The Beatles remasters, in my opinion, resulted in more of a whimper than a bang. Sure, some people ran out immediately to pick them up, but the whole project seems to have inspired more indifference than passion and rabid purchasing. Their albums resurfaced on the Billboard charts in the wake of it, but in a market where getting a record certified gold is exciting (where previously multi-platinum was the goal), that really doesn’t mean much. The box of mono remasters, in particular, does not appear to have done the kind of business that I bet they were hoping for. There they sit on the shelf at my local record shops, slowly dropping in price.

I purchased a few of the new stereo discs – Magical Mystery Tour, Sgt. Pepper, and Past Masters – and though I do like them quite a bit, I can’t say I was so wowed by the new masters that I fell off my chair and ran out to buy the rest of them.

Quite by chance I discovered that the first wave of Beatles compact disc pressings were farmed out to West Germany and Japan, as were many early compact discs. I wouldn’t have guessed this – the Beatles CDs started appearing in 1987 when the USA had at least one pressing plant on line. I can only assume that EMI and Capitol Records anticipated such a Beatles feeding frenzy that they recruited other plants to help meet the initial demand.

At any rate, while flipping through the Beatles section at a record store I spotted a smooth-edged CD case containing Revolver. Those who’ve listened to me prattle on about discs know that the smooth-edged jewel cases typically only showed up on very, very early releases before they were phased out in favor of the more familiar ribbed-edge cases. So it was quite possible that there was a neat surprise inside.

There was. A West Germany-for-US issue, pressed by our old friends at PDO (Philips-DuPont Optical).

“But couldn’t that just be a release for Germany that made its way to America somehow?” Well, no. Not in this case. EMI and Capitol always confused the issue a little bit on their releases by using the same catalog number for different territories, but there was no mistaking the Printed In U.S.A. on the back of the rear insert (sorry, it’s so tiny that you can’t really see it in the scan below, but trust me).

Needless to say I immediately decided to track down as many of these kind of releases as I could – and with patience and persistence I’ve done pretty well. I now have copies of Please Please Me (though that one was pressed in Japan) on up through Sgt. Pepper, and hope to work my way to the end of their albums soon.

Do they sound different from the much-easier-to-find US pressings? Umm… no. No they don’t. It has been discussed elsewhere that the masterings are exactly the same.

So why bother?

Go back and read the rest of this blog again. Ha!

“And how do I find some of these for myself?”, you ask? Well, a smooth-edged CD case is always cause to inspect a disc more carefully, but may not always reveal the inner contents – there was obviously a period of time in there when the labels mixed-and-matched pieces to make up a release. CBS was notorious for having rear tray inserts that listed “Disc Manufactured in Japan” but placing a US-pressed disc inside. But speaking of rear tray inserts, the very, very first CD releases of The Beatles catalog were missing the Apple Corps logo and are a potentially good indicator of an interesting pressing.

Note: I have not seen these kinds of early discs for Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine, Let It Be, Abbey Road, or Past Masters, and don’t know 1) if there are discs of them pressed elsewhere than the USA, for the USA or 2) if there are W German or Japanese discs, whether they have the Apple or not. But it is definitely true for Please Please Me through Sgt. Pepper.

Oh, and: the limited edition USB version of the remasters is just too cool, but the pricing is a little crazy.

When People Are People finally got some heavy rotation on US radio back in 1985 I was entranced.  Sure, the chorus contained one of Gore’s worst rhymes yet, but the music was unbelievable.  It simply sounded like nothing else on the (US) radio at the time.

As soon as I could I picked up the People Are People LP, and hearing Get The Balance Right and Everything Counts sealed the deal.  This was a band I wanted to pay attention to.  I started to follow their career and releases right up through Violator (Songs of Faith and Devotion, Alan Wilder’s departure, and Ultra confirmed that my time following Depeche Mode had drawn to a close).

My LPs of People Are People, Some Great Reward, and Black Celebration are all long gone.  Needless to say I also had those on CD at one point, but like many in my collection they lived a hard life through high school and college and eventually wouldn’t play without skipping.  As soon as I got a decent rip of them into iTunes the oldest discs hit the curb, though I still have A Broken Frame, Construction Time Again, the copy of Music For The Masses my old friend Brian gave me years and years ago – not to mention the recent find of an original Mute copy of Violator.

It was time to start thinking about replacements for some of the old albums (Black Celebration never ripped properly and is missing entirely from my collection), and I was always interested in pursuing the singles.  I haven’t heard the newest remasters, though I imagine with Alan Wilder’s input they are probably fairly well done.  However, as we know, I’m much happier chasing the old issues.

