August ICE news

[John Johanneson <JOHANNESON@macc.wisc.edu>]

Deface the DaVincis at the Louvre. Yell "Ban assault weapons" at an
NRA convention. Order veal at a vegetarian restaurant. But-unless you
really want to court controversy-don't reissue an album by The Who.
Following the June release of the revamped A Quick One and The Who
Sell Out CDs, the wrath of Who fans descended rapidly.

Before we get into the meaty (and beaty, big, and bouncy) issues, a
few quick ones can be polished off. Several readers told us that "I
Can See For Miles" (on Sell Out) skipped on certain CD players at
3:35 into the song. MCA officials are checking out the problem and
will respond in next month's issue. The "stereo" notation on the disc
itself for A Quick One, which irked a number of readers because much
of the CD is in mono, was placed there by the art director when
replicating the Who's Reaction-era logo, and was not intended to
mislead consumers. The "remixed" notation stickered on A Quick One,
which several readers felt implied that the entire album's contents
had been remixed, was intended to indicate only that some tracks-not
all were remixed. And the version of "Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand"
(track #22 on Sell Out) is a previously unreleased third version,
clearly differing from both the album take (track #3 or the CD) and
the single version on the U.S. B side of "I Can See For Miles."
Although it's labeled "Alternative Version" on the back of the CD,
the booklet mistakenly refers to it as the single version.

ICE talked to two of the Who reissue program's principal architects.
Jon Astley is the compilation producer, responsible for selecting
(with group leader Pete Townshend) and remixing the tracks for final
inclusion on the reissues. Chris Charlesworth describes his
responsibilities as supervising the packaging an proposing the bonus
tracks: "I [combine] my Who collection, my bootlegs and my knowledge,
and-knowing what Pete has-I put together an intelligent selection. I
propose those to Pete; he says yea or nay."

The bulk of reader complaints concerned the mono/stereo issue on A
Quick One. As back ground, Larry Geller of Flushing, NY, observes
that the original British LP A Quick One-on which this reissue is
based-came out in mono only. Its American equivalent, titled Happy
Jack, came out in both mono and stereo, the latter having been a mix
of true stereo and the dreaded rechanneled stereo. True stereo
exists, Geller says, for six of the original album's 10 tracks: "Run
Run Run," "Boris The Spider," "I Need You," "Cobwebs And Strange,"
"So Sad About Us," and the miniopera "A Quick One While He's Away."
These all surfaced on a 1966 French Polydor album called The Who,
which was reissued in 1972. "Whiskey Man" and "Don't Look Away" exist
in rechanneled stereo versions; "See My Way" and "Heatwave" are
mono-only. However, the only track in true stereo on MCA's new
reissue is "Run Run Run," which-contrary to the liner
notes-previously appeared in that form on the American Happy Jack and
Magic Bus albums. "Whiskey Man" retains the rechanneled stereo form;
the other eight are in mono.

Geller (and others) maintain the mono mixes are missing a number of
instruments. "A lot of the album's humor is based on the stereo
mixes," he says, citing the jumbled midsection of "I Need You" and
the chaotic entirety of "Cobwebs And Strange" as examples.

Producer Astley accepts full responsibility for this aspect of the
reissue, but defends his decisions. "It'll be on my head, I suppose,"
he tells ICE via telephone from England. "The mono and stereo
versions were knocking around, so I did digital copies, compared them
and just made the choices. Really, it's down to me. I did listen to
everything I could get my hands on when I was doing it, and [I would
say] it sounds better in mono. I don't like the way the stereo
sounds. "It would have been lovely to go back and remix them and make
them all properly stereo. We remixed the whole of Sell Out but
weren't able to with A Quick One, because the fourtracks were left in
Venice when it got flooded at [Who manager] Kit Lambert's palace. We
did remix the Ready Steady Who stuff [and some other bonus tracks]. I
found the four-track masters for that.

"So Sad" sounded awful in stereo. The mono version leapt out and I
went, 'That's a lot better.' I don't think I found the others in
Pete's library. I probably should have spent more time hunting
around. But I can only go so far with these things, going through
Pete's library and the Polydor library and digging out what I can
trying to get the best. The record [as a whole] was never supposed to
be heard in stereo, whereas The Who Sell Out was remixed for proper
stereo release [at the time]."

