The recent batch of Rolling Stones reissues has previously been discussed here at Blogcritics. In short, their 1960s material has finally been given a proper remastering; ABKCO, who own the rights to the Stones' '60s recordings, have hitherto been kind of shabby in their handling of that catalogue, and haven't buffed the tapes up since their first CD appearance in 1986.
Not that the remastering job performed on them then was much good anyway; I was always under the impression that the Stones' 60s albums were never that well produced in the first place--I've heard the 1970s Rolled Gold compilation on vinyl and the sound was often shockingly poor--but the 1980s remastering didn't help them an awful lot. Finally they've produced a nice new shiny series of CDs. Until today, though, I've resisted the hype and temptation somewhat.
For one thing, I've been reasonably satisfied with the mono CDs I have of Their Satanic Majesties Request, Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed... the story behind those is apparently that when ABKCO's plans to rerelease the Stones' albums a couple of years ago fell through, some enterprising bootlegger tracked down mono vinyl editions of their 60s albums, polished up the transcriptions and added sundry bonus tracks from other bootleg releases to show ABKCO the way to do it. I have the three aforementioned ones (all are highly spoken of by Allmusic.com) and they're great things, much better than the official stereo releases I've heard.
For another thing, there was the price. The regular cost of a CD here in Australia is $30. The price of the new SACD versions was about $48. I didn't care what anyone said about the beauty of the sound even on a regular CD player, I wasn't paying that much for the privilege. And they didn't have any of the bonus tracks the mono bootleg versions have. So I thought that was that, and the new Stones discs would most likely go unheard by me.
Until today, that is, when I happened to be in Red Eye Records, and for some reason or other I found myself browsing the R end of the CD racks. And there by God among the Rolling Stones section were the new remasters at regular CD price. Until today I hadn't known the new remasters were going to be released in regular CD form at regular CD price as well as the dual-layer CD/SACD versions. I was, as you may appreciate, now greatly interested all of a sudden.
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Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Excellent - can't wait to hear them myself. By the way, it's "What a drag it is GETTING old."
2 - Sean Hackbarth
I recently bought Forty Licks so I could have something by the Stones in my collection. The sound was great. Drums came out and slapped me in the face, and the guitar was clear. The songs were tremendous. The 2-disk set showed me why people consider them to be THE greatest rock and roll band.
3 - James Russell
Augh. I can't believe I made that error. I'll correct it right away. Thanks, Eric...