Monday, June 27, 2011

Gathering Rolling Stones SACDs

This weekend was a nice boost for the other large catalog of SACDs I'm collecting: The Rolling Stones.
But unlike the Bob Dylan collection, the Stones SACDs are not just getting hard to find. They are, and have been, hard to keep track of.
The early Rolling Stones catalog was released by Decca Records in the United Kingdom and London Records in the United States (see here for an explanation of the unique licensing agreement). As was the practice with other transatlantic releases by British Invasion bands, the two labels did not offer identical releases. For example, according to the website "Stones on Decca," that label made the decision not to release any singles on its LPs. This practice of releasing different LPs in each market continued until 1967, with the release of Their Satanic Majesties Request.
In that four-year period, 12 Rolling Stones albums released. In three cases, Out of Our Heads, Aftermath, and Between The Buttons, both the U.S. and U.K. releases had the same name but subtly different lineups. For example, the two versions of Between The Buttons feature 10 identical songs, but two songs unique to each release. Telling the two apart visually is also difficult: both have the same cover photo, but the U.K. version has a pinstripe around the edge.
For me, it gets even more confusing when different albums feature the same artwork. For example, the cover photograph is nearly identical for the U.K. release of Out of Our Heads and December's Children (And Everybody's):
 
while the U.S. release of Out of Our Heads featured a photo that reminds me of the release 12x5:

When ABKCO released the SACD versions of these albums in 2002, they could have made one country's releases standard (like The Beatles did when their albums were converted to CD). But for whatever reason, both catalogs were released. In fact, if one wants "everything" the Stones did, these get even more difficult to keep track of because one version of the album will have a mono version of the song, another will have the stereo version.
Just to add to the confusion, ABKCO stopped producing the catalog in SACD when the United States pressing plant closed. But unlike Columbia, which generated new stock numbers for the subsequent non-SACD releases, ABKCO continued using the same catalog numbers and UPC after SACD production ended. For that reason, there is no way to tell a standard "redbook" CD from an SACD version without seeing the paper "digipak" sleeve or the SACD logo printed directly on the disc. While this can keep the price of SACDs lower (if a CD shop doesn't have a knowledgable staff, they will price each version identically), it makes buying the SACDs from larger sites online almost impossible.
The result is that I'm not only unsure which SACDs I need to complete my collection, but that I'm not entirely sure which albums were released as SACDs in the first place. I think that my set is almost complete, and this week I added two titles to my collection.
First was England's Newest Hit Makers, the Stones first album, second was More Hot Rocks (Big Hits and Fazed Cookies)

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