Albums where Side 2 sounds best played First...!

[Dave]

Brian Hyland Tragedy / A Million To One - Side 1 starts off with "Tragedy", but for kicks I listened to it as "Side 2"... Side 2 starts with "See The Funny Little Clown" (yes, by Bobby Goldsboro), which as a "Side 1" isn't a bad track to start off with...

The first side ends with "A Million To One", which does an equally good job closing the second side of the album and lately, to me, better than the "original" closer, the Gerry Goffin-Carole King-written "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", which is a fine "intermission"...



Dave

 

[Dave]

Had to get out my Spinners album, Spinners (Atlantic SD-7256)...!

Although Side 1's final track, "I'll Be Around" is a funny way to end the album, I prefer it there if Side 2 at least begins w/ "One Of A Kind Love Affair", which sounds better opening the album than Side 1's "Just Can't Get You Out Of My Mind" & thank God for programmable CD's, if ending the LP w/ "Could It Be I'm Falling In Love" (last track, side 2) sounds even more awkward...!



Dave

 

[Mark-T]

Three Carpenters albums' "Now & Then", "A Kind of Hush", and "Old Fashioned Christmas".

 

[Dave]

I would probably put The Carpenters Close To You, there, too!


Dave

 

[Mike Blakesley]

Although I would never listen to it side-2-first, Santana's third (self-titled) album would be a good candidate. If you play side 2 first, you would kick off with the hit single "Everybody's Everything" and then you would end with the epic instrumental, "Toussaint L'Overture." Played in correct order, the album starts with a non-single instrumental "Batuka" and ends with "Para Los Rumberos" which is still a great song but doesn't have that epic, album-closing quality like "Toussaint" does.

No matter what order you play it in, that is one hell of a great album.

 

[Dave]

Three Dog Night's "Ridin' Thumb" -- is that the Seals & Crofts song, included on one of their earliest albums? If so - good tune!

King Curtis covered it, too... On one of his last LP's, Everybody's Talkin'... There's a "Ridin' Thumb" "Jam" at the end of the album, as well...


Dave

 

[Dave]

Oooohhh...! Not particularly an album I can often listen to, but Andrea True Connections, "More More More" sounds better ending w/ the title track on Side 1 , than it does w/ "Call Me", the final track on Side 2...

Side 2 begins with "Fill Me Up (Heart To Heart)", and at 10-min., I wonder why that's a longer song than "More...", but it probably wouldn't have been a hit if not going beyond its 6-min. and still being the "mega-dance-work" it is, of which the same can be said for Side 1's opener, "Party Line", running at nearly Seven...!



Dave

 

[Dave]

Pink Floyd's A Saucer Full Of Secrets: Get it on an 8-Track & the side-long title track which is really a suite will come on first, unlike the vinyl & cassette tape counterparts, of which "Saucer Suite" is really Side 2...

And "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun", which really ends Side 1 on the cassette or LP is the 8-Track version's definitive epic "closer"...!

My mom bought me this P/F 8-Track, at a St. Vincent's Store near my grandmother & grandfather's house, along w/ a bunch of other tapes she'd thought I'd like--Crosby Stills Nash & Young, So Far; Some instrumental thingy w/ a solo piano playing stuff like "MacArthur Park", among a few other things--and I DID!!!!

Deep Purple FIREBALL -- Here the songs ARE "reversed"... That is when I bought this on cassette a long time ago, Side 2 was Side 1 and Side 1's songs were on Side 2, contrary to the other formats... Wonder why that was?

Led Zeppelin LED ZEPPELIN -- I had this on 8-Track first, whch started off with "Your Time Is Gonna Come" and ended with "Dazed and Confused", which I strongly prefer over "Good Times, Bad Times" (the real Side 1 album opener) and "How Many More Times" (the real last song on Side 2) starting and ending this album, respectively... The Cassette, as well as LP copies I have seen, revealed the original order...

Somehow, someone at Warner Communications, when programming one of these outside the usual LP and LP/Cassette format, screwed up...

The same was w/ my Black Sabbath Technical Ecstasy cassette: Side 1 & Side 2 are reversed, as opposed to its LP counterpart; had a short-lived used copy...

-- Dave

 

[Dave]

Hank Snow Hits Covered By Snow: Side 1 starts with "Where Has All The Love Gone" & ends with "Like A Bird" (the next-to-last song there is "Gentle On My Mind"--two songs in my opinion which sound better ENDING this album!

