Worst liner notes

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by videoman, Jul 18, 2014.

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  1. videoman

    videoman Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    Lake Tahoe, NV
    I'm reading through some of the liner notes John Tobler wrote for the Elton John 1995 remasters.

    Huh?

    On "Honky Chateau" he twice mentions the "synthesizer noises" and "synthesizer swoops" on "Rocket Man". uhhh....the synth plays pads largely in the background on that song. I presume he's talking about the slide guitar parts.

    And on "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" he mentions both "Funeral For a Friend" and "Your Sister Can't Twist" as songs that "might have influenced" Jim Steinman when he wrote the 'Bat Out Of Hell' album for Meat Loaf and tries to draw a connection by mentioning that Davey Johnstone played on that album...

    ....huh? Really? This is stuff that makes it to press? Nothing more interesting or ACCURATE could have been said about these records two decades later?
     
  2. Fullbug

    Fullbug Forum Resident

    Location:
    Seattle
    Aja, Steely Dan

    Huge waste of ink.
     
  3. DJ LX

    DJ LX Forum Resident

    Location:
    Madison WI
    The nadir of liner notes is William Loren's pretentious and overwrought blurb on Eric Matthews' It's Heavy in Here.

    The best is Jym Fahey's essay appearing in the Sony Legacy reissue of Axis: Bold as Love.
     
  4. Folknik

    Folknik Forum Resident

    On the double album reissue (on United Artists) of the 2 Hourglass albums (vintage Duane and Gregg Allman), the liner notes begin with "The music on these 2 records is not very good." Was the label trying to sabotage its own product or trying a bit of reverse psychology? If the latter is true, it worked on me. I bought it so I could decide for myself. Personally, I like it. If they were giving us a caveat emptor, it would have been more objective to say,"The music on these 2 records doesn't sound much like the Allman Brothers Band."
     
  5. Folknik

    Folknik Forum Resident

    On the Vee-Jay album Jolly What (4 tracks by the Beatles and 8 by Frank Ifield), whoever wrote the liner notes referred to the compilation as a "copulation."
     
  6. Rocker

    Rocker Senior Member

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
  7. bRETT

    bRETT Senior Member

    Location:
    Boston MA
    It's a Becker/Fagen joke, isn't it?
     
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  8. drasil

    drasil Former Resident

    Location:
    NYC
    that Clint Harrigan guy is really uninformed and kinda jive. can you dig it?
     
  9. KeninDC

    KeninDC Hazy Cosmic Jive

    Location:
    Virginia, USA
    Honorable mention will always go to Andrew Loog Oldham. The liner notes on What's the Story Morning Glory were certainly channeling Andrew.
     
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  10. vinylman

    vinylman Senior Member

    Location:
    Leeds, U.K.

    Freudian slip. Had it been on a Capitol Beatles lp, it would have been understandable. And accurate.
     
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  11. vinylman

    vinylman Senior Member

    Location:
    Leeds, U.K.
    hi_watt, BadJack, rwil and 6 others like this.
  12. Rocker

    Rocker Senior Member

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    I see what you did there! :D
     
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  13. vinylman

    vinylman Senior Member

    Location:
    Leeds, U.K.

    I couldn't help myself, Officer...............
     
  14. jymy

    jymy Senior Member

    Jermaine Jackson - Dynamite (Expanded Edition), gives 'nice' descriptions of the tracks, written by Matt Emrick, webmaster of Church of La Toya:
    - Sweetest Sweetest: despite its obvious Latin flair, the song is also very synthesized and sanitized
    - the duets with Whitney, Pia Zadora, Michael Jackson: obligatory superstar duets
    - Escape from...: so bad-it's-good dance song, with maniacal laughter from a Vincent Price imposter
    - Come To Me: whose most interesting features are a few non-descript Middle Eastern musical influences on the chorus
    - Some things....: erupts into another punchy dance number suitable for a sweat-inducing aerobics class
     
  15. EddieT

    EddieT Forum Resident

    Location:
    London UK
    They are awful liner notes in those remasters. Lacking in accuracy or even anything interesting don't you think? Btw they were synth lines on Rocket Man. But they have been played by Davey on the guitar when done live. Depends whether he plays the song in acoustic or electric style.
     
  16. SoundAdvice

    SoundAdvice Senior Member

    Location:
    Vancouver
    Hendrix Woodstock 1994 reissue written by Michael Fairchild. Cosmic, man!!.
     
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  17. Aghast of Ithaca

    Aghast of Ithaca Forum Resident

    Location:
    Angleterre
    Roy Harper's sleevenotes for his own reissues are excruciating.
     
  18. SoundAdvice

    SoundAdvice Senior Member

    Location:
    Vancouver
    Dave Clark
     
  19. The prose might be a bit stiff but it's very penetrating.
     
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  20. kwadguy

    kwadguy Senior Member

    Location:
    Cambridge, MA
    Eh...I find it relatively flaccid.
     
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  21. Surly

    Surly Bon Viv-oh-no-he-didn't

    Location:
    Sugar Land, TX
    The compilation I Want My 80's Box! from 2001. "Higher Love" by Steve Winwood is referred to as simply "A percussive song about love." OK, so that's accurate I suppose, but while I am in no way religious or spiritual, even I know the song is about love from a "higher power." Not to mention the apostrophe from "80's" in the title is in the wrong place!

    Also, the One Way reissue of Phantoms by The Fixx: I had a little hand in that reissue because I suggested it to the label when I was working for Universal, and I also suggested the bonus tracks, but that was the limit of my involvement. Not only did the channels of the audio get reversed, they also used the AllMusic.com review of the album (since they were part of the same company at the time) as the liner notes...and the review is rather negative. Not a good move; the fans were very unhappy with that release. Had I known they were short on funds to pay someone to write notes, I would have offered to write some myself, since I wrote them for the '03 Reach The Beach reissue!
     
  22. sixelsix

    sixelsix Forum Resident

    Location:
    memphis, tn, usa
    The 90s Wire Train retrospective (Last Perfect Thing) contains liner notes which belligerently claim that the band's music was so much more substantial than the contemporaneous UK "drag queen pop." I think there's maybe three songs on the disc which stick with me.
     
  23. JQW

    JQW Forum Resident

    The notes for Charley's Townes van Zandt 4CD set Texas Troubador are dreadful. There's an entry for each song, most of which say little, and some of the covers are credited to the wrong songwriter.
     
  24. off_2_the_side

    off_2_the_side Senior Member

    Location:
    Brantford, Canada
    The first CD issue of Samson's Survivors has liner notes that look like they were obtained through Google Translate and then formatted by a fourth grader.

    The liner notes in Ted Nugent's Out of Control box set are in an appallingly huge font and just consist of Ted boasting about his greatness.
     
  25. bRETT

    bRETT Senior Member

    Location:
    Boston MA
    They blew an opportunity there...The promo cassette of Phantoms had intros of each song by Cy Curnin. They could have transcribed those, or just used the intros as bonus tracks,
     
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