Extending the stereo/mono issue to the bonus tracks, reader Geller
points out that "Disguises" (the key track from the Ready Steady Who
EP) is in stereo on the Who's Maxlmum R&B box set in a longer
version, but here a short version appears in mono ("in the worst
alltime mix"). Astley responds, "How frightening! Well, they've got
the best of both worlds, haven't they?" His implication is that
virtually any fan who buys the new reissues has already purchased the
box and thus now possesses both versions. He continues, "I suppose
it's just what fits into what project. When you're listening to the
bulk of the record in mono... I just found all the rough mixes and
bits of tape on 'Disguises' I could find and said, "Well, I have to
go with that one."

Geller, David C. Olstein (via e-mail), and others wondered if
"Batman" and "Barbara Ann" were different takes from the EP versions,
but Astley says they were just remixed. He volunteers that "Man With
Money" (the Everly Bros. song that was a fabled unreleased Who track
until its appearance as a bonus track here) was also remixed, and
salvaged in the process. "I found the four-track of that; it's
actually on the end of the Ready Steady Who sessions. I'll tell you
why it never came out: On the intro, it's got these awful guitar hits
on acoustic and electric, and they're two feet apart; it's just badly
played. Thanks to the technology I have here, I managed to mend it."

The other main concern regarding A Quick One revolved around track
selections. Boiled down from hordes of queries, they amount to: Why
wasn't "Circles" included; it's the only track from the Ready Steady
Who EP that isn't here? Why isn't the single version of "Happy Jack"
here; it was on the original U.S. LP? Why no "I'm A Boy" or "Pictures
Of Lily" (single A sides from the same approximate period)? With
around 20 minutes of space left on the CD, sureIy these tracks could
have been incorporated. As Al Gordon of San Francisco, CA, puts it,
"The obvious exclusion of such pertinent tracks seems odd, or at the
very least, careless or haphazard."

In response, Chris Charlesworth tells ICE "Happy Jack" wasn't on the
English album, as you know. We feel we're English people and we do it
the English way, just as the Beatles did with their reissues-they
scrapped all those dodgy old Capitol albums and now you've got the
English ones. A perfectly wonderful version of 'Happy Jack' appeared
on the box set. Instead of giving them the same track again, I
decided to give them the acoustic one as a bonus, which I thought was
far more interesting. No one had ever heard it before; I hadn't even
seen it on a bootleg. What's wrong with that?" Astley seconds that
notion: "You've got a beautiful version of 'Happy Jack.' It wasn't
even marked on the tape box; I just came across it. It was a finished
quarter-inch mix but it had big pops all through it. So I put it
through my computer, isolated every time Roger [Daltrey] popped a
'Hap-PEE Jack,' and pasted that little 'p' back into the pathway in
the computer. Otherwise it never would have made a record."

Charlesworth had a further explanation for the nonappearance of the
single sides. "You know how Led Zeppelin put their box set out in two
versions [full-length and then truncated]? The record companies are
angling for that, and they'll get it, sooner or later. It'll probably
be called The Story Of The Who, and will have all the best-known Who
tracks in the same sound quality as the box set. I think it's a bit
soon to do that yet [with all the other reissues coming]. But it will
take the place of every other Who greatest-hits or best-of album, and
be consistent throughout the globe. It'll probably happen sometime
near the end of next year."

As for the missing song "Circles," a favorite among Who collectors,
Charlesworth confirms the supposition of several fans: "Shel Talmy
owns it. We're saving that for such a time as we can do the first
album." As detailed previously in ICE, Talmy, The Who's first
producer, retains the masters of all the material he produced; thus
far, prolonged negotiations have not produced a settlement that would
allow the group's first album-and appropriate period bonus tracks-to
be reissued.

Via e-mail, Richard Powell pointed out many discrepancies on
recording dates in the Quick One notes as opposed to the box set's
booklet. Charlesworth addressed this issue in general, noting that
there were a few blatant misprints in the box set's notes.
"Subsequent research has revealed some things on the box set to be
wrong," he says. "What is on the new things is correct."

Addressing discrepancies in the recording dates given for "Boris The
Spider," Charlesworth says, "As far as I'm aware, nobody knows for
sure. John Entwistle doesn't know, and it's his bloody song! Pete
doesn't know, Roger doesn't know, Kit Lambert, the producer, is dead,
so he doesn't know. None of them were sober, and none of them were
the kind of people who kept copious records. They were having a
wonderful time in those years, and there was no diarist who followed
them around. On the actual tape boxes, we don't know whether it's the
date they were in the studio, the date they did some overdubbing, or
the date they did the mixing. But those dates can't be reliable,
anyway, because half the time they didn't know what time it was or
what date it was! And what's more, none of them cared. Try to ask
John Entwistle when 'Boris The Spider' was recorded; he'll say, 'How
the fuck should I know?'

