Out of Print Gems: Paul Simon - "The Boy in the Bubble (Extended Version)"

Obsolete technology is always a source of curiosity. Some examples were replaced by superior versions of essentially the same idea; others never got off the ground; for still others, it's hard to understand how they ever existed at all. One example of the lattermost is the CD single, which willfully sacrificed more for less. The format succeeded 7" vinyl and was roughly contemporaneous with the cassette single. All 3 formats were cheaper than their album counterparts and featured correspondingly less music. However, where the record contained less vinyl and the cassette less tape, the CD was unapologetically placed onto the market partially empty. It's hardly a surprise, therefore, that to whatever extent any market for CDs can still be said to exist, the CD single has officially become thing of the past.

The first CD single was released in 1985. Not long thereafter, with record companies still experimenting with the format, Warner Brothers released a promotional CD single of "The Boy in the Bubble" (the opening track from Paul Simon's landmark album Graceland) for distribution to radio stations. The single was officially released around the world only on vinyl. The 7" versions featured a "Single Remix" on the A side and either Graceland album track "Crazy Love, Vol. II" or the title track to Simon's previous album, Hearts + Bones, as the B side. 12" versions featured an "Extended Version" of the single, one of those two B sides, and (sometimes) the 7" remix.

An otherwise extensive 25th anniversary reissue of Graceland has come and gone, but the single-exclusive tracks remain officially unreleased outside of those original vinyl copies. It's too bad. Though the 7" mix is identical other than fading out 12 seconds sooner, the Extended Version is dramatically different from the familiar mix, or anything else on Graceland. Many of the African-inspired tracks on the album were, in fact, born from extended jams, which were pared down later to best suit the sensibilities of Simon's radio-listening audience. For historical interest alone, it's worthwhile to hear some of what a Get Back-style Graceland might have sounded like. It also helps that the Extended Version of "The Boy in the Bubble" is an outstanding jam, with thunderous drums and a self-harmonized ending that mirrors the ethereal ending of "Under African Skies" (which ultimately made the cut and is heard on the album).

While it's a shame that this mix has never been officially revisited, we're lucky that it was ever released on CD. The only other track on Graceland to be released in a less-edited incarnation was "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes," released as a 12" mix only in the UK and Germany, and only on vinyl. The rest may never be heard - at the very least, not until Graceland's next round-number anniversary rolls around. Until then, you can download a 320kbps copy of the extended "Boy in the Bubble" (and the useless "remix," for good measure) here.

Out of Print Gems: Andrew Lloyd Webber - The Odessa File

Hip-hop producer J Dilla died in 2006 of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, a blood clotting disorder, after an extended illness that left him wheelchair-bound for his final European tour. Though only 32 years old at the time of his death, Dilla's career had already featured collaborations with De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and The Roots (to name a few), in addition to a handful of solo releases. His final album, Donuts, was a universally acclaimed collection of instrumentals built on an emblematically eclectic group of samples, ranging from standbys like James Brown and Stevie Wonder to electronic music pioneers Raymond Scott and Bruce Haack. In creating tracks for himself and others, Dilla relied on a personal record collection numbering in the vicinity of 10,000 LPs. In the years following his death, most of these records traced a circuitous path back to the MC's mother, Maureen "Ma Dukes" Yancey. Ma Dukes subsequently has put many of these records up for sale on eBay, with proceeds going towards paying off debt incurred during the course of Dilla's treatment, providing income for his two daughters, and establishing a charitable organization for musically-inclined children.

J Dilla Collection sales are a grab bag, with each buyer being sent a record picked at random from the collection. Enticed by the lottery system (in addition to the obvious allure of potentially receiving a record actually sampled in one of Dilla's many hundreds of productions), I purchased an album last week and received - unsurprisingly - an obscurity: an Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtrack to a 1974 Nazi hunting film called The Odessa File.

