I was 16 at the beginning of my senior year in hs when this came out.

Damn, this is nice !  Side 1 so far. Love, love the new mix and the clarity.  It should have sounded like this on day one, imho ...

Side 2 is soaking ... 

Side 2 is just as nice as Side 1.  Funny, this might be the first use of a (sorta) hidden track on an album.

This is the best this album has ever sounded.

 Proclivities wrote: 
I'm a fan for sure.  A musician / engineer.  I might put him up there with the likes of Steven Wilson and Todd, who was one of the first of this skill set.  Al Kooper also comes to mind and may have even mentored Todd at some level. Saw Todd last night btw.

This is one of my desert island albums.  It is also a musical reset button for when I get out of sync with life.  I became very used to hearing it a certain way off the CD.  Never knew anything different.  Usually it is the other way around.  This was originally recorded on analogue tape and released on vinyl initially but only one pressing in several countries.  The rest since has been on CD and cassette.  1995 was at the end of vinyl the first time around.  From the early 90's most of the remaining vinyl issues of new albums were being made in Europe.  The USA was the first to let go.  And fwiw, it is these 90's copies of albums that are currently worth the most on average price wise and some of the rarest.

Vinyl is now a pretty complicated thing to play anymore with all the different materials, thicknesses and different cutting lathes and then the playback hardware.  Regardless of all of that, once you get your cart aligned properly (offset angle, overhang / zenith, azimuth) to get it tangentially perpendicular to the arc and perpendicular to the surface , you still have to be able to change the vertical tracking angle (VTA) or rake angle of the stylus cantilever for each individual piece of vinyl.  Too low, too bassy and sibilance can happen.  So you raise the height / angle to tune in the sound.  If you have sibilance, you raise it until it is gone.  That may be too high though and you lose the bass, so you have to go back and forth until you find the right spot. It requires that you make the final choice by ear and may have to make compromises.  More subjectivity to one of the most subjective things to begin with.  There are some albums where I change the VTA by .25 mm or more up or down on the other side just to get it to sound right to my ears.  I have had to do this with this album already, raising the height for Side D about .3 mm over the height for Side C on the second take which I'm playing as I write this.  I'll take it off the TT and wash it again and start over, recheck the settings playing it at least three more times.  Now up .5 mm on take 3.  And yes, vinyl does break in as well.

This is half the reason I rip the vinyl in the first place.  It's just to capture the optimal playback with the optimal settings.  I am not a vinyl romanticist per say.  I love the sound, not all the hassle that goes with it.  Iffen I had to go and reset everything every time I wanted to play something, I probably would not.  I would have to have notes inside of with the album for every time I played it.

This particular album also being at 45 rpm speed might add even more possibilities to this adjustment.  I'm working on finding out about that.  So I picked my starting height and was really shocked to hear the vocals really muffled and things way too bassy than I remembered.  I thought that I picked a good height based on the thickness.  I've since figured it out and played it vs the rip of an early CD of this album.  The vinyl sounds as it should, and actually better than my CD copy.  Turns out that the CD clips all over the place, it was done way too loud.  But who knew back then or cared (as much) ?  That and CD's can clip and still play and sound decent.  Vinyl cannot clip and will not play properly if it does.  The stylus will jump out of the groove.

 kurtster wrote:
 
The thought of hearing vinyl after knowing the digital or CD version for so long hadn't occurred to me before.  Their records generally sounded good; Butch Vig is a wizard in the studio.

2015 EU 2 X 12" @ 45 RPM 20th anniversary pressing

Very interesting experience listening to something very familiar on vinyl for the very first time.  It has taken a lot of different Vertical Tracking Adjustments to get it to sound close to like it should.  But I only know what the CD sounds like.  Still not there after 4 different height changes up .25 mm at a time.  Gonna have to go back and play the CD for a refresher.

 KurtfromLaQuinta wrote:
 
Ditto!!

1969 US 1st  A noticeably thicker deep groove copy and a hot (loud) pressing.  

 KurtfromLaQuinta wrote: 
Happy Ways is my favorite song on the album.  We had a great local live version here in Cleveburg of Rocky Mountain Way with Joe singing "Nixon's at bat" instead of "Casey's at bat" along with some other lyric changes that I simply cannot find anywhere. WMMS played it for years.  The summer after the album came out in 1974, the Indians decided to do a concert after a ball game on a sunny summer afternoon.  Joe and company opened for the Beach Boys with Brian there.  After the game, they rolled out a decent sized stage and set it up on 2nd Base , Joe did his stuff.  And the BB's did a really nice show as well.  It sure was a really fun time.  Have a really clean copy of Barnstorm, too.  I think I will tidy them both up and put them up by the end of next week in that other thread for well you know ...  I know there are more than a couple of Joe fans around here.


At the end of that show it was announced that tickets would be going on sale for an Elton John and Billy Joel concert the following year at the Stadium.  It never happened.  I had to wait 40 years for them to come here together in town.  That was a really great show.  The wife was still going back and forth then and got to see them in a small venue in LA about two months earlier, too.  I found some info regarding the stadium show.  World Series of Rock   I am pretty sure that REO and Skynyrd did not show up.  I did find a poster for a show I had totally forgotten about that I did go to where REO opened and basically got boo'ed off the stage.  Halloween, 1973.  This was the concert where the album was introduced.  I was living in Kent trying to go to school there like everyone else.  I had just got out of the hospital after breaking my arm a few weeks earlier on my 21st Bday, playing tackle football bare footed in T shirts and jeans and after we had just got done busting up an LB and a long taste testing.  Not a good idea.  So my arm was still in a sling because they put a plate in it because it was the bone between my shoulder and elbow.  The choice was an upper body cast for three months because it was the only way to lock my shoulder and elbow at the same time or put a plate in and be out in a week.  I took the plate.  And so it goes.  I went to many of the WSOR concerts including the CSNY one which at the time established a closed arena attendance record of 88,000 of your closest friends.  And so I did see Santana after all. Hmmm. I do remember the Band and Jesse though.  Opium. 'nuff said bout that.

 kurtster wrote:
 
Love, love that album.

Finally getting around to flipping over the record.  It's been sitting on the TT since August 27th when I was working on my last mixtape.  Too long without listening to live vinyl.

 kurtster wrote:
 
Nice!

 Proclivities wrote: 
Yeah, side 2 is excellent.  Maybe one of my favorite album sides, period.  Comfort food.  The more I get back into vinyl, the more I am reminded that I had several dozen go to album sides that I preferred to listen to vs the whole album.  While there are strong songs on the flip sides of some of these albums, the whole side is not something I would want to listen to on a regular basis.

 kurtster wrote:
 
I used to listen to that album a lot in the late '70s - especially side 2.

1976 UK 1st press.

1970 Japanese 1st press.

1974 2nd press with the 1973 stereo remix.

1979 Japanese 1st press.  Guilty pleasure stuff ...

Japanese 1st press white label Promo just arrived. 
The difference in sound from the US 1st is really hard to believe.  It goes from great to delicious.