gimmicks

What won't they think of next? A Swedish band, the Shout Out Louds, have released their new single, "Blue Ice" in a new format: a playable record made out of ice.

I'd love to follow up by saying it's available in the refirgerated section of your local record store, but you'd see through that particular joke. First of all, most record stores don't have a refrigerated section. Second, the ice version of the single is an extremely limited edition. Only ten were made. And technically, when you get it (assuming you are one of the chosen few), what you get is a mold, a bottle of water and instructions. You pour the water in the mold, freeze it, remove the record from the mold and then play it. Cool! For more details, here's the article I saw.

Yeah, it's obviously a gimmick. Keeping the record as part of your collection is not an easy thing to do. I would assume it's not great for your record player, and I doubt the ice would survive many playings. Heck, even the first play seems to be pretty porr quality. But it is a clever idea and good for some attention.

In a similar vein, I recall reading about a record that came with a cardboard turntable that -- if memory serves -- had to be folded together. And I also recall reading about a digital record that has some kind of software built in to change it in small random ways so that it never sounds the same twice. Don't ask me for details. I don't recall.

A bunch of questions come to mind: Do you have to use the water provided in the bottle, or does plain old tap work? Will the music sound bubblietr if you use seltzer? Can the mold be used more than once? I would hope so. I'd hate to think that you can use it once and that's it. But I could see the possibility that the plastic mold is damaged beyond reuse when the frozen disk is removed.

What I will admit is that it shows how far gimmick releases have come. I remember some gimmick releases from my youth, but they were all simpler. There were some singles that came in odd shapes. I particularly remember a specially released single by the turtles that was shaped like a turtle. Split Enz' first album came with some kind of laser etching so that if you held the record at the right angle you could see the album's logo on it. I also had a 5-inch single (Jona Lewie's "I'll Get By in Pittsburgh") and a 6-inch single (Squeeze' "Another Nail in My Heart").  And, of course, there were picture discs, and albums released on clear or colored vinyl.

My favorite gimmick, though, was a flexi-disk produced by Mad Magazine. It was for a song called "It's a Super Spectacular Day." The gimmick was that it had eight different endings, and you didn't know which one would play any given time you listened to it.

when names change

One thing that causes my anal-retentive self a bit of agita is when bands either change their namess or are inconsistent in their spelling.

I like to organize my music alphabetically by band or artist. Admittedly, my CDs haven't been organized for quite some time, but that's another story -- and even so, there's still the database that I'm forever trying to complete. But my organizational efforts are hampered by a few bands that don't have the decency to be consistent.

Now, when a band records under a completely different name (e.g., Brinsley Schwarz recorded and released some tracks as "The Knees"), that's fairly straightforward. I enter those tracks as recorded by the band under whose name they were recorded. In the example cited, I list those tracks as being by The Knees.

But there are other cases where things aren't quite so easy for anal-retentive me. Following are a few examples:

The Toy Dolls
The British punk rock group's tenth album, Orcastrated,  has their name on the cover spelled as "Toy Dollz." Note the "Z" at the end. I could ignore the missing "The" at the beginning -- lots of bands add and remove "the" all willy nilly without regard for the anal-retentive among their fans. But the "Z" bothered me. Alphabetically, keeping the album separate wasn't a big deal, since "Toy Dollz" comes right after "Toy Dolls." But part of me wants to list them as a different band, and list all the tracks as by the "other" band. Of course, many of those tracks also appear on compilation albums, so those albums would show tracks by both "Toy Dolls" and "Toy Dollz." I've resisted the urge, but it does bother me.

Squeeze
There was a contemporary American band called "Tight Squeeze." So to avoid confusion this British group was, early on, billed as "U.K. Squeeze" in the States. And their first album was  released as U.K. Squeeze. For the longest time I filed that album under U (while all other releases were filed under S. And my database reflected tracks from that first album were reflected as being by U.K. Squeeze instead of Squeeze -- even when they appeared on compilations. A friend (who is a bigger CD collector than I am (though he doesn't keep a database on computer) summed it up succinctly when he found out. "That's mental" he sneered. Perhaps so. What made me change it and file everything under S? Some epiphany that it was mental? No. When I found out that, in Great Britain, the band was always billed without the "U.K." in front of its name and the album was released as Squeeze. Of course, even though my copy of U.K. Squeeze went back to S with the other Squeeze albums, I kept it after Sweets from a Stranger because the album title still had "U.K." in it even if the band name didn't. I have also since learned that the band was also known as U.K. Squeeze in Australia. That was because of an Australian band called Squeeze, and lasted much longer.

