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Cut!
What if we don’t want to hear your outtakes?

BY DOUGLAS WOLK

We’re sorry. We really are. We didn’t think it was going to come to this. But it has, and there’s nothing to do but present a manifesto. The problem, of course, is that expanded reissues of classic albums have finally gotten out of hand. It starts innocently enough: there’s always something sort of worthwhile on the cutting-room floor, and it doesn’t seem to hurt to stick it on the reissue. Before you know it, though, every album you like metastasizes into a boxed set. These are our demands:

1) Leave record collecting to record collectors. If you want to put a song on an album, put it on the first time around. If you feel like sticking some extra stuff on singles, that’s cool. Compilations of rarities and B-sides are fine things too. But don’t spoil your finely calibrated album by issuing it on CD first as is, then as a pricy reissue with a bunch of bonus tracks, then as a pricier re-reissue with the outtakes sprawling onto a second disc. Elvis Costello, are you listening?

2) Edited performances are edited for a reason: leave them alone. You will never find a bigger James Brown fan than Smallmouth. We cherish his every utterance. So why are we so disappointed by the “Deluxe Edition” of Live at the Apollo Volume II (Polydor), a new double-CD version of the wall-shaking 1967 album that reinstates half an hour missing from the original double LP? Simply because the half-hour wasn’t missing the first time around: it was deliberately cut. The Godfather was at a weird crossroads in his career when he recorded it, a few weeks before the release of “Cold Sweat”: he was on the verge of a funk breakthrough (the hammering, sweating medley that introduced “There Was a Time” points straight at it), but he was also trying very hard to go Vegas — there are earnest covers of “I Wanna Be Around” and “That’s Life.” And, mostly, he was playing to the crowd: dancing, falling to his knees, bantering with the band. That sort of thing goes over great on stage, but someone wisely excised a lot of it to tighten up the LP version. Now it’s back, and it’s brought some serious slack to a once-great album.

3) If you give it to us twice, make sure you give it to us once. Another “Deluxe Edition,” Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Catch a Fire (Tuff Gong/Island), signals a potentially disastrous development: the album as we know it on one disc, the “unreleased original Jamaican versions” (the same album with fewer overdubs and two more songs) on another. Fortunately, there’s also an un-deluxe one-disc version with the additional songs appended at the end; forcing people to pay for the same record twice in the same package would just be provocation. Neil Young (the person reported to be responsible for including most of Buffalo Springfield’s first two albums twice in their forthcoming Rhino release Box Set), are you listening?

4) Don’t be afraid to cut. Hollywood is abuzz right now over the anonymous genius who’s been circulating the homemade Star Wars: The Phantom Edit, which is shorn by 20 minutes and largely de-Jar-Jar-ed. When will pop stars catch on? Consider what a well-constructed greatest-hits album can do for the reputation of an artist with an uneven catalogue — think of Marley, or even David Bowie. It’s certainly a tonic for classic hip-hop acts, whose catalogues define “uneven.” Digital Underground’s new greatest-hits No Nose Job (Tommy Boy) isn’t just the best album of their career, it makes all their other albums irrelevant, even with its dodgy remixes and heavy selection from their mid-’90s decline. No bad songs, no skits, just one floorshaker after another — nothing worthy is missing. We will even go out on a limb and say that Eric B. & Rakim’s budget-line, 11-track The Best of Eric B. & Rakim: The Millennium Collection (Hip-O) makes the four original albums by the greatest rap duo obsolete. It may be time to return to the forgotten music-biz practice of replacing a chunk of an artist’s catalogue with a single-disc abridgment — a salvage operation rather than a greatest-hits. The drinks will be on us the day that artists start to release special “Contracted Editions” of their lesser records. And we will buy the 45-minute version of Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile for all our friends.

Issue Date: July 12 - 19, 2001