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
Reissue Theory: The Smiths, "Meat is Murder"
"Re-issue ! Re-package ! Re-package ! Re-evaluate the songs Double-pack with a photograph Extra track (and a tacky badge)" - "Paint a Vulgar Picture," The Smiths Sometimes one wonders why a band as listenable, influential and obsessed over as The Smiths doesn't get much in the way of back catalogue treatment. Outside of a few compilations (most recently 2008's The Sound of The Smiths) and a box set of reproduced singles, that's been more or less it; the albums haven't been repressed since
Back Tracks: The Solo Bacharach
May 12, 2012: Happy 84th birthday, Burt Bacharach! The living legend was recently the recipient, with longtime lyricist Hal David, of The Library of Congress' Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, bestowed upon the team by President Barack Obama. In celebration of the maestro's birthday and this great honor, we're republishing this special installment of Back Tracks, exploring Bacharach's solo career from 1965's Hit Maker! through 2008's Live at the Sydney Opera House! Age hasn’t slowed Burt
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
Reissue Theory: Naked Eyes
Eighty-two years ago today, a Kansas City, Miss. couple named Bert and Irma Bacharach welcomed a son, Burt, into the world. In 1957, the young songwriter met a lyricist, Hal David, at a meeting in the Brill Building in New York City. The rest, as they say, was history, with some of the most enduring popular songs of century flowing from their pens. This is a difficult fact to grasp if you're a young person. Nowadays, people couldn't really care less who writes the songs that make the whole
A "Four Score" from Intrada
Get ready to run up a staircase with excitement: Intrada has announced the first-ever score release of Vince DiCola's Rocky IV. The fourth, perhaps most over-the-top sequel in the long-running franchise pitted Sylvester Stallone's heavyweight champ against a feared opponent from the Soviet Union. Like its predecessor, Rocky IV was buoyed by a handful of pop hits, including two Top 5 smashes for Survivor ("Burning Heart") and James Brown (the vaguely left-field "Living in America"). Often
And Don't It Feel Good (To Have an Update)
Way back in the early days of The Second Disc, we reported on a set of remasters from Katrina and The Waves due for an April release. Only somewhat recently did we realize the release date had passed - but unlike most reissues that get announced and forgotten about, these actually came out. Well, sort of, anyway. As of this writing, all four reissued LPs (Kimberley Rew's The Bible of Bop, featuring tracks from The Waves, The Soft Boys and The dB's; The Waves' debut EP, Shock Horror! and both
Back Tracks: Barry Manilow, Part 2 (1985-2010)
Back Tracks left Barry Manilow in 1984 after the release of his first genre-specific album, the jazz-inflected 2:00 a.m. Paradise Café. We pick up with him shifting gears in an attempt to once again court the pop market. He’s left his longtime label, Arista, and signed a new deal with RCA. This union would be a short-lived one, producing just four albums: two sets of his greatest hits as sung in Spanish and Portuguese, and the following two discs... Manilow (RCA, 1985 - reissued Legacy,
Reissue Theory: Celine Dion, "Falling Into You"
The Second Disc's Mother's Day Mania continues with a Reissue Theory look at Celine Dion's Falling Into You, the Canadian chanteuse's fourth English-language LP and one of her all-time best. Wait, what? For some, it is weird to label a Celine Dion record as good. Even more forgiving folks will come down hard on her for what some would consider her increasingly schmaltz output over the years (particularly after the inescapable "My Heart Will Go On" helped propel Titanic to an even wider
Back Tracks: Barry Manilow, Part 1 (1973-1984)
Where Barry Manilow is concerned, it's best to let the facts speak for themselves. A Grammy, Emmy and Tony Award winner, Manilow scored his first Billboard No. 1 album in 1977, his most recent in 2006. His string of hit singles extended from 1974's chart-topping "Mandy" to 1983's Top 20 "Read 'Em and Weep," with 38 songs hitting the Top 40. He's recorded over 25 studio albums and released countless more live discs, compilations and soundtracks, and regularly plays to sell-out houses after over
The Sun Still Shines on T.V.
Talk about timing. With hours to go before a-ha played their first U.S. date in years, the band's official Web site revealed a delightful pair of track lists for the promised deluxe editions of Hunting High and Low and Scoundrel Days from Rhino. The sets should be ready to pre-order May 11, says the band's site, and will be in the hands of fans by June. Check out these stunning track lists and some more a-ha thoughts and treats after the jump.
