In the Winter print issue of Goldmine, producer Don Was was asked about a story where he was in the studio with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and needing original copies of their earlier records to use as sound references, they used Goldmine to find a record seller who had them.
“Oh yeah,” Don Was says with excitement, “it was around the same time [that] Virgin wanted to remaster all the old albums for updated CDs. They sent the tapes to Bob Ludwig, and Bob, per instruction from the record company, made them sound modern; it was Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main St., those were the first two, and the first one came back not sounding anything like the Sticky Fingers we remembered. I mean, Bob Ludwig is probably the greatest of all time; it wasn’t his fault, he was just going off of the label’s instructions. We couldn’t change these records to fit the times; these are timeless records.
“So we compared a bunch of CDs and a bunch of vinyl [reissues] and none of them sounded different,” Was continues. “What was the standard? Well, obviously, the standard was the first pressing. Then we thought, How are we gonna find a first pressing? So, we picked up Goldmine, and someone had an ad [in the issue], and they happened to be local. Well, without telling the guy who it was, I called and asked him to bring them over. So, the guy shows up at my home studio, and Mick and Keith are sitting there [both start laughing] … and it blew his f**kin’ mind.
“He didn’t want to charge Mick and Keith for them; they struck a bargain whereby they signed a bunch of other records for him, that was the tradeoff. So, we used that Sticky Fingers as a point of reference, and we sent it off to Ludwig, and we said, ‘Na na na, don’t modernize it, forget what the record company said.’”
Goldmine to the rescue!
Read the full interview in the Winter print issue of Goldmine. Get the issue by clicking on the image below!
—-
Find more Rolling Stones in the Goldmine Shop by clicking below!