Back when I first started looking at Depeche Mode releases in ’85 a few odd items made it to the US.  I distinctly remember seeing three 12″ singles that were never released domestically and have long since gone out of print internationally – the 1983 blue, red, and green singles of Get the Balance Right, Everything Counts, and Love In Itself.

I knew I had seen these on disc at some point and started to track them down.  They were never released on CD by Mute UK or Sire in the US, though Indisc in Belgium and Virgin in France did put out their own copies.  The easiest (and most cost-effective) to find were the German issues which were handled by mega-distributor Intercord Tonträger.  These fit in with my general collection trend of West German pressings, and eventually I rounded up all three.

This presented a problem for my tiny DM collection.  I now had three (four, if you count the Sire/Canada release of Construction Time Again) distibutors represented.  I don’t much like that.  Which direction to go for further additions?

This past weekend my old friend Ethan was in town for some beery goodness with the folks over at BeerAdvocate.  We spent a good portion of Saturday afternoon milling around town, ultimately walking from the waterfront to Kenmore Square.  It was getting close to the hour that he needed to head off to the Cyclorama, so we hung around in Nuggets to kill some time while his friends came to pick him up.

I can’t stand Nuggets.  The owner and his (wife?) seem like nice folks and the store is fairly spacious and yields some interesting finds, but there is one incredibly bad thing about buying from them: he uses the most impenetrable pricing stickers ever invented.  If you are able to remove one of them without damaging the cover art of your purchase, you deserve a reward.  I guess I understand, he must get a lot of riff-raff from the nearby Red Sox games, but after years of browsing record stores I can suggest a few other methods of securing one’s inventory that does not involve ruining it.

At any rate, I was leafing through the Depeche Mode section and spotted two very intersting items: an Intercord issue of Construction Time Again, and a Mute cdstumm release of Martin Gore’s first solo EP Counterfeit.  I grabbed both of them immediately (so long, Canadian Construction Time Again) and the decision was made then and there.

The priority is Intercord.  They have the strongest presence in the collection now, so I might as well run with it.  Mute is represented as well, so I’ll keep an eye out for them too.  My Sire copies of People Are People and Music For The Masses need to stay (MFTM was a gift and PAP was never released on Mute or Intercord), but I don’t have any plans for further Sire purchases.

How will I decide between an Intercord copy and a Mute copy?  I probably won’t have to.  It will come down to whichever I find first.  I don’t see myself rabidly chasing this stuff and paying premium prices – my interest in DM comes and goes too frequently.  There are long stretches when I don’t pay them much mind at all.  It will take me quite some time to find everything from either label, never mind both, so I will most likely have this particular collecting project running in the background for years.

I like that idea.  Always something to look for.

Now. About those singles…

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If you have any interest in Depeche Mode at all you have to check out depmod.com – one of the most excellent and exhaustive band-centered collector resources out there.
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Success rate, sticker-peeling, Nuggets

Gore’s Counterfeit EP: sticker took some printing with it, cover ruined.

Suicide’s American Supreme: some sticker residue, fair.

Construction Time Again: almost completely cleanly removed. not bad.

Many, many years ago my stepmother Nancy used to go to the Powder Hollow Auction in Enfield, Connecticut with some frequency. I was rather young at the time and never went myself. However, there was one occasion when for some reason or other my father and I stopped by during the viewing period before the auction began in earnest.

I spotted it immediately – a vintage lava lamp. I couldn’t say with any certainty anymore whether it was a Century or an Aristocrat, but it certainly had the classic coloring: brass-colored base, yellow liquid, and red lava. As young as I was I knew cool when I saw it and begged Nancy to keep an eye on it. What for, I’m not quite certain. I was likely around 10 at the time. Not exactly a big budget at my fingertips (though I was so hot on the thing I’m sure fate would have lent a hand one way or another).

Unfortunately, I woke up to find that despite Nancy staying rather late (she never got back from the auction before I went to bed), the lamp still had not made it to the block by the time she headed home. It slipped out of my fingers.

The next time my birthday rolled around, though, I was presented with an exciting surprise: my very own Lava Lite brand Century lamp – classic red/yellow color scheme and all. I adored the thing. Even made a little movie with the lava lamp as the star – now long since lost to the ages, I’m afraid.

A few years later my Century met with an unfortunate mishap at my boarding school. No one ever admitted exactly what happened. All I know is the morning after our big Madri Gras fundraiser I found it in the basement with the top broken off and a waxy red mess on the floor (which I had to clean up).

