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7 February 2024: 12x5, The Rolling Stones. (2006 ABKCO reissue of 1964 London release)

Here we have another Stones mini LP from Japan, part of the 2006 The Rolling Stones in the '60s reissue campaign like England's Newest Hit Makers in my previous post. This was the band's second album in the U.S.; the U.K. corollary to this is the album The Rolling Stones No. 2. Above we see both front and back covers with the campaign's obi strip in place.

Below are both sides of the unadorned cover.

Unlike with my copy of England's Newest Hit Makers, there is no insert showing the U.K. counterpart of this release.

Below is the front page of the insert.

Next, the disc itself.

Once again we have a trading card in a little resealable silver envelope.

This time the trading card depicts the U.K. version of the band's 1966 album Aftermath, and after that we see the card's backside showing another piece of the puzzle that when all cards are collected can be assembled to see the cover of the band's 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties Request.

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7 February 2024: England's Newest Hit Makers, The Rolling Stones. (2006 ABKCO reissue of 1964 London release)

Even though I've been sitting here for months with a stack of Rolling Stones Japanese mini LPs within arm's reach, it's another thing when I have to post and talk about them. I only meant to buy a couple of these things and I wound up with something nuts like 15 of them, with another 3 or 4 still on my wishlist. Ultimately they'll serve a good listening purpose, and I'm thrilled to have the cool Japanese format instead of some random modern reissue in digipaks or whatever, but my Stones fandom is not as intense as it would seem for a guy buying more than a dozen of these things. Had I not found incredible deals on all of them, this wouldn't have happened.

This particular purchase comes from a lot of five that I bought from a dealer in Japan whose prices were irresistible. England's Newest Hitmakers is their debut American album; much like the Beatles, the Stones were subject to U.S. companies dismantling their album visions to concoct more product to sell. Reissue companies get to continue this, as both the U.S. and U.K. versions of Stones albums are still reissued to the present day. Perhaps the most insane outcome of my newfound interest in buying Stones albums I know I didn't even like the last time I examined them is I've decided I want both countries' versions of everything. Good lord.

Above we see the front and back covers of the album with its 2006 obi strip from the campaign launched that year called The Rolling Stones in the '60s.

Above we see the unadorned front and back album covers.

An interesting touch with this reissue is a one-sided insert that depicts the original U.K. version of the album cover. In the band's homeland, the album was just called The Rolling Stones and aside from a Decca Records logo the cover was wordless. The logo isn't part of this insert image.

Next we see the front page of the insert.

Next up is an image of the disc itself.

Next we have a funny little addition to this particular 2006 reissue campaign. Each release included a little trading card in a silver envelope. Because Japan values detail in their packaging, this envelope is resealable and you don't have to destroy it to get to the card inside. First we see the unsealed envelope, and then both sides of the card itself.

The cards included in this series all depict different Stones releases. This particular one shows the 1989 box set The Rolling Stone Singles Collection: The London Years. I got that set for Christmas in 1989 and it was the first time I'd heard most of the early Stones work. It was a bit of a cynical release as it came out almost simultaneously with the band's new album Steel Wheels, no doubt meant to cannibalize sales of the new material. 1989 was a big deal for the Stones as they went on an enormous tour that year and the buzz was hot. ABKCO was a shady label and their shadiness continued well after the Stones had moved on. The box looked like about five minutes was spent on designing it; the book that comes with the vinyl edition is an embarrassment. I've got no idea what other formats are like. But I digress. Considering the box's presence on this trading-card series, I presume it was also reissued in mini LP style in 2006. I have to admit I'd love a copy of that.

The back of each of these cards is an excerpt of the album art for the group's 1967 Their Satanic Majesties Request. Collect them all and you can arrange them like a puzzle to see the full album cover.

[musiconanironingboard]

6 February 2024: Walls Have Ears, Sonic Youth. (2024 Goofin' reissue of 1986 unauthorized Not Records release)

Walls Have Ears was one of those elusive '80s Sonic Youth pieces that I never saw in real life but people would talk about in hushed tones. Originally released by the band's UK label boss without Sonic Youth's knowledge or permission, it's long been a sore point for the band but a well-liked quasi-bootleg for many fans. With Sonic Youth unable to tour or record due to their implosion fueled by Thurston Moore's infidelities, the group continues to find ways to keep the music's flame alive and this year they decided to give Walls Have Ears an official release. It compiles smatterings of three different British gigs of the mid-'80s and I'm sure it's a cacophonous squall, based on other similar boots I've heard from the time. I first saw Sonic Youth perform in 1990, shortly after they'd signed to a major and released their album Goo, but they were still performing a lot of this early, raw material. I don't know that this will get a lot of mileage on the stereo, but I am glad to have it. I opted for black vinyl instead of the myriad colored variants; I wanted something as close to an original copy as I could get.