The Flamin' Groovies
The Flamin(' -- ?) Groovies made some great music, but for some reason they couldn't decide whether their name had an apostrophe in it. Or maybe they simply changed their minds after three punctuation-less albums. Part of me really wants to reflect two different bands in my database. I also never really know whether to use the hyphen when I write their name. I tend to prefer to include the apostrophe, since it just doesn't look right without it. So the one band in my database has the apostrophe in its name. I'm guessing that if I were to ask Roy Loney or Cyril Jordan about the name, and whether the apostrophe should be there, they'd look at me like I was nuts. Or maybe anal-retentive. Did I mention that I'm anal-retentive?

Lynyrd Skynyrd

When the band reformed in the late '80s after the airplane crash-induced hiatus, here were legal battles over use of the name Lynyrd Skynyrd. As a result, the 1991 album was released as Lynyrd Skynyrd 1991, and the album notes made it clear that the band was also known by that name. I find it interesting that, while Wikipedia mentions and briefly discusses the legal battles, I can't find anything about the band being billed under the expanded name.My database still reflects it as being a different band. I suppose if I liked them better and became a completist when it came to their music I would have to do the resaerch and decide how to reflect them. But I don't and I'm not so I probably won't.

John (Cougar) Mellencamp
When he first started out, John Mellencamp reluctantly agreed to use the stage name "Johnny Cougar" because his manager felt that "Mellencamp" was too difficult a name to market. He went back and forth between John and Johnny. Eventually, when he had had some measure of success he was able to add his real surname to the mix, so several albums were released as "John Cougar Mellencamp." It wasn't until 1991 that the "Cougar" was gone and he started releasing albums as "John Mellencamp." It makes me glad that Jason Ringenberg had a band behind him so his last name didn't become an issue.

cd annoyance: bad placement of divisions between tracks

I was listening to a CD I got through Freecycle. It's The Bobby Darin Story.

It's generally a good CD. Pretty much what you'd expect -- a compilation of Bobby Darin songs. As near as I can tell (though I'm not bothering to look it up), it was a CD reissue of an old compilation.

But my one big complaint concerns the first track: "Splish Splash." (As an aside, I'll note that for some reason whenever I think of that song I can't help picturing Anson Williams as Potsie Webber singing it at Arnold's.) It's preceded by a spoken introduction in which Darin talks of how he got his career started. Now I assume that the intro is there because it was on the record that was being reissued. What annoys me about it is that they didn't separate the introduction from the song -- it's one track with both.

In terms of ripping this into my iTunes library, there's the complication that I have three options:

1. Take "Splish Splash" from another CD (assuming I have it on another disc -- I think I do, but I'm not sure offhand, and I'm too lazy to check my database);
2. Take "Splish Splash" complete with the introduction. That's not the worst thing in the world, I'll admit. But it offends my sense of aesthetics; or
3. Use software to edit the track and remove the introduction. But my anal-retentive side won't let me do that unless I also create a new CD with the intro-less version and enter that CD in my database.

By the by, this isn't the first time I've had issues with where the track breaks are placed on a CD.