However, a Christmas or two later I was asked if there was anything that Santa could have his elves whip up for me. I had to admit that I missed my good ol’ lava lamp. Christmas morning a lovely new Century was all mine. I’ve had it ever since.

Around 2000 a vast majority of my belongings were boxed up and deposited in my folks’ barn (long story) – including the lava lamp. Without thinking about the consequences I let it lay on its side on a shelf in a climate-control-free environment for 10 years.

Whoops.

Fast forward to 2011. With the so-flimsy-as-to-be-laughable “ban” on incandescent bulbs coming up my friend Ethan wondered aloud if he would be able to ever power his own lava lamp again once the bulbs were made “illegal”. As it happens, they use appliance bulbs and so are exempt, but that’s another story.

But it got me thinking about my own lamp. Had it survived those 10 years? Did 40 season changes ruin it forever? I started to worry excessively. Luckily my parents were coming up to help me move, so I immediately emailed them and asked if they could bring the lamp along for the drive up. My dad sent me an alarming image:

Oh dear. The lava had separated. Not a good thing. The liquid had also gotten rather cloudy – a sure sign of lava lamp trauma.

A few weeks after I moved I pulled the lamp out of the box. Maybe just letting it run for a few hours would help? What could it hurt if the thing was already in trouble?

After a few hours it became clear that the lava very much wanted to stay separated into two densities – a very runny pool of wax that stayed down in the bottom (the remains of that “floe” that looks like a big red slug crawling up the side), and a large clump of more rough-looking wax that immediately floated up to the top – taking the coil with it – and sat there.

My next strategy was to drain off a significant portion of the liquid. Perhaps if I got the rough-looking wax closer to the heat, it would start to melt a bit and rejoin with its runny comrade?

No such luck. It just wouldn’t budge. That puck of wax just wouldn’t mix with the blob that in this angle is just peeking up above the base’s edge.

After a lot of reading online I drained off the rest of the liquid and went for the super-heat. Not only wasn’t the temperature of the vessel tempered by the liquid anymore, but I also wrapped it in a small towel to raise the temperature even more. Eventually both masses melted into a clear (think candle wax) pool of lava at the bottom. I swirled the globe a few times like a fine wine, then placed it back on the base to settle, turned the lamp off, and let it cool. I repeated this cycle four times.

I had also planned on replacing the liquid using a recipe that I found online, but figured that with the lava being in such a questionable state I was going to need the most accurate liquid I could get (apparently it is a delicate balance of surfactant and saline) to evaluate whether or not the thing would ever be happy again.

But it was still a bit cloudy. What to do? How about a coffee filter?

Success! I can’t guarantee that a coffee filter will work for all cloudiness issues, but it cleaned mine up like a champ. The liquid was now nice and clear. Compare the photo above to the one my dad sent me farther up for a noticeable difference.

I put it all back together and can report with pride that after a few runs it is almost completely back to normal. There is still evidence of wax separation in the form of a few little odd clumps, but at this point they stay combined with the healthier-looking lava and get smaller each time I run it. I like to think they’re being digested.

Beyond that I don’t see myself necessarily becoming a lava lamp collector or aficionado. They’re cool and all, but they are also a desirable collectible and sometimes command a significant price tag. I like my classic Century – it was discontinued some years ago – and a number of the other vintage designs, but not enough to make a habit of chasing them.

However.

Over the early course of Lava Lamp history there has been one other style example that I always saw next to the classic Century in fleeting ads. The amazing Lava Coach Lantern. Mysteriously Provocative, indeed.

I’m not quite sure what possessed them to style a lava lamp to resemble a traditional oil lantern. You could hardly mistake it for anything that you could drag out with you during a hurricane.

However, I was always fascinated by this design. The Century always struck me as much cooler, but the Coach Lantern always had a kind of funky, whimsical charm of its own. Needless to say, I perpetually secretly wanted one, but missed the boat as the company changed hands and phased out the last traces of the classic designs in favor of the new.

Of course, these days eBay can solve all of your vintage-item desires with a little patience, and after some vigilance I finally came across an example that I thought was in reasonable condition and reasonably priced. The water looked a little cloudy in the listing, but I figured that with my new-found lava expertise surely I could make a go of tidying it up and making it shine again. In anticipation I smarched out to Pill Hardware for a can of Nevr-Dull to polish up the base and hardware (though I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with the rest of the Nevr-Dull wad now that I’m done with the rehab – I guess I could polish all my doorknobs?)

