Numero Cinco said:This is fascinating. I thought that H. A. made his David Rose statement with "Love Potion # 9." It's hard for me to imagine the present, up-tempo, quasi-ragtime version stopping for 30 seconds of David Rose, then resuming as was, but I guess that's why I'll never be a music arranger and should keep my day job.
Why did A & M issue different versions of "Plucky" on different WNML LPs? Was this common practice in the Sixties?
One of the great unanswered TjB mysteries...
We've bandied it about quite a bit around here, and all we know is that there are two different stereo mixes of the entire WHAT NOW MY LOVE album. The one that features the "Plucky"/striptease version also seems to have these anomalies:
"What Now My Love" featuring Herb's lead with less of a reverb
"So What's New" also has less or no echo on the whistling part
"Brasilia" is missing a trombone part.
Some fans here reported that all of those things sound 'normal' to them and are surprised by the other LP version that most of us seemed to grow up with. That indicates that it might have been a regional thing with some pressing plants having one master, and other pressing plants using the other.
I grew up with what I consider the 'normal' version of the LP - echoes on "What Now..." and "So What's New", no striptease on "Plucky", and a prominent trombone on "Brasilia". I was quite surprised the day I first heard "Plucky" on the CD of WHAT NOW MY LOVE, nearly stopping in my tracks as I was driving to work. The other mixes didn't sound as different to me, having heard all of them on various greatest hits compilations over the years.
That's what makes it so much of a mystery: Many of us heard "What Now My Love" in its echoey form from the singles and albums of the period. It lost that echo almost immediately when re-issued on SOLID BRASS and GREATEST HITS 2. "So What's New" and "Brasilia" got the same treatment, appearing in their 'altered' form on the compilations, indicating that the masterers at A&M considered these to be the definitive versions even back in the '70s. So what was it that we were listening to back then? And why do some fans think that these versions were 'normal'?
The only answer is that there were two different pressing masters out there. And to make it all stranger, in an attempt to find out more about the mystery, I uncovered a copy of WHAT NOW MY LOVE that seems to be a hybrid: Side one sounds like the old normal issue to me, with all the echoes in their proper places, but side two has that missing trombone on "Brasilia", a fact that drove me nuts until I found this forum years ago.
I hope that fills you in on the WHAT NOW MY LOVE mystery. Thanks for starting this thread - I think we needed a little jump-start. Things had gotten a little slow around here on the TjB front.
Harry
...trying to explain the near-unexplainable, online...