Here’s a fantastic justification for the lack of posting today: The Second Disc has recently been preparing some interviews with some interesting characters within the reissue world. One of the interviews was conducted today with none other than Harry Weinger, vice-president of A&R for Universal Music Enterprises and gatekeeper of the catalogues for great soul labels and artists from Motown to James Brown. The full interview will be yours to read on Monday, but for now The Second Disc provides a few important morsels from the conversation – notably, some of the…
How Crowded is EMI’s House?
A fun little tidbit from release date king Pause & Play, himself a diligent arts journalist who just recently got to interview the members of Crowded House (their new album, Intriguer, was released this week). At the suggestion of some cheeky catalogue music blogger, P&P asked the members of the band if there were ever any plans to expand the band’s catalogue on CD. (The Crowded House discography is relatively free of B-sides, compared to some of their contemporaries, but demos and other outtakes would make for a great set, not unlike…
“Golden Years” Revisited
Details have arrived regarding the long-awaited deluxe edition of Station to Station, David Bowie’s 1976 album and the vehicle for his “Thin White Duke” character. Recorded while Bowie was arguably his most drug-addled, Station to Station featured the U.K. Top 10 hit “Golden Years,” as well as singles “TVC 15” and “Wild is the Wind.” The promotion of the LP saw Bowie in some of his most outrageous days; interviews were punctuated by the singer extolling the virtues of facism, and controversy boiled over when Bowie was allegedly photographed in mid-Nazi salute…
Rick Nelson Box Set Raves On
A hat tip to MusicTAP for pointing this one out: Bear Family, the inimitable German catalogue label specializing in reissues from the early days of rock, is issuing the last in a series of career-spanning box sets from the late, great Rick Nelson. In 1957, Ricky Nelson, the heartthrob co-star of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (which starred his parents), began to develop a rock ‘n’ roll career that thrived throughout the rest of the decade. Next to Elvis Presley and Pat Boone, there was no greater presence on the Top…
News Round-Up: Live CSNY, XTC on Vinyl, Teardrop Expands
An article from The Columbian of Clark County, Washington is making the rounds for noting that a box set is being prepped chronicling the 1974 tour of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Planned to enter stores around the holiday season, the set is said to comprise three CDs and a DVD, culled from eight of the best stops on the tour. The 1974 tour saw CSNY performing after a four-year hiatus; the outdoor-arena shows (among the first of their kind) often stretched to three hours of electric and acoustic performances. A hat…
It is Spartacus
Confirming months of rumor and speculation, Varese Sarabande Records has announced the full specifications for a lavish box set version of the music to Alex North’s score to the classic sword-and-sandal epic Spartacus. The honchos at Varese weren’t kidding; the venerable score label’s latest limited release (the 1000th to be produced by longtime producer Robert Townson) is easily the largest set ever devoted to a single film score. A jaw-dropping six CDs and a DVD make up the set, featuring the entire film score in monaural sound, all the surviving stereo mixes of…
Back Tracks: Michael Jackson Part 2 – The Epic Years and Beyond
After poring through Michael Jackson’s Motown years, we commemorate the year anniversary of his passing with a look at the material he recorded as an adult for Epic Records. If the J5 material was platinum, much of this stuff is uncut diamond – and the world is eagerly waiting to see what Sony will do with this material for catalogue purposes. (A multi-album deal has been struck, with the first batch of material likely due for the holidays, alongside a new video game based on Jackson’s music.) Again, this can’t possibly as…
Back Tracks: Michael Jackson Part 1 – The Motown Years
With Friday being the year anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death, The Second Disc would be at fault for not commemorating The King of Pop’s recording career and its representation through catalogue preservation. But to quote a dusty outtake from The Jackson 5, we’re gonna change our style. Your humble correspondent cannot possibly say anything about Jackson’s career that hasn’t already been said in the year since he passed away. There are plenty of other resources for such a thing – I recommend Popdose’s ongoing multi-part retrospective – but here will be simply…
