Rolling Stones SACD

Is everyone out there thinking the same as me? My major concern with the new Stones SACD collection is whether we are finally going to hear True Stereo versions of songs we have never heard before, or just a select few?

I have the 21-song sampler from ABKCO and I notice the difference in the first two songs "It's All Over Now," and "2120 South Michigan Ave." which are in stereo. Unfortunately, "Get Off Of My Cloud" is in mono. Supposedly, "Satisfaction" is a re mixed stereo. To me the version on the German Hot Rocks blows it away. According to the press kit for the SACD collection it states: " All electronically reprocessed stereo recordings have been expunged from the catalog and have now been replaced with mono mixes while, when available and appropriate, true stereo mixes replace the mono counterparts on the following recordings: "2120," "Satisfaction," "Around And Around," "Confessin' The Blues," "Empty Heart," "Heart Of Stone," "Honky Tonk Woman," "If You Need Me," "It's All Over Now," "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Look What You've Done," "Paint It Black," and "Time Is On My Side." These are the only songs listed as being replaced with stereo mixes. I hope these aren't the only songs, because there are many others that were recorded in stereo but never released, like the following:

"The Last Time"
"Get Off My Cloud" (only in other countries Germany, Japan etc.)
"As Tears Go By"
"19th Nervous Breakdown"
"Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadow?"
"Play With Fire" (only in other countries Germany, Japan etc.)
"The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man"
"Sad Day"

A lot of RCA stuff. And this is to mention just a few songs. There are a lot more. It sounds like they did a fairly good job on the Chess stuff, (from the June 64 sessions anyway) but the RCA recordings need work.

Does anyone have more info on this? I know it's a hard question to ask because they haven't been released yet, but I figured maybe someone has reliable details.

 

Yes, I've had similar thoughts.

These have already been confirmed as being in mono on the new Hot Rocks set. Note that As Tears Go By might *not* have been recorded on multitrack. If it was, there's a good chance the multitracks have been gone for some time, as stereo versions have not even showed up on bootleg.

Well, note that Under Assistant and Sad Day have never showed up in stereo before. It is possible stereo mixes were never made.

But, yes, there is quite a bit of material that could be in stereo but will not be. This includes most of the Out Of Our Heads/December's Children material done at Chess and RCA in late-1964/early to mid-1965. Down Home Girl, Pain In My Heart, Good Times, Mercy Mercy, Spider And The Fly, etc (the list goes on). Plus later b-sides like Sad Day, Long Long While, Who's Driving Your Plane...

So, yes, ABKCO is "dropping the ball" on some of the above tracks, but for others, stereo mixes might not have been ever made, and ABKCO has claimed they are not doing any remixing, so...

If you haven't seen it, check out my website for some info on the subject:

http://lukpac.org/stereostones/

 

Stones SACD

Actually, "As Tears Go By" was recorded on multi-track. My friend knows a guy who has the tape, and others as well. We know these won't be on the SACD collection because ABKCO never contacted them for the tapes. Why ABKCO doesn't have these tapes is beyond me, considering the tapes are there's, but we're talking about ABKCO here.

It would really stink if "Mother's Little Helper" on the U.K. Aftermath is in mono and the rest of the songs are on stereo. Everything the Stones recorded in America (RCA or Chess) in the Sixties was in stereo. I have a interview with Dave Hassinger (the recording engineer at RCA Studios) in the Stones MFSL box set clearly states:

Q Let's talk about how those early albums were cut....mono versus stereo, multi-tracking.

Hassinger: They were all done in stereo.. as much as you can make a stereo record on a four-track machine. And we bounced a lot. As we built the record up, we bounced from one track to another and combined to open tracks to lay down more parts until the record was completed.

Any song recorded at RCA was definitely stereo. From what I believe the same goes for Chess. So any songs recorded at these two studios, there are stereo masters somewhere.

 

Re: Stones SACD

Hmm, that's interesting. Could you elaborate some more? I believe As Tears Go By was done in the UK, and much of the stuff they were doing in the UK at the time was straight to mono. I know I've never heard a stereo mix...

Right. Chess was 4 track at the time, and RCA was 3 track until 1966, when they upgraded to 4 track. Of course, the real question is, where are the stereo mix tapes and/or multitracks? It seems as if stereo mixes were not made for many songs, and it is unclear where the multitracks are today.

 

Luke, As Tears definately sounds like a multitrack recording...on the basic track, for example, it sounds like there's a vocal punch in on the first "smiling faces" (at least on the earlier, "bad" ABKCO versions, a shift in EQ in the vocals is VERY noticable right after that line..i.e. "Smiling faces (switch) I can see").

Also, I would have to think that the backing instrumentation would have been recorded on free tracks on a multitrack. It would just seem to make more sense.

Re things like Sad Day, yes, it's massively stupid that stereo mixes--if they don't exist--aren't being made. Heck, Flowers could become a repository for such things. But nooooo.

-D

 

I always thought the same thing about "As Tears Go By." At that time (63-64) everything the Stones did in England was mono. Not according to my friend. It is a multi-track master of the song. I will double check with him the next time I speak to him. When he mentioned it to me I said the same thing you did. He did not tell me what the other songs were.

What heppens in cases like this is for some reason tapes don't go to all the right people. I think what might happen is this (I'm speculating here) sometimes engineers have tapes, or tapes get put in unmarded boxes that nobody seems to check, and don't surface until years later. It may sound crazy, but I think there is some truth to this. How do so many rare versions of songs (outtakes or rare stereo mixes) pop-up on bootlegs? Where do they come from?

 

You may be right, although remember most of the early stuff was done via bouncing from one machine to another.