Side 2 starts up with "The Name Of The Game Was Love", followed by "Honey"--which if you had this LP, you'd agree that these two are better "beginning songs"... Side 1 also ends w/ a very depress-o number "Green, Green, Green" (which, like "Honey", this song is about a death--TWO, actually--Good Lord!!!!)...!

-- Dave

(Whatta'ya think????)

 

[Dave]

OK, another one I'd recently bought: Pat Bone Departure from 1969... (Done after being a veteran '50's rock singer, & just before entering his Christian Music phase...) Covers of 12 songs, by John Stewart (2), Tim Buckley (1), Roger Dollarhide (2), Mike MacRae (1), Biff Rose (2), Fred Neil (1), and John D. Loudermilk (3)...

Departure's second side begins with "Long Distance", of which some live/crowd noises are dubbed in making me think this was a live album, at first... The album ends w/ a song called "Friends" which ends w/ some riff-raff rambling & Pat sounding like he'd been singing another song maybe from this album (ahhh, but which one???? I'd listened to this at least 5 times & can't pin point it being from this album now...) right at the end of it & even has him shouting "Bah-yyyy!", followed by a shutting of a door (I know B.J. Thomas Billy Joe Thomas you hear ending w/ a door shut, there, too!)

But Side 1 begins w/ a cover of Biff Rose's "What's Knawing At Me", sounding highly orchestrated (by Jack "Specs" Nietsche) and ending w/ a version of John Stewart's "Never Goin' Back" (of which Pat sang at the end of a BEVERLY HILLBILLIES episode, though mighty differently than what I hear, here!) of which I recognized the song when I bought Stewart's California Bloodlines album) and as the 2nd song, also on Side 1, (also from ...Bloodlines) does a fairly showbizzy-ready, horn 'n' banjo-driven "July You're A Woman", himself...

A record if you can get ahold of, I recommend giving a try & in this "backwards order", too...

My wife even thought I'd been talking to someone on the phone, but I either had this record playing at the time, or had been running my John Stewart & Buffy Ford Signals Through The Glass CD, 3 times (played the 6 out of 10 songs, programmed the remaining 4 songs & the 10 songs on the album twice, to make the 24 tracks my player is capable of being programmed & fell asleep to) & just heard the dialog on the first track "Lincoln's Train"...


-- Dave

 

[Dave]

OK, another one I'd recently bought: Pat Bone Departure from 1969... (Done after being a veteran '50's rock singer, & just before entering his Christian Music phase...)


-- Dave

Of which I'd also done w/ one such Contemporary Christian Music album of Pat Boone's I'd recently got, Miracle Merry-Go-Round...


-- Dave

...Wondering why I'd never begun my record collecting starting w/ this guy? He made a lot of albums & if I'd bought him at some of the record stores I'd seen his stuff at before they'd long closed, I would probably have a pretty good, big-sized collection!

 

[newvillefan]

I'd go with Frida (ex-ABBA) and her debut solo album in 1982...side 2 opens with the great track 'I Know There's Something Going On'.

 

[Dave]

I'd always thought that it was what the album actually opened with! I did obtain a copy, but never did play it "Side 2, first", though!

So maybe I need to review a track listing of this & see what the order is... I must'a been satisfied w/ the playing order then...


-- Dave

 

[Dave]

Al Jarreau, All Fly Home... "Fly" ends Side 1, while "(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay", ends Side 2, so the former sounds better ending the LP, as the Otis Redding chestnut made the disc sound unfinished...

Big difference as "Thinking About It Too" starting Side 1, and "Wait A Little While" kicking off Side 2, also sounded better transposed...

Now on an Al Jarreau kick, after "Your Song" on Glow gave me the inspiration to resurrect another thread (and he drops lyrics from "Sittin On..." at the end, there too)...


-- Dave

 

[jfiedler17]

I agree that that third Santana album works every bit as well, if not better, if you play the sides in reverse order.

Another record I much, much prefer listening to in the wrong order is Hall & Oates' Big Bam Boom. Somehow when I first bought that record (mind you, I was only six at the time!), I didn't notice the "A" and "B" marks at the end of the catalog number on the disc label and mistakenly assumed that the record opened with "Going Through the Motions" and it wasn't until a year or two ago when I saw a CD reissue of it in FYE and was confused by the running order of the tracks that I went back and studied the label of my vinyl copy only to realize that I had been playing the sides in reverse for 25 years! I've tried listening to the album in the correct order, but it just doesn't work for me. Of course, if you listen to the sides in the reverse order, most of the album's hit singles (i.e. "Out of Touch," "Method of Modern Love," etc.), save for "Possession Obsession," don't show up until the back half of the album, but I think "Going Through the Motions" - which is an excellent song and really could've been a single itself - makes a much, much stronger album-opener than "Dance on Your Knees" does, and "Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid" similarly makes a much, much stronger album-closer than "Possession Obsession" (which is a great song, but really belongs more at the end of the first side of an album than the second.) [There's also something to be said, too, for not throwing all the most obvious contenders for singles onto the first side of a record, 'cause I know when an album's particularly front-loaded with singles, I'll often fail to check out the rest of the album.] If you own that album, I highly recommend listening to it with the sides reversed. It just flows much better that way.

