Album Reviews

Greatest Hits albums from the '60s are a crap shoot: how many were made from original tapes strung together to produce reels for lacquer cutting? A few but not most. Instead the originals (hopefully) were pulled and tape copies of the hits were made and those were strung together for the hits package.

On the other hand, sometimes the originals were string together for greatest hits packages. But you can't be sure. I know that when Warner Brothers issued the Paul Simon compilation Negotiations and Love Songs, Roy Halee did pull the masters and string them together for the double LP set, so it's definitely one worth looking for, though how many bad songs did Paul Simon write? The full albums are worthwhile too!

The Young Rascals, later The Rascals, produced some very strong albums worth enjoying from start to finish, but a hits package is also enjoyable and when this one was issued in 1968, with a Roy Lichtenstein-like "pop art" cover, the group had a strong catalog from which to stitch together a hits package, though some of these were hardly hits or even issued as singles.

The fourteen song collection includes "Good Lovin'" "Come On Up" "Mustang Sally" (a hit for Wilson Pickett), "Lonely Too Long", "Groovin'", "A Girl Like You" "How Can I Be Sure", It's Wonderful", "Easy Rollin'" and "A Beautiful Morning" among others. Oldsters know them all.

The Rascals combined white soul, with exuberant bar band energy, vocals from Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati the could cut through the densest arrangements, Gene Cornish's underrated, always tasteful guitar licks and Dino Danelli's virtuosic, jet-propelled time keeping.

I saw their recent multi-media reunion show at Port Chester, NY's Capitol Theater produced by "Little Steven" Van Zandt, who engineered the reunion by bringing together Felix and Eddie who had had a few decades long feud. I know Eddie and his brother David, who was in the original Joey Dee and The Starlighters and later sang backup on some of The Rascals' tracks.

In fact I sat down and interviewed them some years ago. They were really angry and just let it spew but afterwards thought better of it and asked me to not publish it. I honored their wishes and I'm glad I did because it might have made the reunion more difficult to achieve and now that they have re-united (they did once before for an evening's performance for a charity), the results are breathtaking—as if they'd never split up or even got older. The multimedia show makes it way to Broadway soon for a limited run and if you're in the New York area, I suggest you go. You'll have a blast.

I don't suggest you buy this crappy reissue though. I'd gotten a few emails from readers complaining about it so I couldn't see spending the money to find out for myself, but when one reader kindly offered to send me his copy I said "yes."

So look, first of all, most of these tracks were never great sounding to begin with, though some were. Secondly it's easy to argue that the mono mixes were better on the first few albums at least since the singles were meant to be heard in mono and more care was lavished on them. Some of the stereo mixes included hokey panning like on the opening of "Good Lovin'" where the "1,2, 3" pans back and forth with each number.

The kick drum is boxy and cardboardy on many of these tracks, and there's no deep bass but some sounded pretty good on the original LPs, less so on the original greatest hits album (Atlantic SD-8190), where it sounds obvious that it was generated from copies not the master. That's the nature of the beast, as I said at the outset.

This reissue was "mastered by Joe Reagoso from the original Atlantic Records tapes at Friday Music Studios, Surf City, CA with Kevin Gray." Now, what does that mean? First of all, the lacquer scribe says it was Kevin who cut it, but at Cohearant Mastering, where he has his lathe, not at Friday Music Studios. So if Joe Reagoso mastered it from the original tapes, he did so to some digital format and Kevin cut from files.

That can sometimes lead to decent results but not here. First of all, if this was from the "original tapes," it means the original second or later generation tapes strung together to produce the greatest hits package in the first place. It must mean that because it certainly doesn't sound like the original original master tapes and if Mr. Reagoso did get Atlantic to ship him all of those tapes and he put them up and transferred them to digital and used first generation digital masters to assemble this package it sure does not sound like that!

But if that's what he did, I'll tell you what he also did: he equalized the crap out of these tapes to produce a steely-bright, hard and flat top end, a hollowed out midrange and a bulbous low end. The staging is flat and un-engaging too. In fact there is nothing positive I can write about the sound of this reissue. From the first to the last note it just plain sucks. It evidences a heavy hand on the EQ knobs the robs any warmth and subtle textures from the performances.

I can't even say "this sounds as if it was cut from a CD" because the CDs of this material sound much better than this.

Adding insult to injury, the pressing I got had visible non-fill and what's worse, it was audible. This should have been caught and rejected by someone along the line. This would not even be acceptable sonically or physically as a $16.99 reissue but at $27 it's a fucking disgrace. Pardon my French.

So yes, you'd better run. Run as far away from this one as fast as you can. The sound is atrocious, the presssing quality is too. The cover art is well done. Whoopie.

If Friday Music plans on reissuing more of the catalog (it's previously been reissued by both Rhino and Sundazed, though decades ago and both sound far superior to this, though those were the original LPs not a hits compilation) I suggest a thorough re-think before proceeding.

This is advertised as a "limited edition". That's good news. The more limited, the better.