Couldn’t Get It Right

Still love this song. At one point, I borrowed a friend's bass just so I could teach myself to play the bassline. It's one of the easier basslines in the pop world.

The original 45 and LP versions didn't have any harmonies on the opening lines.

The first CD to include the song was Rhino's Billboard Top Hits 1977 (1991), where it runs 3:15. It sounds pretty good, but it's a previously unreleased mix that narrows the soundstage and includes harmonies on the opening lines. The differences are subtle, so it's no surprise that it went undetected for so many years. There are other previously unreleased mixes that first appeared on the Billboard Top Hits discs, including "Ring My Bell", "Heaven Is A Place On Earth", and "Wild Wild West".

The following discs all use the same analog transfer as Billboard Top Hits 1977:

• Rhino's Have A Nice Day Vol. 19 (1993; digitally identical)
• Time-Life's Guitar Rock Vol. 3 1976-1977 (1993; left/right channels reversed - avoid)
• Rhino's Mellow Rock Hits Ventura Highway (1997; digitally identical)
• Time-Life's AM Gold Vol. 24 1977 (1997; digitally exactly 1 dB quieter)
• Madacy's Rock On 1977 Dance Dance Dance (1998)

There's a different analog transfer on Time-Life's Sounds Of The Seventies Vol. 17 1977 Take Two (1991), which chops off the first 0.02 seconds of the intro, and fades early to 3:02. There's an RE-1 rereissue of this disc, which is digitally exactly 1.9 dB louder than the original released (no RE-1 in the matrix number). Avoid these for this song.

There's another analog transfer on Disky UK's 8-CD Wow That Was The 70's (1999), which is a tiny bit compressed compared to the others, and fades a little early to around 3:09. Avoid.

If you have to have this previously unreleased mix on CD, go for Rhino's Billboard Top Hits 1977 (1991).

Edited by crapfromthepast

The best place to find the single version of this song is
on the album from which it came.