History Does Repeat Itself - Over and Over
Music reissuing gives the phrase Play It
Again, Sam a whole new meaning.
Go searching for
Pet Sounds, the Beach
Boys' 1966 album, which was credited with changing the soundscape
of pop music, and you'll find choices. A lot of choices. Do you
want the original recording remastered with extra tracks and issued
on CD in 1999? How about the 40th-anniversary edition with a DVD,
extra tracks, and a fuzzy cover? Or the 40th-anniversary edition
without the fuzzy cover? Or the gold CD, released in 1993 and
without extra tracks?
In actuality,
Pet Sounds has been released
on CD at least nine times. Unusual treatment for a classic? Not at
all.
Miles Davis's
Kind of Blue has been
offered seven different times. The work of alt-country pioneer Gram
Parsons has been the subject of two retrospectives in just the past
three years. Led Zeppelin has released yet another new hits
compilation, its third (or fourth, depending on how you judge it).
And this fall,
Elvis Costello's 1977 debut,
My Aim
Is True, was reissued for the fourth time - in a different
package and by the fourth different record label.
Record companies have discovered that selling the past, even
selling the same past again and again, is profitable. They say
they're aiming not only at completist fans looking for extra tracks
and improved sound but also at new fans, virgin ears who may not
have been born when albums like
My Aim Is
True were first issued on compact disc. And, executives
note, some groups have never had their classic albums on CD because
of legal or other entanglements. Earlier this year, Rhino Records
reissued the long-unavailable first two albums by the Traveling
Wilburys - the supergroup whose members include George Harrison,
Tom Petty,
Bob Dylan,
Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne - and quickly
sold more than 100,000 copies.
"How can you deny
Pet Sounds?" asks Cheryl
Pawelski, the vice president for Artists and Repertoire at Rhino
Records, a major reissuer and compiler. "At some point when you're
discovering music, you will get the classics. Led Zeppelin is as
classic as you can get."
Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of A&R at
Sony's Legacy
Recordings, says there is a huge collection of recordings to mine.
"Our job is to be salespeople, marketers, and educators, in a way,"
he adds. "At Legacy, sometimes I think we're supposed to sell CDs;
other times, I think we're a little bit of a Library of Congress
and a Smithsonian."
Berkowitz steadfastly maintains that the reissues are sonically
light-years ahead of the first attempts to convert analog tapes to
CDs. "Nobody knew what they were doing [at first]," he says. "The
first wave of CDs was to make them sound just like the albums. The
engineers were not experienced. We got to a place eight or nine
years ago where analog to digital got really good. Now they're able
to make them sound more natural and like they were intended to
sound."
The prime example of that is
Kind of Blue.
In the early 1990s, Sony engineers discovered that the tape machine
that was used to record part of the album ran slower than standard.
As a result, those songs were about a quarter note off their
intended sound. So in 1992, Sony released an expanded and
corrected-speed version. Then, five years later, the company
released a 20- bit remastering of the disc, which it claimed would
sound even better.
It's tough for a die-hard fan to keep up, and some have been
frustrated by the seemingly endless stream of repackaged reissues.
On Amazon.com earlier this year, several Elvis Costello fans
complained that it was no longer possible to be a completist. One,
Thomas D. Ryan, figured he had spent enough to finance a Hawaiian
vacation for a record-company exec and his family, just based on
the reissues he'd purchased. "Nowadays," he wrote, "I simply stand
by, amazed as the repackaging craze continues unabated. By my
count, the above named collections represent the 10th and 11th
recompilation of Elvis Costello's 'hits.' I'm not saying they are
bad collections. The booklets contain song lyrics, which is a nice
touch, especially for the older material. Naturally, the songs are
great and I should know, because I bought each of these tracks at
least a half-dozen times already. If you still don't own them, then
go ahead and buy them. You will enjoy them. I, however, will stare
at my room full of Elvis-related plastic and acknowledge [that they
are] the reason that I never made that trip to Hawaii myself."
Even Berkowitz sounds frustrated at the chaotic state of the music
industry today. Big-box retailers, he says, aren't likely to carry
anything other than the greatest-hits package of a group like Sly
and the Family Stone or Lou Rawls or Teddy Pendergrass - artists
Legacy has reissued or will reissue soon.
While putting out reissues doesn't require the original-recording
cash outlay, Berkowitz says there still is "a substantial expense.
If it costs us $60,000 to get that record out, and then the cost to
make each one, where do they go?" he asks. "Where do we sell them,
with record stores getting smaller and smaller and smaller?"
Online is one answer. That's where Berkowitz expects there to be an
explosion of reissue material in the coming years as the technology
improves. The compressed format of an
MP3 doesn't match the sonic
depth of a compact disc. But, Berkowitz says, "I think we're at the
dawn of massive amounts of music being available digitally and
sounding great."
Another answer is through what Pawelski oversees at Rhino, a niche
label called Rhino Handmade. This label issues small numbers of
albums sought by die-hard fans and collectors, usually between
2,500 and 7,500 copies. The albums are offered only online, and
when they're sold, that's it. Retail stores, she says, are
decreasing the variety of their offerings, so this is the only way
to get the music to fans. "There's certainly a market for really
great music, and the direct-to-consumer model was the way we solved
that problem," Pawelski adds.
Fans can also request discs on the Rhino website, such as the
reissue of Melanie's Photograph: Double Exposure, a project
Pawelski steered. Among the other reissues Rhino has released are
albums by T-Bone Burnett, now a star producer; the Rascals; Bettye
LaVette, a soul singer who has resurrected her career late in life;
and 1980s alternative bands like Rank and File, Guadalcanal Diary,
and House of Freaks. There are also several new reissued
collections of material from
the Doors. "Some of this stuff is
perennial, like the Doors," she says. "The Doors continue to sell
and sell and sell. Every year, kids are 'discovering' the Doors."
Berkowitz says he tries to market to longtime fans, but that he
also looks for opportunities to go beyond that. Sometimes it works;
sometimes it doesn't. He remains perplexed at how hard it has been
to sell reissues of Jefferson Airplane, a major '60s band from San
Francisco that had a ton of hits.
Pawelski says reissues allow fans to discover something new that’s old. “There are things in every record label’s vault sitting around that maybe just didn’t catch on the first time around,” she says. “We look for those hidden treasures.