Edition №17

Back to Black is the record that introduced me to Amy Winehouse when it was released. Not long after, I was working as Director of International Production at MTV, and I was hearing more chatter about the turmoil in her personal life than about the music.

In my first year in that role I went to the MTV Europe Music Awards in Munich, on November 1, 2007, to survey the production, because parts of it would be under my management the following year. Amy was on the bill, and I'd been looking forward to finally seeing her perform. I had all-access credentials, so I was able to stand very close to her satellite stage. As soon as the lights came up I could tell she was in rough shape: thin, fragile and dazed. She sang "Back to Black" beautifully, and she wasn't there. The audience roared.

Her songs inspired and helped me through different points in my life, and I still listen to them, on 2 copies: the 2006 European CD and an American LP reissue. I keep both because they don't end on the same song. The CD closes on "Addicted," and the LP closes on a second "You Know I'm No Good," this one with a verse from Ghostface Killah.

The swap follows the line between the album's 2 producers. Mark Ronson produced 6 of its 11 songs, which began as rhythm tracks the Dap-Kings played live to analog tape at Daptone in Brooklyn and were finished in Pro Tools. Salaam Remi built the other 5 digitally in Miami, and the European CD's rear insert credits them to him by track number. "Addicted" is the last of Remi's 5, so on my shelf the CD carries all of his songs and the LP carries 4.

Which copy you buy decides how much of each producer you get. Both of this edition's picks, on vinyl and on CD, carry the 11 songs as they were released in October 2006, opening on Ronson's "Rehab" and closing on Remi's "Addicted."

The 20th-anniversary editions arrived on October 23. The 3LP's first disc is a new cut of those same 11 songs, and its third is a live set recorded at the Paradiso in Amsterdam on February 8, 2007, nine months before Munich. I haven't decided whether to buy it; it depends on the analysis. Discogs credits the new cut's mastering to Miles Showell and Alex Gordon at Abbey Road, and nothing I've found says what it was cut from.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Reference Checks is a Twelve Bar Studio production. If you've ever bought a record everyone praised and wondered why yours didn't sound like the one they meant, that's the problem I started it to solve. My listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and kept out of every verdict. Research uses AI tooling; the verification and the editorial are mine. See Editorial process.

Sources: The Lead1 · The chain2 · The musicianship3 · The verdict4 · The endnote5 · Not yet read6

Edition №16

My sister and brother-in-law have seen King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard quite a few times, and they're the reason I know the band at all. Two things amaze me about it: a level of access for fans that I'd put next to the Grateful Dead's, and a habit of changing styles from album to album, sometimes from one night to the next. I was supposed to see them in the summer of 2025. Travel got in the way.

Polygondwanaland is that access taken about as far as a band can take it. On November 17, 2017, the band put the album on its website for free as 3 separate masters: one for digital, one for CD, and one prepared for vinyl, with a warning that the vinyl files "will not sound normal on generic Hi Fi speakers." The page asked people to make their own tapes, CDs, and records, and it waived the mechanical license. The Creative Commons license on the band's Bandcamp page let anyone copy the album and sell it, as long as nobody altered it. Stu Mackenzie told NME the day before release that the whole thing was a gift and an experiment. "I don't think we really thought this through," he said.

People took them up on it, and they still are. Discogs dates 6 new versions of Polygondwanaland to 2026, 9 years after the files went up, and one of them, its label says, is made from recycled plastic.

You can own this record without anyone ever selling it to you. The band's page says so in 8 words: "We do not own this record. You do." Labels and fans have since made hundreds of versions of it. The list worth owning is much shorter.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Reference Checks is a Twelve Bar Studio production. If you've ever bought a record everyone praised and wondered why yours didn't sound like the one they meant, that's the problem I started it to solve. My listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and kept out of every verdict. Research uses AI tooling; the verification and the editorial are mine. See Editorial process.

Edition №15

On the last weekend of April 1979, Willis Alan Ramsey played two nights at the Basement Coffeehouse on the Texas A&M campus, and a Battalion staff writer named Lyle Lovett got him between sets on the Saturday. They talked over take-out steak and lobster at a workbench in the student union's bicycle shop.

Ramsey was 28, and his only album was seven years old. He had made it across five studios, from Tyler to Nashville to Los Angeles, because, he said, "I was not happy with the different situations I was in." "I liked the record," he told Lovett, "but I just didn't think it was as good as it could be."

Lovett wrote, "So fans can look for the new album in..." and Ramsey answered "1982," with what Lovett called a sarcastic laugh. His manager cut in: "Don't let him print that." Ramsey tried again. "No, uh... soon." Telling the story in 2022, Lovett remembered it as a one-word question and a one-word answer.

