CLASSIC ROCK TRACKS POLL: THE RESULTS

I think I just said "hm" or something; I got the feeling it was a sensitive subject, so I dropped it.

hahaha that is awesome!

When I get a chance, I'll have to recount the time in the late '70s when I had a threesome with the Wilson sisters. I'm on my way to the library right now, though.

gross!
xp i would have probably gone on and on and then someone would have been like "this isn't what we pay you for" and i'd shut up

I would give my left arm to be able to grill pearlman and krugman about BOC and the whole imaginos mythology and all of that. I dream of writing a secret treaties 33 1/3 with tons of new interview content.

Sandy Pearlman is one of the more fascinating characters in rock history imo. His academic career alone is enviable!

I think the 'more cowbell' sketch is hilarious but I suspect that most people who repeat that line don't actually get why it's funny.

(Ha, the classic rock station just started playing "Reaper".)

Sandy's Lynott story is also great!

gr8080 and some dude did such an amazing job with this!

OTM.

thank you all for the love and appreciation, sincerely. it was a lot of work but you all made it a pleasure.

Sandy Pearlman is one of the more fascinating characters in rock history imo. His academic career alone is enviable!
^this is otm.

Kudos to gr8080 and some dude.

It's our privilege some dude. Being given a whole genre with fresh ears is the biggest gift ILM has to offer, and you guys delivered.

This Marshall Tucker Band track is great. It's weird how classic rock has a fresh feel when not played over the radio.

Adding james gang to the list of bands that cut awesome sounding records

it's sad that some of Hendrix's stuff doesn't sound so good

rong

i mean, i totally wish Jimi had lived to make records with some of the more sophisticated developments in rock production that came about in the '70s, but the kind of outsized, almost tacky ambition with which he attacked the limits of '60s recording are a pretty integral aspect of the whole charisma and texture of the Experience albums.

I feel that

Jimi was kind of hitting his head against the ceiling of what was possible in the late '60s the same way The Who were -- i can't even imagine how amazing the Jimi equivalent of Who's Next would have been.

I guess we always have SRV records :-o

and john mayer's continuum

I'm really interested in this recording-technology stuff - can any of y'all elaborate? I mean, I hear huge differences between 60s and 70s rock records but I can't articulate them, or tell how much is "what's possible" versus "what was seen as a good sound" - for example, as I was saying about the Who upthread, the drums in 60s records always strike me as really quiet compared to how rockin' the songs sound in my head.

I think it's as much about the development of the rock aesthetic as the technology. "My Generation" is an amazing sounding record in its own way, but it seems pretty clear that nobody was really sure yet how to harness a band that played like that in the studio yet. or, like, those early Stones records where the tambourine is practically drowning out the drums.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neve_8078

I'm no expert but the tape op dudes seem to point to this frequently.

Tape Op interviews are perhaps my favorite thing to read

Dudes like Walter Sear would argue that nothing changed I think, though

Which supports some dude's post, I think

a lot of those early British invasion records were initially only released in mono. i think Electric Ladyland was the first album or one of the first to be recorded with 12-track mixing. it seems like things changed really rapidly in the 2nd half of the '60s.

yeah but how does track number = sound? Limited overdubs to perfect mic postion, etc?

you can straight up here background noise in voodoo child

i'm not talking strictly about sound quality. i'm just saying a lot of what we take for granted as the basics of recorded music weren't even around until well into the 'rock era.'

*hear

although # of tracks has a big effect specifically on drum recording -- look at how many mics are placed around a drumset in a modern studio session. there might've been just one or two mics on Keith Moon's set for those early Who records. you're not gonna get a strong kick drum sound if there's just one mic hanging over the whole set.

This is really illuminating - never thought of that before about miking drums but that makes total sense. Man. Would love to hear some of those early and mid-60s rock records with the drums the way they must have sounded in the studio. Must have been frustrating for the drummers!

those early Stones records where the tambourine is practically drowning out the drums.

i love over-eager '60s tambourine mixing. sometimes it can sound silly, no doubt, but that's one of the essential features of '60s rock production imo.

yeah it can be a charming quirk of the era but sometimes i just detest it

Pete Townshend's autobio goes into a good amount of detail about how they recorded the first few albums, things that frustrated him about one record that were stepped up on the next record, the kind of equipment he was buying for his home studio and then for Rampart, attempts at quadrophonic sound, etc.