Above are the front cover—I've always loved that Halloween imagery, a visual nod to the art of the band's 1985 LP Bad Moon Rising—followed by the hype sticker and back cover.

Below is the album's gatefold.

Here are both sides of LP one's inner sleeve (this is a double album).

Next we have the labels of sides one and two. Oy vey, please forgive my reflection. The lighting arrangement in my stereo room is now horrid and I really need that software that trims labels out of photos perfectly.

Next up, both sides of LP two's inner sleeve.

And, last, the labels of sides three and four.

[musiconanironingboard]

6 February 2024: A Politically Incorrect Christmas (EP), Mary Karlzen. (Y&T Music, 2007)

Oh my. It's been a long time since I've been able to even think about posting my purchases, and now that I'm looking at them from a few months' remove my winter 2024 passions seem quite strange. Among them is the decision to acquire the entire Mary Karlzen catalog. This isn't meant as a slight to Karlzen, but it illustrates how quickly fixations can change and for a record collector they can change by the hour. I bought one Karlzen album in the '90s, my brother for some reason revisited that album (we both bought it back then), and the two of us panicked and decided we needed everything she did. I'll be dutifully scheduling a Karlzen listening project come January 2025, so these will all be played, but sitting here today looking at a corny Christmas EP I do have to wonder what life would be like if I didn't operate this way. Ah well, once it gets going, I'm sure I'll find plenty to enjoy.

Once Karlzen fell out of the major-label system in the late '90s, it was easy to lose sight of her. A South Florida indie label, Y&T Music, kept a torch going for her, and she continues to make music to the present day, now living just up the road from me in Milwaukee. One of these days I know she's going to announce a live date there and I'll want to attend.

Here we have her Politically Incorrect Christmas release, and above we see the front and back covers. Karlzen has had a sense of humor throughout her long music career, and it's perhaps most evident here.

Above we see the opened jewel case with the reverse of the insert and the disc itself. To my disappointment, this is a CD-R. Artists do what they can, but all I can think when I receive is a CD-R is that it'll be unplayable in ten years. (Some do defy this fate, but I definitely have some unplayable ones I bought in distant years.)

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5 February 2024: Nanci Griffith Revisited, Nanci Griffith. (Damian/BMG, 1999)

This is one of the most peculiar albums I've seen. Someone somewhere decided it made sense to take Texas singer-songwriter Griffith's folky recordings and transform them into nightclub bangers. I embellish a bit—I've not heard this yet, so I don't know that they're really nightclub bangers—but someone really did decide there needed to be a Nanci Griffith remix album, with things like "Gomi's Extended Arena Mix" of Griffith's gentle song "Late Night Grande Hotel." While apparently some copies leaked out into retail, Griffith's management took umbrage at this project and were able to halt a widespread release. I don't know how wide it really could have been; what in the world is the market for this? Coffee shops whose clientele are bored unless there's a little bit of trip-hop beats in their folk? What an asinine project. So, of course, having just spent many, many months examining the entire Griffith catalog in detail, I needed to obtain this thing to cap it all off. It's not easy to find, but I finally did it. (Oh, I forgot to mention: Damian starts the album out slowly, with three "Original Mix" Griffith tracks, which I presume are just her original album versions. I'll be finding out.)

Above are the front and back covers, removed from the jewel case.

There's no real booklet; the front cover/insert is a 5" by 5" square and the artless mess shown below is on the back of it. Labels like this, I swear. I see they have a Dolly Parton album, too, and there's one by Kinky Friedman, of all people, but by and large Damian Music seems to be a total bonehead of a label, even if they somehow got distribution by BMG.

Not only is this a dumb concept with artless packaging, Damian Music couldn't even proofread the track list. For the three separate tracks remixed by "Boy Wunder" (good grief), the typesetter or designer or whomever messed up and just put Boy Wunder's name where the song title was supposed to be. The track list on the back cover is the only place the titles appear, so for these three tracks you have to play the album to find out what Griffith song they represent. Ridiculous.

Here's what you see under the tray, with Nanci Griffith's name in script on the spine, as if seeing it twice on the front cover isn't enough.

Last, here is the disc.

I'm glad this thing got buried. What an embarrassing idea and product. I looked up the Dolly Parton album on Damian and it's a remix album, too. The executive producer of both is one Kyle Utley and these are his only two credits listed on Discogs.

