Dr Frank Weakly Reader for 6.28.2019
By: Frank Portman
Tags: Rock, YouTube, Music, Vinyl, Songs

FRONT BURNER

— Pre-orders for the Sounds Rad 1995 MTX poster in shirt form are now live. Like it says, I found a stash of the original posters and I’m going to sign a limited quantity of them. See the link for details. Also it looks like there’s a skate deck in the offing, plus associated other products. Stay tuned and watch this space and all the other spaces for stuff like that.

— Just a heads up that we will have some shows to announce soon. Get ready to mark your calendars. I guess this is a tease, if tease means what I think it does.

— Mtx forever update: Well, as a result of being finally backed into a corner by a deadline, the Mtx forever sequence is complete. I seriously never thought this day would come, and if I’m honest, I fought it tooth and nail (in that quiet way I have.) It’s all fun and fine when it’s theoretical, but committing to an irrevocable list isn’t quite so breezy. Like a lot of you, I had to leave cherished items off and did so only because compelled and with deep regret. My songs are my special, differently-abled children. I don’t like any of them to be left out. But you can’t just give everyone an award just because you feel sorry for them. Then the award is meaningless. If everybody gets it, nobody gets it.

But where was I? Oh yeah, the sequence.

It was a very challenging problem, a true logical puzzle, as well as an artistic exercise. History vied with aesthetics, history and aesthetics struggled with the quality of the extant materials, sonic variety had to be balanced with consistency, the calvacade of “hits” had to submit to the realities of pacing… a different corner, a different deadline might have resulted in quite a different list. As I said, cramming decades of songs, in a representative yet significant and meaningful sample, onto two vinyl LPs is basically an insoluble problem.

Thanks to everyone who submitted lists and commentary and who gave the matter so much thought and sincere consideration. It was helpful to see your takes on the lists, and particular the notes and commentary. Inevitably, there will be those whose preferences are not met precisely, which is the way it crumbles, cookie-wise. Anyway, it’s too late to go back now! Les jeux sont faits. If you don’t like it, start your own band, write 300 songs, put out a bunch of records, wait thirty years, and choose 24 of them. But I wouldn’t recommend it.

We are going to present the best possible package, the absolute best we can do, and so far things are looking pretty good. It’s going to be a knock-out, sonically and visually.

The next step is mastering. Nobody but me has heard all of these recordings in their original, full spectrum form from tape, in many, many years. There were many surprises to me, sonically, in reviewing the tapes. In many cases they sound like totally different recordings. The final result should be interesting, to say the least. And, as I mentioned before in one of my previous essays on the subject, part of the motivation for doing this is as a trial run for future remastered re-issues. We’ve got the tapes, let’s see what we can do with them. The results here will, it is to be hoped, inform future decisions. There’s still a bit of suspense as to what will happen and what we’ll learn.

Finally, I’m sure a good number of you may be quite keen to know the track list. That will be revealed in due course. I will tell you though, that there is at least one track from each major release, and that A:1 is “Love American Style.” More soon.