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 July 15, 2005 Unnecessary Music RecyclingThe notion of the audiophile as a guy who has $50,000 worth of equipment and only a handful of records, mostly of train sounds, is an enduring one. Certainly there is challenge and satisfaction in assembling a topnotch system, and serious stereo fans buy magazines and consult audio newsgroups to help them make the best choice. But in the end, the purpose of great equipment is to listen to music. Another erroneous idea: The only music worthy of the best audio equipment is classical, so audiophiles listen exclusively to that. In truth, all types of music benefit about equally from high-quality gear, and most of my acquaintances have broad musical tastes and large collections that cover many genres. My own collection is like that. I must confess, however, that for recreational listening I often like to go back to the recordings of my teens and 20s, when music was moving from early-1950s pop (which I love, perversely enough) to the golden age of rock’n’roll. For many of my contemporaries, there’s something sacred about those old records. It’s not just the songs and the artists, but the specific recordings themselves. The top-40 songs of the day were drummed into our heads with such relentless repetition that we got to know every tiny riff, down to the last detail. Any tinkering is immediately obvious, even half a century later. There are exceptions, of course. A friend who grew up listening to the same stuff I did recently put on a CD by a ’50s group that purported to be a compilation of their greatest hits. They were indeed the right songs, but in modern rerecordings that sounded nothing like the originals. Even though the liner notes made no secret of this fact, or that the group didn’t include a single original member, she hadn’t noticed the difference. It’s when a recording pretends to be original and isn’t that I get that fingernails-on-blackboard sensation. When I began to supplement my oldies collection with CD reissues some 20 years ago, I made the error of buying discs from a couple of labels that, as it turned out, routinely mixed original recordings (typically only three or four per disc) with re-creations. One of these companies identified the originals with the tiniest possible asterisk; the other didn’t flag them at all. In the former case, the company claimed that, although not all the recordings were original, the original artists had made the re-creations. That’s hardly a guarantee that they’ll be any good. Back when various specialty labels were stumbling over themselves to bring out "audiophile" LPs, one company assembled enough old rockers to fill six albums with rerecorded hits; the sound was superb but, with only a few exceptions, the music was laughable. Those records reminded me of the cheap 10" LPs sold in the ’50s with a bunch of current hits rerecorded by anonymous musicians, to hideous effect. None of this is to suggest that there’s anything inherently wrong with remakes, as long as there is some new interpretation, but there seems little point in simply redoing what already exists. A case in point is the 1959 Flamingos hit "I Only Have Eyes for You." This was itself a reinterpretation of the 1934 Harry Warren original, written for a Hollywood musical, but it became a classic largely because it contained the distinctive she-bop-de-bop background riff, arguably one of the most famous in rock’n’roll. Art Garfunkel and Timothy B. Schmidt evidently thought so -- both recorded virtually identical versions, down to the last she-bop. Similarly, Amy Grant’s version of "Big Yellow Taxi" was virtually indistinguishable from Joni Mitchell’s original, except that the tree museum now cost $25 to get into rather than $1.50. Why bother? It shouldn’t come as a surprise that people are very protective of bits of their past, but the fact is often ignored. The worst abuses of this sort, in my view, arise from a tendency to rewrite pop songs as advertisements. There was considerable resistance some years ago when a bank co-opted Bob Dylan’s "The Times They Are A-Changin’" to flog its online services. The worst offender, however, seems to have been the Canadian retailer whose ads wrecked everything from the old Regents/Beach Boys frat-rock hit "Barbara Ann" to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. That seems to ignore the fact that people love or hate individual songs with considerable passion; if you tinker with them, they resent it. And if they already hate a song that’s been made into an ad, they’re unlikely to buy any product on the strength of it. ...Ian G. Masters
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