The film was directed by Ronald Neame, fresh off the man-vs.-tidal wave cult classic The Poseidon Adventure, and starred Jon Voight as a reporter who uses information from a Holocaust survivor's diary to track down the SS commandant of the Jewish ghetto in Riga. Reception of the film online is in general highly positive, with the occasional critique often reserved for the film's score by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

By 1974, Webber had already begun his monumentally successful career as a Broadway composer with Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar; he would famously go on to make boatloads of money by inexplicably anthropomorphizing cats (to unsettling ends) and earning the perpetual enmity of Roger Waters (to hilarious ones). In the meantime, The Odessa File was the 3rd and final soundtrack composed by Webber, following Gumshoe in 1971 and an adaptation of his score of Jesus Christ Superstar for the filmed version in 1973. Standing on its own, the album is an interesting piece of work, featuring funky interludes juxtaposed in a vaguely jarring way with a Perry Como-sung Christmas theme and German beer hall music. The entire experience is well summed-up by the video below, which begins with "Miller's Theme," a cello workout featuring Webber's brother Julian, and segues into a marching band polka number.

Surprisingly, despite the merits of the music and the stature of Andrew Lloyd Webber in American popular music, The Odessa File soundtrack was never released on CD, and in fact, has been out of print since its initial release 40 years ago. Interested parties can download the album here.

Sherlock Holmes of the SFRY

My friend Jason recently sent me a postcard unearthed at a garage sale, representing the only part of his haul that eluded identification. Here is the card itself, which was accompanied by a request to find the subject:

Both card stock and architecture immediately suggested the late 1960s or 70s, as did the architecture and Brady Bunch stylings of the card's layout. At first sight, the alphabet appeared to be a subtype of Cyrillic that I couldn't identify any more specifically. Whatever it was, it featured an odd idiosyncrasy:

Compared to the typeset word on the back of the card, the handwriting-style text on the face featured lower case letters familiar to me from general Cyrillic script; all, that is, except for the "T", which resembled an "m" rotated 180° and crossed with a bar. Though I figured this would prove a good guess verifier, it didn't help me to get going. My first and most important clue came at the bottom of the card:

Having been produced by what reason dictated - and Google confirmed - had to have been the Zagreb Chamber of Commerce sometime in the aforementioned time period, the card must have been made to promote tourism in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Unfortunately, this meant I would be looking in an area that today comprises six countries (Serbia, Croatia. Bosnia & Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia). The good news was that I had the language: either Serbo-Croatian or Macedonian, both of which share a (virtually) identical alphabet. Examining the Wikipedia article on the Macedonian alphabet, I found an explanation for the anomalous letter, which proved to be a cursive Te.

The word reads Jastrebac, which happens to be the name of at least 4 landmarks in Serbia. Three are small villages in the southeast, with respective populations of 221, 423, and 19 (!) residents. The last is a more centrally-located mountain, noteworthy for its wooded scenery and for appearing impressively tall despite a modest elevation of 4895 ft., thanks to surrounding valleys. The mountain is studded with small towns and vacation spots, and lamentably I was unable to positively identify most of the pictures on the face of the card. It struck me, however, that the building on the top right was not only too large to be a private home, but distinctive enough that were it still around, any renovations would have been unlikely to have rendered it unrecognizable - even in the wake of four decades elapsed and two governments crumbled. With some digging, I did indeed find what I was looking for:

The building pictured is the Hotel Trayal, located near the terminus of Class II State Highway 223 (referred to as Jastrebački Road). The hotel - along with the adjacent Hotel Merima, for which the Trayal is apparently often mistaken online - overlooks Jastrepcu Lake, an aqueous speck only 0.257mi in circumference. The lake and hotels are found in the geographic ballpark of 43°25'58.7"N 21°22'11.1"E. A higher resolution shot of the Trayal can be seen below, courtesy of a man with a screen name that Google Translates to "Uncle of the Danube":

The Hotel Trayal of 2009 has ostensibly said goodbye to the ZAZ-965A Zaporozhets once parked out front, and it appears that at some point the management made the wise decision to update the balcony railings. Close inspection, though, shows that impressively little seems generally to have changed. The stone facade is still standing; the same trees dot the skyline; and though the patio umbrellas have been replaced, the classic color scheme is largely intact. Unfortunately, barring an unforeseen Serbian vacation, the rest of Jastrebac will seemingly have to go unexplored and unidentified. But for now, thanks to Jason and the expansive possibilities of the internet, I've seen a wonderful little sliver I never would have otherwise.

