[78-L] Angel records in Canada

[Jeff Sultanof]

I never thought about it before, but now that you mention it.......

Capitol was a different label after EMI took over. The early Duophonics are
quite listenable, the later ones absolutely horrible. And yes, decision
making became a game there with hardly anyone who knew what they were doing
watching the ship. Quite a few early stereo sessions were just thrown out;
there is abundant proof that they had stereo tape machines going during
sessions that were only released in mono. The stereo miking for the last
Harry James album on the label is one of the worst I've heard.

My favorite instance of the mess that was Capitol was when Pickwick made a
deal with them to release budget albums. Capitol opened their vaults to Cy
Leslie and told him that his only restriction was that he couldn't use
recordings that Capitol still had in print. Well, Capitol had deleted a lot
of their back catalog at the time, and Cy discovered that they'd put some
Sinatra recordings out of print. Well, what do you think Pickwick put out
first? Sinatra hit the ceiling, and Capitol had to do some fast maneuvering
to straighten the situation out. According to Leslie, he went easy on them
(and I believe him; he is truly an honest record executive). Leslie was
responsible for issuing tracks that had never been issued; when I brought
this up to him, he simply told me that he'd gotten lists from Capitol and
picked what he liked.

Jeff Sultanof

On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 9:58 AM, agp <agp2176 at verizon.net> wrote:

> At 04:09 29/08/2010, DL wrote:
> >Reminding us that it wasn't only The Beatles that Capitol's engineers
> dumbed
> >down.
>
> Maybe its just me, but it seems that Capitol/ EMI has the worst
> history when it comes to screwing up stuff. Perhaps I'm making my
> assumption based on stuff they put out after the 1960s, but I note
> that of the majors only Capitol has a section in their wikipedia
> article nailing them on this (see Record altering in
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records ).
>
> Granted a lot of people did fake stereo, but it seems that Capitol
> did it more often along with rubbish like duophonic, re-arranginging
> tracks on lps, as well as in general crap mastering. Of all the EMI
> companies, only Toshiba-EMI seemed to really give a hoot about quality.
>
> T
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 78-L mailing list
> 78-L at klickitat.78online.com
> http://klickitat.78online.com/mailman/listinfo/78-l
>