When the lamp arrived and I opened the box I fell in love immediately. It was everything I had dreamed. Tall, regal, sort of bizarre – everything I aspire to be. Overall it is in pretty good shape. There is some light scratching to the base, and some wear to the brass plating. No matter, though – a bit of elbow grease saw it shine again.

The water was as cloudy as I had feared. Not horrible, but not particularly clear either. I plugged it in, turned it on, and let it do its thing for about 5 hours. Not much change (which is not all that unusual).

After the wax had cooled and solidified I drained the water off into a pitcher and armed myself with a coffee filter. Slowly poured the water through, and though it got rid of some of the larger particles, there was still a rather pronounced cloudiness. Damn.

I knew I needed the help of an expert.

Working in a laboratory that has its origins in fluid dynamics sometimes pays off in strange ways. I fired off an email to my boss Sheila describing the problem. This seemed to be a good distraction for her from the day-to-day business of watching over undergraduates, and we came up with a plan.

She gave me a few Whatman glass fiber filters. They look like a flat coffee filter, but a little bit thicker and much more brittle. However, while coffee filters are in fact rather porous (relatively speaking), these filters promise a pore size of 1.2 micrometers. Maybe that would do the trick! The filter itself is actually in the bottom of the funnel pictured below.

My first “pour” was only slightly encouraging. The liquid passed through, but there was nothing obvious on the filter and the results weren’t as exciting as I’d hoped they’d be.

But, if at first you don’t succeed…

After running the water through a clean filter four times I can report that although there is still a bit of a rosey cast to the water, it is almost crystal-clear and just about good as new. Sheila and Parsons Lab to the rescue once again!

Now I just have to try a different bulb for the lava – it doesn’t flow quite like it should, just sort of forms a strange column of lava that just sits there. The good folks at OozingGoo recommend a clear bulb instead of frosted. I am going to try that next, though it is also entirely possible that ambient temperatures are still too low right now to encourage good blobbing. The Century also seems to be having trouble now as well – the temperature in my room has been around 65 degrees, so I think I’ll wait for a warmer day to really see how these lamps are going to perform before messing with the bulbs.

Will that satisfy my lava madness? Most likely. One example each of two absolutely classic designs should really be enough for anybody.

But there are some awfully cool other designs out there. Do a search on the Carlisle… or the Saturna… or the stately Consort. Even the Mediterranean, pictured way up top here, has a certain nutty charm to it.

Not that I’d pursue any of them or anything. As I’ve said many times right here on this blog, compact discs make an excellent collecting hobby because they’re just so damn cheap. Vintage lava lamps? Not so much.

However, if one of these cool old models just happened to cross my path for a reasonable price…

p.s. I’ll get back to CDs on this neglected blog soon. It’s been a busy spring.

The soundtrack is almost as amazing as the special itself, but is also a wee bit of a bumpy ride. Christmas Time Is Here is one of the most beautiful latter-day holiday songs ever written. Any time of year I only need to hear a few notes before visions of hot cocoa, gently falling snow, chestnuts roasting, jack frost nipping, and all sorts of other fuzzy heartwarming images start to emerge from my subconscious. I could be sitting on a beach in mid-August, the effect would still be the same. I’d be looking for my scarf and wondering what you got me for Christmas.

Of course, the album was originally issued on LP. All CDs of the album (as far as I know; I admittedly haven’t researched it too heavily) have followed the same track listing, placing the instrumental and vocal versions of Christmas Time Is Here side-by-side. Bad move. It might have worked back then, you had some time for the instrumental version to wear off as you flipped the LP, but with CD it just leaps right into the next track.

I also grow weary of Für Elise and question the decision to include it at all. Was it just to pad the LP? Was it necessary? Ditto for the disposable Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. It is dreadful and shrill, and disrupts the flow of an otherwise perfectly lovely album. These grumbles are minor, though, and mercifully with today’s technology I can program them right out of the sequence if I so desire.

Fantasy Records released both this one and A Boy Named Charlie Brown as hybrid SACDs a few years back. The funny thing is the recordings had always been a little bit dodgy, A Charlie Brown Christmas in particular, and this new release has a tendency to reveal a few more of the flaws rather than present the recordings in a breathtaking new light. No matter, though – it’s all part of the charm and ambiance in my opinion.

Once you’ve had your fill of the calm, cozy side of Christmas it’s time to lose your mind with out-of-control holiday cheer. Enter: A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector.

There’s nothing quite like it. It comes roaring out of the speakers with such excessive force that it’s like a series of uncontained Christmas explosions. The hysteria starts with White Christmas and doesn’t let up, not even when you hit Silent Night at the end – the awkward pageantry of Phil reciting a bizarre dedication to his listening audience carries you right through the otherwise gentle rendition in a shimmering haze of holiday weirdness.