* * *

Update (April 3, 2014): My friend Stephen did some digging of his own with remarkable results, turning up photos accounting for the remaining 3 buildings on the card - top middle, bottom left, and bottom right. I subsequently was able to flesh out each of the three. It turns out they were all within hundreds of yards of one another, in a manner unclear from the map for reasons I'll explain. The first is probably the most interesting:

Apparently a victim of the dual collapse of communism and Soviet tourism (closure having occurred "more than 20 years" prior), the Hotel Ravnište was reopened in Summer 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the only time it housed Marshal Tito. The inaugural guests were representatives of the Ministry of Defense, who were treated to 10 days of testing demonstrations of Morava, the Serbian military's new self-propelled rocket launcher. The hotel itself appears to have lost the twin pines in front, but kept the wood paneling and white supports visible on the postcard. (Evidence suggests that one tree may have survived the other.) The hotel is no longer visible on standard Google Maps: a recent update requires you to revert to Classic View to access the satellite picture, and since the hotel was so long defunct, it's no longer marked on the road map at all. Time will tell if this resuscitated, military-friendly iteration stays open long enough to merit being once more added to the map.

The second is variously identified as the Hotel Šator and - herein lies the confusion - the Hotel Ravnište. The first name would appear to be the most appropriate, translating as it does to "tent." The two properties appear to be separated by 0.2 miles. It's possible that the Šator, which has never gone out of business, decided somewhere along the line to ditch its more cutesy name and appropriate the moniker of its fallen neighbor. Šator may also have been a nickname, or one incorrectly listed on the archival photo Stephen found. In any event, it's the "Šator" that occupies the spot on the map labeled by Google as the Hotel Ravnište. Make of all that what you will.

The third (and most frustrating) case of missed identification ostensibly has to do with one of those worries I had in my initial post, which led me at first to focus on what turned out to be the Trayal: radical renovation. The final building is, in fact, the aforementioned Hotel Merima, a building adjacent to and often mistaken for the Trayal. The photograph on the postcard showed the Merima from the southwest, taken from the unnamed road that connects both hotels to Class II State Highway 223. Here it is compared with a roughly contemporary photograph taken from the lakeside:

Both show a transept in the building design and the high-arching eaves that defined the building. At one time, the Merima featured what appeared from the back to be an extremely unsafe balcony. Perhaps aware of some lack of structural integrity, ownership appears, at some point, to have radically redesigned the hotel. Here's what it looks like today:

The Merima has a promotional video on YouTube which, in addition to advertising personal bathrooms "equipped with high quality ceramics," notes that the hotel was renovated to a "capacity of 60 beds in 17 rooms and 2 apartments." Though the renovations have clearly eliminated the transept, the deck and eaves are still evident, and the location appears consistent relative to Jastrepcu Lake. I can therefore feel assured that my eyes didn't miss anything they ought to have caught by themselves, but confident that this is the Hotel Merima. I'd say that qualifies as a happy ending.

Sherlock Holmes of China Basin

On Friday, I found a panorama of AT&T Park on sale at Target in Emeryville, CA (distributed by Artissimo Designs, product #074-12-1907). I decided that I probably ought to buy it, but more pressingly, needed to piece together precisely when the photo had been taken. Here is the product itself:

Like my crappy reproduction, the photo itself suffers from poor detail resolution. However, even the overall view provides contextual evidence. The 6 championship flags flying above the scoreboard indicate a game subsequent to Opening Day 2011; both the amount of time necessary to produce such a product and the absence of the flag in right field, however, suggest that this game must have taken place before Opening Day 2013. This 2 year window dramatically limits the possibilities. Let's dig deeper.

We clearly have a Giant on the mound and opposing batters both at the plate and on deck. I would recognize the pitcher anywhere: staff ace and longest-tenured Giant Matt Cain. Precious little else is apparent, beyond there being a right-handed batter at bat and a leftie on deck. The dark away jerseys limit the range of possible opponents, but offer no clear identification.

