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MAllY STAR SNOOP DOGGY DOGG JON SPENCER BLUES EXPLOSION CHAKA KHAN CHRIS WHITLEY

SMASHING PUMPKINS FLY HIGH WITH NEW SINGLES BOX SET, DUE NOVEMBER 19 IF LAST YEAR'S EXPANSIVE double CD Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness left any doubts as to whether Billy Corgan - the mastermind behind The Smashing Pumpkins - is one of rock's most

, prolific songwriters, the November 19 release of The Aeroplane Flies High should dispel them once and for all. The five-CD singles box set contains a wealth of Pumpkins B-sides, many of which have never been available domestically, plus five previously unre­leased cover songs.

"The band came up with the idea as a special item to its fans, " Virgin's Director of Product Management, Eric Ferris, tells ICE. "This is a collector's item for those who want to have all five of the band's singles in one place."

The complete breakdown: • DISC ONE: "Bullet with Butterfly Wings," embellished with " ... Said Sad­ly" and the previously unreleased cov­ers "You're All I've Got Tonight" (The Cars) , "Clones (We're All) " (Alice Cooper), "A Night Like This" (The Cure), "Destination

SONY LEGACY LAUNCHES NEW ILiVE FROM THE VAULTS' LINE WITH THE WHO, CAROLE KING DIGGING DEEPER INTO THE Sony Music archives of previously unreleased material, Legacy will launch its new "Live from the Vaults" series on October 29. The inaugural titles are: The Who's two-disc The Who Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970; a two-disc various-artists collection titled Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival 1970; and Carole King's The Carnegie Hall Concert:june 18, 1971.

"It's another way of addressing the material in the vaults of Colum­bia, Epic and other Sony labels," Mark Feldman, Associate Director of Marketing and Product Development for Legacy, tells ICE. "Some pro­ducers have told us abGur tapes they have found, stacks and stacks of unreleased live recordings from the '60s and '70s. It was pretty much standard policy to record almost every live performance by major artists throughout the years. We 're just trying to figure » CONTINUED ON PAGE 10

Unknown" (Missing Persons) and "Dreaming" (Blondie). • DISC TWO: "1979," with "Ugly," "The Boy Cherry" (previously import-only), "Believe" and "Set the Ray to Jerry" (previously

import-only). • DISC THREE: "Zero ," along with "God," "Mouths of Babes," "Tribute to Johnny," "Marquis in Spades," "Pen­nies" and "Pastichio Medley." Notes Ferris: "Even though it was released as a single, Billboard treated this as an EP on its charts, because of the num­ber of songs and its running length." • DISC FOUR: "Tonight, Tonight," plus "Meladori Magpie," "Rotten Apples," "Jupiter's Lament" (previ­ously import-only), "Medellia of the

.. Gray Skies ," "Blank" (previously import-only) and "Tonight Reprise" (previously import -only). • DISC FIVE: "Thirty-Three," with "Transformer," "The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right) ," "The

Last Song," "The Bells" and "My Blue Heaven." By the time the sin­gles box hits , this single will be available, » CONTINUED ON PAGE 4

JOHNNY CASH JOINED BY TOM PEm & THE HEARTBREAKERS JOHNNY CASH'S SOPHOMORE American Recordings CD, Un­chained, finds the Rock and Roll Hall of Farner once again working with producer Rick Rubin to craft a record that recalls Cash's country roots, while it simultaneously strikes out into new musical territory. The CD is due November 19.

Unlike its all-acoustic predecessor, 1994's American Recordings, the new disc features the talents of a full band: none other than Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, whose involvement began when Petty told Rubin he wanted to play bass on the Unchained sessions. A source at the label tells ICE that Cash readily accepted the offer from Petty, who showed up at the studio with a couple of Heartbreakers in tow.

Also lending a hand are Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, who appears on a soaring version of Spain 's "Spiritual," country star Marty Stuart, whose mandolin solos grace both the Louvin Brothers­penned "Kneeling Drunkard's Plea" and Jimmie » CONTINUED ON PAGE 8

The CD Watchdog column is designed to alert you to problem CDs, covering anything that frustrates or short-changes the CD buyer. Got a gripe? Jot it down with enough detail to clearly identify it, and moil or fox it in to us. Though we cannot answer all queries, we will investigate and address as many as possible.

INSTANT COLLECTOR'S ITEM MCA's soundtrack to Grace of My Heart is the subject of an interesting mix-up. Mike Bodayle of San Antonio, TX, was the first to inform us that he bought the CD on the day it was released, but instead of hearing Kristen Vigard sing the seventh track, "Man from Mars," his CD played a version sung by the song's composer, Joni Mitchell, in a performance available nowhere else. "Then the news breaks that they had recalled it the day before," Bodayle says triumphantly.

To find out what happened, we contacted Deanna Cohen, listed on the CD as "The Executive in Charge of Music for MCA Records." Cohen tells ICE that the Mitchell performance was set to appear in both the movie and on the soundtrack album, but at the last minute the film's director, AJlison Anders, changed her mind. Anders decided that, instead of using Mitchell to sing "Man from Mars" over the scene in question, she wanted Vigard's vocal, just to maintain consistency throughout the picture. "Creatively, she thought it worked better," Cohen says.

