'The Return Of The Spectacular Spinning Songbook', Nov. '11

[oliversa1]

My copy has arrived today (no. 619), very please even though it cost me £206.

Looking forward to watching and listening to the discs tonight.

[TX_Fan]

A dear friend gave me the box set for XMas (no. 105) despite Elvis's recommendations.

I'm certain I will very much enjoy it.

[verbal gymnastics]

I wish I had a dear friend like that.

Perhaps sulky, Neil., BWAP, so lack and johnfoyle could chip in and buy it for me...

[Boy With A Problem]

I wish I had a dear friend like that.

Perhaps sulky, Neil., BWAP, so lack and johnfoyle could chip in and buy it for me...

We'll get right on that.

[sulky lad]

I'm sorry my computer has crashed and I can't get any messages about buying VG this fine Christmas present

[bambooneedle]

I take back what I've said about EC here. I remembered that his father just died and everything so he probably isn't in the best state of mind to deal with record company nonsense.

[cwr]

On the positive end of this debacle, I live not terribly far from the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, and was unaware of it until EC's recent box set recommendation/self-disavowal. I paid a visit to the Museum last week and took the tour, also buying one of the last 5 copies of the Ambassador Of Jazz box on my way out.

The tour was lovely, and the staff and volunteers mentioned that they had seen a huge uptick in visitors this month "because of Elvis." They brought him up several times with no prompting by me or anyone, and seemed genuinely appreciative that his shout-out had garnered so much extra attention...

[Hamerdriven]

I paid the standard $202 price from Amazon and received copy #99. Which is WAY louder than 11. I like the audio disc, have yet to investigate the DVD or vinyl, and the book is nicely done if slight. And I like the actual working spinning wheel. I was in the second row at the 4/11/11 Wiltern show and it's great to have that night's version of "All Grown Up" saved for posterity. I would have (of course) preferred the ENTIRE show including cover tunes, but I accept the rationale for why those were mostly eliminated. I guess I'm easy to please (and unable to visit the Louis Armstrong museum)...

[MOJO]

I've already misplaced the DVD. Way to go, MOJO.

[oliversa1]

Well, all set to watch the DVD at the weekend only to find that it was in the wrong Region Code for the UK. I am well HACKED off with Amazon for not stating this in their advert, waiting for them to call me.

Overall, very pleased with the package, just need to get the DVD player sorted.

[scamp]

Well, all set to watch the DVD at the weekend only to find that it was in the wrong Region Code for the UK. I am well HACKED off with Amazon for not stating this in their advert, waiting for them to call me.

Overall, very pleased with the package, just need to get the DVD player sorted.

Sometimes you can hack the DVD to set it to region free or have it include more regions with a remote code. This info I got a few years ago but never had to use it myself.

[Neil.]

I'm pretty sure there's a code you can input to your existing DVD player (using the numbers on the remote control), which enables US dvds on British DVD players. Do an internet search for 'change DVD region codes' or similar.

[oliversa1]

Thanks for your help guys, I will have a look tonight.

[migdd]

Release dates for the individual DVD and CD have been pushed back to February 21 per Amazon.

[verbal gymnastics]

Looks like my Valentine's gift will be a bit late (although it won't be necessary if BWAP et al buy the box set for me).

[blureu]

I listened to the audio CD yesterday. Sounds great. The editing/sequencing is pretty good too.

[TX_Fan]

Loved hearing "All Grown Up" on the audio CD, wish it had made the DVD. On the DVD, I liked the Bangles singing "Tear Off Your Own Head" and "God Give Me Strength" (He didn't sing that one in the Nashville show I attended)

[johnfoyle]

I'm still scanner-less so I got a friend to do the job and here's the scan he sent me-



To see the text more clearly click on it, click on 'view image' and the words should be bigger. Or save the image to your hard drive and enlarge etc.

It's worth the effort , Terry Staunton being spot-on in all he writes.

[Natasha]

This is from today's newspaper



I can translate it later (right now I have to get ready for the New Year's Party at Copacabana Beach. ) but the article is on how music industry is investing on luxury packages to please the fans. Pretty much what I was talking about earlier in this topic (I swear I don't work for this newspaper. :p - And I wish, because this is the most important brazilian newspaper).

There's no new or useful information. I just wanted to share this because I was thrilled when I bought the newspaper this morning and found this. I would never expect that and I think this is a good sign for the new year.

btw, happy new year everybody!

[Top balcony]

From the pages of the Guardian here's Alexis Petridis' take on the "big box set" , interestingly in view of the recent press coverage of Elvis's thoughts about his own product, this is actually a Costello-free-zone:

The rise of the super-deluxe box set- U2, the Who, and the Beach Boys are just some of the artists cashing in on the trend for super-deluxe box sets. But do we really need 38 different versions of Heroes and Villains?

You could, if you so desired, detect a slight tone of surprise when Pete Townshend says, about the latest reissue of his 1973 rock opera Quadrophenia: "The record company and book publishers are still paying me good money to pick through my own underwear drawers and find unworn socks." Perhaps that's because, as Townshend reminds you, he's 66: old enough to remember a time when rock'n'roll was widely thought of as a passing fad, not something that was going to be extensively curated in the next century. Then again, you don't have to be 66 to be a little taken aback by the latest trend in what record labels call "catalogue exploitation".