The scoreboard verified Cain's identity and clearly enough demonstrated that the Pirates were in town. A quick glance at Cain's recent pitching record showed only one home game started against the Pirates at home between the Opening Days of 2011 and 2013: Friday, April 13, 2012. All subsequent details merely erased any lingering doubt.

The scoreboard shows a count of 1 ball and 2 strikes with no one out in the fifth inning. The first batter Cain faced in the fifth inning on 4/13/12 was first baseman Casey McGehee, a right-handed hitter. As expected, on deck was right fielder Garrett Jones, a left-handed hitter. (Note the two bats on opposite shoulders.) Though McGahee's name remains more difficult to read, Jones's name in the five spot in the order can be clearly identified along the right side of the scoreboard, which always lists the away team at AT&T Park.

The strikeout counter lists four strikeouts by Giants' pitching prior to this batter in the game; furthermore, the K's are all forwards, indicating that all third strikes were registered on swings and misses. (In scorekeeping shorthand, a backwards K represents a third strike called by the umpire on a batter who didn't swing.) On April 13, prior to McGahee's at bat in the fifth inning, Cain had struck out Alex Presley and Neil Walker in the first inning, followed by Jones in the second and Pedro Alvarez in the third - all swinging. The final piece of evidence came from the only other score clearly visible in the photo:

...a 12-2 victory of the Boston Red Sox over the Tampa Bay Rays that ended at 2:28pm Pacific Time on 4/13. Based on the spot in the game, I guessed that the photo had probably been taken at about 2:35pm. My accurate guess made it more palatable to have apparently forgotten that most ballparks feature large clocks that make that kind of conjecture unnecessary:

So what happened after the photo was taken? Though the next pitch to McGahee was a ball, he would strike out on the fifth pitch of the at bat, and Jones would soon follow suit - again, both swinging. Cain went on to strike out 11 en route to a 5-0 win in a complete game, 106-pitch shutout (video here, with McGahee striking out at around 1:45). He surrendered only one hit, a weak 6th inning grounder by pitcher James McDonald that found a hole on the 3rd base side. McDonald would turn out to also be the only Pirates baserunner. Cain's superlative performance was outshadowed precisely 2 months later, when he surrendered one fewer baserunner in tossing the 22nd perfect game in Major League history, and the first in the monumental history of the franchise. It's this (slightly) lesser masterpiece, though, that will proudly adorn my walls, courtesy of Target - frozen forever in plywood, formaldehyde, and glory.

Bill Evans by Tony Bennett

A brief interlude: I found this portrait of Bill Evans, as drawn by Tony Bennett, in the booklet of their justifiably revered 1975 collaborative album. I couldn't find it on the internet, so I decided to put it up. The caption reads "An on-the-spot sketch of Bill Evans by Tony Bennett." It was drawn during the June 10-13, 1975 recording session of their album at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, CA. Enjoy.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (7) Thriller - Michael Jackson