Tracking You Down
A little early-afternoon treat to readers of The Second Disc: another poll! The last one, drafted during the Exile on Main St. reissue bonanza, was pretty darn successful, and this one’s going to get things moving with a pretty simple question we’ve never asked before. What sort of bonus tracks get you to buy a reissue or deluxe title? It’s a simple question, but one that can spark a myriad of discussion. Of course, it can be a case-by-case query. Prince fans are probably looking more for unreleased songs from the fabled…
Rhino Handmade Goes “On Tour” Plus a Bit of Live Dead
Rhino Handmade has announced its latest title, a thoroughly expanded edition of Delaney & Bonnie’s seminal live LP On Tour with Eric Clapton. In late 1969, Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett embarked on a killer tour that included some of the best blues and rock musicians of the era. Clapton was the featured performer, to be sure, but that tour also included star turns from Leon Russell, Dave Mason of Traffic, Carl Radle, Jim Gordon and Bobby Whitlock (who would form Derek and The Dominos with Clapton) and a performer credited as L’Angelo…
Hancock in a Box
A quick heads-up from the Twitter feed of music Web site Innerviews (thanks to MusicTAP for the heads-up) that Legacy plans on releasing yet another humongous box set for one of their artists. Jazz legend Herbie Hancock will join the ranks of Miles Davis, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan in getting a super-sized box. CD Universe has a pre-order page for The Complete Columbia Collection, a 35-disc box encompassing everything Hancock did for the label, from 1973’s Sextant to Perfect Machine (1988). This is not a career-spanning set, as Hancock recorded for Blue…
Tangled Up in Bob: Dylan To Be Boxed Again?
The music of Bob Dylan is widely credited with introducing the concept of the box set to the CD era with the 1985 release Biograph (Columbia C3K 38830, reissued as C3K 86568). Further Dylan box sets have followed including 1991’s The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare and Unreleased): 1961-1991 (Columbia C3K 47382, reissued as C3K 65302), 2003’s limited edition catalog reissue box simply collecting 15 individually-available hybrid Super Audio CD editions of his catalog (Columbia 90615), and most recently, the career-spanning Dylan (Columbia 88697 11420 2-S1). Well, in an interview on Wednesday…
Prince Week Day 7: Crystal Ball
In the penultimate entry of Prince Week (I know, this is Day 7, but we got one more piece for you tomorrow), The Second Disc turns its attention to one of the most fertile times in Prince’s life. From 1986 to 1987, just two short years, His Royal Badness managed to record enough material for a good four or five albums; it should go without saying that this material would be greatly served in a box set from Rhino at some point in time. Hit the jump to get your world rocked…
Box Set Round-Up: Hank Williams and Level 42
There’s a pair you’d never expect to see in the same title. A few bits of news around the way regarding a few box sets coming up. First up, Time-Life has got a really large box set of Hank Williams material coming out. The Complete Mother’s Best Recordings…Plus! is a 16-disc box set (including a DVD) of all Williams legendary, surviving recordings for Nashville radio station WSM (where he had his own show sponsored by Mother’s Best Flour). These 72 acetates were recorded through 1951, two years before Williams died at just…
Prince Week Day 4: The Reissue Conundrum
Talking about Prince on a blog devoted to back catalogue music usually results in three considerations: 1) Prince really should allow remasters/reissues of his astounding discography, 2) Prince won’t ever allow remasters/reissues of said discography and 3) why the heck not? As many of his fellow contemporaries (Madonna, Michael Jackson, Rick James, etc.) and other luminaries (The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, even The Beatles) have enjoyed remastering and rediscovery on compact disc, Prince has not. Even more disturbing is that he may never – and worse yet, no one quire understands why….
