_________________________________________________________ __________ __________ __________ __________ __________ S P E C T R O P O P __________ __________ __________ _________________________________________________________ Volume #0166 October 15, 1998 _________________________________________________________ Bringing the finest recorded entertainment into your homeSubject: What Am I Gonna Do With You Sent: 10/14/98 2:10 am Received: 10/14/98 7:41 am From: Jack Madani, Jack_MadXXXX@XXX12.nj.us William Stos wrote: >the Chiffons' "What Am I >Gonna Do With You," blows Lesley right out of the water! I've never heard the Chiffons' version, William, but I will mention that there are two very different mixes of Lesley's version of that song. The one on the 2-disc set is a poor mix, really burying the beauty of the production and throwing Lesley's voice way too far out front. OTOH, there's a remixed version on a single-disc Mercury anthology, which is unbelievably outstanding. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jack Madani - Princeton Day School, The Great Road, Princeton, NJ 08540 Jack_MadXXXX@XXX12.nj.us "It is when the gods hate a man with uncommon abhorrence that they drive him into the profession of a schoolmaster." --Seneca, 64 A.D. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------[ archived by Spectropop ]-------------------- Subject: Lesley Gore and Barbara Alston Sent: 10/14/98 10:50 am Received: 10/14/98 11:15 pm From: Jimmy Cresitelli, JimmyXXXX@XXXom Hi gang! Lesley Gore is appearing here in the Orlando area on October 30th. at a restaurant / club... I am going to try to show up as a member of the press from the newspaper I write for, and hope to meet her. No, I won't gush... just a simple "hi, Lesley, how's Johnny?" might suffice. Maybe we'll share a round of Manhattans. I was in a neighborhood band back in 1963, and recorded "It's My party." I was the drummer... and that's all you can hear on the tape 35 years later: my tinny, awful drumming... And Will Stos is right, y'all need to check out Barbara Alston's website. There's a great shot of SIX Crystals in the studio with Phil Spector. The Crystals are trying to achieve Hall of fame status... and can you blame them? After all they put up with? After all they contributed?? Dee Dee's STILL touring, non-stop for 37 years... you go, girl! That's gotta be some sort of record for the industry... The URL for Barbara Alston's website is: The Buyer's Club <http://www.popenterprises.com/"> Go to the MUSIC link for the web page re: Crystals, Hall of Fame, book, etc. Good luck! Jimmy --------------------[ archived by Spectropop ]-------------------- Subject: other kinds of compression Sent: 10/14/98 5:53 am Received: 10/14/98 7:41 am From: Doc Rock, docroXXXX@XXXcom Compression, meaning a sort of automatic volume control, is certainly one kind of compression. But there are other kinds of compression. Back in the '60s, I noticed something strange about some of the music I heard on the radio and on my turntable. Sometimes, it was peppier than at other times. For example, on the J&D hit 45 "Sidewalk Surfing," the music clocks right along at a real nice pace. But -- when I played the stereo LP version (which is missing the skate S/X, by the way), the song seemed to drag just a bit. A similar thing seemed to take place with "The little Old Lady From Pasadena." Hummm. Meanwhile, I was listening to several local radio stations in those days, including KTOP and KEWI, both in Topeka, Kansas. For some reason, I liked the way the same records sounded better on KTOP than on KEWI! Then, I was in Colorado in the summer of 1964. The station I listened to that vacation was KIMN in Denver. Man, those records sounded really good. I was not sure why. But they seemed even more peppy. Mentally considering all of this, I finally concluded thXXXX@XXXne was doing something with the speed of records -- XXXX@XXXhing -- sometimes. Years later, I got a fancy turntable which had a pitch or speed control. If I wanted to, I could edge the speed of records up just a bit on that TT. And when I did so, the songs sounded great! Apparently, I was right in my deduction that sometimes songs were speeded up. In the '70s, I got some real, hard evidence on the matter. For one, I read an article in Billboard magazine about KIMN. It seems that, back in the '60s, someone invented a new machine called a compressor. What the compressor did was to essentially speed up a record without changing the pitch of the music. In other words, whereas the normal speeding up of a recording creates a MIckey Mouse or Chipmunk effect. But with the compressor, the speeding up was accomplished without the change in pitch! How did it do this? By taking out the "spaces" between the music on hit records, and making a new recording that was faster due to the minuscule quiet spots being taken out. (Compression only worked on certain songs. With other records, the effect was lousy, and so only certain hits on KIMN were compressed.) Around this same time, I got a flexi-disk in the mail from a company which was selling a tape recorded for college students who were too lazy to take notes in class. This tape recorded compressed speech. Lecturers pause and stumble a lot. In an hour lecture, a large percentage of the time, the guy ain't saying nothin' at all. So this fancy tape recorded would make tapes that were compressed. The speech would be very fast, but not changed into a Chipmunk voice. And the sample son the flexi disk proved that it worked. But back to the Billboard story, KIMN had great success with the music compression system. Kids loved the way the