Shine on Brightly
A&M 7.5 ips reel-to-reel with track-list anomaly
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Shine on Brightly, like other early Procol Harum albums, came out in a 7" reel-to-reel version running at 7.5 inches per second.
Some audiophiles preferred this format to vinyl, arguing that vinyl tended to make the tracks closest to the centre of the disc sound bad, since the relative speeds of stylus and groove were much lower there than on the opening tracks of a side. |
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This Shine On Brightly evidently follows the American packaging of the album, with the wrecked piano and tailor's dummy – supposedly a less disturbing image than George Underwood's zombie-filled grand piano on a pink desert, and certainly a much less interesting one.
The track listing, however, is a bit curious. In Held 'Twas in I apparently comes in parts I & II, perhaps echoing Paul Williams's remark that he couldn't tell how many tracks there were on side two … |
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Most mysterious, however, is the apparent inclusion of Magdalene (My Regal Zonophone) twice on the tape, once on side one, again on side two.
This contradicts the quoted timings (oddly, 20:22 on both sides): the side one running order listed here would clock in at about 21:40, or 18:49 without track 3. Side two would indeed run for 20:22, as it does on vinyl. |
One knows that running-orders were occasionally tampered with in order to make the two sides of a tape programme the same length. But it seems unusual to duplicate one whole track, in order to accomplish this. If someone out there still possesses this reel-to-reel version, perhaps they'd like to tell us if Magdalene does indeed feature twice, or whether in fact this is just a blunder on the part of the office that compiled the reel-label.
Art Dudley from Listener Magazine writes to BtP:
A while back you posted a photo [see above] of the reel-to-reel tape version of Shine On Brightly, which I believe you had spied on Ebay. You called our attention to the fact that the label listed two appearances of the song Magdalene (My Regal Zonophone) – yet different timings were given for the two!
As luck would have it, I was the winning bidder, and with the tape in my possession I can now report that the song in question does indeed appear twice. Unfortunately, in its first appearance on the tape, sandwiched oddly between the title song and ... My Moonbeams, it is simply the version of Magdalene with which we are all familiar, yet minus the kazoo-like "buh-buh-buh" tag in which a verse's worth of the song is repeated after the fade at the end, sans words. (The longer version, in its normal position in the running order, is Magdalene in its entirety.) <Sigh!> I was hoping for an alternate version. As consolation, the sound of the reel-to-reel version is superb, with unusually good bass extension and weight (more so than the slightly tinny American LP and even the Japanese "album-sleeve" CD).
Thanks, Art