• On the first reissue of Nick Lowe's Pure Pop for Now People the break between "Nutted by Reality" and "36 Inches High" was placed a little to early, so if you listen to music out of the album order (either by shuffling a disc, putting it on a mix disc, or (as I do), by putting an entire iTunes library on shuffle play), "Nutted by Reality" ends abruptly while "36 Inches High" begins with a half-second of echoing guitar.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's album, Off The Deep End, has a hidden track called "Bite Me." It's a few seconds of cacophony after ten seconds of silence at the end of "You Don't Love Me Anymore," which is the last listed track. The idea is that someone who has the album on may forget to turn off the stereo after the final track. So, ten minutes after the album seemingly ended there is a sudden burst of noise. Of course, this was accomplished by making the final track last about 14 minutes.
• On some reissues of the Monkees album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, Ltd. the spoken word "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky" is part of the same track as "Pleasant Valley Sunday," while in other rereleases there's a track break between them.
• Lots of concert albums seem to have incorporated questionable decisions as to where to split tracks. If, for example, between songs X and Y, the singer talks to the audience, and says something along the lines of "Now, we'd like to do a number that has special meaning for me. It's called Y," then it's best to try to get that patter in as the beginning of the track for Y rather than at the end of the track for X. When you're listening on shuffle, it just works better.

Part of my issue with this stuff, I'll admit, has to do with my anal-retentive side and how I keep my CD database. I should probably post about that at some point. The short of it is that my database is relational, and any given track can appear on more than one album. Take, for example, "Tempted" by Squeeze. That track was originally on their East Side Story album. It also appeared on their compilation, Singles, 45's and Under. It's also appeared on other Squeeze compilations, and a bunch of various artists compilations as well. My database identifies these as all the same track. Aside from helping me to know what I have, it also makes it easier to avoid putting more than one copy of a given track into iTunes. Also, of course, it lets me fiddle with music and databases. Assuming, hypothetically, that some other album has an alternate mix of "Tempted," or a live version thereof, those are listed as different tracks. Note that it's not all science. If a remastered version comes out, I don't treat that as a different track if they didn't change the mix. Mea database, mea praecepta.

Now, the issue for me, is that if the mix is the same but there's some issue with track breaks -- the end of the song cut off on one issue (see first bullet), an additional thing that's not part of the song but part of the track on one album (see second bullet), or some other thing like it, that screws me up. It also bugs me with issues of deciding whether a track is what I call "mixworthy" (i.e., worthy of being ripped from my CD collection into my iTunes library.

At what point is it a different band? (part 3)

Awhile ago (here and here) I talked about the question of when a band has changed enough that, even with the same name, it's a different band. In those posts I looked at specific issues with specific bands. In the first, I considered Dr. Feelgood, a band that -- through a variety of personnel changes -- no longer contains any of its original members. In the second, I considered Ducks Deluxe, a band that broke up in 1975 and reunited more than thirty years later.

In a more general sense, the question of whether a band is still really the same band comes down to who is the creative force, and who gives the band its sound. Granted, that's all kind of vague, which leaves lots of room for debate.

People often refer to "early Beatles" or "late Beatles" to distinguish, because the band's later psychedelic sound was so vastly different from the earlier merseybeat. Heck, even when they made Abbey Road, trying to back to their earlier style, they produced a record that bore little resemblance to their early material. But because of the continuity -- no breakups and no change in personnel (at least once they got famous) -- no one thinks of them as different bands.So, could the Beatles have replaced anyone and still been truly the Beatles? Lennon and McCartney were the creative axis. George Harrison was, by far, the best musician in the group, and Ringo gave the band its goofy factor. So it's easy to say that each of the four was a necessary ingredient in the band.

the Merseybeat Beatles

The psychedelic Beatles

But I don't think so. I'll buy Lennon and McCartney -- each was necessary for the band to truly be the Beatles. But Harrison? As good as he was, he could have been replaced. There are lots of other good guitarists who could have stepped in. And similarly, Ringo could have been replaced. I'll note that for a time it was thought that all four members of the Who were essential. But when Keith Moon died, he was replaced by Kenney Jones and the band played on. I'll admit that there were some (purists?) who didn't accept it. But there are also some who haven't come to terms with the idea of Pink Floyd without Syd Barrett. Backing up to the Who, though, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend are the essential ingredients. I realize, of course, that events being what they are, I'm not going out on much of a limb by saying that.

To take an example from the other end of the spectrum, there's Squeeze. The band has gone through more lineup changes than anyone would care to remember. But through it all they remained Squeeze because Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook were there.