Robert Johnson - Classic or Dud?

I guess my point was, are we approaching this as, if you're a beginner, don't listen because you won't get the nuances that made him great, all you'll hear is stereotype or uninspired meandering--or are we saying, intrinsically, we believe RJ is no good, and if you're a beginner, don't bother listening to this because, unless you're a blues afficionado who cares about pointless details, RJ sucks and really is just built out of hype, a la Pet Sounds to many popsters.

As a side note, per classical, I don't mean contemporary art music, so I'm not including composers, great as they may be, who are living or lived into the 20th/21st century.

Or rather "Is the mainstream of Blues music-making and tradition good?" I suppose.

I still maintain that it's an odd question, though, considering how canonical RJ's work is. I mean, if you didn't pick him, among a few others, who would you pick for a beginner? It's like not picking the Beatles if you wanted to initiate a novice into pop music. Sure, you may not like it, but it's undisputable that they are essential as a primer.

Because we're dealing with an "average intelligent listener" with no bias, one way or another, we can safely assume that he or she will either like or dislike RJ, but not necessarily that the opinion is automatically one way or another, since there are people on both sides of the fence. The question, then, is "Is RJ's work of enough substance, is there enough meat there, so that one can extract something to decide a valence on?"

And I think that question is moot considering how valued RJ is. While I find it odd that many people wouldn't like RJ and would like the blues, I don't think it's impossible. I would find it much more difficult to swallow if someone suggested that he was disposable/irrelevant, however. And I think that's what I would wnat to know as a tyro in search of blues clues.

Robert Johnson almost certainly not the best way into 'the blues', or even acoustic country blues - the tortured satanic whatsits that Marcus blahs on abt in 'Mystery Train' are not always easy to hear NOW, 70 odd years after the fact. Also, Johnson cld, even on record, be surprisingly jaunty and straight-forward - 'Red Hot', for example, is little more than a (great) food-related novelty song. I'd say Johnson's songs are best listened to sparingly, not more than one track at a time, or even on a mixtape where his strange, ghostly voice/playing may be thrown into greater relief. A basic knowledge of Johnson's (near) contemporaries - Son House, Skip James, Charley Patton etc. - wld also help the 'novice' to put RJ's work into some kind of context.

why wd people expect to like r.j. if they don't like blues? it's not like he's apart from the genre.

*actually i don't remember any but it's been a while so i'll give g.m. the benefit of the doubt.

$25!!!

yeah, the jsp boxes are k-ugly. but cheap!!

because everyone talks about him as if you WOULD like him even if you didn't like blues!!

i really like robert johnson now, though i didn't when i started this thread.

that's silly talk.

do you mean you'd never put him on your home stereo but you'd enjoy him on someone else's?

(otherwise...trying to figure out why someone would listen to music except for pleasure...)

(since i like pretty much everything ever it isn't usually a problem)

sigh.

FYI: A third photo of Robert Johnson has been discovered.

scroll to bottom of page: http://www.robertjohnsonbluesfoundation.org/

yeah, there was a story in vanity fair (I think) about that pic a little while ago? they've definitely proved it's him?

think this is another grail artifact for boomers/cream fans more than anything.
that site is very um...blueshammer. anybody heard steven 't bear' johnson?

I have not heard him, but just his appearance is enough to keep him on my must-miss list until further notice.

I would stay away from the Complete Recordings. Better fidelity can be found on The King of The Delta Blues Singers remastered from 1998 and Vol 2 from 2004. Also you gain the newly found take on Traveling Riverside Blues. It was found in the Smithsonian. Going this route also gets rid of the problem of having back to back takes to listen to, which I find quite annoying.

listening to robert johnson recordings sped up a bit was kind of heartbreaking

why?

too convincing, stole the magic

do you mean those slowed down versions, or ...?

yes er uh exactly, that's what i thought i said, or was trying to think, or some such. not functioning too well today, for various reasons. but yeah.

that

ha, ok, i was confused ... dunno, i listened to those and didn't really buy it.

but i can see how they might kinda make the released versions sound weird.

i guess i was/am convinced. the recordings sound so natural and "correct" at reduced speed. and a lot more ordinary, too. on first hearing them, my response was immediate: "this is how robert johnson actually sounded." tone & timbre, singing, playing & rhythms all suddenly made so much more sense to me. but rather than encourage me to re-explore his work, it just bummed me out.

not sure why. loss of otherworldliness, a sense that i should have been able to figure it out on my own, something like that.

that is, such a record player used to be fairly common.

