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Cheap Trick : In Color : Steve Albini : The Whole Story : As Far As I Can Tell : After Searching the Internet : for Half an Hour
This is from answers.com and seems identical to what I read awhile back on Wikipedia but is now mysteriously gone.
On the radio show "Rockline" in 2003, someone called in and asked the band for the history behind the rumored Steve Albini version of the "In Color" disc, and Bun E. Carlos gave the explanation. The "In Color" album was produced by Tom Werman, but the band always felt that Werman screwed up the album. "He made it safe for radio, but the album sounds like it was done in a cardboard box." So in the late 1990s they were in the studio hanging around with the producer Steve Albini, and had nothing to do for a few days, so they said "Yeah, that would be fun to redo that." So they started re-recording the songs. They Did not finish the album, not all the harmonies or instruments are on it yet, but it can be found on the internet. It includes two versions each of "I Want You to Want Me" and "Oh Caroline" as well as a cover of John Lennon's "I'm Losing You."
More gifts below the fold!
Follow up:
I did find this on Wikipedia:
"I'm Losin' You" was a song from John Lennon's Double Fantasy album, back when Cheap Trick worked with Lennon. Lennon's wife Yoko Ono fired the band, but the song remained intact (with Nielsen's guitars and Carlo's drums) The song is also available in an unreleased remake of In Color, which was produced by Steve Albini.
Am I the only one that didn't know that Cheap Trick worked on Double Fantasy? From some dude's site:
I questioned Bun E. about what is was like working with John Lennon on "Double Fantasy." He said it was great playing with Lennon, but that Yoko was a "f...ing bitch." He claimed the Lennons "stole" some of Nielsen's riffs that he contributed to "Losing You" without compensating Nielsen for them. It's fairly common knowledge that Yoko resented having to pay their session fees so this makes sense.
From earcandymag.com
But the session that I most wanted to know about were the legendary John Lennon "Double Fantasy" sessions with Cheap Trick in 1980. Only three songs were recorded before Yoko banned Cheap Trick, citing that they were using John. I told Rick that I recently found a bootleg with the three unreleased Cheap Trick/John Lennon tracks. He asked, "so, could you tell the difference?" I sure could, the tracks seemed to rock more, with even Yoko's song sounding inspiring. Rock comments, "that's the only way you could handle it, have us behind her voice & you need kind of schizophrenic stuff going on." But, why did the band do only one session with Lennon? Nielsen didn't blast Yoko, just explained diplomatically, "we were asked to do more for vocals. What I call those John Lennon baby voices (sings a little). But & ah & by then they were finished. We didn't get lucky enough to play on that one." Still no real answer as to why the recordings didn't wind up on the final record. I guess the story in Albert Goldman's book, "The Lives of John Lennon" is the closest to getting the story correct.
Did anyone read that book? Can you shed any more light on it.
10 comments
I also have, and deeply enjoy, the Albini In Color sessions. My version also has a really great version of "Can't Hold On."
my reaction to the albini sessions is....meh.
i'm all for sloppiness generated by a desire to rock with one's all. and i like the performances. and what's valuable about it is their "committed" performance, as oats has pointed out.
i'm very familiar with the albini production credo. and i suspect that he would've given this a more careful mix if it were to be released. this is basically a live performance with a few overdubs mixed on the fly.
that said, i'm still not all that thrilled....
in many places, zander's vocals thin out and get lost. would it have killed him to compress them just a little more so that they stay present? we'd be able to appreciate that committed performance a little more.
again, he may have corrected this in a "final" mix, but then again, i'm not so sure after having heard other recordings by him where this also occurs.
other features of these mixes are also ubiquitous in albini produced recordings:
the room mic'd drums are filled with ugly mid-range tones. and that sound doesn't work for every song.
the bass and the kick drum also disappear for songs at a time. again, a little compression -- not so much that the life is sucked out of the recordings, but enough to keep instruments present in the mix -- would've been nice.
productionwise, i'm all for having things hang over the edges (i like how some of the guitar tracks just devour things here and there), but not just for the sake of doing so. that's always seemed to be albini's m.o.; production that is raw, over the edge, antagonistic to traditional production for the sake of being so.
it takes REAL production / engineering talent to create recordings that take the spontaneous energy he's managed to generate and use it to serve the songs.
i would have hoped for something in between the extremely canned sound of the original and the uneven sound of these.
phils 6, nats 1.
we're goin' to the playoffs, boys!
thanks for choking on your mitt today, glavine.
Even though Cheap Trick often is categorized as power pop, I still think they were not easy to pigeonhole; they had many dimensions and seemed to know how to take the best aspects from many genres (50s and 60s rock, glam, hard rock, punk, new wave) and make something you could both tap your foot and sing along to.
Thus, I believe the Albini mixes put the band in a new light. And that Lennon cover is killer.
i didn't say i preferred either version.
i concluded by saying "i would have hoped for something in between the extremely canned sound of the original and the uneven sound of these".
the plea for a happy medium was admittedly accompanied by criticism of the albini mixes. but that was only because they're the ones we haven't heard. they were the ones on offer.
to team albini, i am willing to concede, as i have above, that in the final mix (which this is not), he may have evened things out a bit. however, i'm all too familiar with his aesthetic, and i suspect he wouldn't. but that doesn't make the original preferable to me.
but why not do this on a song by song basis? dr. john's point that cheap trick has lots of dimensions not suggested by their studio output is a good one. I think they were as aware of it then as we are now, and this was one of the reasons to "go live" for the american market in '78. and certainly, to my ears, this version, or the budokan version of "i want you to want me" is preferable. both the live and the albini version have a quicker tempo, more space, a more appropriate aural setting for the rush the song expresses. by the same token, i think the sweetened, smart pop production values on "downed" suit that song perfectly. the albini version is cheap trick playing a great song while the "tape" rolls. but i'd much rather hear the what the studio can bring to that song. the "in color" version puts a much more vivid picture in my head because of things like *isolated* guitars and flanging. the albini version sounds like albini making a statement about canned studio recordings.
so both have their merits and drawbacks.
that is all.
One song that really does, I think, is Southern Girls. You can really hear the glam-rock influence in Nielsen's heavy chording and the trebly vocals. And the backbeat come through loud and clear.
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