All Of Those Old Records Have Mistakes On Them

Flea, you're starting with a very romantic notion there. Check out what charted, starting in '62, year of Bob Dylan's first album (spoiler alert: it wasn't Bob!):

http://www.bobborst.com/popculture/top-100-songs-of-the-year/?year=1962

Shiny happy pop music has been a powerful force for a very long time.

:)

What are you on about? There were some fantastic songs on that list......... I don't know all of them of course but you know. It is not pop music I have anything against - but the way they are produced and tinkered with now, nothing as horrendous as Lady Gaga/Katy Perry etc... existed then because it couldn't have possibly existed then - autotuned, super-processed nonsense.

Like I say - people who survive on a show like American Idol (or in mainstream pop) fit a cookie cutter version of what will be popular.

flea, you brought up Bob Dylan and suggested he wouldn't be a success in today's pop world. I merely pointed out that he hadn't been a pop success 50 years ago either.

Very little has changed in pop music. The charts are typically a preponderance of highly polished material. As mistake free, to reference your original post, as the technology allows.

Interesting........ you do know "Like a rolling stone" charted at its highest at #2? Yup he did relatively awful in the pop music industry.

My favorite song with a mistake in it, offhand, is Louie Louie by The Kingsman.
It was like a One Take Wonder :D
Great catch by the drummer 8)

Another fav is Burnin' H ell on the Hooker 'N Heat album.
Johnny Lee with Alan Wilson on Harp.
Johnny Lee leaves it sound like he wants the instrumental break, and Alan goes for it.... But Johnny Lee starts
to come back with another verse and stops to let Alan go on.

Ken

We record primarily live and try not to do edits. You get better takes, better mistakes and overall better tracks....
I am a sucker for outtakes, 1st takes, ground tracks, B sides, Board feeds, 4 tracks and Alternates. I like recordings to feel like I'm in the room much more than the best possible rendition.

Yeah, I found that my best takes were the first ones. They just have so much better energy and feeling.
Every take after that is dull and lifeless - at least mine are.
Like you become way too self-conscious, especially if you make the mistake of listening to your first take....
Then you hear all the mistakes and think too much when you get to that point again.
I'd rather have the wonderful vibe of the first take, warts and all, than a sterile/perfect subsequent piece.

And some of my fav music was found on the b-sides of my ma's old 45's :D

Ken

There's a bum note on Angie, by the Rolling Stones, too. I'm sure there are gazillions of others.

you do know "Like a rolling stone" charted at its highest at #2?

I didn't. I knew he'd a couple of top 10s through the decades, but couldn't have named the songs. The timing certainly makes sense. Peter Paul and Mary would have had a bunch of hits with his songs over the preceding several years, so interest ran high. He finally got some commercial airplay. :)

you do know "Like a rolling stone" charted at its highest at #2?

I didn't. I knew he'd a couple of top 10s through the decades, but couldn't have named the songs. The timing certainly makes sense. Peter Paul and Mary would have had a bunch of hits with his songs over the preceding several years, so interest ran high. He finally got some commercial airplay. :)

And Blowin' in the wind reached #2 in the charts from his second album (albeit as a cover version by someone else).

Maybe you should google stuff before you make statements about Dylan songs not getting into the charts. Sure he didn't have a hit off the debut album but it was mostly covers anyway.

I don't think you could show me anything from the 60s that was as poor as Lady Gaga or Katy Perry anywyay and certainly nothing with the overproduction and auto-tuning that makes those records sound at least ten times worse.

Apparently I have read the organ intro to "like a rolling stone" by Dylan was shambolic and would never appear on a modern record - I didn't quite get what was meant by that one.

al kooper was a guitar player, but they already had mike bloomfield, so they put kooper on keys, which he didn't really know how to play. so the engineer tried to lower kooper in the mix, but dylan told him to crank him up on the track. at the time, dylan was really chasing a more spontaneous sound in the studio, as opposed to polished licks, and often went with first or early takes for the final record, and apparently kooper's simplistic riffs appealed to him.

also, as for his lack of commerciality, he's sold somewhere around 50 million albums over the years and i believe his last album hit number 1.

There's a bum note on Angie, by the Rolling Stones, too. I'm sure there are gazillions of others.

Mick's opening line on 'Ruby Tuesday'. Horrible. Worst imaginable thing to release. Absolutely horrible...

Cat

Mistakes can give a record or song personality. When everything is clean and polished over it all comes out sounding the same. I like that older records are more raw.

A lot, though not all, of the music put out today sounds terrible live because the "artists " rely too much on everything being polished up in the studio. I love going to classic rock concerts because these old rockers can deliver live

The good thing about old recordings is that the band and the singer are all playing at the same time. This gives an organic feel to the recording and provides an opportunity for the players to react to each other. The other side of that is the fact that there will be mistakes.

Personally, I like the band playing together as long as the mistakes aren't too bad.

I hear a lot of modern recordings where the singer put the vocals on last, and a sax or guitar player played the fill-ins before the final vocal track -- and the call and response have nothing to do with each other. As a player who really enjoys playing interventions between the vocal lines, and uses that opportunity to either compliment or contrast the vocal line, when the vocals and fill-ins have nothing to do with each other, it doesn't do anything for me.

When you lay one track on top of another, the same thing happens. That lead guitar played a rhythmic lick that the drummer should have picked up on, but the drum track was done last week so it doesn't happen.

I for one am more interested in the purity of the music than I am in the purity of the recording.

But that's just me. There is more than one right way to do this.

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