Hollies-Bus Stop

Yah Shure wrote: Lest we forget, "Happy Together" was the only track on stereo copies of the similarly-titled Turtles album on White Whale to appear in rechanneled stereo. Was the title track not yet mixed to stereo in time for inclusion on the LP? The Turtles Golden Hits LP on White Whale did have "Happy Together" in true stereo a couple of years later.

Wasn't even that long. The first GH LP came out in late '67. I remember getting it for Christmas that year.

Graham Gouldman was on tear in 1966, writing a flood of hits for the Yardbirds, Herman's Hermits, the Hollies, and others. He was just 19 when he wrote "Bus Stop", which is still amazing to me. He definitely has a gift for songwriting.

Hit mono version

The 1966 hit was mono. The song wasn't mixed to stereo when it was a hit.

You have exactly one choice for finding the mono version on a US CD: Capitol's Classic Masters (2002). As far as I know, it's not on a UK CD, either. It runs 2:52 here. It's mastered a little loud for my tastes (a bit of clipping or compression/limiting), but overall the sound is fine. The EQ is nice, and I don't hear artifacts on the fade from any added noise reduction. It might even be a very nice dub from vinyl - do I hear a little low-frequency turntable rumble on the fade and maybe a tick or pop? Not sure. But vinyl dub or not, this CD is all there is and I'm greatful that it exists at all.

I assume that the 45 represents the full performance of the song, without any editing or rearranging (can't confirm, but I think it's a pretty good assumption). At 0:16, Allan Clarke sings "bus stops / busgoes" with the words bus and goes being squashed together like we're used to hearing. At 2:22, Allan Clarke sings "bus stops / bus goes" with the words bus and goes being sung on the beat, which sounds a little stiff to my ears because we've never heard it sung like that before. (Unless we lived through hearing it on the radio in 1966.)

At 1:09, you can hear an edit in the vocals on the word "true". It sounds like the engineer is switching from one vocal take to another take at the edit. I don't hear any edit in the instrumentation at 1:09 (although it's hard to hear behind the vocals). The edit is between beats.

If you want another CD with the full performance, it appears in dreadful fake stereo on JCI's Rockin' Sixties (1988). It runs 0.9% slower than Classic Masters. The tail of the fade is about 4 beats shorter than Classic Masters. If you use only the left channel, apply a whole lot of EQ correction, speed up the track by 0.9%, and pretend the fade runs 4 beats longer... it will still likely sound like mud, but you'll get a good idea of what the full performance sounds like.

Non-hit 1968 stereo version

Parlophone UK did a proper stereo mix in 1968 for the Hollies' Greatest vinyl LP, two years after the song was a hit. If the CD copies of this mix are to be believed, the drums are panned mostly left, and the vocals are panned mostly right. The panning isn't 100%, so there's a little bit of drums on the right and a little bit of vocals on the left. Maybe there's a version out there with a wider soundstage that has complete panning, but I haven't encountered it on CD.

I believe that the first CD to include the stereo version was EMI UK's 2-CD All The Hits And More - The Definitive Collection (1988). It runs 2:53 here. The tail of the fade is about two beats shorter than the mono 45 version. Sound quality is quite nice, with seemingly low-generation source tapes, great dynamic range, nice EQ, and no evidence on the fade of any added noise reduction. I'm more impressed with the sound on this disc than I expected to be.

At 0:16, Allan Clarke sings "bus stops / busgoes" with the words bus and goes being squashed together like we're used to hearing. But at 2:22, Allan Clarke sings "bus stops / busgoes" with the words bus and goes also being squashed together, which is different from the mono 45 version.

At 1:10, you can hear the edit in the vocals on the word "true", just like the mono 45 version. Because the vocals are pretty well confined to the right channel, you can isolate the point where the vocals are edited. There's no corresponding edit in the instrumentation in the left channel at that point. The edit occurs between beats, at the same location as on the mono 45 version.

I A/B-ed the vocal tracks between this stereo version and the mono 45 version, and I can't find any other differences aside from right around the 2:22 point.

The following CDs use the same analog transfer as All The Hits And More - The Definitive Collection:

• Time-Life's Superhits Vol. 12 The Mid-'60s (1991) - tail of fade is 2 beats shorter
• Time-Life's AM Gold Vol. 5 The Mid-'60s (1995) - tail of fade is 2 beats shorter
• Cema Special Markets' 2-CD Rock N Roll Greatest Hits Of All Time Vol. 3 (1995) - tail of fade is 2 beats shorter
• Disky UK's 10-volume The Beat Goes On Disc 5 (1997) - if not the same analog transfer, then uses the same tape source; tail of fade is 3 beats shorter

There's a new analog transfer on Rhino's British Invasion Vol. 3 (1988), which sounds almost exactly like All The Hits And More - The Definitive Collection with a small treble boost. The fade begins and ends in the same places. The waveforms even look similar. The same analog transfer is used on:

• Time-Life's Classic Rock Vol. 22 Blowin' Your Mind (1990, RE-1 reissue) - has left/right channels swapped; tail of fade is 1 beat shorter
• Entertainment Weekly's Rock Archives Vol. 1 (1990) - has left/right channels swapped; tail of fade is 1 beat shorter
• Time-Life's History Of Rock 'N' Roll Vol. 7 The British Invasion 1964-1966 (1993) - tail of fade is 1 beat shorter

EMI put out a Greatest Hits in 2003, which sounds like the 1968 mix, but with a narrowed soundstage and very muddy sound. Not sure what happened here; avoid.

Finally, a complete surprise: Simitar's Love Rocks - In Love With Love (1998) seems to use the same analog transfer as All The Hits And More (or both use the same source from EMI), but runs 2 beats longer than All The Hits And More! Plus, it has a very slightly wider soundstage than All The Hits And More! I don't know what source Simitar used from EMI, but it's a winner!

Non-hit 1993 remix

Ron Furmanek and Mike Jarratt remixed the song in very nice stereo for EMI's 2-CD 30th Anniversary Collection (1993).   It runs 2:55 here, and about 6 beats longer than the stereo mixes listed above. The 1993 remix separates the double-tracked vocals into the left and right channels, respectively, so each vocal track is isolated in a single channel.

It still has the vocal edit during the word "true" at 1:09, but only in the left channel! The right channel's vocals go on just fine at the word "true".

To deal with the 2:22 stuff, Ron Furmanek and Mike Jarratt repeated the portion of 0:13.7 to 0:17.6 at 2:20.0 to 2:23.9. It's literally the same 0's and 1's, cut-and-pasted from the first instance of "busgoes" to the second instance of "busgoes". This is not the case with the 1968 stereo mix (I checked it). Not sure why they did that, unless the vocals that were used for the 1968 stereo mix at 2:22 were unavailable for some reason.

My recommendations

For the hit mono version, go with Capitol's Classic Masters (2002).

For the non-hit 1968 stereo version, go with Simitar's Love Rocks - In Love With Love (1998). If you can't find it (or we can't identify what mastering this Simitar disc is really based on), EMI UK's 2-CD All The Hits And More - The Definitive Collection (1988) and Rhino's British Invasion Vol. 3 (1988) are both much more common and sound about the same as the Simitar disc.

For the non-hit 1993 remix, go with EMI's 2-CD 30th Anniversary Collection (1993).

Woo-hoo!

It turns out that the Simitar disc is a level-shifted digital clone of EMI UK's 20 Golden Greats (copyright 1978, CD released 1987)!

20 Golden Greats is now my go-to for the 1968 stereo version.

Well done, dc1!