[musiconanironingboard]

5 February 2024: Flowers, The Rolling Stones. (2022 London/ABKCO reissue of 1967 London release)

In my ongoing series of Rolling Stones Japanese mini LP purchases, here we have a US-centric compilation (also released in some European territories and Canada). The 1960s Stones compilation landscape is a mess; if you focus only on "canonical" comps (versus the world of UK budget comps, of which there seems to be a dozen from this period), there is Flowers, coming a year after Big Hits (High Tides and Green Grass) and then in 1969 there is Through the Past, Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2). All of that gets supplanted in 1971 by Hot Rock 1964-1971, which while I was growing up was the gold-standard Stones comp—and don't forget 1972's More Hot Rocks (Big Hits & Fazed Cookies—but at any rate, even just the '60s albums have overlap and one wonders why all of them were deemed necessary. My version of heaven wouldn't involve things like floating on clouds in bliss, it would involve things like receiving full, omniscient briefings as to the specific reasoning that all these overlapping compilations needed to be released. When I decided to start buying Stones minis, it was at first because an online retailer was selling a few of them for €7.99 and the deal was too good to be true (the cheapest copy of this one on Discogs right now is over $30), and I picked out a couple of my favorites. Why I threw Flowers into the mix I'm not entirely sure, other than it seemed weird to me that this long-supplanted comp even got the Japanese mini LP treatment. Having spent a chunk of February listening to Through the Past, Darkly, I wonder how it plays against Flowers; without giving it one second of research, the latter seems to weigh more heavily on pre-"Satisfaction" Stones, from their early blues-cover period that I don't much like. Throught the Past, Darkly is more of an overview of the emerging dark Stones once they started focusing on original music. So there's the difference, I suppose, and I'd think that once the band took off into "becoming the Stones" the audience for their original shamblings through the likes of "Route 66" (not on Flowers, but you get my drift) started to fade or, at the least, become less commercially relevant. That's about the depth of the Stones philosophizing I'm apt to do, as they've already gotten way more time from me this year than I ever intended them to (not to mention the two-disc deluxe edition of Tattoo You has finally hit the top of my to-play stack and I'm dealing with that right now; 2024 is an inexplicable Stones revival here, something I would have said was impossible before I saw that damned €7.99 sale).

Above we see the front and back covers of the 2022 mono edition of Flowers, with the 2022 obi in place and partially concealing the vintage replica obi.

Next, both sides of the cover with just the vintage replica obi.

Finally, both sides of the unadorned cover. I've read that the rest of the band found it "hilarious" that poor Brian Jones's flower had no petals on it.

Next up, the front of the foldout insert.

Last, here is the disc.

[musiconanironingboard]

5 February 2024: Beggars Banquet, The Rolling Stones. (2022 Decca/ABKCO reissue of 1968 UK Decca/US London release)

Here we are again, with me acquiring Rolling Stones mini LPs like they are going out of style. This is the strangest development in my record collecting of 2024 thus far. I may have mentioned this in a previous post—this is the fifth Japanese Stones mini that I've bought and discussed here—but it all started when Paul Sinclair, who runs the informational website Super Deluxe Edition, pointed out that several of the 2022/2023 Stones mini LPs were on sale at an evil online retailer for €7.99. This is one of them. I went well beyond that sale and started scouting Stones minis on eBay, but we'll get to that in subsequent posts.

The 2022 Stones minis were all mono editions of their catalog prior to them signing to Atlantic and receiving their own vanity label, Rolling Stones Records. And what I am learning from some of these new editions is 2020s Japanese mini LPs are not your father's Japanese mini LPs. First there was the edition of Undercover where the stickers on the original album cover were just printed on rather than being teeny-tiny stickers, something that never would have happened during the proper age of Japanese mini LPs, whenever that was (circa the Aughts). And now we have this abomination, which I'll explain in a moment.

First up, above we have photos of the front cover first with its 2022 obi half-concealing the vintage obi replica, and then we see it just with that vintage obi replica. Normally the next photo would be the front cover unadorned by any obi strip, but I can't do that here, for the obi is glued to the front cover. What?! Yes, this thing is not an actual little band wrapped around the cover that you can slip off, it's actually a sticker just stuck to the cover. That is ridiculous. I've not encountered this with any other of the new Stones minis I've seen, so I don't know why they did it this way here. But I find this to be outrageous.

Next up, let's see the back cover, first with 2022 obi and then with no obi, which is possible here because, like I've said, the front replica obi is a dang sticker and doesn't wrap around the whole sleeve.