The album also sounds – in an engineering sense – absolutely unbelievable. Like many mono recordings it doesn’t work as well on headphones, but put it on a good stereo and bask in the glory of the same shear volume of sound being simultaneously pumped out of both speakers. The bass is more pronounced than on many Spector releases from the period and vibrates through your bones providing a meaty, throbbing foundation for everything that was layered on top via his notorious production techniques. Wall of Sound, indeed. The whole house is coming at you when you put this one on.

Despite my claim that the impact is diminished on headphones, don’t let that stop you. Whenever I feel I’m not really in sync with the holiday season I let a few tracks from ACGFYFPS shuffle up and can feel Christmas infecting me like some strange, twitchy virus. It is particularly useful when combating mall crowds, or gearing up for office holiday parties. If just a few well-chosen tracks don’t whip you into such a holiday frenzy that you’re ready to short-circuit, chug a bowl of egg nog, and launch into your own rendition of Darlene Love begging “please… please… please…” in Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), I’m afraid you’ve just been added to my Naughty list. You’re getting a scratched copy of Mannheim Steamroller’s 27th tired Christmas album in your stocking.

Half of Pinback is none other than Rob Crow, who has a lengthy and detailed career in a variety of bands and in a range of styles. One day I walked around the corner from my mall part-timer, marched right to the back of Border’s, and without having any idea what it was going to sound like purchased Summer In Abaddon based solely on my research around the band Optiganally Yours. 3.5 years on it has turned out to be one of my favorite albums of all time.

Optiganally Yours was (is?) a project that focused its attention on a few quirky old instruments (the Optigan and the Talentmaker) that Pea Hicks, the other half of Optiganally Yours, had become an aficionado of. It started as a cover band of sorts, but quickly turned to original material almost exclusively. Their two albums – Spotlight On and Exclusively Talentmaker – are quite remarkable. There are those that would disagree, but I am partial to the latter. Worth checking out.

The Optigan was an organ-type instrument that was marketed for a few years by Mattel. It actually had kind of a nifty concept: imagine the optical soundtrack of a movie (much like the animated one in Fantasia). Audio waveforms embedded in the film are interpreted by a light sensor and translated into sound. The Optigan took the same principle and looped it – inside the console was a changeable disk that was imprinted with loops of rhythm sections and actual organ or other sustained sounds that could be played via the keyboard.

I stumbled upon the Optigan via Tom Howe’s site for RCA’s CED/Selectavision format. Tom kept track of some of the interestingly similar inventions out there, and the Optigan was one of them. The principle of Selectavision isn’t really much like the Optigan, but it still depends on an encoded rotating disc to retrieve the needed information.

The earlier days of the internet provoked all kinds of strange memory recoveries, and back around 1998 or so I remembered (it might have been via the Dead Media Project) and started looking for information on Selectavision. I had been introduced to it during its original release back in the early eighties. Periodically my father and his friend George would go up to Lechmere in western Massachusetts to look at new developments during the very first rumblings of the about-to-explode home theater market.

I was fascinated with Selectavision – it was the first example I had ever seen of a video format that the consumer could control. VHS and Beta were around at this time, but they were still prohibitively expensive. I can remember seeing a Beta player (I think – I doubt it ws VHS) very early at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, CT. My sister and I were watching Smokey and the Bandit or Cannonball Run or something along those lines.

But I digress. I remember the little silver buttons that allowed you to visually fast forward or rewind through the program (Selectavision was actually really, really good at this – no static at all), and also that the demo disk that Lechmere was using was most definitely Goldfinger. How on Earth could I possibly remember that? Well, true, I was probably 7 or 8 at the time, but you don’t forget the first (and only) time you see a beautiful woman painted in gold.

Anyway, the brave new world of eCommerce and the trend of people around the globe clearing out their basements and selling it off via eBay meant that Selectavision was firmly within my grasp despite having been discontinued years prior. Eventually I found a player at the Goodwill in Davis Square and got it running again. I do not have as many disks as I did at the peak of my Selectavision hysteria (they weigh a ton and take up all kinds of space), but I do have a working player and a small collection of appropriately themed disks – 80s movies mostly, and of course the copy of Goldfinger that I found.

A long meandering path, to be certain, but just goes to shore up a point I made in an earlier post (The Beat Goes On): my dad and George Perzel were more or less responsible for a good deal of the interesting stuff that I have pursued in my life in terms of music and audio/video technology.

That’s pretty cool.