music sounded, and tuned in the station more than they had before. However, there was a problem. When the kids went to the record counter to buy the records, they got the normal 45s. When they got the 45s home and played them, they sounded "wrong" to the kids, who tried to return them to the record stores as defective. In the end, KIMN had to stop using compression because of this side effect. Now I knew that I was not crazy. "Peppy" versions of records really did exist! In subsequent years, I got more proof. In the 1970s, bootleg albums of Jan & Dean music began coming out. Wow. How different from the hit recorded some of the out takes and practice sessions sounded. For example, "The New Girl In School" was considerably slower in the boot version than in the 45 version. "Little Old Lady," too. Final proof -- as if I still needed convincing -- came when I talked to Jan's engineer, Bones Howe. First, I asked him why the stereo versions of Jan & Dean albums often sounded different from the mono versions. "The mono and stereo versions were mixed completely separately," explained Bones. "First of all, the only thing that anybody cared about at the record company was the mono release. That was the record. And the stereo was always whatever you wanted it to be. We recorded on three tracks, not 24 tracks, maybe we had four tracks near the end of that period. By the time we were finished, all the instruments ended up on one track, the vocals on another, and the background vocals on the third. And there were no time codes to allow us to hook up two machines together. So oftentimes, to finish what Jan wanted, there were additional over dubs done while we were mixing down." These would not be on the master tapes, just on the final recording. And so, if Jan speeded up the mono mix for the 45, the increased speed would not end up on the stereo LP, either. And so I asked Bones about the possibility that Jan speeded up tapes for 45 releases. "Jan would try any kind of crazy thing he would think of. We'd run the tape slow and speed it back up to get the voices in tune with the music; you wouldn't believe the things we tried, exclaimed Bones. "Jan would listen to a tape over and over again, then say it wasn't exciting enough and speed the tape up. So! The 45 of "Drag City" and the other songs was speeded up for excitement! I was vindicated at last! But back to compression. One the one hand, I love CDs. I mean, who wouldn't? They are so convenient, they don't get scratchy, and all kinds of stuff that would never have been issued on vinyl (like the Fantastic Baggies) does get put out on CDs. On the other hand, I feel kind of like the kids who bought 45s in Denver, only to find that the music on the 45s didn't sound like the music on the radio. CDs often just don't sound right to me. They sound good, great, excellent even. But not right. Why? One reason can be the electronics. Paul McCartney built a recording studio for himself a few years ago, using as much old fashioned equipment as he could find. He wanted that old, warm sound. Vacuum tubes have a slow, warm, smooth internal action. Electronic chips have a sharp, precise, cold action. Makes the music sound different. I asked my engineer at the radio station why he thought records sounded better than (or anyway different from) 45s. He said that music takes a lot of data to record on a CD. And, in order to fit all the music on a CD that we want (like 72 minutes), a lot of overtones and undertones, supposedly inaudible, are eliminated on a CD. But eliminating them makes the music seem hollow, cold. So there is another reason why CD music never sounds as good (or anyway the same) as a 45. Our old friend. Compression! But this time it is a different kind of compression. Let me quote from an article in Consumer Reports 1994 Buying Guide. They are discussing Digital compact cassette decks (DDC), a new component which can play both conventional and digital cassettes, and record digitally, like a CD. "For recording on digital tape, DCC relies on a data-compression process that leaves out parts of a musical program that are masked by other sounds. In essence, it records only what you're apt to hear and ignores inaudible sonic information." This compression in also used on CDs, according to my engineer. I welcome comments and corrections. Doc --------------------[ archived by Spectropop ]-------------------- Subject: compression Sent: 10/14/98 1:04 pm Received: 10/14/98 11:15 pm From: john rausch, jXXXX@XXXnet thanks to everyone for the compression 101 lesson! and to claudia: i have also noticed the male voices in the background of lesley`s "sunshine, lollipops and rainbows" and wondered who they could be.also a great question you proposed about who the session singers were besides ellie XXXX@XXXin 76 i attended one of lesley`s concerts when she was pushing her "love me by name" lp and once again a few years later she did an "oldies" concert with some other oldies artists of all places but thistledown horse racing track here in ohio and when she was done she ran off stage but i was waiting for her at the other end and asked her for her autograph and she scribbled her name and walked away then she turned around and looked at me and said "here...let me do it right" and redid it more clearly and then she gave me a peck on the cheek...i will always remember that night forever!...still have both autographs too! ps thanks jamie for signing my phil spector site guestbook. jonr Presenting theFabulous Ronettes http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Studio/2469/ --------------------[ archived by Spectropop ]-------------------- End