Here is the opened gatefold.

Here is the front of the insert.

Here is the disc, which is so glossy I have to hold it at a weird angle to photograph it.

Since the 1986 reissue of Beggars Banquet, every territory on earth seems to have reverted to the original cover art that was banned and had to be changed. I wonder what young Stones fans think when they see what the cover actually looked like for almost twenty years; below is an original US copy. The gatefold is the same.

Here's just one side of the inner sleeve, a catalog ad for other titles on the label.

Forgive the horridly blurry photo of the label.

[musiconanironingboard]

4 February 2024: Lassie Eats Chickens, Classic Ruins. (Throbbing Lobster, 1986)

Here's a blast from my past. This is an album my brother acquired when it came out, then a year later, perhaps remembering the label from his copy, I bought a sampler album on the Throbbing Lobster label while on vacation with my parents in Massachusetts where the label was located. For a 14-year-old, that compilation was a little bit of exotica as it wasn't something you'd be likely to find in my Illinois hometown. I'm sure my brother had to go to a nearby college town to find his copy of Lassie Eats Chickens. One of the tracks from the Classic Ruins LP appeared on my sampler, so while I've never heard this full-length (unless I borrowed it from him 35 years ago and don't remember it), I definitely have heard "Geraldine I Need Money (More Than I Need You)."

I picked up this copy by happenstance while shopping at Dusty Groove, generally a somewhat uptight jazz-centric store in Chicago that has increasingly grown a rock section. It was $1.99, so I couldn't resist it, and it's a very rare bird: an album cover that's been scribbled and drawn on yet I didn't mind buying. If there is so much as a discreetly inked pair of initials in the corner of an album cover I generally refuse it, but in the case of this Classic Ruins album I actually felt the scribbles enhanced things.

Above is the front cover and then the scribbled back, which I'll give some close-ups of.

This copy was autographed for a guy named Ned, and I imagine it taking place in a small club or bar somewhere in New England.

"Congratulations! You're the very first person actually named 'NED' that I've ever met. Here's the world's largest beer! You may have it"

I love that frontman Frank Lowe here has drawn himself a whole cartoon body coming out of the photograph, and I love the "WORLD'S LARGEST BEER" that he's holding. What I didn't capture closely is the notation at his feet reading "ANGIE'S NEW SHOES," undoubtedly an in-joke lost to the sands of time.

The other members weren't as ornate with their scribblings, but the pennant reading "NED RULES" is a nice touch.

The album includes a Throbbing Lobster catalog insert; here are both sides. At the top of the second side is Claws!, my beloved sampler album bought at Musicsmith in Cape Hatteras the summer before I turned 15. I also bought Rum Sodomy & the Lash by The Pogues there. I wanted to also buy a sealed copy of Wow/Grape Jam by Moby Grape, but it was $25, and my parents had to discuss whether they would permit that and it turned out I didn't get it. I was terrified that they'd see the graphic details of the Pogues album cover so I concealed that all the way back to Illinois. I don't think they knew I bought anything other than the Throbbing Lobster compilation.

Here are both sides of the label. I've always liked how on Throbbing Lobster's first side there is one lobster, and two lobsters on side two.

Since we're here, let me show you my copy of Claws! This is the third volume of Throbbing Lobster samplers. I've dallied over the years with finding the first two, but there's something that I like about just having this third one, having bought it in its home territory when it was new. That cover hasn't aged well; there is excessive foxing all over the sleeve, and I've kept it immaculate and in a plastic sleeve for almost 40 years.

I used to pore over that back cover, reading all the little notes about the bands on the sampler. And I wrote to Throbbing Lobster for a catalog and got paper copies mailed to me for the next several years. They were like a zine and done on a typewriter. They sold used records and the catalog would be pages and pages long, all single-spaced. At one point they allegedly acquired part (all?) of deceased record critic Lester Bangs's record collection and were selling it. I remember asking my brother, "Should I buy a record that belonged to Lester Bangs??" He replied "No, they probably have beer spilled all over them." That made sense so I didn't.

[musiconanironingboard]

4 February 2024: Noah, The Bob Seger System. (2023 Big Pink reissue of 1969 Capitol release)

This is the second-ever Bob Seger album, purchased as part of my inexplicable drive to examine his entire catalog, as I describe briefly in my previous post, where I also explain the questionable reissue label this edition appears on.

Noah is a controversial Seger album in that, apparently at the label's insistence, Bob Seger System member Tom Neme sings all lead vocals on half of the album, despite Seger being the only person pictured on the front cover. Seger has disowned this record, which is why you have to resort to shady unauthorized copies to get a new one. But when you are Catalog Man, as my brother calls me, and study the entirety of a person's work, this is what it takes!

