As long as I can remember I’ve been interested in audio gear and records. My dad brought a giant teak stereo cabinet and a big clunky pair of speakers back from Taiwan where he was stationed during the Vietnam War. The speakers had a wooden lattice on the front that encased the fabric. The turntable sat suspended in a special piece of the inner cabinet which also housed his Kenwood receiver. I remember gleefully spinning the fat dial on the Kenwood, sending the tuner needle racing like a comet over the radio frequencies, cascading accross that faraway glow that lit the faces of japanese receivers of the era. Living along side the massive Kenwood was dad’s reel to reel tape deck with its exposed heads and mysterious and complicated tape feeding requirements. Dad would eventually teach me how to use it and it seemed like I could remember how to feed the tape through it for about a week before I’d forget again. It was all low-tech audio at its best!
Despite the gear Dad never seemed all that into music. He liked to talk about the Canadian band The Guess Who and had a few records. I think he enjoyed using the name of that band as a punch line to entertain my sister and I more than he was really into their music. “What’s the name of the band?” he would ask with a devilish grin on his face. “We don’t know!” my sister and I would cry out. “Guess who!” he’d reply. “What’s the name of the band?!”.
Mom loved Barbara Streisand and she loved to sing. She sang choir in high school and had a bit of voice training which, while she had a nice voice, always gave her singing an earnestness that made me a bit self conscious. She encouraged my sister and I to sing and enjoyed theatrics and performance. Now and again, she and my sister would spontaneously break into the Three Dog Night song “Joy to the World”. It used to drive me nuts and when I squirmed and protested they sang with even more enthusiasm and volume. I sincerely hoped I’d never hear the lyric “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” again in my lifetime.
My best friend growing up was Todd Smith and I remember once his older sister Andrea went to see an Elton John concert. It was the mid seventies and Elton was in his prime, dancing madly in heavy rimmed glasses accross the top of his grand piano and according to Andrea nearly falling off as a result of his terrible eyesight. Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy had just come out and I bought a copy and listened to it non-stop since it was the only record I owned. I would learn all of the lyrics and sing along and even spent sleepless pre-pubescent nights composing my own songs in the style of Bernie Taupin. I was learning what it felt like to be a serious music fan with just the right blend of wide eyed wonder and pre-teen angst.
Once I happened to watch a film on television that featured a number of different rock music acts of the time. I was blown away seeing footage of a Beatles concert with hoards of female fans literally screaming their heads off. It was absolute mayem. The film contained some David Bowie concert footage. Bowie was performing “Space Odditty” and scenes from the audience show fans who, in contrast to the crazed and kinetic Beatles fans, simply stood motionless in stunned silence, hypnotized. It was days of Jim Jones and Charlie Manson and I remember feeling a bit spooked at the time. But I was beyond fascinated and I knew I had to discover how it was that Bowie, or any musician for that matter, could have that affect on people.
I bought my first David Bowie record, Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in high school at a record store on an airforce base south of my house in Homestead, Florida. On this album Bowie revisits his Mr. Tom character from Space Oddity on the fabulous song “Ashes to Ashes”. Here’s the wonderfull video he directed along with David Mallet. At the time it was the most expensive music video ever produced.
By the time I was in college at Berkely in the late ’80’s David Bowie had become something of an obsession. My friend Ian and I turned his name into an adjective. Along with the name of Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy, “David Bowie” would mean anything that had it’s own unique brand of cool. “It’s kind of David Bowie, it’s kind of Peter Murphy,” we’d say. When last year Ian sent me a text from his home town of San Luis Obispo to let me know that Peter Murphy would be performing there, Mr. Murpy officially lost his status as a symbol of coolness. Despite the debacle that was Tin Machine David Bowie never will.
After college I developed a close friendship with a young man named Robert who grew up in the L.A. area and had done a bit of modeling. Robert had met David Bowie when shooting the cover for Never Let Me Down. You can see him in the photo below peaking into the circus tent holding a camera.
