Round 2

Well..............since I can not for the life of me remember the password to my other blog.......& since I now have time again (work has dropped down to 40 hour weeks) I think I am going to give this another shot. Let's see if I can get more then 1 or 2 posts up here this time.

This blog is going to be about whatever I acquired over the course of a week or so that excited me the most.

This week I am going to split things up a bit..... as I am all whacked out form Vicodin my dentist prescribed me due to an extraction of the #13 molar & will be lucky if anything I post makes any sense.

The first thing is I have a friend named Disastro who is posting mix CD's of tracks he's diggin' at this moment. I have downloaded them all & I couldn't recommend them more to anyone looking to find some new sounds. He's flipped my whig on lots of things in the past & has never let me down so go here......

Disastro's Mix Tapes

Second thing is I FINALLY learned how to use PowerISO to convert a FLAC'ed CD into separate tracks using the .cue sheet.................. annoying it is but as some of my archives are in FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) it was a necessary evil. Guess you have to convert the single FLAC file into a single .WAV file THEN apply the .cue sheet. Whatever..............

OK...... now to the meat of all this. I am not sure what I want to delve into this week. Was thinking of discussing The Golden Dawn............. or The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band..........but realized that the only reason I wanted to was they were both files I was able to convert. So maybe next time..........

I think this week is going to be The Chocolate Watchband..............not just because they were damn good.......... & not because they have a goofy "food" name. (Will touch upon The Strawberry Alarm Clock & The Electric Prunes some other time.) But because their latest re-issue "Melts In Your Brain.....Not On Your Wrists" (2005 Big Beat U.K. 2 CD's) really just pisses me off. Right from the start it has got to be one of the most inane titles out there............... I mean......c'mon.............. They should have titled it something less silly like "The Complete Recordings" since that is what it is. This is the only thing the set has going for it in fact.............. there is no new info on the band in the liner notes. No recently discovered "Lost in the vaults" tracks. No "Never before seen photographs".
What there is in fact is pretty standard. All 3 of their Tower Records plus singles on 2 discs.

The only bonus the buyer gets is that the original lead singer David Aguilar came in & re-recorded 3 vocal tracks (Let's Talk About Girls, Medication & 'Til The End Of The Day) after the original vocal track was wiped by producer Ed Cobb & replaced (intentionally) by singer Don Bennett. Yes, this is a very crappy thing to do but the new vocals add nothing to the songs. This is not how people remember hearing those songs & I have only listened to them once. (They do nothing for me.) Neat idea? Yes. Except for the fact that 15 years previously there was a budget label (long gone) called Europium out of the U.K. that was doing that very same thing. Only they were taking the lead singer.....say Reg Presley of The Troggs (I had this disc) & playing an instrumental version of the song while Reg re-cut the vocals. Then they would issue said disc as a cheap best of...... needless to say this practice didn't last very long. Unfortunately Ed Cobb set the tone for the bands releases as on all 3 of their LP's (No Way Out, Inner Mystique & One Step Beyond) feature different musicians calling themselves "The Chocolate Watchband".

They did, at least, give some credit where credit was due by denoting that "Blues Theme" & "Loose Lip Synk Ship" are performed by "The Hogs", "Inner Mystique" & Voyage Of The Trieste" are performed by "The Yo-Yoz" & "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go" is performed by "The Inmates". Once I went thru both discs I just ended up cutting up the CD's into the original issue 3 LP's & slap on the singles as bonus tracks. Then returned the set.

Reissue labels really need to be very careful when messing w/ the customers memories. I think Big Beat blew it on this one. Everything was out of order & spread out over 2 discs only made it worse. No new pics, no new info, no unreleased tracks. Just re-recorded vocals & plenty of disarray. (Waste of time.)

Tho they didn't blow it as bas as Capitol did when The Beatles CD's first came out into the market. They put the UK versions out ONLY. The US versions of the LP's were very different then the UK versions & when The UK CD's came out there was mass confusion w/ the US buying public. The names of the CD's were different........the pics were different............. & some (if not most) of the tracks were different. Some people even thought that The Beatles had put out new material. On the other end of the spectrum we have EMI who issued Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut". They did put a bonus track on it. Which is very odd for Pink Floyd to do as they are very stingy w/ releasing anything from their vaults. But they stuck the song ("When The Tigers Broke Free" [from the movie "The Wall"]) in the middle of the track line up. Bad move guys. This may just be where the song would fit for you but is not how the LP now flows............. especially after listening to it for 25 years now. Bad juju.............just bad juju...........