Forty-seven years later he is still playing shows, and the second album is still unreleased. The first one exists in two mixes, and the LP that reached shops on October 16 does not say which it carries.

You can own every vinyl copy pressed in the record's first eight years and never hear the mixes Ramsey first approved. Only one copy is documented to carry them, and it costs less than the new LP.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Reference Checks is a Twelve Bar Studio production. If you've ever bought a record everyone praised and wondered why yours didn't sound like the one they meant, that's the problem I started it to solve. My listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and kept out of every verdict. Research uses AI tooling; the verification and the editorial are mine. See Editorial process.

Edition №14

On Thursday, August 18, 1966, Frank Kofsky took the train out to Deer Park, on Long Island, to interview John Coltrane. Coltrane met him at the station and drove to a shopping center nearby, and they talked in the car with a tape running.

Kofsky brought up what he called a change of pace after "Chasin' the Trane" and "Impressions": the album with Duke Ellington, Ballads, and the album with Johnny Hartman. "Whose ideas were those albums?" he asked. "Were they yours, or were they Impulse's?" Coltrane started with a mouthpiece, and the transcript keeps every stumble. "I did a foolish thing. I, I got dissatisfied with my mouthpiece [laughs] and I had some work done on this thing, and instead of making it better, it, it ruined it." He talked about "that certain fast thing that I was reaching for—that I couldn't get." Kofsky asked whether it had undermined his confidence. "It could have, it certainly could have."

Then he came to the songs. "I chose them, and they seemed to be something that were laying around in my mind—from my, [laughs] you know, youth, or somewhere—that I just had to do." Impulse, he said, wanted "a balanced sort of thing, a diverse sort of a catalogue."

In 1968 Kofsky interviewed Bob Thiele, who produced the record, and heard a different origin. "Ballads was really my idea to try and educate more listeners," Thiele told him, and the songs were "sort of a joint effort… I selected a few and he selected a few." Kofsky had now heard the story from both men, and their accounts do not agree.

Which copy you should own is easier to settle. The best one you can put on a turntable was made in 2024, 61 years after the original, cut at Sterling Sound and pressed in an edition of 5,000.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Reference Checks is a Twelve Bar Studio production. If you’ve ever bought a record everyone praised and wondered why yours didn’t sound like the one they meant, that’s the problem I started it to solve. My listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and kept out of every verdict. Research uses AI tooling; the verification and the editorial are mine. See Editorial process.

Edition №13

The only Talk Talk I owned, from college until this year, was a 12-inch remix of "It's My Life." I knew the music long before that. When I was a teenager in north Dallas a group of us went to a teen club called Jams that played music videos, all of us too young to drive. We maximized the whole thing of “my parents could drop us off if your parents could pick us up”. "It's My Life" was in rotation the entire time we went. Every time I hear Mark Hollis's voice I stop to listen. I heard The Colour of Spring back then too, and I can't say why it didn't stick. What I heard in that era was a classic simplicity, and I never went further than hearing it. They are a band I wish I had paid more attention to while they were still making music.

The simplicity is what the method and music-making left standing.

Hollis said in 1986 that there was a conscious effort on the album to use cheap sounds, so as to sonically stress the playing. That is the part almost nobody writes about, and it runs deeper than the sounds. Hollis said he did not consider all the various players on it as “session musicians”. They were all working musician, some in other bands. They were allowed to come in and play freely, and he and Friese-Greene selected what they liked inside the booth. Hollis said he liked working with people because they add rather than take away.

So the record was cast in those sessions, and then it was filtered.

The album was cut 4 times in 1986, in 4 countries, and this edition ranks all 4 as equals. Each one sits one generation from the tape that caught all that playing, which is what decides how much of it you get. A half-speed pressing reached shops this month and does not say where its master source.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Special Edition

Oasis hits differently when you’ve survived a few things.

I found them the way a lot of people did: college, headphones, a sibling handing you a copy and saying, “Just listen.” They were defiant, big, messy, and real. The music made you feel like maybe you’d survive whatever it was, and it never pretended it could fix any of it.

I was diagnosed with an incurable disease around the same time I found this band, and the music seemed made for people quietly trying to hold it together. Since then, holding it together has meant cancer, both parents gone, and an industry I love and have worked in my entire career turned upside down. I went back to the band on the hard days and on the invisible ones. Some tracks acted as body armor, while others were for relief.

I saw them live a few times back in the day, when they were a total mess. I loved the music, but the noise around them, broadcast to the world without a pause, was tiring. At one show Liam sang with his back to the audience for most of the night. By the time they broke up it surprised nobody, and a reunion looked out of the question, forever.

