Every smelly fanboy in the world is crammed into Wellington right now in the sweaty-palmed hope of glimpsing a hobbit or a wizard or an elf. I think that David is right; New Zealand - and Wellington in particular - has just officially hit its dorkiest.
I don't care though, 'cause I'm listening to Curtis Mayfield's first solo album, finally released on CD by those dorks at Rhino. Curtis was pretty unique in that he could be preachy as heck and funky as a motherfucker at the same time. Nowhere is this truer than on the first track on this album, (Don't Worry) If There's Hell Below We're All Going To Go.
The CD is buffered with some extra material, along the same lines of Rhino's earlier (and more expensive) two-CD deluxe edition of Mayfield's masterpiece, the Superfly Soundtrack. There are backing-track versions of several songs, which I find somewhat disposable. At first I was disappointed that it repeated two demos from the Superfly release - Underground and Ghetto Child - but when it turned out that the Ghetto Child demo was about two minutes longer than the Superfly version I was well happy. For my money, this raw guitar-heavy demo is better than the album version, which was retitled Little Child Running Wild.
So to buggery with the Rings (ho ho).
Posted by pearce at December 1, 2003 2:57 PMCheck out the double CD version of What's Going On. The alternative version of the album on the second CD is actually interesting.
What's the parent company doing these packs? There's also one in this format for Bob Marley's Catch A Fire (Island) and John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (Impulse).
PS: if you find it hard to get around the rampant earnest spirituality of A Love Supreme, here's the solution: it only matters when he starts singing anyway, so just imagine that as he sings "a love supreme" over and over, he's really ordering pizza for the band. I wasn't that concerned about the religiosity anyway, but this added greatly to my enjoyment of the album.
Posted by: elvin at December 2, 2003 4:50 PMUm, not sure who puts them out, but they're kickass. The Velvet Underground and Nico "deluxe edition" has both the stereo & mono mixes, which are actually quite different; the mono is the original mix and the stereo is the softened, slightly shortened studio remix, which is the only version previously released on CD. It also has the single versions of the songs, and the tracks that the Velvets wrote & played on from Nico's Chelsea Girl album - those last are pretty weird in that they're lush and string-heavy.
The Howlin' Wolf London sessions is also choice.
Posted by: Pearce at December 3, 2003 10:15 AM