When I asked Robert what was Bowie was like he said he just seemed like a regular English bloke. Indeed when you see non-performing footage of Bowie he comes across that way. He never struck me as a person who had an ego anywhere near matching in scale his standing as an artist.
Over the last few years as record collecting has become somewhat of an obsession I’ve regularly turned my attention to David Bowie albums in my ongoing effort to acquire better sounding copies of the records I really care about. I must admit I stopped buying David Bowie records in the 90’s and for the first decade of the current millennium. The somewhat mixed The Next Day was the first new Bowie record I’d bought since college and there have been a few of his vintage albums that for whatever reason never made it into my collection over the years.
One of those is Pin Ups. I can’t say why exactly. It’s got everything you want in Bowie record – great cover art, great songs, great performances and loads of that certain David Bowie something that I just can’t get enough of. Probably I never bought it because it didn’t have any of his hit songs on it. In fact, it doesn’t have any of Bowie’s songs as it’s an album of covers. But what an album of covers! And a Bowie album of covers makes perfect sense in that Bowie made his career largely on knowing just what to borrow from other musicians along with his uncanny ability to elevate what he borrows artistically to another level.
Pin Ups is also one of the best recorded Bowie albums. From purely an audiophile listening standpoint it is knock your socks off awesome! My first copy was the 2016 Parlaphone reissue. It’s a pretty good sounding record and it helped get me excited about Pin Ups and excited about writing about it so I knew I needed to get at least one vintage copy for comparison.
There are a lot of copies of this album for sale and first UK pressings are not that expensive so that seemed the obvious choice for a vintage copy. I ordered one from a seller in England and when it came, it turned out to be the first French pressing. For this version the jackets were printed in England and identical to the first UK pressing so I figured it was an honest enough mistake and asked if the seller would send me another copy of the first UK pressing he had in his inventory. He agreed and when that one came, it was ANOTHER first French pressing!
To be honest I kind of dropped the ball on a UK pressing or any other pressing of this record after that. And it’s hard to explain it but somehow the French pressing does in some strange way suit the weird and wacky aesthetic of this record. Perhaps it’s something about the “Face 1” and “Face 2” on the labels. Only I still can’t fathom a record seller who grades 2 of the same album and never notices the labels are written in French!
So the other day I decided to do a 2 way shootout with these 2 identical pressings to see if perhaps there was one that sounded better than the other. It was a blast hearing these songs the multiple times it takes to listen critically for quality of reproduction. I was especially taken by what is perhaps my favorite Pink Floyd song of all time, “See Emily Play”. I love the way Bowie and his band interpret that song here. Incidentally that band includes the wonderful Mick Ronson on guitar and piano as well as Aynsley Dunbar on drums, T.J. Bolder on bass, Mike Garson also on piano and other keys along with Ken Fordham on baritone sax and Bowie himself fleshing things out on moog, harmonica and tenor and alto saxophones. Bowie and Ken Scott co-produce the record.
Getting back to the shootout, it turns out there was a clear winner. The difference being the scale of the sound on these records. One record just sounds bigger! The drums are bigger, the soundstage is bigger and this bigger soundstage gives more room for the other instruments and vocals to live in. Both of these French pressings of Pin Ups could be called really good sounding copies, but one sounded great. It just goes to show how every record sounds different from every other record, even two records from the same pressing. So if you decided to buy a vintage copy of Pin Ups I can say the first French pressing is a great option. I can’t promise, clearly, that yours will sound as good as my best sounding copy. But maybe it will sound even better!
The take away here is how a record sounds and not what pressing it is is what ultimately matters. However, when it comes to the 2016 Parlaphone reissue I can safely say you’d be better off buying a just about any vintage copy. The Parlaphone is digitally remastered and it just doesn’t have the space and naturalness to really do this album justice. At least that’s my opinion. You may want to get a copy and play it and decide for yourself.