Above are the front and back covers with the Big Pink informational obi in place. Below we see the same, but unadorned.

Next up is the foldout insert. Unlike the insert of the Seger Big Pink release in my previous post, this one is single-sided.

Here is the CD sleeve, which appears to be Big Pink's current standard practice.

Last, here is the disc itself.

[musiconanironingboard]

4 February 2024: Back in '72, Bob Seger. (2023 Big Pink reissue of 1973 Palladium/Reprise release)

Another of many inexplicable things I've done is decide I needed to study the entire Bob Seger catalog. This is a guy whose music is deep-programmed into my brain, having lived in the Midwest U.S. in the 1970s. The thing about knowing Seger from the radio is he had a lengthy career before any of his stuff became hits. Back in '72 is an example of one of these pre-stardom albums, and it's an album you never, ever see in the bins anywhere. To get it, then, I have to resort to the apparently illicit/fraudulent South Korea label Big Pink, which people on music forums complain endlessly about, and I understand. Sometimes I go to these lengths to hear music I want to hear, and I don't always like it, but I don't see how it's much worse than listening to Spotify, frankly. At any rate, whatever the deal is with Big Pink they at the very least are immaculate with their packaging. All of their stuff, at least what I've seen, is presented in the same fashion as Japanese mini LPs, meaning replicas of the original vinyl issues in paper packaging.

This is, specifically, the sixth Seger album, and the third "solo" release following a trio credited to The Bob Seger System.

Above we see the front and back covers with the informational obi strip in place. Below we see the covers sans obi.

Next up we see both sides of the foldout insert.

Next up we see the sleeve the CD comes in. This is another nice little piece of graphic design; original 1973 copies wouldn't have come with this, but apparently Big Pink's signature inner sleeve is a visual riff on 1960s UK Decca inner sleeves. Give this post a look for an example: https://musiconanironingboard.tumblr.com/post/740158186917658624/10-january-2024-let-it-bleed-the-rolling-stones

Here is the CD, so blindingly reflective that I have to contort to get a photo that reflects nothing.

The packaging may be immaculate, but when I inspect the CD itself I see some manufacturing aberrations. The aluminum is ragged on the outer edge, or maybe it has already deteriorated. These Big Pink releases aren't cheap and it will be a frustration indeed if playback is compromised in any way due to manufacturing foibles. Time will tell. I had planned to get the other two Big Pink Segers, Brand New Morning and Mongrel, but I'm not sure I will do that. If there weren't a local shop stocking these, I doubt I'd be buying them at all, though I'm not sure what route I would be taking as non-counterfeit originals are impossible to find for an affordable price.

[musiconanironingboard]

3 February 2024: Four-Calendar Café, Cocteau Twins. (2024 4AD reissue of 1993 UK Fontana/US Capitol release)

When the craze started of putting 1990s CD-only releases on modern vinyl pressings, I found it exciting. Now that it continues to happen, I get a little queasy sometimes. Part of this is I have no room for more records and I once again find myself at that crisis point where I have to devise a solution. Another part of it is I've gone from buying essential classics to buying all kinds of things that I may have once had a passing interest in. I liked Cocteau Twins a lot in the '90s, and this, their seventh album, was the first one by the band that I bought in real time when it was released. This and its 1996 follow-up and band swansong Milk and Kisses were, so to speak, "my" Cocteau Twins albums, as opposed to their earlier work that I had to examine in hindsight long after every cool goth in town had worn out their third copy of every Cocteaus cassette. I haven't worried about chasing vinyl reissues of any other Cocteau Twins albums (partially because I have original copies of the ones I care about), but when these got released I knew I'd at least want to buy Four-Calendar Café. I don't dislike Milk and Kisses, but nor do I remember it very well.

Above we see the front cover, hype sticker showing this to be the first-ever US vinyl issue, and back cover, all courtesy of the horrible new lighting fixture in my stereo room that I didn't want and am now stuck with.

Below are both sides of the inner sleeve.

Next up, both labels. With this damned new lighting fixture, I can never decide if it's best to shoot things with it on or off. Sometimes with it on the reflection is so bad in the dead wax, as with side one below, but sometimes it's the opposite. I hate this lighting fixture! The whole package was difficult to photograph, and in part I think the cover has the bad look of a reproduced piece of old artwork without the clarity of the original art. The contrast and coloring of the album cover itself is just wrong. If I'd thought to do it, I would have included a photo of the original CD here to illustrate my point.