Hrmm...I'm listening to the London version now and I don't hear any change after "Smiling faces"...

 

Luke - I think David might be talking about the original vinyl. I seem to remember a type of skip sound or switch on the vinyl version of "As Tears Go By."

 

Well, As Tears Go By was done in '65, so it is slightly more likely it was done on multitrack rather than direct to mono. Although, stereo mixes of just about all the "hits" have shown up, albeit some not officially. As Tears Go By has *never* shown up in stereo. It seems likely that if it was recorded on multitrack, Decca would have mixed it to stereo when they mixed a lot of the other stuff. Although, maybe they didn't...

Some of the rare stereo mixes (19th Nervous Breakdown, Have You Seen Your Mother, etc) were most likely done by Decca, but never issued. The versions on bootleg are copies of those stereo mixes.

I think that ABKCO might not even have the multitracks for some of that stuff, although I've been told they *do* exist.

 

I have a bootleg titled Dartford Renegades which has stereo mixes of "19th Nervous Breakdown." "The Last Time," "Satisfaction," "Cloud," and "Have You Seen Your Mother." This might be the same boot your talking about. This boot has appeared under different titles.

Rob

 

I'm waiting to hear many of those songs in true MONO!

 

That's one of many, yes. That particular title sounds like total garbage, though. Obviously Get Off Of My Cloud and Satisfaction have been released officially. 19th Nervous Breakdown and The Last Time have shown up elsewhere in FAR better sound - I'd say better than the mono mixes myself. The only aforementioned track not to show up in better sound is Have You Seen Your Mother...and I've got a lead on what I *hope* will finally be a good sounding stereo version.

 

Why are you waiting? They've all been available in mono (on CD) for years.

 

Stones SACD

The only recordings I want to hear on mono, are the ones recorded on mono. Why the Stones bothered to record in stereo at a time when nothing they recorded was released in stereo is beyond me.

 

Well Rob, it was the nature of the business. zThe singles market and the radio market were mono so they mixed to mono. Remember, the mono mixes are usually very different that the stereo mixes.

 

Except the Chess tracks, which are identical in mono and stereo.

 

Grant - That is true. Even during the stereo period of the Sixties (1966 onwards) when you could get stereo mixes of the albums, the singles were always mono.

 

Re: Stones SACD

If you record in multitrack -which is the case for most recordings we discuss here- you can derive mono and stereo (perhaps crappy) mixes.

Multitrack does not equate to stereo. It's just a more convenient way to record.

 

Also, it's easy to forget that the UK music business treated singles differently than the US music business did in the 1960s. In the UK, the industry assumed that people bought all formats (singles, EPs and albums), so when a new album came out, a new single that was issued at the same time was NOT on the album. (Think "Rubber Soul" and "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper"; "With the Beatles" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand"/"This Boy"; the White Album and "Hey Jude"/"Revolution." I don't know enough about the Stones' UK releases to know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if things were similar.) Singles were mono, as were EPs, so the Brits saw no need to create stereo mixes of singles.

In America, the industry assumed that two different types of buyers were interested in 45s and albums, thus the new hit song HAD to be on the LP. Why the US labels didn't insist on stereo versions of the singles for use on LPs probably has more to do with time and economics than anything else. They figured "well, we've got the mono mix; we can rechannel it!" Then as now, the consumer who truly cared about the sound was a minority.

 

Tangencially related: I read in Goldmine that the reason why American albums had five songs per side versus six in their UK "counterparts" is that in the US mechanical royalties are paid per song and in the UK a fixed amount is divided between the number of cuts in the album.

 

Good point, although I simply don't think this is the case here.

And heck, even if it WERE, they could remix.

FWIW, the shift isn't NEARLY as prominent on the London discs...as the song in general sounds so much better, you'd think it'd be easier to spot, but it's much more obvious on the ABKCO disc.

-D

 

That would seem to be true (compare the Turtles releases by Repertoire vs those by Sundazed...obviously Repertoire managed to shove many more tracks on their discs, and yet keeps the cost about the same).

Regarding the stereo "19th Nervous" and "The Last Time," one confirmed "source" for them is Dick Bartley's "American Gold" programme. I have a Stones countdown show on disc that has the stereo versions of TLT and 19th Nervous (although, irritatingly enough, the fourth hour disc is missing, so I'm unsure of whether it also has Have You Seen...).

-D

 

I believe Grant is referring to stuff that's only been available on CD in rechanneled "stereo" or folded-down "mono".

 

One of my best friends and former roommate of mine built the SADiE systems the Stones discs are being mastered on. He lives in London now and works with Jon Astley who is transferring them. Then they sent the drives to Bob Ludwig in Maine to perform the EQ work.

I don't know if any of you are familiar with Jon Astley's work. My sphincter tightens when I see his name. He's on my most hated list right along with Vic Anesini of Sony. If Jon squeezes the life out of things with limiting and way too midrange EQ Vic kills them by making everything snugly soft®. Both of these guys have somehow made their way into remastering (and way too often re-mixing) stacks of classic albums. Jon is Pete Townsend's brother in law and is responsible for the Who catalog being re-mixed by himself. He killed George Harrison's 'All Things Must Pass' reissue and somehow made the ABBA catalog sound awful even though the brilliant sounding ABBA Gold record showed us how good those mixes were. All this to say I hope he knows how to align an analog deck properly but doubt he's learned that skill in the extremely short amount of time since he's decided he's a mastering engineer. I wish they would have given the job to someone more competent.

 

yesman, Jon Astley is well known on this forum and your assessment of his mastering work will meet with more or less unanimous agreement. Most folks here don't seem to mind Anesini's work, however.