Album Reviews

Producer Lou Adler, best known by 1969 for co-producing The Monterrey Pop Festival and for producing The Mamas and The Papas on his Dunhill Record label (and that really doesn't begin to cover his comings and goings back then or now) had this idea to re-imagine Bob Dylan's music in a gospel setting.

No doubt part of it was simply a creative mind at work who heard or imagined he heard a gospel influence in Dylan's music, but perhaps it was also a bit of Jewish guilt having seen and heard all of these fabulously talented black singers playing a back-up role on so many great pop and rock songs (and not getting much credit for it), many of which he produced. Whatever the motives or from wherever he got the flash, Adler had worked with some of the singers he assembled for this project and the rest heard about it through the gospel/background singer/Baptist Church community. For the purpose of this record Adler called the assemblage "The Brothers and Sisters of Los Angeles".

Being a great producer and one for whom the sonic picture was key, Adler hired engineer Armin Steiner to not mike the singers closely and not record them as in a typical studio session. Instead he envisioned creating a church like sonic environment and letting a lot of Sound Recorders Studio's room sound invade the not closely placed microphones, other than on the lead singer and on the small bass/drum/organ/piano rhythm section arranged and conducted by Gene Page, which of necessity had to pop!

The large gospel choir arrayed well behind the lead singer and rhythm section (or at least that's how they got it to sound) was also imbued with a lot of air and space. The result was the feel of being in a gospel church but with Dylan instead of Jesus—or maybe with both.

The singers, who included Merry Clayton before she was known for "rape/fire" on "Gimme Shelter", Edna Wright of The Honey Cones and Gloria Jones who was first to record "Tainted Love", perform these songs with a gospel ferocity that re-invents even the most familiar lyric. The large chorus takes it all higher, which is as it's supposed to be.

Not every song works effectively re-imagined as gospel but the ones that do—the obvious ones like "I Shall Be Released" are terrific. Also great are "The Mighty Quinn," "Chimes of Freedom" and even, surprisingly, "Lay Lady Lay". Less effective is the closer,"Just Like a Woman", but as the notes conclude, everyone was in such a joyful mood for this one, the final song recorded, the pleasure shines through even if the translation to gospel doesn't.

This is a relatively short record, which is good because the concept only goes so far before it threatens to become shtick, which it never does. It just threatens. In an age of recorded artifice, this live in the studio in a minimal number of sessions over a few days improves with age and was definitely deserving of a reissue.

The original Ode Records edition (Z12 44018) distributed by CBS Records was always a great sounding LP that produced with every play a charge of energy and room filling three dimensional sound. You could "see" the musicians, feel the room and the long decay time, whether produced by mike leakage or added later artificially and listening was always an uplifting event.

For this reissue Light In the Attic went back to the original tape, which Sony keeps at Iron Mountain and which it doesn't allow to travel. Rather than an analog tape copy, the label chose to have Mark Wilder at Battery Studios transfer the tapes to 96/24 digital and send it to mastering engineer Dave Cooley for final EQ and then on to John Golden at Golden Mastering for lacquer cutting. I think RTI pressed it.

The packaging shows a great deal of care and attention to detail. It's gatefold, paper on cardboard, with decent artwork reproduction—a bit grainy and overly "contrasty" but better than many reissues. The label includes a full sized nicely produced booklet with annotation by Jessica Hundley that includes interviews with Adler and Merry Clayton among others along with a great deal of useful information, photos and even a print advertisement that ran when the record was originally released. A very classy presentation, especially considering the very reasonable $21.99 price.

The label was very forthcoming about the source material and for that they are to be commended. There's a photo of a master tape in the booklet, not of an assembled reel side, but rather of individual tracks. These days many "records" we know and love exist only as individual tracks and for all analog mastering that requires time consuming, expensive production (as Chad Kassem has bitched to me about more than once!).

I assume the songs were individually transferred and files sent to Cooley, who did reference an original pressing(s) before his mastering. When I first compared my original to this reissue without knowing the sourcing story, I was sure the source was a high resolution digital file. Much of the original's spaciousness made it through the digitization process but not all of it. The reissue is drier and the decay drops off prematurely compared to the original.

On the other hand, while the original sounds more "live" as if you are there, the reissue's equalization is arguably far superior. Let's just say that they sound very different with a case to be made for either version and in my book that's more than good enough. One strange anomaly, that leads me to believe the tracks were digitized one at a time: on the reissue, the opener "The Times They Are a Changing" features a distinct tambourine on one track almost by itself at the beginning that simply does not exist on the original pressing. There is no tambourine! I have to assume that a different mix was used for the reissue of at least that track. I can't think of any other way that might happen.

But you can listen for yourself. Here are two 30 second "fair use" snippets at 96/24 resolution of the original and reissue. Can't hide which is which because of the tambourine. Hear what you think. I think the response will be 50/50 as to which sound better.

A very well done reissue IMO from Light In the Attic. (by the way, the channels were reversed here too as on a previous shared set of files. Not my fault! A software glitch in the A/D converter is to blame. I had all cables correctly configured but forgot about the glitch!)

File "1"

File "2"