[musiconanironingboard]

3 February 2024: Band on the Run, Paul McCartney & Wings. (2024 Capitol expanded reissue of 1973 Apple release)

Largesse knows no bounds when it comes to the 21st century McCartney catalog. When he's not issuing his seemingly 59th new edition of mediocre 2020 album McCartney III or abandoning his Paul McCartney Archive Collection program (largesse in reverse), there's always time to squeeze out another anniversary edition, and if you're me you slavishly buy it. (I do not buy every McCartney release, and even if I were a millionaire I wouldn't.) Here we have the third special reissue of Band on the Run. This one is for the album's 50th anniversary; in order to produce some sort of extra that wasn't on the giant 2010 deluxe box edition, they've coughed up an "underdubbed" version of the album. I've not heard it yet, but from what I've read it seems like it might as well be called "the unfinished version before we added all the overdubs in the studio." Whether I find this essential listening or not awaits to be seen, but in the meanwhile, I want my neighborhood record shop to stay in business, so week after week I special-order titles, and here it sits. Above you see the front cover, the hype sticker, and the back cover.

The fine-print information on the album's reverse comes in the form of a sticker. I guess for the underdubbed edition they wanted the cover art to be underadorned.

Open up the package once and you see this.

Open it once more and you see the below, with the "Linda McCartney Polaroid Poster" folded up and put in a slot in the middle panel.

Here is the same view with the "poster" removed.

Here are both sides of that poster. I couldn't get it to stand up on its own, so we see it at a funny angle.

Next up we see both sides of disc one's slipcase followed by the disc itself. This is simply the Band on the Run album proper, using the original artwork. I've got no idea what mix or master this is, if they did a new one or used an old one. I could look it up, but I'd have to care.

Next up, the same of disc two.

At least McCartney is now back on Capitol where he belongs, and not some expansion-team label that sounds like a hedge fund owns it.

Below we have copies of the three "recent" Band on the Run reissues. At least they seem recent to me, even though the first one here was bought by a much younger me I barely remember. This isn't even one of my favorite McCartney albums. Why do I do this? I suppose a therapist could tell you.

From left to right:

25th Anniversary Edition, which includes a bonus "documentary" CD I'm not sure I've ever played (Capitol, 1999)

The Paul McCartney Archive Collection two-CD edition, which also includes a DVD that I've not watched (I did not buy the super-deluxe edition of this version, which includes even more material) (Hear Music/Concord, 2010)

Their new friend the 50th Anniversary Edition (Capitol, 2024)

My 9-year-old nephew will want these someday, right?

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3 February 2024: Sadness Sets Me Free, Gruff Rhys. (Rough Trade, 2024)

Gruff Rhys, former frontman of inventive Welsh group Super Furry Animals, has an extensive solo career and routinely issues excellent albums. This is his latest release; I'll be hearing it come March.

Above are the front cover, hype sticker, and back cover.

Below is the opened gatefold.

Next are both sides of the fold-out insert.

Last, here is the disc itself.

[musiconanironingboard]

2 February 2024: What the Birds Say, Vesper Sparrow. (2023 Y&T release of 1986-1989 unreleased recordings)

In an earlier post I explain my sudden Mary Karlzen kick, and here you see one of the immediate fruits of the situation. It wasn't until I started scouting around looking for all things Karlzen that I discovered she, before her solo career, lived in south Florida and was part of a band called Vesper Sparrow. It just so happens that last year the collected recordings of the band were assembled and released for the first time. Y&T was the label that issued Karlzen's first solo release back in 1992; it seems that they're a bit of a specialist in Karlzen releases, as most everything save her 1995 Atlantic album Yelling at Mary has appeared on Y&T. I listened to a bit of Vesper Sparrow online and it reminded me of the 1980s college rock I mainlined last year courtesy of the Strum and Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987. I think Vesper Sparrow is a bit more glossy pop than alternative jangle, but sometimes it's not a far walk.

Above are the front and back covers.

Below is the opened gatefold. Karlzen is the one on the far left (on the front cover, she's the one in front leaning against the doorframe).

Here is the disc itself. This is a CD-R, a quasi-disposable format that I don't like, but I understand that some albums just wouldn't exist were it not for this option.

In all the press I see about What the Birds Say it is hammered home that only 150 copies exist. This seems odd, considering that I see it for sale on about a billion websites, but whatever the case I'm glad to have obtained one.