"We've tried especially hard to make it accurate this time, and we
think the dates on the new issues are more accurate than those given
on the box set. It's educated guesswork, Sherlock Holmes stuff, by me
and a guy named John McMichael, a Who freak who's putting together a
detailed Who chronology like Mark Lewisohn's Beatles books."

On the subject of Sell Out, the overall reaction of readers was much
more positive... but the ones with complaints did not mince words.
Whereas the lack of remixing on A Quick One was a sore point with
many, the opposite held with Sell Out. Geller says, "Obviously the
persons who did it had no love for it, because they changed the
sound. The LP had a sound all its own-spacy, echoed, reverbed to
death, made to sound like a pirate radio show. That's all gone now.
It's been remixed to sound like Tommy; they took the psychedelia out
of it. It's people applying nineties aesthetics to sixties
recordings." Astley reacts to that charge forcefully: "Have they
compared it to the original? Andy [MacDherson. who remixed and
remastered the album with Astley] and I sat down three nights ago and
said 'let's have a listen to [the new version].' We put it on and
said, 'bloody great sounding record,' and then wondered what the
original sounded like. We got out the original CD and went, 'Oh my
God'-we didn't realize how much we'd improved it. It was so distorted
and horrible in places.

"Our main reason for going back to the eight-track tapes was to get
rid of that horrible quarter-inch state that people went through,
where the azimuth wasn't lined up properly, things get squashed onto
tape, and it's never quite as good as when you mixed it. And, of
course, you've got tape hiss as well-quite a lot of it in some cases.
On things like 'Our Love Was, Is,' we went back to the first
four-track before a submaster was made, because we felt they got it
wrong when they did the submaster; some things were balanced really
badly. We pasted everything back in onto a new digital eight-track."

Responding to complaints that the album doesn't sound like the
original any more, Astley replies, "That's because it's cleaner.
That's what I'm employed to do. I did a reference CD for Pete and he
phoned me up immediately and said, 'This is fucking great.' He said
we'd captured exactly what they'd wanted, and it now sounds much
better than it originally did. And, at the end of the day, I'm
working for him."

Mark Easter of St. Louis, MO, wrote that the album was "not only
remixed, sounding different enough to be extremely irritating, but
Jon Astley and the other folks behind this reissue program have
apparently decided to repaint the Mona Lisa and add a track within
the original running order." This addition consists of a short demo
version of the Roto Sound Strings commercial that appears earlier on
the album, inserted here between "Relax" and "Silas Stingy."

"That's an interesting one," Astley says. "My original running order
was the same as the original record, as I thought it should be. There
was always this big gap there, and when I first played it for Pete,
he came back to me and said, 'There's something wrong here; this gap
shouldn't be here.' So I tightened the gap, sent it to him and he
said, 'No, it needs something in there; find something and put it in
there.' He said it should have had something in there in the first
place."

The mono version of "Our Love Was, Is" feature is an entirely
different, Hawaiian-guitars sounding guitar solo compared to the more
common stereo version. Several readers asked why the mono version
wasn't included on the Sell Out reissue.

Astley says, "In remixing, I couldn't go back to that mono guitar
solo, because it got wiped when Kit [Lambert] decided to remix the
album in stereo. Pete wandered in and redid the guitar solo when they
were remixing it, so that mono guitar solo exists only on the
original mono mixes; no remixable recording survives. I prefer that
mono solo, too."

Reader Geller wondered why the radio commercials found on Sell Out
weren't assigned their own individual track numbers, which would have
allowed listeners to reprogram them or access them separately.
Instead, they play during the negative index-number countdown which
leads into the proper song that follows-the same technique used on
the Live At Leeds CD for spoken intros and outros. Astley replies, "I
thought a Iot about this, but you would have had to flick through 32
tracks-or whatever-to get to a number you wanted." On reflection,
however, Astley agrees that the separate-number method might have
been preferable, given that some listeners want to access the
commercials individually.

