Wild Pepper

Apologies to the blogosphere for my long delay between posts. I've been wrapped up in a few things. I hope my extended New Orleans travelogue kept you busy, though.

I spent a couple of days in and around Lower Lake, California, this week. Now, I'd guess that every single person who reads this Weblog regularly lives in a city, or at least in a metropolitan area. Blogging does seem to be largely an urban phenomenon, for the most part; the very term "blog" will get you some funny looks in Lake County, California. I've been to far more rural parts of California, mind you, but this was plenty rural: monster trucks, methamphetamine, telltale out-of-fashion words like "Oriental" slipping out of people. And I'm not sure they know about the blogosphere.

You know what they did know all about? Karaoke. There were plenty of people still singing their hearts out after midnight on a Tuesday. I've seen incredible rural karaoke crowds before -- a Friday night in Weaverville, California, and a Saturday night in Twentynine Palms spring to mind -- but those were weekend crowds. This was an impressive showing, and boy, was it not full of good singers.

The best karaoke performance I've ever seen was some kid doing "Angie" by the Stones, down in the desert. Had the place in stitches.

At any rate, I returned home with some belongings of a late friend -- a couple of guitars, some videos and records, mostly things of little value that I took for their personal significance, in exchange for a donation to his niece's scholarship fund. There was one major discovery in the bunch, too: I spun the monaural Sgt. Pepper last night, and learned just how different it is from the one I've been hearing for the last eighteen years. Guitar solos that are buried in the other mix, outbursts of applause and laughter, weird edits, the faster "She's Leaving Home" -- it was like hearing a whole different album.

Remember when CDs were new? (It was the mid-eighties, when treble ruled the day. Good sound was frequently associated with crystal-clear hi-hats and bright 12-string guitars, rather than chest-thumping bass and broad use of the sonic spectrum.) The 1987 CD issue of Sgt. Pepper isn't overly trebly, but it is the stereo mix. I remember hearing it for the first time on CD and thinking, "I'm hearing tons of things I never heard before." Well, as it turns out, the main reason for that wasn't the quality of the CD mastering -- it was that I'd grown up with my parents' monaural LP. Duh.

They say George Martin and his staff spent 50 hours mixing the mono masters, with the Beatles themselves present for the sessions. The stereo master was done in 10 hours, and the Beatles were not present. And while some things are cleaner in the stereo mix, like the famous chicken-cluck-into-guitar-note as the "Sgt. Pepper" reprise begins, the mono record sure seems like the definitive version. There have been rumors of reissues, but none yet. I understand that if you buy the CD today, the booklet still refers you to the cutouts on the long box, so maybe it's time. Maybe when it was forty years ago today?


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