LATEST ADDITIONS

Lonely and Blue, the rarest and most valuable of Roy Orbison's Monument LPs--his first for the label--has been given splendid sonic and packaging care by Classic Records, in both monophonic and stereo editions. According to Classic's Mike Hobson, this is the first time the original master tapes have been used since the original pressings were issued in 1961. At a January 2003 Consumer Electronics Show press conference, Hobson told how the masters were discovered in Nashville and gave every indication of having not been "cracked" since they were used to generate the original LP. What Mobile Fidelity used for its gold CD, or Sony for its gold CD, remains a mystery, then, but when you hear this issue, you'll have no doubt the original tapes were used--especially if you've become accustomed to those CDs.

This Otis Rush love fest, produced by Mike Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites at Fame in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, was payback for the generosity and help Rush provided the youngsters back in Chicago during their "formative" years. Led by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the white suburban audience that formed the core of the "counter-culture" had discovered the blues. Butterfield had backed Dylan at Newport in 1965, causing a big stir, and soon thereafter Mike Bloomfield and drummer Sam Lay were in the studio with Dylan to record Highway 61 Revisited.

By the end of the '70s, rock was dead, prog-rock had grown grotesquely self-indulgent, and the angry punk/new wave deconstruction had begun. It was a long-overdue musical cleansing. The Sex Pistols and The Clash were at opposite ends of the dividing line: one unabashedly stupid, the other worldly and literate. The late Joe Strummer was anything but working class, but he kept his upper-class roots tightly wrapped beneath a veneer of growling anger and disgust. He was hardly alone in towing the image line.

Perhaps, in a perfect audiophile world, Shel Talmy would have arranged to remix these three-track originals to analog for the LP release and to digital for the CD. But this isn't a perfect world. However, compared to my original American Decca "stereo" pressing of The Who Sings My Generation (Decca DL 74664), this is perfection. The original stereo edition was an electronically reprocessed, boxy-sounding compressed mess. While purists may have preferred it in mono, the stereo remix found in My Generation (Deluxe Edition) is respectful and keeps most of the action centered, avoiding hard-left and -right separation. I did get a chance to hear an original UK Brunswick mono pressing, and this reissue has nothing to be ashamed of.