To say this is the greatest announcement in the history of the world, ever, is to understate its importance.


[www.billboard.com]

Sweet!

I am an enormous Replacements fan -- admittedly not enough to incorporate into my TP username but a huge fan nonetheless. (In fact I dont know where my username came from, but that is a different story) They are truthfully my first or second favorite band of all time. Let It Be is one of the most perfect records of the 1980's. I have a framed album cover on my basement wall. And yet, I have to ask:

Why would I want some outtakes and alternate takes tacked onto the end of that howl of anguish known as Answering Machine which closes the record on the perfect note of teenage pain? One of the few "re-issued" CD's I owned is Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain CD and I have never been able to get over the feeling that this product is not the original album. I still mentally think of the original album as that cassette tape that kicked around my car for 15 years. In other words, my belief that an original album is a complete artistic statement transcends any desire I have to hear bonus material from an artist I love. I have heard "20th Century Boy", "Perfectly Lethal," and "Temptation Eyes" and they are good outtakes so far as outtakes go. And yet, sticking them on the end of an album seems kind of a sacrilege to me. It's the DVD with the alternate ending phenomenon: it is an ahistorical way to treat art which is already a perfect whole. In the best case, I feel like all bonus material should be added to a second CD. That would alleviate most of my anxiety I think. But even still, I would rather have none.

Am I turning into Bob Costas (i.e. a hopelessly romantic keeper-of-the-flame type) or is this not good news? Does anyone else agree with this attitude towards reissued/repackaged albums?

I've been thinking about this issue the past few months myself. In general, I agree with you - put the bonus material on another disk, or at the very least put some extra silence between the end of the album proper and the bonus tracks. It bugs me too when the song obviously intended to be the final bit of music on an album is followed by something else. The Rhino reissues of the Elvis Costello catalog is a good example of how to do reissues right.

That said, sometimes the outtakes/bonus tracks are songs that were always intended to be on an album but were cut for space reasons. If the artist is given the job of reintegrating those songs into the reissue, it usually works. (I'm not saying that's the case with the Mats reissues.)

Plus I imagine it's not cost-effective for a record company to manufacture a two-disk set when they can fit the music on one disk. That's the primary reason for the current practice, I'm sure.



Post Edited (02-14-08 08:58)

jothoma, I also wasn't too happy about "Let It Be.....Naked". They should have released the Glyn Johns version, down to the cover w/them posing as they did in their first album. That "bonus disc" wasn't any great shakes either.

So will the new version be "Let It Be...Fully Clothed"? I like what Ryko did with its Costello CD's, leaving a blank space of 15 seconds after the album and before the bonus cuts. It gave you the sense of conclusion the album needed and didn't rush the other material after it. Are the Rhino reissues any better? I'm not so much into more and more bonus material, but am into better sound for the album in question. I hate the idea of buying an album in some format for the fifth time.

What Delvin said.

The original album is on disk 1, sounding great, while the Ryko bonus cuts and stuff beyond that is on disk 2. Of course, most of the bonuses are demos of album cuts, and that's not always as revelatory as record company publicists might have you believe.

That said, the demos included on Rhino's Imperial Bedroom set are often substantially different than the finished versions, especially "Beyond Belief," so that one's definitely worth it.

I totally agree with the perspective that bonus tracks sort of taint the integrity of the original album release especially in those horrible instances where some genius came up with the great idea of putting some of the bonus tracks in between the songs on the original release and not just merely tacking them on at the end (ugh). I think an equal offender of this (as I mentioned here a while back) is the two albums on one CD packaging. I do own a few of these under protest (Chrome, Shoes, Gram Parsons, etc.). Most people would welcome the opportunity to get a reduced price for two albums on one disc (and I really can't argue with them either really) but I'd much more prefer to have each album by itself which brings me back to the original bonus track point at hand.

I look more negatively on bonus tracks tacked onto some of my more favorite artists' albums than I do for the average artist who I merely like enough to own CDs by. For instance, it didn't bother me too much when I got bonus track material with the self-titled Echo & The Bunnymen CD (after all, that early version of Bring On The Dancing Horses originally titled Jimmy Brown absolutely blows away the tamer version they subsequently recorded). At the same time, I think I'd rather have those early classic Bowie discs without all the bonus material on it (even though some of it is outstanding). However, I'd still like to have bonus track material somewhere and the second disc suggestion is a good one although I can certainly understand the cost factors prohibiting such a practice.

Ultimately, I'd rather have an album as it was originally released despite what the artist's intentions might have really been. Put quite simply, if that's how the album was originally released then that's the copy I want. But I came to realize that I'm probably being too nit-picky, very few people care about it and it is never going to change so there's nothing I can do but accept it. I'm essentially in the minority and maybe rightly so although it still doesn't change how I feel.

Of course, this becomes a bit irrelevant when iPods come into the equation but that's another conversation entirely. Afterall, I'm not totally like Costas. Sure I despise interleague play in baseball but I have come around on the wild card.

Hmm - I guess I'll have to determine if it would be better to just download the Replacements bonus tracks and burn them to CD so I have them somewhere and keep the original albums as they were released or just replace the ones I have in toto with the new reissues. It's a 50/50 prospect right now.

Was I the only one who was pissed when the Beatles released "Let It Be... Naked" over just officially releasing the Glyn Johns produced "Get BacK" album they assembled in 1968? Sure the sound was a vast improvement over the over production that Phil Spector added but I felt it would have brought historic justice to release the album as originally intended.

Can't you just program the track selection on the CD, to play the tracks you want in the order you want to hear them — i.e., to duplicate the original album — and skip the ones you don't care to hear?

GREAT NEWS!!!!!!

You guys are fanatics. A few bonus songs at the end are always fun.

Actually the Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane 2 disc 30th anniversary editions are ideal. One disc of the OG and then a second for extras. Ziggy was the same.

From my scavenging/listening experiences, the Rhino 2-CD reissues of Costello's catalog include all the same material as the Ryko reissues, plus some more goodies. Armed Forces, for example, includes the Live at Hollywood High promo, along with all the extra tracks that had appeared on the Ryko edition.