[musiconanironingboard]

2 February 2024: Zing, Kleg. (Barooni, 1992)

My brother and I participate in the online community God's Jukebox, a song-sharing site where everyone basically gets to play DJ. I post a new song every week and generally do a lengthy write-up about it. Some people post manically, multiple times a day, but I prefer to use it as a writing exercise and the weekly cadence is perfect for me. It's a friendly place, and relationships develop and every person winds up with their favorites and once you've been on for a while you see who gravitates toward your posts and vice versa. I have a small handful of favorites on there, and then there are people in my larger sphere I don't always interact with but still enjoy seeing around the site. One of these people was a chap I knew only as @paull. On January 13th he announced that he had an aggressive form of cancer and on January 20th he died. It is always strange when an active member of an online community dies; you've not met the person, most likely, but they've impacted you in some way. I don't partake in the site's hashtag games, but it turns out that @paull was the curator of a complex web of hashtags used by site members to categorize their postings; looking on his profile, I found a link to a detailed spreadsheet of hashtags that would rival any statistic geek's output. There was an outpouring of love and affection on the site in the wake of his death, and people are still talking about it, sharing songs that remind them of @paull. Apparently the comments of many God's Jukebox members were shared in a display at the funeral; in the week before his death, his page on the site became filled with touching tributes and farewells. Hopefully he got to read them. His final post on the site, and the last song of his funeral, was the great 1973 track "Sail On, Sailor" by The Beach Boys.

He managed to curate his own funeral's playlist, and another member who was present for the funeral shared it. He included music by Sonic Youth and there was also a song by a band called Kleg. It turns out that Kleg was @paull's own band. I checked out their song "Diamanda," from the funeral playlist, and thought it was fantastic—an instrumental by a grinding, miniature guitar army doing propulsive, rocking riffs. I thought wow, it's evident from this that he was definitely a Sonic Youth fan; when I started researching the album it comes from, I was amazed to learn it was produced by Sonic Youth member Lee Ranaldo. Ranaldo's wife Leah Singer did the artwork and I wager that's her handwriting on the back cover. I snagged a copy on Discogs and you see it here. Kleg did two albums, this one and a 1989 effort called Eating and Sleeping that is a 50-minute suite.

Above are the front and back covers of the disc. This item is in pristine condition. Below is the opened package. @paull, whom I now know to be Paul Lamens, is the fellow in the strip third from the left.

Here's a close-up of the disc.

You can see the video for "Diamanda" here; Paul is the one with the glasses and wild red hair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=WhX4c0Q3XmvnCS6_&v=tHI84AtFBWA&feature=youtu.be

[musiconanironingboard]

1 February 2024: Mary Karlzen. (Y&T Music, 1992)

Singer-songwriter Mary Karlzen is a notorious artist in the record-collecting world of my brother and me. She appeared in our consciousness in 1995 with her major-label debut (and only major-label release) Yelling at Mary. My brother will tell you he learned of the album from a review in Musician magazine, and I'm sure that is correct, but I don't remember the review; I only remember buying the album, which I think I did because he told me it was good. Consulting my music logs for 1995, I see that it was my 48th most played album of that year. Yelling at Mary was a strange outlier for us; we never pursued any other of Karlzen's music, and she seemed to vanish into thin air thereafter. This by itself isn't peculiar, but what is peculiar is we have both managed to hold onto Yelling at Mary for nearly three decades after its release when it would seem a likely candidate for the many purges we have both done to our collection over the years. It's not that the album isn't good, it just had no staying power, and sometimes I think we held onto it totemically—as if some force, maybe just our own silliness, had decreed you cannot trade Yelling at Mary. (I have always, though, tried to avoid getting rid of anything that made my Top 50 year-end most played list.)

Of course if you're us, and you are able to stick around long enough, everything changes. So this of course means that in the year 2024 my brother and I both are suddenly embroiled in a Mary Karlzen kick. I don't even know how this happened, really. It seems that my brother desired out of absolute thin air to hear Yelling at Mary after umpteen thousand years; I think it might have been from him discovering that there's a 2003 reissue of the album featuring bonus tracks. Whatever the case, before I knew it he was playing the album and singing its praises and then he was going on eBay and snapping up all kinds of Karlzen items. When one of us does this, the other often follows suit, and before I could even find my copy of Yelling at Mary that I've got buried in storage I was on eBay buying Karlzen items myself. (And it seems others in the music world caught Karlzen fever over the years; following that 2003 reissue, on tiny south Florida label Y&T, corporate indie label Dualtone picked it up and reissued it again themselves in 2006.) I've not heard a note of Karlzen's music since 2000; my music logs confirm this, and I'm wagering I played Yelling at Mary that year in an effort to determine if I'd be placing it on my Top 125 Albums of the 1990s list (I did not). Still, as soon as my brother started talking about this album (and, apparently enthusiastically loving it again), I got "Time's Forgotten Crime" and "I'd Be Lying" in my head as though no years had elapsed. I look forward to jumping back into her music.

