Walter Hale 4 wrote: ↑Sat Nov 11, 2023 4:33 am
hey emjel !
Mate do you recall in 1973 how much those 2 LP Red and Blue legendary compilations set you back ?
Im assuming that you wasted no time in purchasing your copies when they first was released.
It was either £4.49 or £4.99 which was quite a lot in one go and as I was saving to get married, they were not an immediate purchase when released but the Red was a Christmas present from my fiancé in 1973. The Blue one came a year or so later.
The White album had an even lower priority when it was released back in 1968 as I simply could not get into much of the music that was on it, in fact, Beatles albums after Pepper never made it into the collection for a couple of years as having just started work the previous year, my priorities were buying lots of early Elvis albums that I hadn’t been able to afford as a teenager and I was slowly building up my Elvis US imports too. But by 1972, I had them all apart from The White album even including an import of the Magical Mystery Tour LP was in the collection, but my wife who was my girlfriend back in ‘72 really surprised me and bought it for me that Christmas, so filled the gap.
But no delay in getting these new re-issues. I got them yesterday and the Red one with all the remixed tracks is really superb. A couple of slight disappointments with She Loves You being the most disappointing, but then they only had the mono tape to work with. I think my biggest disappointment is more the packaging as for 50th anniversary releases, I think they should have done better - the CDs should have been presented in 7" or 8" packaging with a decent booklet, probably like FTDs 7" Classic album series, whilst the vinyl was disappointing keeping the original format but with one album in the left part of the sleeve and the two albums in the right part. For me, it came across as some kind of budget release done that way.
But both are going to get a lot of plays over the coming weeks and I’m really hoping Apple get the two early albums out as deluxe re-issues very soon as what they have done with some of the material is amazing getting the vocals centred up and the overall sound especially the drums vastly improved. Some sound like they have just been recorded.
And I wouldn’t be surprised to see both albums in the Top 10 of the U.K. album chart next week.