Even by the standards of a music industry that's been pumping out reissues and box sets for more than 30 years, there's something fairly startling about the current glut of super-deluxe box sets: their size, their contents, their price. Quadrophenia has been expanded to four CDs and a DVD, a poster, a facsimile 7in single of 5:15, two books and sundry other ephemera and memorabilia. Depending on where you shop, it'll cost you between £70 and £105. Something similar has happened to Nirvana's Nevermind, the Rolling Stones' Some Girls and the albums of the Smiths. The "Immersion" edition of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon comes with two books, an art print, a replica ticket, five collector's cards, a scarf, nine drinks coasters, a set of marbles and a bag to keep them in. All of them are made to look positively parsimonious by the 20th Anniversary Uber-Deluxe edition of U2's Achtung Baby, which comes in a magnetic puzzle tiled box containing 6 CDs, 4 DVDs, five 7in singles, 16 art prints, an 84-page hardback book, a magazine, four badges, a set of stickers and a pair of Bono's trademark "Fly" sunglasses: yours for around £350.

"I don't think there's a competition to outdo Pink Floyd or Quadrophenia, or any of those things," says Nick Stewart, once the A&R man who signed U2 to Island Records, these days a freelancer specialising in, among other things, marketing and catalogue exploitation, and thus the man behind the Achtung Baby box. "We set out to make the very best package for the U2 fan of a seminal album. We weren't just filling it up for the sake of filling it up." He chuckles. "I happen to think we've outpointed everyone else. But then I would say that, wouldn't I? I think it's raising the gold standard, so that all these packages become bigger and better."

It's hard to imagine how that could happen. Even before you get to the non-musical ephemera included within them, super-deluxe box sets are hugely, impossibly distended. In the case of the two Pink Floyd Immersion sets currently available – The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here – what started out as less than an hour and a half of music has been expanded into five CDs, four DVDs and two Blu-Rays, containing 23 hours of material from a band once famed for their reticence regarding letting the public hear anything they'd deemed unworthy of release: "I think Nick Mason bought a box set with absolutely every note John Coltrane ever recorded in a jazz shop in Paris or somewhere, and he suddenly got it," offers Andy Jackson, one of the remastering engineers responsible for the Immersion sets, by way of explaining the band's volte-face.

You can hardly argue that they don't offer value for money, and certainly the grandiosity of the enterprise is in keeping with something about Pink Floyd: never a band afraid of the extravagant gesture, as anyone who saw them live would attest. Nevertheless, looking at what's on offer, you occasionally find yourself wondering who all this munificence is aimed at. Were there really Pink Floyd fans who felt their life would be somehow incomplete until they owned the 1973 quadrophonic mix of Dark Side of the Moon in 448kbps, 640kbps and 96kHz/24bit, and who only now are sleeping soundly? It's a sensation you're struck by again and again: who needs all this stuff? Is there any reason for the Beach Boys' Smile box set to contain not just five CDs, but two 7in singles and a double album replicating material that's already on the five CDs, other than as an excuse to push the price up?

Whether the super-deluxe box set represents important works of 20th-century art being treated with the respect they deserve or a cynical music industry on its last legs is a moot point. The truth is probably somewhere between the two. The answer to the question about who needs all this stuff appears to be: plenty of people. "There seems to be an appetite in the marketplace at a certain level for well-produced, lavish reissues, " says Stewart. "The fan that buys it tends to come from an era when vinyl was moving into CD. They were used to nice artwork, posters inside. This slightly harks back to that at a time when we've reduced everything to small 6in plastic boxes, or in the case of a download, nothing at all."

That said, there's no doubt that the super-deluxe box set owes its existence to the difficult climate in which the music industry currently operates. "Record labels are incredibly keen to make up for the shortfall in CD sales that they're seeing year on year in the digital space," says Tim Ingham, editor of the industry magazine Music Week. "But although digital sales are growing, they're not making up for the loss in physical sales. They've seen a real opportunity to hike up the cost of physical goods and direct them towards a small but incredibly loyal audience. If they sell one over the counter, it makes everyone a hell of a lot more money than if 20 people go to Tesco's and buy the Adele album for a fiver. Plus, if you look into the world of piracy, the extra tracks or whatever they put on will quickly spread across torrent sites, on to YouTube within a day of the CDs' release. But you can't pirate Bono's sunglasses or the marbles you get in the Pink Floyd sets. That gives a real physical, almost romantic tangible aspect to the sale, which means that perhaps people will be swayed from just enjoying the audio on YouTube."

