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Producer Bill Szymczyk Upgrades Catalogs of the Eagles and The James Gang PRODUCER BILL SZYMCZYK is best known for his work with B.B. King ("The Thrill Is Gone"), The James Gang, Joe Walsh and The Eagles. Szymczyk recently had the chance to upgrade the sound quality significantly on The Eagles' CD catalog last year and The James Gang's this spring. Most of the Eagles discs are already in stores; the James Gang titles are due from the Universal Music Group on June 6. The first two Eagles albums, Eagles and Desperado, were recorded in London in the early '70s and produced by Glyn Johns. Szymczyk took over as producer starting with 1974's On the Border, and continued on through with four consecutive #1 albums, One of These Nights, Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, Hotel California and The Long Run. He finished up with Eagles Live in 1980. Szymczyk remastered the whole catalog, with some of the old CD masters dating back nearly two decades. "Their Greatest Hits was the first Eagles CD I ever saw," Szymczyk tells ICE, "and that was something like 1982. Somebody, whoever it was, the stock engineer at the time, just took the tapes and arbitrarily mastered them to CD back then." Does Szymczyk really think that those old digital masters were used to make Elektra's Eagles CDs right up until last year? "I know they were," he says with some contempt. "I couldn't listen to those CDs any more...I'd go out and pull a tape--a one-generation-removed, two-track 15 IPS master of Hotel California, for instance--put it on and compare it to the CD, and go, "I don't believe this...this is dreck." "I'm the one who kind of got the ball rolling. Finally, after about a year of kicking and screaming, Elektra allowed me to do this. The results are phenomenal." "It too us something like four months to find all the original two-track masters. I didn't remix anything, but I swear to God, you A-B the new ones to what's been out there and it sounds like they've been remixed. The difference is almost like lifting a packing quilt off your speakers. Obviously, the level (sound volume) is about double what it was. And the stereo is back...it was kind of binaural (very narrow stereo) on the old CDs...I don't know how that happened. And the highs are now way, way crispier. It's unbelievable." We asked if any one upgrade stood out from the others. "The improvement was marked on all of them," Szymczyk says. "But the very first album, when (engineer) Ted Jensen and I A-B'ed the master tape to the CD, lo and behold, the CD was a quarter to a half tone flat. We're looking at each other thinking, "Now, how did this happen? So the first album wound up sounding a whole lot better. At least it's at the right speed now." Brian Cohen, Elektra Records' Vice President of Marketing, tells ICE that the final two entries in the upgrade program, the two Greatest Hits albums, should just now be hitting retailers' shelves. Given the way that distributors and retailers work, however, old stock can sometimes linger and still be on sale a year or two after upgrades start appearing. "They're all labeled properly this time," Cohen stresses. "The credits have been adjusted on the back covers and inside the booklets, and they've also been stickered. It wasn't exactly a well-mounted campaign (to create awareness), but we wanted to get them out and into the bins before we made any announcements." As for the James Gang, Universal Music Group is following the more common practice of assigning release dates to the CD upgrades to bring attention to them. Once again, Szymczyk did the remastering for Yer' Album (1969), James Gang Rides Again (1970) and Thirds (1971). Andy McKaie, Universal Music VP of Catalog Development and A&R Special Markets, tells ICE, "Yer' Album has never been out on CD before, and the other two came out at the beginning of CDs. So this is the first time they've ever been done right. We restored all of the album graphics and got new liner notes from the guys: Joe Walsh, Dale Peters and Jim Fox. A combination of two members supply liner notes for each album." McKaie adds that the long-deleted full-length version of "The Bomber" was used for Rides Again, reinstating the brief snippet of Ravel's "Bolero." As Szymczyk explains it, "the first 50,000 copies of Rides Again (in 1970) had it on there; then the cease and desist order came over from France, so I had to go in and lop it out after the second pressing." The full version remained in the can until MCA was allowed to use it again in 1995 for its double-CD Walsh anthology, Look What I Did! The long version of "The Bomber" also appears on UMG's new James Gang's Greatest Hits album, due a month before the upgrades, on May 2. Besides handling the mastering, Szymczyk contributed liner notes to the package. And he also included a treat for fans,: and unlisted bonus track at the end of the disc, drawn from the band's late '60s demo acetate which helped get them signed to ABC Records. "It's a guitar part that Joe did, about 90 seconds long, a solo thing that was on the end of another song on this demo acetate," Szymczyk says. "It's really cool. It's complete with all the ticks and pops you'd expect from an acetate that's 30 something years old. So after listening to all their best songs, it sort of represents their very beginning, found at the very end." |