So i got those remastered versions of Tim and Pleased to Meet Me today. I was somewhat skeptical about the need for remasters on the twin tone cds. They always sounded perfect to me as is, and the graininess of the earlier CD mixes of Let It Be in particular felt more appropriate to what the album is and is trying to do than the remaster, which gave certain songs a vh1-y feel. But Pleased to Meet Me always sounded terrible on CD - distant, muted, brackish. I'm listening to the remaster now, and the songs that always sounded great sound better - those horns on "Can't Hardly Wait," for instance, now evoke the Memphis soul they were supposed to rather than Huey Lewis and the News, and i can hear subtleties of the guitar riff on "Alex Chilton" that I can't on the original CD version. The songs i usually skip on the album also sound better - "The Ledge" is explosive now, and the lyrics of "Shooting Dirty Pool"'s first verse are now almost comprehensible. "Nightclub Jitters" sounds hte most radically different - the remaster brings the bass way up, and it almost sounds like Sinatra meets Portishead or something.
Tim sounds mostly the same to me, and for me, that's a good thing. I've never had any problem with Tommy Erdelyi's production on that CD. One thing the remaster does is make Left of the Dial slightly cleaner, but not so much that it doesn't sound like what it is, a paean to the 1980s 'alternative' scene. At any rate, "Bastards of Young" and "Here Comes A Regular" sound as good as always, just a little louder, and I'm fine with that. Between them, the two discs have four different versions of "Can't Hardly Wait," one acoustic (which doesn't really work at all), with three different versions of the lyrics. The "Studio Demo" of "Kiss Me on the Bus" has Dinosaur Jr. levels of distorted guitar. "Nowhere is my home," an unreleased track from the Tim sessions, shows how great a guitarist Bob Stinson could be. Pleased to Meet Me has TEN bonus tracks. Some of the unreleased stuff, like "Birthday gal" and the incredible "photo," whose pre-chorus is awesomely reminiscent of Blue Oyster Cult's "burnin' for you," are wonderful. Chris Mars's take on "Cool Water" anticipates Cool Dump (and predates it by two decades.)
My three day-long stint in post-nasal hell caught up with me in the classroom today. It wasn't that I was underprepared so much as that my brain wasn't making the connections i wanted it to, that I just kind of blanked on where I wanted class to go and about a third of the connections i wanted to push people to make. Which sucks, because it was an important week in terms of the readings -- racialized domestic work. emotional labor. affect. Grr. Bobst Library is much more fun at 7 AM.
Mets are currently down 5 to 1 in the eighth. Here's hoping they pull out of it...
\EDIT: in lieu of Arlie Russel Hochschild's work and following Kathleen Barry's own work on flight attendant labor, i should note that "Waitress in the Sky" is an obnoxious, bad, and offensive song from a guy who once expressed admiration of ronal dreagan and said some dumb shit about Vietnam but writes (mostly) amazing songs.
Case in point: "Swingin' Party"
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