Even with a massively augmented album (10 bonus tracks plus a number
of new commercials ), questions arose about tracks that were not
included on Sell Out, specifically some rock oldies that the Who
recorded around that time. Charlesworth addresses the question: "The
Who did record a studio version of 'Summertime Blues,' an Eddie
Cochran song called 'My Way,' and a studio version of 'Young Man
Blues' that appeared on a Track sampler but never appeared elsewhere,
and is long since deleted. The reason they weren't included is that I
felt quite strongly that that kind of music is blues-based rock 'n'
roll. And The Who Sell Out is not an album of blues-based rock 'n'
roll, it's an album of psychedelic, jangling-guitars rock 'n' roll,
very 1968-ish in nature. 'Summertime Blues' doesn't fit alongside
'Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand."'

Astley chimes in, "We tried to keep the flavor of the album, rather
than reissue everything that they recorded that year. In 1967 they
recorded three times as much material as they ne eded for Sell Out.
Things like 'Under My Thumb' and 'The Last Time' don't have the
flavor of the original record."

A home will be found, however, for much of this material.
Charlesworth confirms that "there will be a new, revamped Odds &
Sods, probably next year. It's our intention to put some stuff like
that on the new Odds & Sods, where we can mix things up and it
doesn't really matter, because it's not a concept." While the new
Odds & Sods- most likely a two-CD set-will gain a large chunk of new
rarities, many of the tracks found on the LP will probably be deleted
because they can be found elsewhere now. "I'm The Face," for example,
will probably start off The Story Of The Who album; "Pure And Easy"
and "The Naked Eye" will be on the revamped Who's Next.

Speaking of Who's Next, Charlesworth observes that the upcoming CD is
"unlikely to cause this sort of [reaction], since it was damn near
perfect to start with. We're still figuring out exactly what bonus
tracks to put on it. We'll probably use 'Pure And Easy' from
Lifehouse To Leeds [the legendary Who bootleg whose pristine tapes
were recently reacquired by Charlesworth], because it's a much
faster, snappier version than the one on Odds & Sods and the box.
We'll extend The Who By Numbers and Who Are You to barely over an
hour, because there just isn't the stuff [to add as bonus tracks]."

Both Charlesworth and Astley went to great lengths to assure ICE
readers that the Who reissue program is conducted with painstaking
attention to detail, and the involvement of knowledgeable fans.
Having assaulted Charlesworth with complaints, we mercifully read him
a pertinent positive comment from Mike Griffith of Victoria, BC,
Canada: "I find it utterly amazing that people are complaining about
these things, when the fact that they simply exist is heaven."
Charlesworth's response: "That puts it into context. Look at what the
bloody Beatles did- nothing. Their CDs are what, half an hour long?
You could have put Please Please Me and With The Beatles on one CD,
but did they? Of course they fucking didn't, because they want all
the money they can get. You didn't get one single bonus track on the
entire Beatles reissue program. What have The Rolling Stones done-
nothing, right? And here people are complaining when we're trying to
give them the best value for money of any sixties legend."

Astley stresses Townshend's close involvement in the project: "Pete
is quite interested in the way these things are coming out. We did a
[preliminary] Who's Next, and he took it back to the drawing board:
he said. 'No. these outtakes and extra tracks are just not good
enough; we need to rethink it.' It's been delayed because of Pete and
his interest, making sure it comes out the way he wants it. And John
and Roger both have comments, which is great. With a lot of other
reissues, a band doesn't get to hear it until they see it in the
shops.

"We agonize over these decisions, and we'd like everybody to be
happy, but it's very difficult. I've been hired to [make judgment
calls], and so far the band and the management and most of the people
I've come across have been very happy.

"We've just been mixing Tommy," Astley adds. "That's going to be
interesting. There are subtle changes in it, nothing major at all,
but there's less distortion in the mixing, and some things have come
out much nicer-'1921' is beautiful. We'll probably get slagged off
again, no doubt, because it sounds slightly different in places, but
we're doing it with great love and care. It is possible to match up
exactly what they did on the original mix, but then you say, 'If we
do this and clean up that, it sounds better.' We're taking our time.
That's part of the reason for the holdup on some of these reissues.
We do it with love, and that's the bottom line." (Thanks also to
readers Gregg Milan of East Chicago, IN; Mark Taylor of Fremont, CA;
George W. Krieger of Elizabeth, CO; and John Harchar of Spot swood,
Nl, for thought-provoking commentar y, both negative and positive.)