ELP's Karn Evil 9 is another great example.

-S

On 1/16/05 11:48 PM, in article
, "BucketButt"
wrote:

On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 15:12:32 +0000, Laurence Payne wrote:

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 23:55:38 -0600, BucketButt
wrote:

How I miss the goold old days, when bands did what they wanted in the
studio (and on stage) under the guidance of a producer, and then the
record companies edited their album-length cuts down to make hit singles.
Some people bought singles, some bought albums, and the record companies
made money either way.


Name us some hit singles that are cut-downs of album tracks?

Back in the good old days (which is when I was talking about), edited
singles were very common. Iron Butterfly's "Inna-Gadda-Da-Vida" covered
most of an LP side, but ATCO Records cut it down to under three minutes.
Big Brother's "Piece Of My Heart" was heavily edited to make a hit single
out of an album track that only diehard Big Brother fans could love.
Chicago's "Make Me Smile" was actually edited from two different movements
of "Ballet For A Girl From Buchanan". Most album tracks in those days
were considerably shorter than these examples, but anything longer than
around 3:30 usually had its intro truncated, its end faded early or an
entire verse (or more) cut out. These edits were *usually* good enough
that cover-bands could perform passable versions. More important to the
record companies, these shorter versions were more acceptable to Top 40
and Adult Contemporary radio stations which wanted to play lots of songs
per hour while still getting in plenty of commercials to pay the bills.

Radio stations began accepting longer singles over the years -- in the
late 1950s and early 1960s most singles (album cuts too, for that matter)
were usually just under three minutes in length, but by the late 1970s a
4:30 single was nothing special.

That's not even counting the twelve-inch discs with multiple edits of the
same song that we started seeing during the (shudder) Disco Era. One that
comes to mind was the Rolling Stones' "Miss You", which was released as a
short single, a "normal" track on the Some Girls album, and as an
extended-length dance mix; the disco version might have gotten play on
album-rock stations if the record company hadn't also enhanced the bass
and drums to a ricidulous degree for playing in clubs.

I have no idea if anyone bothers editing album-length tracks into
shorter-length singles these days, since I retired from broadcasting in
1993; but at at least as recently as 1993 a few "CD single" edits were
still going to radio stations and a few enterprising stations were
occasionally doing their own edits.

--
"Timpani! Take your drums to Brooklyn, play the same volume, you'll be
fine." -Otto Werner Mueller on my "Piannissimo" entrance in a Juilliard
Orchestra Rehearsal, C. 1997

Remove: Spamoff from email address to reply.

On 19 Jan 2005 00:29:13 GMT, Sean Dolan
wrote:

Radio stations began accepting longer singles over the years -- in the
late 1950s and early 1960s most singles (album cuts too, for that matter)
were usually just under three minutes in length

Just under 3 minutes? Many of them in that time period just barely broke
the 2-minute mark. 2:20-2:30 would have been more the norm, with 2:50+
being a bit of an eyebrow-raiser.

I looked at a Herman's Hermits CD the other day that I think contained
16 tracks, 38 minutes total.




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