CDs stack up like cord wood under the best of circumstances; going into the black hole of Jazz Fest just exacerbates the problem. Here’s a quick trip through recent reissues:
Carole King – Tapestry (Ode/Epic/Legacy): Still sounds great, and the second disc of live solo takes of the album’s songs from the 1970s (which are supposedly more intimate) highlight how genuinely intimate the full band version is. Live, it’s clear she’s singing to a audience; in the studio, it sounds like she’s singing “You’re as beautiful as you feel” to the mirror.
The Replacements – Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, Stink, Hootenanny and Let it Be (all on Twin-Tone/Rhino):
The first time around, I heard the first three albums on campus radio and liked them when I heard them but wasn’t motivated enough to buy them. The only song that stayed with me from those was Stink ‘s “God Damn Job,” so hearing them again borders on a first listen, and they don’t really show their age. There’s not much essential listening on anything before Let it Be, but on Hootenanny, you can hear a band stretching its musical muscles to see what they can do. Nothing quite prepares you for the leap in ambition and sophistication they made between that album and Let it Be and I wonder if I would have been irritated by Hootenanny‘s all-over-the-place quality when it was first released in 1983 when I didn’t know what would follow it. There’s little left to say about Let it Be, which belongs in everybody’s collection. The bonus tracks are unnecessary on all the discs, but the demos on Sorry Ma suggest that the band was fully formed right from the start and just needed time to discover their voice.
Mission of Burma – Signals, Calls and Marches, Vs. and the Horrible Truth About the Mission of Burma (all on Matador): The first two Mission of Burma releases are, like Let it Be, pretty essential discs from the American post-punk moment (late 1970s to early 1980s), and it’s impossible to imagine the Pixies without Mission of Burma.
Otis Redding – Otis Blue (Atco/Rhino): Bonus live stuff that lets you hear Otis the showman, bonus alternate takes and B-sides that are the usual reissue filler, and mono and stereo mix of a classic album.
Steinski – What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective (Illegal Art): Not a reissue, strictly speaking, but it’s a collection of work by one of the people who treated DJing as a form of collage, assembling a financially suicidal number of film clips and samples into a danceable whole. The first five tracks were recorded with Double Dee, and after “The Payoff Mix,” it sounds like they got caught in a formula, giving James Brown, hip-hop, jazz and Sugar Hill Records the Double Dee and Steinski treatment. The post-Double Dee material isn’t as compulsively filled with stuff, which gives the parts a chance to accumulate, resonate and speak to each other. “The Motorcade Sped On” is built on broadcast tapes from the Kennedy assassination, and it starts with Ed McMahon’s introduction, “here’s Johnny,” followed by the opening chord to “Hard Day’s Night,” then John F. Kennedy’s voice. The link of him to the Beatles is a nice comment, one echoed later when a news anchor reads, “Mrs. Kennedy jumped up, she called ‘Oh no,'” and “Oh no” is repeated until it sounds like “Ono,” while a voice yelps in the background. Revolution is evoked when the word “Time” is looped over a drum and cowbell pattern that recalls the psychedelic mid-song freakout in the Chamber Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today.” Am I inventing connections? Maybe, but in the best of these tracks – and the second disc, a mix prepared for the BBC – he scatters enough voices and ideas to suggest a comment and conversation.
