Bob Dylan - Infidels (original mix)

Bob Dylan – Infidels

(original mix by soniclovenoize)

Side A:

1.  Jokerman

2.  Someone’s Got A Hold Of My Heart

3.  Neighborhood Bully

4.  License To Kill

5.  Blind Willie McTell

Side B:

6.  Man of Peace

7.  Foot of Pride

8.  I and I

9.  Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight

Bob Dylan, what the hell were you thinking?  This is what we asked him all through the 1980s.  Coming off a trilogy of non-secular music that is frankly off-putting and of little inventive substance, Bob Dylan returned to the studio in 1983 with Dire Straits mastermind Mark Knopfler as producer to mark Dylan’s comeback album to secular music.   Infidels was intended  as a return to his idiosyncratic poetic acrobatics and interesting song structures with a lean, meat-and-potatoes rock band production (in contrast to his overproduced slew of post-Desire albums)…  Or so we thought. 

What we got instead was stereotype mainstream early 80s mixing and some of Dylan’s best songs of the decade left on the cutting room floor, mostly due to Knopfler’s early exit from the album, leaving Dylan to finish it himself and make rather disastrous creative choices.  Infidels could have been the best album of his post-Desire era and, while admittedly not a masterpiece, could have been on par with his much stronger albums John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline or Desire (or at least certainly superior to New Morning, Planet Waves or Street Legal anyways).   But after all these years, can Infidels be saved?   I believe it can.  This is a reconstruction of the album that Infidels could have been, utilizing alternate “drier” rough mixes and the early tracklist of the album.  And yes, it includes the unreleased full-band version of “Bind Willie McTell” which is a 50% improvement in itself. 

Dylan recorded a bulk of material for his supposed comeback album throughout April and May of 1983, new originals, random covers and aimless jams alike.  At the conclusion of the sessions, Dylan and Knopfler had compiled a rough mix of an album that contained nine songs: “Blind Willie McTell”, “Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight”, “Foot of Pride”, “I and I”, “Jokerman”, “Neighborhood Bully”, “License To Kill”, “Man of Peace” and “Sweetheart Like You.”  Knopfler’s story was that he was forced to leave the sessions early because of touring obligations and offered to create a final mix of the album upon his return.  Dylan declined, insisting that his label needed the final mix immediately and he choose to create the final mix himself with the studio’s house engineer.  It was at this point in time that “Foot of Pride” and “Blind Willie McTell”, the later unanimously hailed as one of the best songs of Dylan’s career let alone the decade, was dropped from the album and replaced by inane “Union Sundown”.  Dylan also helped himself to additional now-antiquated production giving the whole album the slick 1980s rock 'gleam' that makes Infidels sound incredibly dated.  He also rerecorded vocals for a number of tracks, specifically giving “Jokerman” a new vocal that sounds as if Dylan is falling asleep at the mic.  Why he did this, no one knows; some believe Dylan made artistic choices that were intentionally counter-intuitive and contrary to his inner circle’s recommendations.  Some believe he's mad.  Either way, that was the Infidels that was released, without Knopfler’s valuable final input. 

The first step in my reconstruction is to fix the dated 80s production and utilize alternate mixes for all of the songs.  We are lucky enough to have excellent quality rough mixes of almost all the serious contenders for the album, taken from the bootleg Outfidel Intakes, which apparently received a recent 24-bit remaster by a fan using CEDAR mastering software (kudos to their fantastic job).  These mixes all lack the overdubs Dylan and Knopfler made, as well as the annoying mixing techniques Dylan oversaw himself in June.  They are all straight-forward basic tracks with a rather drier, grittier and often more upfront vocal track.  While the typical 80s-rock sound is inescapable for Infidels no matter how you cut it (it was recorded with the Dire Straits guitar sound and a reggae rhythm section!), these mixes allow the songs to breathe and is closer to Knopfler’s alleged original intent for the sound of the album. 

