A little while back, I was compiling a playlist of ’60s hits in Spotify. The song I started with was This Diamond Ring, a 1965 single by Gary Lewis and the Playboys.
About 20 instances of the song showed up when I searched for it – some of them on Gary Lewis best-of collections, some on compilations like ” ’60s Jukebox Hits” and “60 Hits of the 60s.”
Clicking on one at random, I soon noticed that something was off. The vocals sounded strange – was that even Gary Lewis singing And the snare drum was a very upfront, ’80s-style THWACK, a sound created using “gated reverb,” a studio effect that didn’t exist in the ’60s.
No way was this the original recording I knew and loved. I tried a different This Diamond Ring and got the same bogus recording. That’s when I noticed the parentheticals next to some, but not all, of the tracks: “(Re-Recorded Version).” Re-recorded I clicked on a link without that word in the title, but even that one had the same ersatz sound.
I eventually found what seemed to be the original version of the record, a needle in a haystack. But what was going on here Why the re-recordings, and why the sloppy tagging Some versions not marked as “re-recorded” actually were the re-recorded version of the song, and at least one of the original versions was marked “re-recording” erroneously.
It turns out that many oldies hits have been re-recorded by the original artists in recent years, and in most cases for a simple reason: royalties.
As Irwin Chusid, a music historian and producer (who’s also a colleague of mine at New Jersey’s WFMU) explained to me, most of these artists were still bound by ancient contracts that they signed when musicians routinely got the short end of the stick – and also, to be fair, when few people imagined the fortunes that would one day be reaped from licensing songs to filmmakers, TV producers and advertisers.
The result was that these contracts provided the artists with “a pittance, if anything,” according to Chusid, for “sync licensing,” the fee paid to a recording’s owner for the use of that recording. (This fee is not to be confused with the songwriting royalties paid to the song’s composer.)
Today, film licenses for popular songs are frequently in the five figures, and the licenses for commercials and movie trailers can go even higher.
Short of renegotiating an expiring contract, which is rarely an option, Chusid says, “those artists have every incentive to re-record and try to license” the new recording with a fairer royalty arrangement.
Ad Feedback
There’s literally no way to make an absolutely precise duplication of a record played by humans. And what are the chances that the 17-year-old singer on a 1962 record will sound the same at, say, age 60 Not good.
To take one example, the re-recording of Del Shannon’s Runaway is so impressively close that I wasn’t certain it was a re-recording until about 30 seconds in.
My conclusion was confirmed when the clavioline break, surely one of the greatest solos in rock ‘n’ roll history, started – and was noticeably different from the more staccato original. Sacrilege!
It would be hard to find a fan who prefers a re-recording of their favourite group’s music to the original version – especially when, as sometimes happens, the re-recording is done quickly and on the cheap.
But in many cases, re-recorded records are already crowding out the originals in the wild.
Some devoted preservationists have created rogue YouTube pages with recordings made from vintage vinyl that say things like, “This is NOT a re-recording! This is the ORIGINAL version,” a bit of iTunes-era samizdat.
Is there anything that can be done so artists are fairly compensated while the original, un-tinkered-with recordings are kept easily available for listeners
The most obvious solution would be for record labels to become more flexible about renegotiating blatantly unfair contracts, something they’ll currently do “only if they really need something from you,” according to one producer I spoke with.
A less happy solution involves “re-record restrictions,” which forbid a band from making re-recordings after leaving a label. But these obviously favor the labels and punish the musicians.
One reasonable compromise, highlighted for me by box-set producer Andy Zax, has been used by, among others, Robert Fripp of the prog-rock band King Crimson: He includes re-recordings and other reworkings of songs, such as remixes, alongside originals in reissue packages – sometimes as bonus tracks, and always clearly labeled.
This gives the artist a chance to fiddle with the original as much as he or she wants to, and makes the new version available for listeners to play or not, but keeps the recording that fans know and love in circulation.
-Slate