Why they changed the order up, I don't know, but my cassette copy of Fleetwood Mac's Bare Trees has a radically different running order from the original album and opens with the 1-2 punch of "Sunny Side of Heaven" and "Sentimental Lady." Which is a heck of a great way to start an album. I'd always just assumed that the original record was also sequenced that way, so when I eventually found the vinyl version, I was kinda disappointed in the sequencing. "Sunny Side" just sounds completely wrong to me as the Side 1 closer. I don't know why, it just seems far more at home at the beginning of an album (or at least the beginning of the second side of one) than at the end of an album's first side. And I was amazed that "Sentimental Lady" doesn't show up until Side Two on the original record. The cassette is much better-sequenced.

By the way, going back for a second to your discussion on Pink Floyd 8-tracks, if you've never heard it before, you've absolutely got to hear Animals on 8-track. For some odd reason that I've never come upon any kind of explanation for, the 8-track version of Animals has got the two parts of "Pigs on the Wing" melded together as a single track, linked by a Snowy White guitar solo. It's the only place that that version of the song was ever officially released on. Go figure. One of the cooler oddities in their catalog, though!

 

[jfiedler17]

BTW, Dave, while you're on an Al Jarreau kick, I have to ask ... have you ever heard his song "Says"? It's from L is for Lover, which admittedly is not one of his better-known albums (and I don't believe was in print on CD for very long, at least not domestically; I've actually only got a cassette of it!), but it's easily my favorite song of his. It's one of his more rhythmically complex songs (I can't imagine how many tries it must have taken the musicians to master the abrupt ending to that one! The ending just kinda sneaks up out of nowhere!) and is bilingual at that, but he just pulls it off absolutely effortlessly. That song is no easy one to sing, and a definite testament to how masterful a jazz and pop vocalist he is. I think it's his most underrated moment. What an amazing talent that man is!

 

[jfiedler17]

One legendary '70s-rock album that I find myself almost always playing the sides in reverse order (and did so yet again just this weekend) is Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story. Technically, it begins with the title track and ends with "Reason to Believe," but I tend to listen to it Side 2 first, so that I hear "Maggie May" first and "Tomorrow Is Such a Long Time" last (with "Reason to Believe" and the title cut serving as the halfway-point side closer and opener, respectively.) I think it's actually much stronger that way, but that may just be me.

 

[Dave]

Hmmmm..., our reecent ALBUM OF THE WEEK, The Human League, Dare:

Why not begin it w/ Side 2's, "Get Carter" and ending it w/ Side 1's "Do Or Die"?

Sounds stronger and less-unfinished than leaving it off w/ "Don't You Want Me", as the last on '2', if "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of", on '1', is OK as an opener...


-- Dave

 

[Dave]

Here's one I haven't heard since getting more-than-twenty-years-ago:

Jess Roden The Player Not The Game -- Another one that I accidentally set on the turntable w/o making sure it would start on Side 1, so the "first side" (Side 2) ended w/ "That whiskey's got its grip in my tonight", the chorus from "In Me Tonight", while the "second side" (Side 1) ended better with "The Quiet Sound Of You And I"...

The first songs on each side? "Misty Roses" kicks off Side 1, and this is the Tim Hardin song that is a more slow and mellow ballad... Unlike the more "moving" version of The Sandpipers take on it, I would hear years later being introduced to 'em via The Corner... So it sounds better as a "pick-up" track, if the album equally sounds well with "The Hardest Blow" being its 'Invocation' or 'Aurora' (sorry had to borrow a couple Carpenters album terms there)...

Roden rocked out well in the Butts Band and a few other groups he was in... On this LP, that I'd bought for my fav' guitarist John Tropea appearing on a number of tracks, Jess kind'a puts me to sleep... Though "Drinking Again" and "Lonely Avenue" the latter by Doc Pomus, while the former a Standard by Bette Midler, et al. have their charm...!


-- Dave