Next we sequence the tracks utilizing the stronger songs that were cut from the released version, replacing the weaker ones.  While we don’t have the specific track order, we do know what songs were on the original tracklist.  If we make the assumption that the songs were in the same basic order as on the officially released album, then we are left with the seven Infidels tracks (minus “Union Sundown”) that require “Blind Willie McTell” and “Foot of Pride” to fill in the gaps to make two sides of an LP.  If the fantastic full-band electric version of “Blind Willie McTell” (as opposed to the longer, acoustic version found on The Bootleg Series 1-3) is placed on side A and “Foot of Pride” on side B, we are left with two 23-minute sides.  This must be more than a coincidence!  Thus “Foot of Pride” effectively replaced “Union Sundown” on side B, and the band-take of “Blind Willie McTell” is a powerful closer to side A.  I believe this was Knopfler’s original tracklist. 

One final adjustment made that admittedly was not on Knopfler’s theoretical rough mix is a result of my own creative license, and that is the replacing of the clichéd dullard “Sweetheart Like You” with the slightly more interesting fan favorite “Someone’s Got A Hold Of My Heart”, another Why-was-this-left-off-the-album!?-track.  It was not on Knopfler’s rough running order, presumably because Dylan never thought it was finished; the fact that the song was later rewritten several times and completely simplified into Empire Burlesque’s atrocious “Tight Connection To My Heart” seems to validate this assertion.  But I hear nothing wrong with this basic-rock alternate version used here (as opposed to the dismal radio-friendly version found on The Bootleg Series 1-3) but it keeps a better momentum for side A and is a great upgrade to the trite “Sweetheart Like You”, a song that truly deserved to be dropped from the album. 

Is Infidels truly a good Dylan album?  Honestly, we are unsure because its praise is grounded solely in its historical context rather than the quality of the actual material: it’s not a Christian Dylan album and it’s not complete shit.  But my presented original mix reconstruction will hopefully demonstrate that it could have been a highlight of his later career—if you don’t completely loathe 1980s mainstream rock that is, which Infidels certainly is and always be.  But now it can be a bit less of that, for what it’s worth, and we can hear the songs for what they are, rather than just hearing the time that they existed in. 

Sources used:

Bob Dylan – Outfidel Intakes (bootleg)

flac --> wav --> editing in Audacity & Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Pink Floyd - Soundtrack To The Film Zabriskie Point

Pink Floyd – Soundtrack To The Film 

Zabriskie Point 

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)

Side A:

1.  Heart Beat, Pig Meat

2.  Country Song

3.  Fingal’s Cave

4.  Crumbling Land

5.  Alan’s Blues

Side B:

6.  Oenone

7.  Rain In The Country

8.  Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up

While doing research for my trilogy of Syd Barrett & Pink Floyd re-imagined albums, I stumbled upon an album I was unfamiliar with and some have called “The Great Lost Pink Floyd Album.”  While I can’t say that it’s truly ‘great’ per se, it is indeed an album that never was and I grew particularly interested in reconstructing it, as others have done before me.  And so here it is, a reconstruction of the proposed and subsequently withdrawn 1970 Pink Floyd album Soundtrack To The Film Zabriskie Point. 

1969 was a hit and miss year for Pink Floyd.  Obviously searching for a signature sound beyond Syd Barrett’s psychedelic pop, the band spent the year touring and composing conceptual sound experiments, finally releasing their double studio/live album Ummagumma to represent (what they thought was) the best of that era.   Aside from this, Pink Floyd had recorded the soundtrack to Barbet Schroder’s film More, and it’s soundtrack album of original music was released that summer.  But that was not the only soundtrack the band composed in 1969; Pink Floyd had also recorded the music for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point in a specific recording session in November 1969.  Although they recorded an album’s worth of material, only a few songs were ultimately used in the film and the accompanying soundtrack, in which Antonioni vied for selections from a number of artists aside from Pink Floyd.  The remainder of the original Pink Floyd recordings was left in the vaults, heard only on bootlegs and subsequent fan reconstructions.

Aside from some previously unheard bonus tracks on the official Zabriskie Point Rhino reissue in 1997, a great leap forward was taken by Magna Qualitas Records for their anthology A Total Zabriskie Point of View and their own album reconstruction 370 Roman Yards.  Allegedly, they were able to obtain copies of tape-box notation showing the tentative tracklist for Pink Floyd’s proposed Zabriskie Point album, as well as firsthand accounts of the sessions, and their reconstruction attempted to follow as closely as possible to that.  While MQR has done a great job researching the material, I disagree to the methodology of construction for their Zabriskie Point; they often chose historical accuracy over simple sonic clarity (overuse of EQ to inferior source tapes).  As the use of release-worthy source material is my primary concern, my construction was a bit different, although I followed MQR’s blueprint from their fantastic research.