I want one

lol wait this is just a fancy name for pitch control!

but for 78s you'd need something special

fascinating

The first item you will need is a suitable turntable with variable speed. This is because so many 78s were not recorded at exactly 78rpm: speeds of between 72 and 85 rpm are quite common, with a few higher or lower. Probably the cheapest option is a second-hand variable-speed Goldring-Lenco unit, one of the ‘GL’ series. They are still easy to find and relatively cheap. They always benefit from some basic maintenance, which will include a new idler wheel. (see end for details of suppliers). The biggest problem with the Goldrings is the incidence of rumble. That new idler wheel will help, as will removing, cleaning and re-greasing the main bearing. If you cannot tackle this yourself, many specialist hi-fi shops can do it for you. Other turntables types include the STD, which has a useful digital read-out, but which can be a nightmare to repair, since spares are hard to find. Many other types can be found that will play 78s, but not usually with the required speed variation. Garrard 301/401 as they stand only have something like a 3% variation, although can at some expense be modified by Loricraft to give very wide speed control. It is perhaps worth mentioning that the Goldring and STD turntables are capable of almost infinite speed variation up to 90 rpm and are thus ideal if you play Pathé discs.

https://www.therecordcollector.org/articles/aguidetoplaying7.html

how would you know if you were at the right RPM, just judgment by ear mostly and get as close as makes sense? or would there be a way to figure it out

I think that's why they use the sheet music as a reference?

ahhh makes sense

Remastered, mint test pressings. This is the best he's ever sounded, to my ears. You can buy a CD or download high-quality FLACs.
https://www.pristineclassical.com/products/pabl010

That's just a 10-song sampling. The same label also has the rest of his works here, but I didn't download these because I don't think they're from the same sources.
https://www.pristineclassical.com/collections/artist-robert-johnson/products/pabl001
https://www.pristineclassical.com/collections/artist-robert-johnson/products/pabl002

lol almost sounds too good tbh

oh man this sounds tremendous. I bought the LP everybody had when I was young & then had the complete on tape, the one that came out in the 90s, like a lot of people I spent a whole lotta time with those. Love hearing the noise cleaned up, it's just great -- you can hear the quality of his singing so much better

There's actually a lot of debate about these remasters among audiophiles. Someone in this forum writes that "anything that reverse engineers is fabricated and thus not the original recording anymore. It is a synthetic re-creation based on elements of the original recording."

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/pristine-audios-robert-johnson-transfers-of-test-pressings-made-from-original-metal-parts.1014579/

However they were achieved, I just found these versions to sound so dramatically different that it was worth mentioning.

always enjoy a furrowed-brow debate about what the most authentic reproduction of a reproduction is

For me, the difference between the 1990s box set and the "Centennial Collection" 2CD set that came out in 2011 was huge, and frankly good enough. Listening to the samples on the website was a little uncanny; I didn't believe what I was hearing.

Pristine Classical has a good reputation in the classical community for their remastering.

This description puts me off; it's not remastering, it's sonic Photoshop:

XR remastering was developed by Andrew Rose in early 2007 and has been in continual development and refinement ever since. Its aim is to go much further than simply “cleaning up” old recordings, using cutting edge technology and innovative, proven techniques to get as close as possible to the original sound heard in the concert hall or recording studio before it was corrupted by early recording equipment.

It starts with what has been termed elsewhere “tonal balancing”. Most of the microphones used to make historic recordings (and even more so the horns used in acoustic recordings) had very uneven frequency responses. We use advanced computer analysis of the tonal content of these recordings to “reverse engineer” and counter the impact of those tonal distortions. This results in a much more natural and realistic sounding recording, limited only by the other constraints of the original source (frequency range, noise levels etc.).

