If you’ve spent time listening to any of these alternate versions of Fleetwood Mac’s beloved behemoths, whether in vinyl form (like this parallel Tusk) or via scores of tracks that litter deluxe-edition digital copies, you’ve got to admit: Sometimes it’s really hard to discern much difference between outtakes and finished products.
Today’s #TuesdaysWithJerry topic: samplers!
I wish more labels had kept up with this promotional practice, tossing together gateway tracks as a means of enticing ears to seek out more from their rosters, while sometimes slipping in a rarity or two to help such things become collector’s items.
Ordinarily I would’ve shared this latest installment in my #TuesdaysWithJerry series on, well, Tuesday.
But as I spent yesterday on the road from Tucson back to Cali, there simply weren’t brain reserves left to produce a post with any measure of meaning. And yet I don’t want to wait longer to nudge this never-ending survey of A&M Records along.
If you’re just joining this ongoing journey through the decades-deep A&M Records catalog — my way of memorializing that label’s late great co-founder Jerry Moss, who died in August at 88 — let me bring you up to speed.
Like so many other platinum acts from A&M Records’s pre-rock catalog, the Carpenters struck me even from a single-digit age as featherlight schlock, inescapably omnipresent (especially in the ‘70s) but instantly dismissed by Gen X’ers (I’m one) who had yet to grow out of ironic hipster attitudes toward everything straight-laced and square.
Some of you surely remember as fondly as I do how that outlook changed dramatically for the better via the 1994 compilation ‘If I Were a Carpenter.’ At the height of grunge, here was an earnestly sincere salute to all this sterling popcraft we’d never properly appreciated.
Because I’m not a boomer who came of age in the ‘60s, I neither fell for these cross-pollinated charmers as a swingin’ sophisticate nor first became aware of Brazilian music via the global smash — Stan Getz & João Gilberto’s ‘The Girl from Ipanema,’ with aloofly dreamy vocals from the late Astrud Gilberto — that put the beguiling sound of bossa nova on a wider musical map.
Those kindly following my sporadic deep dive into Christine McVie’s legacy will recall I pressed pause on that series a month ago, after revisiting Rumours and its alternate edition. Chronologically speaking, it made a lot of sense to wait on this just-released 2LP memento, captured during the first of three nights in August ‘77 at the then-Fabulous Forum, a sort of homecoming for the gone-platinum group.
Like so many other milestones from the early A&M Records catalog, these records were always a reach away in my pre-digital childhood home — yet rarely were they played. I’ve always put their neglect down to the instant antiquity of ever-changing styles.
Music moguls have rarely been as monumentally influential as Jerry Moss was. Last week’s loss of the M half of A&M Records — Herb Alpert, the A, is still kicking at 88, the same age his partner reached — rises to a level of recognition reserved for legendary scene-shapers such as Mo Ostin at Warner/Reprise or Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic. Like those fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, Moss was a crucial titan with a decades-deep effect on careers and stylistic shifts.
Gawd, not this thing again.
I confess: My deep dive into Christine McVie’s discography that began soon after her death last December has been stalled for far too long by Rumours.