My reconstruction of Zabriskie Point begins with “Heart Beat, Pig Meat” and is then followed by “Country Song”, both taken from the Rhino reissue of the official album.  For the sake of audio clarity, I avoided using the familiar version of “Fingal’s Cave” because there is simply no quality source material to my standards.  Instead, I used the track with the working title “Take Off (version II)” from disc 1 of TZPV because it shares extremely similar musical characteristics and motifs as “Fingal’s Cave” (short heavy psychedelic track in the key of E major), not to mention that both pieces were meant for the same scene!  With this information in mind, it’s obvious to me that “Take Off (version II)” is simply an alternate “Fingal’s Cave” and the two should be considered interchangeable.  My choice of “Fingal’s Cave” is hard edited into “Crumbling Land” from the Rhino reissue, as intended by Pink Floyd and featured in the film.  Side A concludes with an unedited version of “Alan’s Blues” (previously known as “Love Scene 6”) from the Rhino reissue.  Although MQR went to great lengths to digitally remove reverb and create presumed edit points to match a specific runtime, I felt the full seven and a half minute track sounded good enough for me! 

The shorter side B begins with “Oenone” and it was a tedious task to find an appropriate take for my reconstruction.  I eventually chose the “full mix” of “Love Scene 2” from disc 2 of TZPV since it featured the longest length and the most sonic elements.  The track was faded out after the orgasmic climax six minutes in, effectively removing the inappropriate post-coital laughter and one-liners from the band.  My reconstruction ends with “Rain in the Country” (known as “Unknown Song”) followed by “Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up”, both from the Rhino reissue.  The final touch is my original cover art, made to resemble its sister album, Soundtrack To The Film More. 

The result is a more concise 38-minute album than other Zabriskie Point fan reconstructions, and a more sonically pristine assemblage than MQR’s novel attempt.  While certainly not the greatest Pink Floyd album—and one can understand why it was never released—the Soundtrack To The Film Zabriskie Point seems to stay close to my heart and holds a lot of air time on my music player.  The album showcases a series of snapshots of Pink Floyd genre-hopping, including individual songs that each play upon their diverse range of strengths and influences: experimental found-sound collage; heavy psychedelic rock; electric blues; atmospheric psychedelia; acoustic folk.  There is a bit of everything thrown in the mix, yet the album works as a whole, more so than their previous and equally-diverse soundtrack album for the film More.  Although largely instrumental, the two song-based gems “Country Song” and “Crumbling Land” are stand-out tracks that could rank as high as any of the Pink Floyd singles from the 1960s.  Soundtrack To The Film Zabriskie Point has something for everyone and shows the essential continuity in between Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother. 

Sources used:

Various Artists - Zabriskie Point (1997 Rhino reissue)

Pink Floyd – Total Zabriskie Point of View (bootleg, 2011 Magna Qualitas Records)

flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR & Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

Frank Zappa - We’re Only In It For The Money (Uncensored)

Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention – 

We’re Only In It For The Money

(Uncensored Original Mix by soniclovenoize)

Side A:
 1. Are You Hung Up?
 2. Who Needs The Peace Corps?
 3. Concentration Moon
 4. Mom & Dad
 5. Bow Tie Daddy
 6. Harry, You’re A Beast
 7. What’s The Ugliest part of Your Body?
 8. Absolutely Free
 9. Flower Punk
10. Hot Poop

Side B:
11. Nasal Retentive Calliope Music
12. Let’s Make The Water Turn Black
13. The Idiot Bastard Son
14. Lonely Little Girl
15. Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance
16. What’s The Ugliest Part Of Your Body? (reprise)
17. Mother People
18. The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny



THIS MIX HAS BEEN UPGRADED AS OF MAY 15, 2014
GO HERE FOR THE NEW VERSION