But this is just the beginning. We were the first to release recordings where wow and flutter – the inconsistencies of pitch common to all analogue playback systems, but particularly prevalent in older recordings – had been fixed using a ground-breaking German computer solution called “Capstan”. Its pricing means we remain one of the few companies working in this field to use it and its impact, particularly in piano music, can be immense.

Another innovation has been the use of a technique called convolution reverberation. A large number of older recordings were made in especially “dry” acoustics to combat the noisy, low-quality reproduction systems of the time. Yet we hear music in concert halls specially designed for acoustics that complement and enhance the sound of the musicians playing there. Convolution (a complex mathematical procedure) allows us to effectively “place” our recordings in some of the finest acoustic spaces in the world – renowned concert halls, opera houses, churches and cathedrals. When sensitively and delicately applied this can add an extra dimension and sense of sonic reality to even the oldest recordings. It’s a far cry from using echo or digital reverberation to try and hide problems in recordings!

There are many other steps involved in making an XR recording – it soon gets very complex, and it takes a lot of painstaking work to produce each of our releases. Over the years XR remastering has become increasingly recognised as producing some of the finest audio restorations around.

yeah but the older recordings are, to borrow your metaphor, pictures taken with cheap cameras under suboptimal lighting. you photoshop that to try to see what the photographer saw.

I think the question is whether the ends justify the means. We don't know what Robert Johnson really sounded like in that hotel room, or how the Hot Fives sounded in the Okeh recording studio in Chicago. The primitive recording equipment of the day tried its best to capture it, but could not do it justice. This still sounds pretty natural to me, whether it's been "Photoshopped" or not. It's not like it's fake stereo or some crap like that. I guess what I'm asking is, would Robert Johnson or his producer, Don Law, object to the sound on the Pristine remasters? We'll never know, but I doubt it.

Pfft. This guy is brazenly stealing Robert Parker's whole engineering shtick on vintage material from the same era, right down to his exact reasoning for doing so. Nothing new, nothing revelatory and every bit as dubious as it's always been. To be fair, it's a fun novelty, but in the way, say, Clint Eastwood's Bird tries to re-create a live performance that can only be known on a scratchy 78 recording - there's no shaking the fact that it's at best a simulation and at worst a forgery, which is how it sounds the more you listen to it.

yeah but the older recordings are, to borrow your metaphor, pictures taken with cheap cameras under suboptimal lighting. you photoshop that to try to see what the photographer saw.

I think what it boils down to for me is the recording, flaws and all, is the work of art. Nobody now living saw/heard Robert Johnson play live. And modern recording technology didn't exist back then. So you listen to the recordings that they were able to make, to the best of their abilities at the time, and you accept that the content is inextricable from the medium. I think cleaning up the original source material as best you can is not only permissible, it's desirable. But this goes beyond that into what amounts to colorization. You shouldn't colorize black and white movies because the cinematographers knew they were shooting in black and white and they operated accordingly. And you shouldn't add echo and reverb to make it sound like Robert Johnson was performing in a concert hall, when he was sitting in a hotel room, tucked into a corner, facing a single microphone.

There's actually a lot of debate about these remasters among audiophiles. Someone in this forum writes that "anything that reverse engineers is fabricated and thus not the original recording anymore. It is a synthetic re-creation based on elements of the original recording."

― TO BE A JAZZ SINGER YOU HAVE TO BE ABLE TO SCAT (Jazzbo)

authenticity narratives are super interesting to me. hmmm. let me kinda try to break down my feelings in text.

if something can be argued as being a new creative work, or at least a derivative creative work, my only real concern is whether that work was ethically sourced, if you will. if pristine classical was saying this _wasn't_ robert johnson's work, but their own original work, that would be objectionable (remember when somebody tried to do that with the beatles' records? applied some processing filter to it and claimed it as an 'original work' not subject to the beatles' copyright? very stupid.) if someone stole other peoples' copyrighted creative work and used it to feed a computer program to "enhance" robert johnson's work, that would be objectionable (some people don't find this ethically objectionable, but i do). neither seems to be the case.

so i'm inclined to judge it on its merits. the tradition of duophonic being seen as "fake stereo". my problem with duophonic isn't that it's fake, it's that it's not good sounding stereo. a stereo remix of "good vibrations", including the vocals, is just as "fake", i'd say, but it fucking sounds great.

doing an a/b with the 2011 recording, it sounds different i guess. idk. i'm a lo-fi head. i got an aesthetic preference for stuff that sounds bad. most people prefer things that sound good to things that sound bad, though. legit.