Part of the sound problem with The Who's 60s records was Kit Lambert, if I remember that scene in The Kids Are Alright correctly.

xps

...which is why the first album, produced by Shel Talmy, sounds so much better than Happy Jack and Sell Out.

more than a few modern producers have tried to go back to '60s and early '70s drum sounds by NOT using all those drum mics. more mics and more tracks does not automatically equal better. there's something to be said for trying to capture the natural sound of the drums as they would be heard from one or two particular points in a room, as opposed to the heightened artificiality of a recording that simultaneously blends 12 or 14 different listening positions. there's also something to be said for mic bleed. but in either case, whether you're talking two drum mics or 14, it is not going to sound the way it actually sounded in the studio. in both cases, you're hearing the mics and the mixing board and the point of view of the mixer himself, among other things.

Jimi was kind of hitting his head against the ceiling of what was possible in the late '60s the same way The Who were -- i can't even imagine how amazing the Jimi equivalent of Who's Next would have been.

― some dude, Saturday, August 2, 2014 5:58 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Charles Shaar Murray (in the indispensable Crosstown Traffic) made the point that Hendrix' earlier records with Chas Chandler sounded better -- clearer, punchier -- than Electric Ladyland did, and that Jimi on Ladyland, always impatient to put down his ideas, didn't want to spend the necessary time to get decent drum sounds, among other things.

I love Electric Ladyland, and "1983" --> "Moon, Turn the Tides" is a key moment in 20th century music. But as monumental as "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" is, it could have been unbelievable with minor tweaks of how the rhythm section was recorded.

The Who in the 60s is a different case: when Glyn Johns was engineering -- as he did on My Generation and "Pictures of Lily" -- their shit had a presence like no-one else's. But their manager/producer Kit Lambert opted not to use Johns on, among other things, The Who Sell Out, resulting in a production far more thin that it should have been (though this was sometimes out of necessity: parts of Sell Out were recorded on the road in the US with whichever staff engineers were available in whichever studios/cities).

While Glyn wasn't the biggest fan of Moon's playing, he was the only engineer, anywhere, ever, who knew how to record Keith. Even the top-flight engineers on the preliminary Who's Next sessions at the state-of-the-art Record Plant in NYC (which were scrapped, but later released on deluxe editions and bootlegs) and Ron Nevison on Quadrophenia couldn't get a handle on how to record Moon.

oh sure, new technology caused as many problems as it 'fixed.' but now people at least have the option of using different approaches, back then you just had the limited options that were available. xp

I didn't know Johns engineered Sing My Generation -- explains a lot.

listening to The Move's version of "Do Ya" for the first time and...eh. why did anyone vote for this over the ELO one? do any radio stations actually play it?

i mean i at least get why we have 2 versions of "Crimson and Clover" in the top 500, they don't feel redundant.

I've never hear the Move version tbh. I cannot imagine how it could threaten the ELO one. But a maybe I'm not imaginative enough.

as a layperson, there is something in the way that drums and bass were recorded in classic rock in the early 70s that is super-indelible to me. the drums are very crisp sounding to me, and the bass is scary resonant. i'm thinking like, the sound of rocknroll hoochie koo, or take the money and run, or rocky mountain way. it was very definitely not "my" music, but for like the 20 years, i find that when i run across that production sound, i crank the system trying to figure out what it is.

"last 20 years"

Listen to the drums on funk #49. So killer.

the thing i love about hendrix, bonzo, page, townsend, pink floyd, even the beatles is they were all essentially starting with hammers & they all said, i fuckin love hammering what else can we do with it so we can hammer more shit better louder cooler

and they went, well what if i take the head off the hammer & put it on this

what if i add two more heads to the hammer

or like, hey is there such a thing as a nail gun? no? can we make one?

they were all mad scientists & it is so awesome that the sounds we take for granted, like jimi, were to an extent created from whole cloth just by tinkering around, hearing a sound in their head & trying to realize it on instruments or equipment that was only halfway there.
and they were so successful at it that companies MADE shit designed to sound that way afterwards because of him/them

it's such a great innovative period when you really dig into HOW they all got their sounds

yeah i was listening to "Hoochie Koo" today and was just kinda bowled over by how alive it sounded. no wonder Derringer has been so successful as a producer.

one of the best things about this poll is listening to a lot of stuff on headphones that i'd previously only heard on cheap TV or car radio speakers, some songs sound dramatically different from how i remembered them.

xpost, epic VG post

Def true that jimi was an innovator with his Leslie cab imitating pedals etc. still I wish he innovated less in the studio!

:(

I also can't believe how much a slog Maggie May is. That is the one song in this poll where my memory trumps reality.