Paying the Price
Next week is going to be much more comfortable when it comes to posting on The Second Disc. After several months of bitterly typing and researching over a creaky, aging Dell PC (having lost a nearly-just-as-creaky Thinkpad T60 laptop), the weekend should see your humble correspondent upgrading to a Macbook. As a lifelong Windows user (barring my time writing and editing for my newspaper in college), it’s an unusual but worthwhile transition, and I can’t wait to regain simple pleasures like posting outside, from the deck in the backyard, cold drinks and…
Miles More
Eighty-four years ago today, Miles Dewey Davis III was brought into the world. His contributions to the fabric of American music – jazz, pop, rock, whatever you want to call it – are immense. Accordingly, he has been celebrated often by the label with which he had his greatest successes, Columbia Records. Last year, the label released The Complete Columbia Album Collection, a 70 CD/1 DVD box set which captured just that: every one of the LPs Davis recorded for the label from 1957 to 1985. It ended up setting quite a…
The Trend
When The Second Disc’s Exile on Main St. poll was posted, I mentioned that I had noticed a rather unusual trend in the purchase of the various deluxe sets that were available. As a member of the electronics/entertainment staff at a Target store, I was able to track a few of the big sets, some of which were only available through our retailers. Target was the only place to get the bonus disc of the deluxe edition (that is, the Rarities Edition), as well as the fan pack which bundled a t-shirt…
Friday Feature: The Star Wars Trilogy
It was three decades ago today that The Empire Strikes Back was released. Much has been written about what the movie did for the Star Wars trilogy as a cultural force (no pun intended), for sequels in general and so on. But let’s not kid ourselves here: when Empire first came out, it was not seen as the masterpiece it is now. The New York Times gave this film – easily the most watchable of the three Star Wars movies – a largely negative write-up. But whatever the merit of such reviews…
Fit for a King
Count your pennies, readers: Legacy is set to announce a box set that will be one heck of a collector’s item. You might want to sit down for these, especially if you’re a fan of…The King. Elvis Presley: The Complete Masters. It’s happening. Thirty(!) discs of 711 tracks. It’s everything you could imagine for Elvis – listed as “every song Elvis recorded for release during his lifetime in a single collection” plus “103 additional tracks, rarities and a 240-page hardbound book featuring an annotated discography, album artwork, rare and classic photos, a…
Miles and Miles of Miles
Well, damn. After blowing minds in the jazz world with last year’s The Complete Columbia Album Collection, Legacy gears up a few more Miles Davis reissues that are sure to pique the interests of devoted listeners and rarity hunters. On August 31, Columbia and Legacy will re-release the trumpeter’s acclaimed Bitches Brew as a Legacy Edition. The original album in its eight-track studio mix (as opposed to more recent digital remixes) will be enhanced with bonus session tracks and a newly-released DVD of the Miles Davis Quintet playing live in Copenhagen in 1969….
Review: The Rolling Stones, “Exile on Main Street” Deluxe Edition
Few records hold the mystique of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. Myths have grown and books have been published in an attempt to explain the sprawling album. The story generally goes that 1972 found the band, literally, as tax exiles, seeking refuge across the English Channel in France. A villa in Villefranche-sur-Mer named Nellcote is rented. Music is made. Sex and drugs abound. Somehow in all this debauchery a record is produced, and that record is Exile on Main St. When Universal Music acquired the rights to reissue and remaster the Rolling Stones catalogue, the big…
Back Tracks: Ronnie James Dio
The loss of Ronnie James Dio resounds greatly in the world of metal. The famed vocalist, best known for his time in Black Sabbath and his own eponymous band Dio, had a powerful voice that few in the hard rock spectrum could compete with. He was a prolific talent who left behind not only a lot of influences, but a lot of catalogue work from a half-century(!) of recording. That’s right: Dio first got his start way back in 1957 as a bassist for The Vegas Kings, a teen-rock outfit that saw plenty…
Recapturing the Magic
It was during a recent, animated conversation about back catalogue affairs that a stunning realization was made. Of all the major companies dealing in music and pop culture, there is one that has a surprisingly subdued place in the world of reissues. Were this company to change their mind about catalogue affairs and start utilizing their vast discography for more box sets and other special titles, it might be a step in revitalizing the whole reissue practice in general. I’m talking, of course, about The Walt Disney Company. I know. It’s probably not what…
News Round-Up: Steve Winwood, India.Arie and The Stooges
There’s some new info to post about Revolutions: The Very Best of Steve Winwood, the upcoming four-disc Steve Winwood box that may or may not be as good as the last Winwood box. This comes from a comment by an admin on Winwood’s official Web site. Also, note that the Amazon selling price is a not-terrible $39.98: All the material in this box set was transferred from the original analogue master tapes at 24-bit, 192k resolution in 2010 using the highest quality Prism A-D conversion. The albums “About Time” and “Nine Lives” have been entirely…