Pfft. This guy is brazenly stealing Robert Parker's whole engineering shtick on vintage material from the same era, right down to his exact reasoning for doing so.
Robert Parker was best known for creating fake, digital stereo reproductions of old mono recordings. Not the same at all.

most people prefer things that sound good to things that sound bad, though.

Yeah, but what's "good" in this case? "I want this mono recording of a dude playing an acoustic guitar in 1937 to have the rich, full soundstage of a Pink Floyd album from 1973" is not "good" to my mind.

seems a bit like colorizing a B&W film. would the filmmakers have used color if they could have? i bet in most cases, absolutely. but it still sucks to colorize a B&W film. idk about this at all.

Robert Parker was best known for creating fake, digital stereo reproductions of old mono recordings. Not the same at all.

I realize he called his label "Jazz Classics in Digital Stereo" (so logically it would make sense it would be exactly that - fake, digital stereo), but I had the Muggsy Spanier one for a while, and if you read the booklet, it has some notes that could very well be in all of his releases. Basically, the relevant part repeats a lot of what's bolded upthread - people listened to jazz in dance halls and concert halls, where the music reverberated off the walls! They didn't sound "dead" like they do on those old '78s - nobody draped carpets and blankets on the walls like they did in recording studios - so I'm putting back the ambience that you would have rightfully heard if you were there!

I'm sure the methods aren't the same, but that's exactly what they're both arguing for in print and you hear it too - far more than any modest stereo spread, the attempt at making this "live" sound from a dry sounding record is what stands out the most on Parker's CD's.

"I want this mono recording of a dude playing an acoustic guitar in 1937 to have the rich, full soundstage of a Pink Floyd album from 1973" is not "good" to my mind.
I certainly don't think the Pristine release makes Robert Johnson sound anything like that! If they sounded unnatural to me, I wouldn't be interested. You can’t tell me which versions are more “authentic” any more than I can, because none of us were in that room.

You shouldn't colorize black and white movies because the cinematographers knew they were shooting in black and white and they operated accordingly. And you shouldn't add echo and reverb to make it sound like Robert Johnson was performing in a concert hall, when he was sitting in a hotel room, tucked into a corner, facing a single microphone.

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson)

ok, if we're gonna dig into the weeds on this, i'm gonna start talking about doctor who

when they put out the doctor who DVDs, they would do "special editions" with new CGI effects. i think the CGI effects look like shit. i mean they literally replaced a shot of a wobbly hubcap with a CGI spaceship and i kind of prefer the hubcap. do i think they "shouldn't" have done it? well, for one, no, just because i like it doesn't mean they shouldn't have done it. for two, who fucking cares what i think? like what makes me the arbiter of what is and isn't a defacement of _real_ doctor who?

there are _so many_ examples of this from the show's history:

* replacing footage on the program as broadcast with newly created special CGI special effects
* colorizing a story originally recorded and broadcast in black and white and editing it to 45 minutes to try and gain a wider audience for that story
* manually colorizing an episode originally recorded and broadcast in color, but which no longer exists in color
* colorizing a story originally recorded and broadcast in color, using color metadata not visible in the recording, but which is still stored as part of a subcarrier signal
* colorizing a story originally recorded and broadcast in color by combining the color signal from a low-quality off-air color recording with the image from a high-quality black and white film print of the story
* using computerized techniques on a 25 fps film print of a program originally recorded and broadcast at 50 fps to give it the "look" of a 50 fps broadcast
* creating a new animated version of a "missing" story using the existing audio and creating new animated footage to let viewers see how it might have looked upon broadcast
* doing the above in black and white
* doing the above in colour
* replacing a recording by the beatles which appeared in the original soundtrack of a story with another recording, for copyright reasons
* cutting part of an episode because it contained a copyrighted performance by the beatles
* obscuring part of the audio of an episode because of its use of a highly offensive racial slur
* re-creating a few seconds of audio missing from all known recordings of the episode, including a recording of the original broadcast, by splicing together recordings of the actor saying the words in the missing line
* re-creating the video of 12 seconds of footage present on the original broadcast, but censored for overseas broadcast, and hence not part of the existing video recording

which of these "shouldn't" the copyright holders of the program have done? which of these are objectionable alterations to the original program?

