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History Does Repeat Itself — Over and Over
Music reissuing gives the phrase Play It Again, Sam a whole new meaning. By Jim Morrison
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.
JIM MORRISON‘S work has also appeared in the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal, and Smithsonian magazine.
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