SH Spotlight Fleetwood Mac "Rumours" 45 & 33 1/3 RPM Hoffman/Gray vinyl mastering & equalization notes..

I was asked how close DCC Compact Classics was to issuing the complete stereo soundtrack of Victor Young's 1956 Oscar winning score to Around The World In 80 Days on CD and vinyl in 1993. Very close.

In the first pic below, these are the Reco-Art color key seps that were made for us by MCA Records in 1992. So we had the album cover, liner notes written by the great mystery writer Bob Levinson, the music ready for final mastering, the art ready for printing. That's how close we were! But **** happens. I posted this here before but here is a reprint of what went down. Fun to read now and again, drove me nutsy then.

Well, let’s go way back to when the movie was released. The original 30 minute soundtrack AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS album was going to be on RCA-Victor in 1956 and was prepared, mastered and everything. When Decca's Milt Gabler found out, Decca threw a **** fit because the composer/conductor Victor Young was an exclusive Decca artist for phonograph records. Decca demanded (rightly) that the soundtrack of the music be released on Decca or nothing. After three months of legal stuff the album was released on Decca in 1957 after Victor Young had passed on, with Sonny Burke re-programming the music cue sections and blending them together in perfect sequence. Sold a million records in one year, amazing for a soundtrack album. Actually it brought in the era of Soundtrack recordings released on LP.

Move ahead to 1989, Allen Sides, owner of Ocean Way had mentioned how wonderful the original six channel mags of Todd-AO stuff sounded including 80 days. Both Kevin Gray and I had discovered the old Decca soundtrack album in our parents' record collections (in fact, that's how we met, when Kevin heard me playing the album at the studio back in 1982 and came up to see who was playing his childhood favorite).

We wanted to see if there was any more music that had not been released that still existed without dialogue or sound effects. Film historian Jeff Joseph of SabuCat Productions and I went first to Mr. May at Turner where the United Artists/M-G-M film vault was, found many wonderful things but no magnetic print Master of 80 Days. Fun to look around though.
Next Jeff and I went over to Todd-AO in Hollywood and the wonderful Sharon Lewis (daughter of trumpet wiz Cappy Lewis) got us in to the vault to see what we could see. That's where we found the original director's cut of BLADE RUNNER by the way, which started THAT whole thing in motion..

At any rate, marked "Todd-AO Music Library" and still stored on little cores in cardboard boxes (no metal, thank God) was Victor Young's six channel original 35mm mag music cues to 80 DAYS; different stuff than what was released back in 1957..

Thanks to Sharon we contacted legendary Fred Hynes, the original recording engineer of the 80 Days music and the inventor of the Todd-AO/Westrex sound process. He explained what was on the six channels, how they were laid out, that they used six Neumann mics, one for each channel and how to make the best sounding stereo mix. A great man, very helpful, very informative. We were sorry when he died.

Every step of our journey had a hurdle. The first hurdle was finding a lawyer who wanted to work on spec so we could have a document to show what we were trying to do. We actually found one. Very nice guy who never got a dime but he loved the movie, it reminded him of his dad.

There was a sudden glitch/hurdle at Todd-AO. A real catch 22. They let us gladly inventory and preview the music but we couldn't mix it. They didn't come out and say what they wanted from us to let us actually mix anything. We had to figure it out. Jeff and I thought it was a legal issue but it was much more simple than that. We laughed when we figured it out, Sharon Lewis slipped us a clue. The hurdle at Todd-AO was that, since they didn't own the music any more, who was going to pay them the vault storage fee for 34 years worth of storage? Ah, so that was it.

Jeff and I paid the fee which simply meant that the film cues were allowed to move about 600 feet, from the Todd-AO vault on Seward Street to their 35mm mag dubber room so we could mix the thing on to recording tape.

So, we got the music, mixed it from mag to tape at Todd-AO (we paid for it ourselves but they cut us a wonderfully good deal, bless ‘em) and tried to figure out how to have it issued, hopefully on the label I worked for, DCC Compact Classics.

Engineer Kevin Gray and I "pieced" the cues in the studio (LRS, Burbank) together in the style of Sonny Burke's original programming of the other cues back in '57 for the soundtrack.
When we had a finished master the next step was to get it issued. I figured MCA Records had to be in the loop. We contacted MCA legal and they said that they owned and controlled all of it (naturally). Not so fast there... Problem is, Warner Bros. also claimed ownership of the music. WB (who bought the movie from Michael Todd's widow Liz Taylor) said THEY owned it because it was unissued therefore Uni had no claim and on and on and on.

Neither would budge so we figured we should get Victor Young on board to show the powers that be that he signed off on it (his estate). Next hurdle. We found his last living close relative (A wonderful woman) who received Young's royalty checks and got her to sign off on it.

We contacted Elizabeth Taylor directly, played her what we had done and she happily signed off on it, bless her. She wanted to form a record company just to release the album. She wanted to call it LIZA RECORDS (sweet).

However, MCA wouldn't license the released stuff to Ms. Taylor to add to the unissued stuff because of the WB involvement and the fact that Victor Young had been a Decca artist. I didn't blame them, it's their artist. Still, we needed WB on board, a hurdle we couldn't jump.. Never could get MCA and WB to agree.

By this time it's like 1993, years later and Jeff and I were STILL working on getting this released somehow, some way. By this time (and with our Victor Young and Liz Taylor "signed on the dotted line" contracts in place), MCA Records was ready and willing to let us release a long version of 80 Days and Jeff and I would have gladly DONATED the complete hour of mastered music to them just to get the sucker out already, but alas, the final hurdle was unexpected.
What was the final hurdle? Well, since the unissued portion of the music was never released on phonograph records back in 1957, the "second usage" thing kicked in with the Musicians union and we would have had to pay all the musicians in the orchestra over again to release the unissued stuff.

No one wanted to spend the big $$ to do that so it was over. Took us five years to get to that point and then, nothing. Sigh.

Note that Jeff and I never expected to make a dime on this, in fact we spent a small fortune on it. No big deal, we just loved the music. Engineer Kevin Gray and others, even sone nice legal people donated their time, pro bono to make this happen but the Musicians union thing was just too big a hurdle.

It's my favorite film score though and the sound quality of that six channel mag film must be heard to be believed. I played it blindfolded for a famous composer a few years back and he asked what orchestra recorded it because he wanted to use them. I broke it to him that he was hearing the original KLING STUDIO (Charlie Chaplin Soundstage) 1956 stereo recordings conducted by Victor Young himself and he flipped.

Anyway, there are volumes more drama on this 80 DAYS saga but this is enough for now.
Great film score. The old DECCA soundtrack LP is wonderful, short as it is.

Back to FLEETWOOD MAC!

 

That's great, thanks. I blasted out GO YOUR OWN WAY tonight from the 33 1/3 test pressing and it really rocked the house. What a great song. The tom toms kill at 20 paces! My favorite Mac song from that era.