personally, in every case, i'm in favor of what the people in question (often the erstwhile Restoration Team) did with these recordings. i have _personal aesthetic objections_ to the results of some of this work - some of the animations are pretty bad - but in no case do i think it's justified to say that the alterations to the original recording media _shouldn't_ have been made.

Wait, what just happened? tl;dr sorry. Nutshell: how does this stack up next to the latest Can reissues?

This whole debate goes way beyond primitive recordings from the 1930s and earlier. You’ll find countless number of rock & roll and R&B tracks from the 1950s and early ’60s on Spotify and Apple Music that sound dramatically different. They’re the same recordings, but one might be mono, the other stereo (or fake stereo). One may have a more solid bass sound, the other tinny. One may sound clear as a bell, the other muddy as the Mississippi. One might sound “dead,” another may have had excessive reverb added.
My favorite version of Little Richard’s “Rip it Up,” for example, sounds dead — no echo or reverb whatsoever — but it sounds immediate and slaps like crazy. The dead studio sound is actually pretty common for a lot of New Orleans-style rock & roll and R&B from the ’50s. That version sounds the most natural to me, but the much more common version you’ll find has reverb. Which one is the “right” one? Even the original label, Specialty, has released different-sounding versions. IDK, I just know what I like.

Did Elijah Wald weigh in yet?

A band is recording an album for my label at the beginning of March, and I'm considering putting out two versions: if you buy the CD (or the digital files from Bandcamp), you'll get stereo, but if you listen to it on a streaming service, it'll be in mono.

Not too sure about this one. It sounds a bit off and overdone to an 'uncanny valley' sort of degree.

It sounds like what it is, an attempt to turn Robert Johnson's recordings into something they are not.
They will always sound like they were done in the 1930s, because that is when they were done.
The convolution reverb is a strange idea. A musician doesn't perform the same way in a hotel room as a concert hall. I don't think you can just throw some convolution on and be done with it. And not sure if there is a need either.

The original recordings are distorted, sure. But in trying to reverse that, they are merely distorting the recordings a second time.

I actually do think you can say that the original 78 recordings are probably closer to what happened on the day. Think of it this way, the 78s add one layer of distortion, whereas these add a second layer of distortion. I think it is statistically very improbable that the second distortion brings us closer to what Robert Johnson would have sounded like in the room.

Not to come off as too much of a purist, I think the important point for me is that this one doesn't quite come off. I feel like other remasters have done a more tasteful job of cleaning up just the right amount without trying to make the recordings into something they're not.

A visual accompaniment to these new releases:

https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/sRzqqriSclw94h8ynDPV/sRzqqriSclw94h8ynDPV--1--5kczy.jpg
https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/qENHSP3bux9JsDCntYGs/qENHSP3bux9JsDCntYGs--1--otozz.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/zMMwiz5.jpeg
https://images.nightcafe.studio/jobs/JEVsJki59SYk7Dd14IJf/JEVsJki59SYk7Dd14IJf--1--kmtbm.jpg
https://cdn.openart.ai/stable_diffusion/af5110c27f02bc5a1e470ebb1bcb4db198554916_2000x2000.webp

Need one of RJ & Bonamassa shaking hands.

Lol

Dion DiMucci has a big Robert Johnson portrait he painted himself hanging prominently in his living room iirc

https://www.facebook.com/OfficialDion/photos/a.281029604934/403804609934/?type=3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUlVCZshZOU

It’s a far cry from using echo or digital reverberation to try and hide problems in recordings!

lol. some things never change.

this is an interesting project

thought I would hate it but to me it's ultimately more like Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old than George Lucas' special editions

Those samples sound pretty awful, the noise swells and shapes with the vocal so I feel like I've got sand in my ear and someone's riding the fader to mute the background.