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February ICE News...






WHAT'S WITH THE WHO?: The last time we visited with Jon Astley, Pete
Townshend's reissue producer for The Who's old recordings, he had
just finished the expanded version of Who's Next and was turning his
attention to other projects (ICE #103). Among those was the Who's
1970 performance at England's Isle Of Wight. Two tracks, with
remastering overseen by Astley, appear on Castle Communications'
just-released Isle Of Wight 1970: "Young Man Blues" and "Naked Eye."
Castle has promised to release the Who's entire performance from the
festival, even scheduling it for late last year. But legal problems
have popped up, and now all parties hope to see it in stores by the
spring or summer. "We're very excited about it, because the two
tracks on the Isle Of Wight album are great," Astley tells ICE.
	Meanwhile, the next two remastering projects on Astley's schedule
are 1969's Tommy and 1973's Quadrophenia. Both will be simultaneous
reissues on both sides of the Atlantic; Tommy is due first, in
March.
	Tommy has been reissued on CD in the U.S. several times before,
including the original mid'80s MCA version which spread the rock
opera over two discs. (Although Tommy's 75-minute program now fits
easily onto one disc, time limitations were much stricter in the
early days of CD.) Subsequent American remasterings from both MCA
and Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs, done in the '90s, fit the rock opera
onto one CD. But up until now, all previous remastering was done
from the two-track stereo master tape (at best) which dates from the
late '60s. Astley's goal was to remix the album from the original
multi-track masters, creating a new two-track stereo master tape, on
modern equipment, that would be free of tape hiss and distortion.
	Astley flew the tapes to America to do the remastering with Bob
Ludwig of Gateway Mastering, whose reputation is sterling. Tampering
with a classic album like Tommy can be a risky enterprise, but
apparently they succeeded at their task. "Bob did a wonderful job
with me," Astley reports. "I got copies to the band, and Pete
[Townshend] came back the next day and said, 'This is just so
unbelievable... it's how l've always wanted it to sound.' He was
just raving about it. So we're very pleased.
	"It's a whole remix, total. It really sounds fresh and nice. We
haven't changed much, other than one or two stereo positions; we
brought the drums into the middle on a couple of tracks. But there's
no tape hiss now, and very little distortion."
	Tommy does have a couple of tricky elements to it, however. When
Mobile Fidelity issued their gold CD of the album back in 1990, it
contained a surprise (ICE #40): a different take of "Eyesight To The
Blind." Says Astley, "I sent Pete a fax saying, 'Which vocal do you
want?' And he said, 'I don't know what the hell you're talking
about!' So I said, 'In America, on the [Mobile Fidelity CD, there's
a version of "Eyesight To The Blind" where Roger [Daltrey] sings an
octave lower: "You talk about your woman..."' And Pete said, 'How on
earth did that get put out?' So we've gone back to the original,
with Roger singing at the top of his range.
	"We haven't added any other extras; we kept all the gaps exactly the
same. But one of the most interesting things was the song
'Christmas.' The original record was obviously a track on the
outside of a very heavy reel. So it gradually gets up to speed. When
I analyzed it, I realized that it [changed] a quarter-tone from the
beginning until when it breaks into 'See Me Feel Me.' It's that way
on the original multi-track, so it must've happened when they
recorded it.
	"On the CD out there now, you hear a horrible, quarter-tone key
change from the previous track into 'Christmas.' So Bob Ludwig and I
gently lifted the first few bars a quarter tone, and the next few
bars an eighth of a tone, and pieced them together. So now it starts
and finishes in the same key that it was recorded in."
	Although Americans have had upgraded Tommy CDs to contemplate in the
past, Europeans still deal with a two-disc version, so they'll
especially welcome the new edition. As for the U.S., Astley says,
"MCA weren't going to release it until they heard it; then they
went, 'Oh... yes, we will run with this, because it sounds so much
better than the one out there now'."
	As for Quadrophenia, another double-LP Who project, Astley says,
"It's been totally remixed. Again, Bob Ludwig did a beautiful job on
it, Pete was full of praise, and Roger's beyond the moon, because he
was so buried on the original. We've changed it quite a lot, in that
Roger's voice is much more up front, and we tried to play down a lot
of the keyboard parts and bring out the band. That was the plan; in
some places it works, and in some places we had to retum to the
original mix, because that's the only way it would work."
	The question arose again: would the new edition of Quadrophenia be
squeezed onto a single CD, for convenience and to keep the price
down? "That's something I wanted to do," Astley says, "but it's 82
minutes long. So I spoke to Pete about it, and he said, 'Well, you
and I could sit down and take out four minutes.' I said, 'I'm happy
to do that, but what about the record companies?' Polydor [in the
U.K.] were happy, but MCA said 'no,' because they knew they'd get
200 fans screaming at them over the phones.
	"I'd like to do a poll on it; I think it would be a really good
thing to do, because a lot of people haven't bought that record. The
way Pete explains it is, he said that it's just such an overblown,
pompous, completely over-the-top [album], that he could easily lose
two, three or four minutes without it worrying him at all. And I was
under the same idea.
	"One Polydor executive told me that he feels a lot of Who fans
didn't buy the album because they thought it was too expensive. And
we want to make it available to the semi-fans who didn't buy it the
first time around. I'm still of two minds, although I think we'll
probably go with the double, which is a shame, because that makes it
a 20-pound album, or a 30-dollar record in America." Astley says
that MCA has agreed to also reissue the new Quadrophenia in America,
although no release date has been scheduled.
	That leaves two albums from the Who's primary canon that still need
reworking. "We've mixed The Who By Numbers," Astley says about he
band's 1975 album, "and we're working on Who Are You at the moment.
But they're not scheduled for release yet. And that will be the full
set." He was referring to the period during which drummer Keith Moon
was alive, which most people feel is the only Who material that
matters.
	Lastly, Astley is working on a 70-minute CD revision of the Odds And
Sods album, and a two disc live Who retrospective running from early
BBC tracks through 1978, the year Moon died. 

That's it!