by Rodney Eric Griffith | Armour of Rod | |
The insufferable Pitchfork cabal got its comeuppance when it was discovered that an archive of confidential material and correspondence had been left out in the open in an unprotected directory. The email reveal key staff members to be, by turns, condescending, arrogant, perverse, self-righteous and misandristic—no great surprise if you’ve read between the lines of their disc reviews, but the confirmation makes for a bracing read.
Rodney | 9:39:00 AM [permalink]The Thank You Masked Man CD reissue will include John Magnuson’s animated short of the same name, but per the release sheet, no additional tracks.
Rodney | 7:41:00 PM [permalink]Every year I get a postcard for the Mid-Ohio Con addressed to “Rodney E. Griffing.” I haven’t been in years. Matt Feazell is usually a guest there. I think when he started his unfinished minicomic series The Death of Antisocialman Bush I was still in office. His Cynicalman trade paperback needs to be reissued.
Rodney | 7:02:00 AM [permalink]Quoting the Hollywood Reporter, via the BBC: “It’s been a personal quest for me over the last three years to get these records released because this is the way I remember them, the way I first heard them.”
What a monumental waste of time and effort—justifying and then deifying someone else’s mistakes. The way they remember it was unequivocably wrong.
Sky News reports record cold for Britain this year.
Rodney | 7:08:00 AM [permalink]
There was finally a press release today confirming the existence of an upcoming Beatles release, The Capitol Albums, Volume 1. The box will contain four CDs based on four of the LPs spliced and diced up by Capitol Records in 1964, with extreme reluctance by the group that created and sequenced the original LPs and singles the Capitol albums were drawn from.
In the press release, current Capitol Records president Andrew Slater—who played bass and drums on Liz Phair’s “Why Can’t I?”—offered the most explicit excuse ever given for Capitol’s initial animosity towards the Beatles catalogue:
“In the Sixties, American record labels often chose to reformat British records to suit the needs of the U.S. market. In America, singles were generally included on current albums, where in the UK albums and singles were most often separate releases. [This is called “Value For Money”; British fans usually felt cheated at the suggestion of buying the same recording twice.—Rodney]
“Higher music publishing costs in the U.S. also made it impractical to include as many songs on American albums.” [This is the new claim, but it isn’t very persuasive.]
None of these explanations begin to excuse the “liberties” taken in graphic design, which caused one Beatle, George, to remark “we thought they were bootlegs.”
The box contains stereo (duphonic and true) and mono versions of Meet the Beatles (Released Jan. 20, 1964), The Beatles Second Album (Released April 10, 1964), Something New (Released July 20, 1964, largely recycled from A Hard Day’s Night) and Beatles ’65 (Released Dec. 15, 1964), skipping over the two LPs that might actually be justifiable to reissue: the United Artists soundtrack LP for A Hard Day’s Night, which included instrumental contributions by George Martin, and Capitol’s audiodocumentary The Beatles Story (which isn’t very good, but probably contains interview bits worthy of preservation).
Some of the graffiti is puerile, some of the posters are brilliant, but I approve the message.
Rodney | 7:22:00 PM [permalink]Autobiographies by Bob Dylan and Nick Mason are released this week.
Rodney | 7:04:00 AM [permalink]