Some of Karlzen's things can be hard to find, so when I saw a copy of her 1992 debut on eBay I nabbed it. That is what we see here; above are the front and back covers.

Next we see the back of the booklet, which replicates the art from the back cover.

Last, here is the disc itself. It's hard to see here, but under her name on the label art it reads "LIMITED EDITION."

[musiconanironingboard]

31 January 2024: three volumes of Julian Cope's Cope's Notes series:

Cope's Notes #1: The Teardrop Explodes (1978-1982) (Head Heritage, 2019)

Cope's Notes #3: World Shut Your Mouth (Head Heritage, 2022)

Cope's Notes #4: The Black Sheep (Head Heritage, 2023)

Julian Cope's catalog since leaving the major-label system in 1997 is a vastly complicated web. Along with his regular new albums of what I'd call pop songs, there are numerous ambient/instrumental albums, projects attributed to other names than his own (e.g. Black Sheep, Robin Hood, etc.), the occasional oddball one-off album connected to things like Cope's giving a lecture at the British Museum, and so forth. I seem to buy most everything he does, but I'm still not close to being a completist. The latest road he's gone down is a series of archival book/CD sets dubbed Cope's Notes. These are generally companion pieces to existing albums or projects, and include lengthy essays by Cope about the work and his life at the time of the subject matter. I never intended to buy all of these, but I was so taken with Cope's Notes #2: Droolian, an expanded reissue of his weirdo 1990 album Droolian, that I now sit here with all five entries in the series to date. Another issue that I purchased while this page was on hiatus, like Droolian, was Cope's Notes #5: The Modern Antiquarian, an examination of his landmark 1998 archaeological textbook of the same name. The CD component of that one is a new studio album in disguise—all-new songs inspired by his own book. I like it quite a bit, and alongside 2023's Robin Hood it makes Cope's second good album of new material in that single year. With volumes 2 and 5 in my home, and knowing how much I enjoyed them both, I felt there was no question that I should buy all the others. I enjoy reading the book component of these issues, and I imagine I will continue to buy any new releases in the series.

Each volume features a strange sort of packaging: on the front cover of the book (more of a lengthy booklet, really) is a CD spindle, and each package is housed in an incredibly flimsy resealable plastic sleeve. Since the CD is otherwise unprotected, you need those sleeves, but in the case of Droolian I've used it so much that the sleeve is approaching the state of being in tatters. These are odd-sized items and I don't have any good replacement sleeves that would fit, so what I really need to do is just put the discs in jewel cases and be done with it, but of course I want to reference those books all the time and the damage gets done to those flimsy sleeves.

Below I'll show each of these three recent purchases, first the front cover, then the back cover, then a random shot of a book spread. The artwork on the CD is identical to what you see on the book cover when the discs are removed, so I didn't bother to show the packages both with and without the discs in place.

First is Cope's Notes #1: The Teardrop Explodes (1978-1982), "48 page of previously unpublished handwritten lyrics, notes, poems & photographs; Included also is a 42-minute documentary soundtrack CD." He's really been mining the Teardrops era lately, as in 2021 he also issued an album called Cold War Psychedelia, half of which consists of 1982 Teardrop Explodes demos. (And it was Universal Music's doing, not Cope's, but 2023 also saw the new six-CD Teardrop Explodes box Culture Bunker 1978-82.)

Next we see Cope's Notes #3: World Shut Your Mouth. This one is devoted to exploring material ancillary to his 1987 solo album of the same name. In Cope's words, "38 pages of previously unpublished lyrics, poems, photographs +4,500-word memoir; Included also is a 35-minutes-long documentary CD."

Last, here is Cope's Notes #4: The Black Sheep, which chronicles the weird period during which Cope's music turned starkly to anarchic, para-military posturing. Black Sheep was ostensibly a music collective; Cope was the obvious leader, but there were Black Sheep spin-off albums that didn't include him. I've not heard any of those, but I did like the 2008 Black Sheep LP and its 2009 follow-up Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse.

In Cope's words, this one features "Forty-eight pages of revolutionary art and songs + an extensive memoir of the early Black Sheep period; Included also is over forty minutes of rare Black Sheep material, new versions and unheard songs."

Here is a shot of all five editions to date of the Cope's Notes series, including the two I purchased when this blog was on hiatus.