Janis with Big Brother:Piece of my Heart...

 

Throggs: Wild thing

 

Kingsmen? Louie Louie

 

Some are worse than others.

A big weakness is overuse of chambers or early electronic/plate verbs. Some snares are thin/harsh- vox also.

 

The funny thing is that over the radio or the small record players of the day things seemed fine. However, give em a listen on a better system of today and some of the production is downright horrible.

 

It makes the good examples of production from that era even more impressive.

Early Moody Blues, Isaac Hayes (via Terry Manning), Beatles, DC5, most Motown hits come to mind as holding up pretty well production-wise. ALso, P. Revere, the Association.

 

Looking back I can say that I was sometimes as much attracted by the production values as by the genre or particular artist ( e.g. Isaac Hayes).

 

You realize we are showing our age here - big time.

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Originally posted by Lee Flier

Just about everything from the 80's.
:D

 

But don't you love those big shiney drums?:(

A while since I used to listen to The Smiths alot but thank God their production values weren't on similar wavelength to Prince for example.

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[i just re-read the lead post and I have to stipulate, that my example is certainly far from 'abysmal' and I withdraw it from that sweepstakes. But I'll let my comments stand as a sidebar. Please do not kill me.]

 

This is very difficult to say because A) I love this album and wouldn't change a thing and B) it's likely to get me flippin' killed some day but... Great, great album, I don't fault anyone anything on it, but Derek and the Dominos is far, far from state of the art (in its time) in terms of studio gloss. That's not a bad thing. I wouldn't change anything. But it's noisy, instruments sometimes go in and out of sonic focus with less than direct correlation to their musical role, there's some very funky miking and/or EQ. But it's a great album and I wouldn't change a thing. Please do not put a million dollar bounty on my head.

 

 

In fact, let me go on to say that there is SO MUCH that is so wonderful on this album that I'm GLAD they did things exactly the way they did them in order to capture precisely what they did. And it's one of the last chances to see Duane or Eric before... well, you know.

 

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Originally posted by Lee Knight

Build Me Up Buttercup by The Foundations. The band and vocalist rock... but the sound is very harsh. I love that guy's voice, harsh or not.

 

 

Mama mia, had a band called "Unified Force" in the late seventies together with Eric Allandale from Dominica, the trombonist of "The Foundations", haven't seen him since...

 

.

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I'm not suggesting that they were written on a bet.

 

I'm just thinking that the only way most anyone I've ever known would write a song to a girl named Bernadette or Buttercup (or Bertha, for that matter -- and no offense to all you Bernadettes, Buttercups, and Berthas out there) is if someone said:

 

 

"I'll bet you a thousand bucks you can't write a hit song with Bernadette/Buttercup in the title."

 

 

And, you know, joke would be on them. Or me. Or, you know... I'm still nervous about the D&tD's comment so I don't want to offend.

 

Pretend I was never here.

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Originally posted by Kendrix



You realize we are showing our age here - big time.

 

 

LOLOL! :D

 

 

I've always said to myself: I will sit up and take contemporary pop music seriously when I hear a new record as perfect in every conceivable way... as "Down Town" by Petula Clark [1964]. That record is my personal touchstone of what a Top 40, 3-minute single should be..... where literally everything's "working", everything's "happening"-- from lyric to melody to emotion to harmony to prosody to arrangement to tempo to performances to FX to mikeing to mixing... everything.

 

Yeppers, I'm a fossil and a stick-in-the-mud. :p

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Originally posted by blue2blue

Caveat, caveat, caveat


but
Derek and the Dominos

 

I always wondered what the deal was with the drums and some of the vocals there...

 

but I wouldn't change a thing either.

 

Did you know...The tracks appear on the album in the order in which they were recorded? Listen to the first few tunes (before Duane arrived), the next few (as Duane and Eric get on the same wavelength), and the second disc (as Duane and Eric set sail for places most of us will never reach):cool:

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Looking back I can say that I was sometimes as much attracted by the production values as by the genre or particular artist

 

 

 

Yes... Admit it, Baby boomers: you flipped, as I did, the first time you heard the coda of "Crimson & Clover" by Tommy James & The Shondells...

