Tommy James 40th Anniversary CD

"Mony Mony". At John's request, I compared the new CD track to the 45. This one's a mess.

For starters, the CD track runs much faster than the 45, by a whopping 1.9 percent! Once I slowed the CD track down, the two played together just fine.

Up until the 2:24.666 mark, that is. At this point (following the middle break) it immediately became apparent that there was an edit on the CD track which did not appear on the vinyl 45. The edit occurs as Tommy sings the word "Yeah!" On the 45, the crowd sounds continue uninterrupted behind that word, but on the CD track, the crowd suddenly disappears at that same "Yeah!" The word "Yeah!" sung by Tommy on the CD track is not from the 45 version.

There is another difference that occurs at this point. A second crowd response is missing from the CD track as follows: (Tommy in bold type, crowd in regular)

CD: "Yeah!" "Yeah!" Everybody!
45: "Yeah!" "Yeah! Yeah!" Everybody!

And a third difference arises. From the "Everybody!" point on, the two tracks are once again from the same take. However, the CD track begins to run faster than the 45 (remember, I'd already slowed the CD track down once.)

In order to mitigate the speed differences, I matched the end point of the CD fadeout to its vinyl counterpart, which confirmed the bad news: the CD track trims off the last four seconds of the 45. Out of curiosity, I cranked up the end of the CD fade, and discovered that the last 1.5 seconds were very fuzzy. Are we looking at some master tape damage, perhaps?



Edited by Yah Shure

I'm actually thinking of putting my collection on ebay. This extra work to match 45 pitch/fades is for the birds...

Yah Shure wrote: "Mony Mony". Up until the 2:24.666 mark, that is. At this point (following the middle break) it immediately became apparent that there was an edit on the CD track which did not appear on the vinyl 45.

Sounds like this is the mono album version then. According to the database, "the LP version...has an ever so slightly different edit at 2:25 than the 45 version."

eriejwg wrote: Has anyone else reviewed this CD? What about Crimson & Clover? Is that correct?

I don't have the 45s to compare them to, but I did receive my copy yesterday. "Crimson and Clover" is mono, and the actual running time is 3:20. Since the single runs much shorter than the album version, it seems unlikely they would have used the wrong tape for that one.

Hopefully Pat will get a review copy soon. It sounds like "Mony Mony" may be the only bad mistake on this.

Edited by Brian W.

John, my "Crimson And Clover" Roulette stock 45 is the more common pressing, with "Some Kind Of Love" on the B-side, rather than "(I'm) Taken." The 40 Years CD does have the correct 45 edit. This one's pretty darn close to the 45; the CD runs ever-so-slightly slower at the beginning, but then keeps pace for the duration, ending up a mere 00:00.056 slower than the 45.

However (and there seem to be a lot of those in this thread) the CD track does fade out earlier, at a slightly steeper rate, deleting the last 2.583 seconds. From a purist's standpoint, this is not ideal. But from a practical standpoint, the majority of that final 2.583 seconds on the 45 is two chimes, at a barely-audible level, and even that is mostly lost in the surface noise of the record. I can guarantee you that those final chimes were never aired on top-40 radio unless some deejays were too busy to notice that the record had run out.

But as minor as they are, the two chimes are a bit interesting. The backing track fades out completely, and those two chimes are left all by themselves, with no fade between them, and they complete the last bar of the song. It would have been nice to have heard them without the vinyl surface noise. <sigh>

The bottom line on "Crimson And Clover": the CD track is fine.

Edited by Yah Shure