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.
I hardly know where to begin with this beast.
Were this an ongoing deep dive into the varied sounds of Lindsey Buckingham, I’d know exactly how to start: Despite memorable material from Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks — including the utterly gorgeous, sometimes seductive ‘Sara,’ my pick for the latter’s peak moment in Fleetwood Mac or otherwise — this thing still plays like LB’s first solo LP.
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.
You might understandably wonder why I didn’t start my #TuesdaysWithJerry series saluting the late great Jerry Moss with this (or any) twofer from his A&M partner Herb Alpert and his long-running outfit the Tijuana Brass Band. After all, it was Alpert’s desire to release albums independently that led to the label’s formation in ‘62 with the emergence of his surprise hit ‘The Lonely Bull.’
How can any survey of A&M’s past begin anywhere else?
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.