 

"Cri-i-i--i-i--imso-o-on and Clo-o-o-o-o-o--oova-h-ah, o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ova-h and o-o-o-o--ovah"

 

To this day I can honestly say that I am not sure whether that is Tommy's voice broken up with a tremelo set to a flat square wave--

 

or whether the engineer actually sliced-and-diced out that effect with a single-edged razor on the tape itself.

 

I'm inclined to suspect the latter, because the timing of the tremelo is flawlessly aligned with the tempo of the song... I think I'm safe in saying that the tremelo effects of 1969 could not (yet) be set to beat at a perfect or predictable tempo... (Comments here?)

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Two albums come to mind, off the bat.

 

"Zenyatta Mondatta"

This should come as no surprise to some of you here who know I'm a rabid Sting/Police fan; it also doesn't qualify in the "abysmal" category, but it's worth noting that it was the album they spent the least amount of energy and effort on, yet was the biggest landmark for them.

 

"Journey: Captured"

 

I know. You're thinking "WHAT THE {censored}"?

 

This is, to me, an album that represented the best of what the band really had to offer--crowd banter, solid groove, pop sensibility, etc--yet it was almost completely ruined by the fact that they had their guitar tech mix the damned album.

I mean, think about it for more than two seconds...you hire the guy who's spent every night near Neal Schon's poorly dialed-in amps, to mix your album?

 

I was NEVER able to EQ out Kevin's bumps. The whole album sounded like you were standing around Neal's guitar monitor offstage.

 

WHO was smoking WHAT?

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I think Kendrix hit it on the head that the music up into the mid sixties was probably mixed to fit those small speakers on transistor radios and mono car radios.

I read a story about Elvis riding a train to New York listening to one of his new releases over and over on a cheap portable record player. When asked about it he said he wanted to understand what his record buyers were hearing so he could make the records better.

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I always thought "Buttercup" wasn't as much a name as a pet name...

 

(Leslie Neilsen voice) "She's my little snookums wookums buttercup"

 

That type of thing...

 

Yeah, I dug the tremolo voice thing on Crimson and Clover too.

 

Y'know what? To me, I dig all those songs (or most of 'em), and in a lot of cases, if the production was bad, I didn't notice, because the song was so great. Plus, for the most part, when those songs came out...screw your huge studio monitors, the best way to listen to 'em was through a crappy little 2" transistor radio speaker...with the smell of Coppertone in your nostrils, the warm sun on your skin, and the sight of a well-tanned lovely lady's bikini-clad derriere (or better yet, several) coming through your sunglasses.

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Yes... the smell of Coppertone is crucial to the proper appreciation of something like Crimson and Clover on a transistor (then again, you'll never hear that kind of cool bass hook)...

 

 

I listen to a LOT of music from the late 20s on up and, obvoiusly, a lot of the older stuff (and some of the new stuff, too, I like the under-the-radar stuff) is severely limited in the fi department.

 

But, I'll tell you what -- I'd rather hear a lot of that ultra-lo-fi stuff than a lot of the top dollar productions that come out of the Big Machine these days.

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Originally posted by blue2blue

Yes... the smell of Coppertone is
crucial
to the proper appreciation of something like Crimson and Clover on a transistor (then again, you'll never hear that kind of cool bass hook)...

 

An aside: just speaking of cool bass hooks from the summer of 1969, :D Tommy and The Shondells' "Crystal Blue Persuasion" wasn't too shabby, either.

 

 

ras :thu:

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You know, for all that is said of Phil Spector's Wall-Of-Sound (and I worship those records, don't get me wrong), in a way he was being celebrated for making a really "crappy" sound... at least "crappy" from the P.O.V. of orthodox "good" audio engineering of his day... (As a ludicrous f'rinstance: just imagine what you'd have gotten had "Lovin' Feelin'" first been optioned to Ray Conniff or Burl Ives or Henry Mancini or Enoch Light to arrange and produce...) He and Jack Nitszche effectively turned audio vices into virtues.

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