Review: Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim, "Sinatra/Jobim: The Complete Reprise Recordings"
"Tall and tan and young and handsome..." Those lyrics to Antonio Carlos Jobim's "The Boy from Ipanema" kicked off a bossa nova boom that saw virtually every noteworthy vocalist and jazz musician of the 1960s recording in the mellow Brazilian style. Frank Sinatra, though, was hardly one to follow a trend for hipness' sake. By 1967, the label he founded, Reprise, was turning its sights to Laurel Canyon and Haight-Ashbury, and the bossa craze was on the wane. Sinatra would, as always, record on his
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,
Friday Feature: "Commando"
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teSmRfAtDOU] As a forgiving film fan, I was appalled by the recent news that 20th Century Fox was planning on remaking Commando, the 1985 action flick that became Arnold Schwarzenegger's first star vehicle after The Terminator the previous year. Hollywood's fascination with remakes is too well-known, but surely someone could have drawn a line with Commando. The film has Schwarzenegger as - what else? - a one-man wrecking crew named John Matrix determined
Back Tracks: Poison
The way culture advances nowadays, it's not surprising to realize you've forgotten certain ways you might have thought or felt about a musician in particular. For instance, when singer Bret Michaels was rushed to the hospital last week after suffering a massive brain hemorrhage, I'm sure many people (especially younger ones with less perspective) immediately thought of Michael's career as a reality show star - he's currently on NBC's Celebrity Apprentice and has spent three years on the abysmal
Boxed In
Reaction to the recently-released tracklist for John Mellencamp's On the Rural Route 7609 box set has been a bit mixed, and for good reason. It's hard to greet a four-disc box set full of album tracks and just over a dozen unreleased outtakes with a price tag of nearly $100. But it's becoming clear that there's a bigger issue here at stake than Mellencamp fans getting soaked. Friends, the entire concept of a box set is in a state of crisis. It's been a long two decades since compact disc box
Soundtrack Miracles and More
A heads-up for two brand-new releases from indie soundtrack label Intrada. This week's batch is quite eclectic: first up is Laurence Rosenthal's score to the classic 1962 film version of The Miracle Worker, available for the first time on CD. This disc is sourced from Rosenthal's own first-generation mono 1/4" tapes and produced with full support from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film's distributor. This is a limited one at just 1,000 copies, so act fast. Intrada's other release turns to the small
Back Tracks: Paul McCartney
Every now and then a catalogue-oriented story breaks into the mainstream. This week, we've had one of those moments: Paul McCartney is moving his back catalogue distribution to Concord Music Group from increasingly beleaguered EMI. Reissues will commence in August with a new pressing of Band on the Run, his high watermark with former band Wings. Of course, for someone of McCartney's caliber, this is not the first time his albums have been reissued. EMI did a massive remastering of 16
Friday Feature: "Licence to Kill"
Recent coverage of soundtracks on The Second Disc has been warmly received. To this end, we have added a the Friday Feature. Every Friday, you'll find some sort of article devoted to a soundtrack or film composer of merit. We hope you enjoy these trips through Hollywood's musical landscape! Our first Friday Feature deals with one of the oddest of the James Bond films. No, not Never Say Never Again (that's not really a Bond film, anyway). Licence to Kill was the second and final feature with
Review: Tom Lehrer, "The Tom Lehrer Collection"
The career of Tom Lehrer is an improbable one. A Harvard mathematics instructor by day and musical satirist by night, Lehrer was never particularly prolific. His entire output amounts to around 50 songs and a handful of albums which have been repackaged over the years. Most of his oeuvre was recorded between 1953 and 1965. Yet he was the recipient of a lavish 3-CD Rhino box set collecting most of his work in one place (The Remains of Tom Lehrer, Rhino R2 79831), and with that set now
Reissue Theory: Sting, "The Dream of the Blue Turtles"
The latest issue of Rolling Stone had a cover feature about the "State of Rock: 40 Reasons to Get Excited About Music" (a cover which featured terrible pop-rap group The Black Eyed Peas, so the list was slightly less than 40). As debatable as the list might be, one item on the list was actually somewhat intriguing - up and coming band I Blame Coco, led by Coco Sumner, daughter of the irrepressible Sting. Coco is not the first Sting spawn with musical tendencies - his oldest son, Joe, fronts the
Not Quite What You Need
It might be seen as unfair to criticize the catalogue-oriented decisions of INXS. Since losing lead singer Michael Hutchence in 1997, they've tried hard to find their way - finding a new singer through a reality show, recording an album with him, prepping a new album with a rotating stable of lead singers and so on. Rhino, the label that controls their back catalogue in the U.S., has released a lot of compilations in the interim as well, plus a few reissues of their late '80s/early '90s work
Reissue Theory: Neil Diamond with a Bang!
Long before he read about a frog who dreamed of being a king – and then became one – Neil Diamond was an up-and-coming songwriter in the waning days of the Brill Building. After a few unsuccessful stabs at recording in the early part of the decade, Diamond was taken under the wing of Jeff Barry, Ellie Greenwich and Bert Berns. In January 1966, the hits started coming: first “Sunday and Me” for Jay and the Americans, then “I’m A Believer” and “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You,” both for the
On the Right (Sound)Track
Here at The Second Disc, there's a lot of coverage of soundtracks. (For proof, check Joe Marchese's recent exciting review of a few vault reissues by Henry Mancini.) Granted, not every fan of classic pop, rock and R&B catalogue releases is big on orchestral scores and whatnot, but it's an integral genre in the wide, wild world of reissues and worth covering from an artistic point of view. But recent revelations have shown that soundtrack catalogue comings and goings are worth covering from
News Roundup: Unreleased Motown and More Coming From Ace
I’ve often described Ace Records as the “British Rhino.” If Rhino pioneered the concept of the deluxe reissue in America – containing bonus tracks, in-depth liner notes and unique packaging – Ace keeps the original Rhino tradition alive across the pond. Virtually every month, Ace and its family of labels releases a handful of titles (both album reissues and compilations) to make collectors’ mouths water. The batch arriving in the UK on April 26 and on our shores throughout May is no