So the music industry gets a Pirate Bay-proof product with a huge profit margin, the extremist wing of the Beach Boys fanbase gets to hear a mind-boggling 38 different versions of Heroes and Villains. But what's in it for the artists? The cynical answer is money – a rumour suggests that at least one artist agreed to having their back catalogue reissued in this way because doing so hastens the day ownership of their recordings reverts from the record company to the band members themselves – although it's perhaps worth noting that almost all the artists involved are at that happy position where money isn't really an issue any more ("One does get to the point where one realises one has more than one needs," as David Gilmour told me some years ago). Pete Townshend says the big attraction for him was the opportunity to explain his work processes to a wider audience. "My composing and recording process has been, with hindsight, really extraordinary. It's close to that used today by many musicians sitting at home with their computers, but I've been doing this kind of thing for 48 years. It's well worth looking closely at where I have done good work and where I have failed, because 90% of what I've released was composed without computer. I was using tape machines in the same way electronic composers like Stockhausen and the various members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop used them, as cut-and-paste tools to create new rhythms and textures. It happens in my case that whenever I came up with a good new sound I tended to add a heavy electric guitar and then set Keith Moon loose to Wagnerise it all, but sometimes I didn't do that, and it's there that my home studio work reveals what I should perhaps be most famous for – my determination, always to try something new. My home demo work is, quite simply richer and more wide-ranging than the music I'm best known for. The demos on Quadrophenia show how this came about."

One theory suggests that there's a hint of finality about the super-deluxe box set, that it not only represents one last, grandiose attempt to sell physical product in a download world, but something one magazine called The End of History, ransacking the store of heritage rock material so thoroughly that there's nothing left to release in the future. After all, it's hard to see where the audience would be for a 39th version of Heroes and Villains or the 1973 quadrophonic mix of Dark Side of the Moon at a fourth different bit rate. Andy Jackson doesn't think there's much point in remastering classic albums again in a few years' time. "Arguably, there are still incremental improvements to be made because the technology gets better, but we're into the very shallow part of the slope on that. There's only going to be a few audiophiles who notice the difference."

Tim Ingham disagrees. "As long as marketing departments exist," he laughs, "they will find ways to reissue, remaster and repackage Pink Floyd and other evergreen artists for ever more. I don't think the market's saturated yet. We've heard from retailers like Tesco, saying this year that the CD format as is, 12 tracks in a jewel case with a booklet, is no longer attractive to the marketplace. They've called on record companies to make the package more appealing. I think they're going to reissue as many of these CDs and add on as many trinkets and goodies as they can."

And perhaps super-deluxe box sets occasionally serve a purpose beyond the accumulation of cash. Pete Townshend is alternately passionate and rather wry when discussing the Quadrophenia reissue, but you get the feeling there might be a sense of restitution about seeing the album explored in such depth.

He thinks Quadrophenia represents "the Who at their highest power as a studio rock machine" and furthermore presaged punk. "Every one of us in the band, our crew, our managers old and new, our record company and our fans, were all poised to either sink or swim in the progressive rock tidal wave that was about to engulf us, and for which we were partly responsible because of Tommy. Quadrophenia was our attempt to say to everyone: 'If this is all we've achieved, then let's celebrate the early days of London pop, and look forward to the coming revolution.'"

But there's the sense that his fans didn't necessarily agree, that it's slightly overshadowed in the Who's oeuvre by Tommy or the less complex Who's Next. "I don't think Quadrophenia is under- or overvalued," he demurs. "I simply feel it has become isolated somehow from the real story of the band. It was the Who's swan song in a way. We never made a truly great album again. It left us afloat and in one sense it failed, it didn't provide us with the live replacement for Tommy as the centerpiece of our stage act, and we were pretty tired of performing Tommy in every show by 1972. This package addresses that."

Will the super-deluxe box set alter people's perceptions of the album?

"I have no idea," he says. "I suppose having me tell them, over and over again how brilliant I was, how brilliant the band were, how hard I worked and how classic it has all proven to be will eventually drive all my fans away. That would be the best day of my life. I look forward to retirement. That statement will, of course be picked up by the tabloids: Stone Deaf Townsend Wants to Drive His Fans Away So He Can Rest.

"I may appear to be indulging myself now with this package," he adds. "I admit that I am. But I did not indulge myself at the time of its release. I produced a rock-solid work. The original Quadrophenia is like the rock Jimmy ends up sitting on at the end of the music. It will outlast us all and resist the battering of the waves."

[Jeremy Dylan]

A Pete Townshend episode of Spectacle would've been really something.

[Top balcony]

Completely agree

[verbal gymnastics]

A Pete Townshend episode of Spectacle would've been really something.

As would one with Paul Weller.

[jardine]

agree and agree. and also, van dyke parks, randy newman, even paul simon would be great to hear sit and talk and play. someone's also mentioned tom waits. mccartney if he could crack the shell, and brian wilson if he could do whatever that might take...i imagine e.c. and b.w. at a piano talking over chords and changes..

here's to spectacle three: shall we start a petition??

and, seriously, I really love listening to him talk music and how, some times in the first two seasons, he opened up things i'd never quite heard before with so many of his guests...

[bronxapostle]

A Pete Townshend episode of Spectacle would've been really something.

As would one with Paul Weller.

my #1 dream SPECTACLE guest also VG! WELLER FOREVER! if i may pick a few more: Ryan Adams, Yo La Tengo, Nick Cave and Wilco/Jeff Tweedy!