It has been
brought to my attention that, astonishingly, a cutting from Melody Maker dated December 4, 1971,
specifically my review of The Who’s album Meaty
Beaty Big And Bouncy, is being offered for sale on ebay, priced at £2.
Here
it is:
It’s not
surprising that I gave the album an excellent review. It was, after all, the
first decent compilation of Who hit singles. The first, Magic Bus The Who On Tour, released in the US September, 1968, was
compromised by MCA’s choice of material and ill-disguised attempt to imply it
was a live recording, while the second, The
Who: Direct Hits, released by Track in the UK a month later, was flawed
because Kit Lambert insisted that no Shel Talmy productions be included.
I
shall draw a veil over my feelings about the surfeit of subsequent Who hits
albums, but I seem to have been unusually prescient by commenting that The Who
‘are making the most of their history in re-issues’.
I
still have my original copy of MBBB,
on the Decca label, given to me by Who tour manager Peter Rudge in Charlotte,
North Carolina, on November 20 in the Holiday Inn where The Who were staying
before their gig at the Charlotte Coliseum. He’d just received a box of them,
couriered by MCA from Los Angeles, for the group, and we all gathered in his
room to admire them. It occurs to me now that I was in the ideal position to
ask Pete, Roger, John and Keith to autograph one for me but I didn’t. It
simply wasn’t cool for music writers to collect autographs, more’s the pity.
This was my first visit to America,
though it wasn’t paid for by The Who or their record label. In fact, I’d flown
to New York at the expense of The Kinks to attend a party thrown to celebrate
their signing to RCA. At the same party were John and Keith from The Who and I
wound up partying with them until the early hours at Nobody’s, a then notorious R&R bar in Greenwich Village, and discovering along the way
that they were about to open a tour down America’s East Coast in two day’s time. Unable for
reasons of managerial incompetence to interview The Kinks, I opted instead to join
The Who in Charlotte, NC, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
When I got back to London I wrote about
both The Kinks and The Who for MM,
including the review now offered on ebay. Here’s the link:
I grew up with it but don't we now, with the advancement of years and cultivating of (inevitably) more sophisticated ears, that the sonically shitty electronically reprocessed stereo mixes on Meaty B fuck with impact of the original incarnations ?
ReplyDeleteThat review is way too much. In current terms a complete 1971 MM is about 1.37GBP. Maybe Townsend or Daltrey will buy it.
ReplyDelete