[This is the fourth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Even before the trials and plastic surgeries, Michael Jackson more closely resembled a cartoon character than a human being, living through the greatest fame any individual has ever known in a private amusement park with a pet chimp named Bubbles. His greatest album endures a similar fate. The vast margin by which Thriller has outsold all other studio albums has in some ways managed to overshadow the music it contains. The issue is compounded by the skepticism often engendered by chart success, where lasting material is cheapened by association with the transient hits with which it shares airtime. Yet one doesn't move 60 million units by accident, and in fact, beyond the sheer magnitude of its success there isn't anything inexplicable - or even particularly surprising - about Thriller. When Jackson entered the studio in April 1982, he did so on the heels of Off the Wall, armed with a returning producer and the artistic freedom from Epic Records that only a critical and popular smash of that magnitude (20 million units in its own right) can provide. In many ways, the follow-up simply constituted a post-disco update: the album featured nine songs written and arranged by the best in the business, comprising ballads and up-tempo numbers expertly balanced against one another. Though Thriller does feature more unexpected additions than Off the Wall - an Eddie van Halen guest solo on "Beat It" and a repurposed African call-and-response coda to "Wanna Be Startin' Something" - the musical feel of the two albums remains much the same. Thriller was able to transcend its predecessor and became a phenomenon in part due to its stellar songwriting. Indeed, it contained enough quality material that its least interesting song was a duet with Paul McCartney; it also spawned seven Top 10 singles (one of which, the immortal "Billie Jean," nearly missed the album's final cut). The true deciding factor, though, was Jackson himself. Primed in the wake of Off the Wall to take over the music business, Jackson produced a supremely danceable album nonetheless infused with enough nervous energy to take advantage of the high-octave vocal leaps which had become his trademark. Though it's easy in retrospect to forecast Jackson's downfall in the paranoia that suffuses Thriller, taken on its own terms the music projects an air less of fear than of a yearning for respect, for success, or simply (as on the exemplary ballad "Human Nature") for love. Of course, in the final analysis, Thriller can't be seen out of context - not in the wake of 25 years of tabloid covers, and not with Jackson cuddling a Bengal tiger cub on the cover of the Special Edition reissue. Beyond the circus with which it will always be associated, though, the most remarkable aspect of Thriller will surely remain that a single listen always reveals what led it to conquer the world in the first place.

Robert Johnson and the Reissue

The history of the record industry is one of reissues: some artists are plucked from out-of-print limbo, while others have anniversary editions of famous albums released with previous editions still being sold new in the marketplace. Predictably, recording technology has advanced in quantum leaps since the 1925 advent of electrical recording; it is further not surprising that each new incarnation of musical medium has inspired reissues of every label's most profitable material. Even the most forward-thinking executives, though, would have had a hard time even 20 years ago foreseeing the emergence of the remastering process. Advances in technology have made it possible not only digitally to excise noise once assumed totally inextricable from the source material, but even to extract detail from the grooves of weathered shellac 78s that went heretofore largely unnoticed. And perhaps most unthinkably of all to Executives of Labels Past, the process can be carried out without the investment of unworkable expense.

Robert Johnson is the unchallenged king of the reissue. His records sold well regionally during his own lifetime, and he was a much hoped-for participant in John Hammond's legendary "From Spirituals to Swing" concerts, the first to showcase black artists at Carnegie Hall. Johnson died four months before the first concert, however, and his memory languished, popularly forgotten, until the 1961 release of the Columbia compilation King of the Delta Blues Singers. The album and its 1970 companion volume deified Johnson with the folkie crowd (and by extension with rock stars, as well). Johnson posthumously shared the benefits of the blues revival - including a much-delayed, if incomplete, shedding of the "race records" label that had followed blues recordings since their inception - with many other artists, but he would come to exceed all of them in renown, due in equal parts to his remarkable talent and to the dubious Faustian myth that accompanies him to this day. The commercial success of the first CD reissue of his discography was nonetheless staggering. In 1990's Complete Recordings, Columbia had a set of 40+ songs more than half a century old that peaked at #80 on the Billboard charts and was eventually certified platinum.

Accordingly, the centenary of Johnson's birth in 2011 provided not only an ideal opportunity to show off the advances in remastering since the dawn of the millennium, but also a rare opportunity to provide a cash cow for a record label and a useful album for fans simultaneously. The Centennial Collection doesn't disappoint. The dual efforts of Steven Lasker (digital transfer) and Seth Winner (remastering) yielded results that save for minor background hiss sound ten - sometimes fifteen - years younger than they actually are. Columbia also provided much improved packaging and tracklisting over the previous release, this time placing every alternate take at the end of the CD, instead of immediately following the master. The astounding improvement in sound quality, together with these other considerations, raises hope for better reissues of other worthy contemporary discographies. Of course, few (if any) old-time jazz and blues masters share Johnson's all-consuming pull, and the likelihood of any such reissue making substantial money again seems slim. With any luck, though, as the technology continues to improve commercial risks will be undertaken in reviving Skip James, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, and others. The standard established by The Centennial Recordings is a worthy one in ensuring that these records continue to be esteemed for what they are: landmarks of American culture and history.