#I wasn't able to listen to the audio when I was enhancing it

[friendlessghoul]

Buster Keaton (Monte Collins behind him) Sidewalks of New York - 1931

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

Rock 'n' Roll Hits of 1958 1999 Rock & Roll / Doo Wop

OK, well, this actually turned out to be a little bit of a surprise for me. Had this CD of hits from 1958 consisted of all original versions, I would've listed nearly all ten of its songs as highlights. But none of these tracks, as it turns out, are actually original versions; they are, in fact, re-recordings, which are, more or less, a bane of pretty much everyone's existence.

Re-recordings are just cheaply made imitations of original versions, usually done by an original artist when they're past their prime, and whenever anyone hears one, they're typically made upset by it, because it doesn't sound nearly as good as the original version that they remember. It's sort of like ordering your favorite dish from a restaurant that you haven't been to for a while, and then finding out the hard way that the chef changed up its ingredients. The dish still has the same name, but once you take that first bite, you realize that something's off, and then you're disappointed that you can't enjoy that same meal that you came for in the first place 😑.

And yet, I was prepared for this to happen. The cheap and generic album art template and the phrase, "10 big hits by the original artists!" are both dead giveaways. See, when you run into enough of these oldies releases, you know what careful language to look for, and that sentence there, rather than saying something like, "original hits from the original artists," really tells you all you need to know: that these are re-recordings.

But listening to re-recordings can also be like watching The Room; you know it's atrocious, but you get a big kick out of just how atrocious it actually is.

So, I was really all set to trash this whole thing, and then have some fun by singling out the absolute worst re-recording of them all, but then I came across what basically amounts to a four-leaf clover: a good re-recording 😮.

Lloyd Price's rendition of "Stagger Lee" here is definitely not as good as its infectious original—in fact, that original just might be my favorite hit of all from 1958—but it's still pretty decent. The audio quality's definitely not spectacular by any means, but whenever Price recorded this one, he clearly still had enough vocal chops to do it, which is not something that you can really say of most other re-recordings. Of course, he sounded a lot spryer in 1958 than he does here, and perhaps that's why the tempo's a bit slower now too, but on this he still has soulful passion, and his grizzliness feels charming rather than piteous. His backing vocalists also lend to the overall goodness of the song too, especially their repeated "ba-da-ba-da-ba-da"s that they rhythmically sing in tandem with the horns and drums. On the original, those "ba-da"s only appear a couple of times, but on here they're way more constant, and they really end up enhancing the track, overall, I think; as does the sax 😌.

So, with this CD, I was actually prepared for what some might think is the unexpected, but what I wasn't prepared for at all was something that should be even far more unexpected, and that is a genuinely good re-recorded hit. I can honestly probably count on one hand the amount of times that I've actually managed to run into one of these things over the years, so you should all consider yourselves lucky to have been able to bear witness to such a rare event, because this is real Halley's Comet stuff here, folks 🌠.

Highlights:

Lloyd Price - "Stagger Lee"