Retro Roundup’s favourite holy grails — attained and not

By Joel Goldenberg, October 19th, 2012

For hardcore Beach Boys fans — myself included— Oct. 9 was potentially a day to rejoice. Not only were numerous Beach Boys albums being remastered for the band’s 50th anniversary, but albums previously released only in mono and fake stereo were finally getting their stereo debut — albeit after several first-time stereo remixes were dribbled out on various compilations.
The results are mostly good, but mixed. The less elaborately produced “unplugged” album Party! sounds glorious in stereo, while the eccentric and mostly minimalist Smiley Smile  sounds even more eerie. On albums like Today! and Summer Days (and Summer Nights!), as well as part of Smiley Smile, some tracks were made into stereo by digitally extracting vocals from the original mono recordings (as vocal multi-track tapes went missing) and grafting them onto stereo music tracks. The results range from quite good (Good Vibrations on Smiley Smile) to messy (Amusement Parks USA on Summer Days).
Also, the long unavailable Brian Wilson-approved mono mixes of the band’s early albums are also available.
Whatever the quality, the release of these albums in these formats were considered a finally achieved Holy Grail, just with not quite the quality fans were hoping for. Here are some other musical holy grails — some achieved, some not — in no particular order:
• The Beach Boys — The Smile Sessions box set  The most famous unreleased album of all time gets an official release, plus hours of wonderful session outtakes. The holiest of musical holy grails, by far, aside from Brian Wilson’s own more complete, but re-recorded Smile album.
• The Beatles — Helter Skelter: This one, for whatever reason, has not been heard by anyone outside EMI studios in London — except for Beatles chronicler Mark Lewisohn. I refer to the legendary 27-minute version of this White Album track. However, if the take recorded around the same time (and released on Anthology 3 )— a couple of months before the released version — is any indication of the marathon track, the desired version could be quite boring. What was very interesting was the release (on You Tube and other sources) of the 10-minute take of Revolution 1, with some elements that ended up being used on the avant-garde John Lennon-Yoko Ono indulgence Revolution 9.
• The release of ABKCO-controlled music:
a) Cameo-Parkway: Anyone in the early days of the Internet who checked out the excellent bsnpubs.com (Both Sides Now) website music discussions saw a lot of hankering for the release on CD of the Cameo-Parkway catalogue, featuring the likes of Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell, Dee Dee Sharp and early Bob Seger and controlled by music mogul Allen Klein’s ABKCO Industries. For reasons unknown, nothing much was forthcoming for years. Suddenly, the floodgates were opened and out popped a 4-CD label retrospective, greatest hits collections of the most prominent artists, a few two-album-on-one-CD collections and various artists collections of more obscure tracks.
b) Sam Cooke’s final recordings: For his secular (non-religious) recording career, soul legend Sam Cooke only recorded for two labels — Keen and RCA Victor — with the exception of one single release on the label for which Cooke recorded religious material with the Soul Stirrers — Specialty — and then under the alias Dale Cooke. Yet, within his RCA catalogue, ABKCO gained ownership of Cooke’s 1963 and 1964 recordings. The result was, for box sets and compilations RCA (later BMG and now Sony) released, they had access to the Keen recordings and their own catalogue from 1960 to 1962, but not the later material. ABKCO would only allow access if the CD was an ABKCO or joint RCA-ABKCO product. The situation was somewhat rectified when ABKCO released a compilation of those final recordings, and an original 1964 album.
c) The Rolling Stones: The Rolling Stones’ ‘60s catalogue was never unavailable, but the original North American CDs generally didn’t sound very good. The 2002 remasters were a big improvement.
d) The same went for the release of the box set of productions by the legendary Phil Spector  — the sound quality of 1991’s Back to Mono was panned. But the recent remasters on Sony — achieved by the great engineer Vic Anesini — were much improved.
• Vault releases by numerous artists: The list is too long here to include everyone — but the many Deluxe Edition album on various label (especially Sony and Universal) have not only seen well-known albums remastered, but alternate versions of those albums and live tracks from the same period as part of the same package. Most notable among these are recent Rolling Stones reissues, in which the band returned to the studio and finished up outtakes from the same album sessions. Believe me, they had to — I’ve heard some raw outtakes, and some are little more than uninspired jam sessions, at least those from the 1970s.
Of course, the most extensive vault release program has been the Follow That Dream fan club collector’s releases of Elvis Presley’s albums expanded, soundboard and full stereo live recordings and numerous outtakes. There have been many dozens of CDs released so far, and they’re still coming.
• And finally, the many mono singles collections CDs released in the last few years, enabling fans to hear the actual versions of songs that blasted out of AM and portable record player speakers, mixed for maximum impact.
So many musical riches, and mostly just in the last 10 years.