"Obviously, we were really disappointed, but I said, 'Well, I'll put Joni 's version on the record anyway.' It's not that unusual to have a different version on the soundtrack than what appears in the film, and AJlison was very much in favor of the idea. But then Joni Mitchell's management company phoned to let us know that she didn't feel comfortable having her song on the soundtrack if it wasn't in the movie. So again, a disap­pointment, but...fair enough."

Cohen and MCA executives then notified their manu­facturing plant of the substitution (Vigard for Mitchell) , but the aJbum had already been approved by all parties and mastered, creating fertile ground for an accident to happen. AJI of the printed components were corrected, but the first batch of CDs carried the wrong musical per­formance - that of brand new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Joni Mitchell.

"As soon as we found out about it, we put a cease­and-desist order out," Cohen says. "And I let Joni Mitchell's manager know that it was an unfortunate -and true - accident. We remedied it as quickly as we could, but for some reason it turned into this spicy story. It was only 19,000 copies, although it was reported as [much more]." How many of those 19,000 escaped to the public, we wondered? "We don't have any figures yet," Cohen says with a sigh. "You just can't control everything. "

MORE SOUNDTRACK PROBLEMS Rob Taylor of Lyndhurst, OH, has soundtrack troubles of another sort. He starts off his letter by stating, "This is similar to the letter about Bob Dylan's Unplugged from ICE #99 Dune 1995, 'CD Watchdog']. Has anyone else complained about the fake crowd noise on the Lynyrd Skynyrd concert film soundtrack Freebird - The

®

Movie? I doubt that the fan hysteria one hears on the disc accurately reflects the crowd's reaction to what was a fourth- or fifth-billed act at an all-day festival.

"In particular, there is a trio of female screams that seems to occur every 30-45 seconds, albeit at different levels in the mix. After six or seven songs, I was so dis­tracted waiting for the screams to repeat that I couldn't finish the disc. It's already made it to the used CD store. Do you think anyone at MCA can comment?"

To get a response, we spoke with Paul Rata­jczak, co-producer of the soundtrack, who tells ICE that the audience sound works well when experienced in a theater along with the movie. Any flaws in the back­ground noise that our reader detected would only become apparent once the music is separated from the visuals, and played repeatedly. "If you see the movie one time, you'd never notice it," Ratajczak says.

"Unfortunately, this was a feature film converted to record, so [MCA] didn't have the budget. They gave me two days to remix the whole record, which didn't give us time to go back and put all-new crowd noise in it. We spent the majority of our time EQ'ing the music to sound as good as possible for the CD, and worried less about the crowd.

"We put the crowd in to create that effect because there was no audience audible at all on the original recording," Ratajczak adds, "because it was run off a PA board. It all had to be put in. They're authentic concert recordings, but we had to create a full-dimensionaJ, six­channel mix in DTS sound [a digital film format for audio]. We had to have the crowd coming out of the front, the back, all around you, three-dimensionally. It was a huge part of the excitement in creating a concert film."

WAITING FOR APPLES TO RIPEN Tim Casey of Roslindale, MA, e-mails, "What happened to the Apple reissue program? One of their last releases mentioned that 'other upcoming releases include George Harrison 's Electronic Sounds and Ravi Shankar's In Concert, ' which was a superb double album of a well-recorded Carnegie Hall show. OK, so it won't crack the Top 10, but...what gives?"

As it turns out, there 's a separate answer for each side of the Atlantic. Mike Heatley of EMI in London tells ICE that the Harrison and Shankar CDs, as well as Badfin­ger's Ass and The Modern Jazz Quartet's Space, are being readied for reissue in the U.K. on November 4.

Why the long delay between releases, we asked? "Given the fact that Apple buyers are often Beatie buyers," Heatley says, "it's prudent to spread things out a bit, particularly when there might be lots of things they want to buy. Often we find that they buy the vinyl as well as the CD. It was that, more than any reason. But

BADFINGER

there 's never a perfect time, unfortunately." As for the Apple reissue program in America, we asked

Capitol A&R rep Wayne Watkins if the U.S. will be fol­lowing suit this fall. "No, we are not," Watkins tells ICE. "The plan is to regroup a little bit, and instead of just tossing the titles out, try to re-analyze the entire catalog and really create some highly visible branding of the Apple name. We're discussing it now. The U.K. wants us to release those titles, but we're just not ready yet, because right now, I think we'd do a bad job. I'd rather wait, and sacrifice some imports to fans. "

We asked Watkins if Capitol would ever be issuing Mary Hopkin 's Greatest Hits, which came out last year in the UK "We definitely will," he says. "Probably in 1997." (It should also be noted that the CD of Badfin­ger'sAs:5 contains one bonus track, "Do You Mind.")

CURB'S BAD 'TRIP' Jon Bryant of San Mateo, CA, wrote in to express his dis­pleasure with Curb's recent reissue of The Electric Flag's soundtrack for the 1967 Roger Corman film The Trip. "Imagine my disappointment in finding that the CD is missing six of the original album's 18 tracks," Bryant writes. "After subtracting the deletions, the LP's length of 42: 11 has now been cut to a ridiculous 26:32 on Curb's CD. What's going on here? What's the point of even reissuing the album in the first place if Curb is going to cut the hell out of it? Please look into this out­rage."

We did, getting Curb General Manager Dennis Han­non on the phone to discuss the hows and whys of his reissue-thinking. Explaining the composition of The Trip, Hannon tells ICE, "We've got a successful mid­price line that's marketed at a » CONTINUED ON PAGElS

ICE NOVEMBER 1996 17