Then, in the summer of 2025, clips from the first few nights of the tour threw me right back to being 20 and trying to believe the world was waiting for me, even if it wasn’t. I was at both MetLife Stadium shows, and more than 30 years on, after losing family, friends, and parts of myself, I still believe.

There are millions of us now, old fans and new, in stadiums around the world for the same reason, and a lot of us can tell the story of how these two records were made: Monnow Valley, Sawmills, the loudness, Knebworth. What almost none of us can say is which version of those two records we actually own, and that turns out to be the more interesting question.

One check before anything else, 2 minutes, any format. Put on “Slide Away” and listen to the bridge. If Noel’s backing vocals are there behind Liam, you own the mix the band approved in 1994. If they aren’t, you own the 2014 remaster or something made from it, the 30th Anniversary box included, and nothing on the sleeve tells you the song is different.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Edition №12

The album nobody bought, and the receipt that says otherwise

In 1982 Brian Eno told the Los Angeles Times that the first Velvet Underground album sold 30,000 copies in its first five years, and that everyone who bought one started a band. He said Lou Reed told him. MGM’s own royalty statement for the band puts the American figure at 58,476, counted through February 14, 1969.

I came to it through a side door. What I heard first was Echo & the Bunnymen covering “Run, Run, Run” on The Rock and Roll Alternative, George Gimarc’s show on KDGE, The Edge, a station that had just gone on the air. I loved it immediately, so I called in to ask what it was. (Ah, remember those days?) George told me it was a Velvet Underground cover, a B-side, on a 12” remix of “Bedbugs & Ballyhoo.”

My path ran backwards. A brand-new alternative station sent me to a record from 1967. Post-punk and new wave is where I’ve always felt most at home, and this is the record that created it.

The only copy I own is the ’96 Japanese mono CD. I have never held a 1967 pressing. Past that, deep respect for Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and the groundwork they laid.

That’s what the number is for. Given only 58,476 sold, most people standing where I am never have held one either. A small group bought this record and an entire world of music grew out of it, so almost everyone who owes it something owns nothing of it. The buying question starts there.

The statement is a MGM form with the band’s name typed into the “Pay To” box, and it itemizes the figure in two. It states 13,336 copies of the mono and 45,140 of the stereo, so roughly three of every four buyers took the stereo version home. The mono original is the scarcer object by more than three to one. That’s a count of what sold, not an opinion about what matters.

The same form runs its arithmetic to the bottom line and ends at $5,482.81 in the red against paid advances. That’s where one account stood on February 14, 1969, and nothing past it.

The numbers are the countable part of this record’s paperwork. The sleeve is the rest of it, and the sleeve credits Andy Warhol as producer. He did not produce it. He paid for the sessions, he kept a label at arm’s length from a band it would have rebuilt, and he made the sleeve. That’s certainly helpful but it’s not producing.

Tom Wilson did the production work. He was a staff producer at the label, he cut “Sunday Morning” months after the rest of it, and he shepherded the album out the door. The engineer who ran the session behind six of the eleven released songs isn’t printed on the sleeve at all. The one engineer credit that is printed is spelled wrong, and two of the reference works you’d check to correct it have been repeating the misspelling ever since.

None of that changes what the record is or what it started. It changes what you have to do to buy the right one.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Edition №11

The master tapes of the first Factory records spent years in Tony Wilson’s loft. Oliver Wilson found them when he cleared his father’s things out after he died in 2007: “piles and piles of 8-tracks, tapes, this, that and the other by every Factory Records artist.” He decided they belonged to the artists who made them. The Durutti Column’s reels went into the Museum of Science and Industry’s archive in Castlefield, on the site of the world’s first passenger railway terminus, and in 2009 the producer Keir Stewart drew them out to remaster the band’s first four albums. His account of that job survives in the box set’s liner notes: transfers run at the Royal Northern College of Music on a lovingly maintained Studer, the outputs fed into a new Prism converter. The reels, he wrote, were “like ancient scriptures of the Factory, original and intact.”

Stewart never left the story. In July 2026 the Durutti Column returned with Renascent, their first album since 2010, on Factory Too, the label run with Oliver Wilson. Stewart produced it. The man who carried the tapes out of the loft made the record that brought the band back.

One of the four albums in that 2009 box was The Return of the Durutti Column, the 1980 debut of Vini Reilly’s band, produced by Martin Hannett. The source end of its chain is unusually well kept: a named archive, a named machine, a producer who can tell you which converter he used. The object end is where it gets strange. In July 1980, Factory re-cut one side of the record and kept the original printed artwork, and the printed surfaces have disagreed with the discs inside them ever since. Three modern editions still print a track listing that their vinyl does not play, and one of those is still in print.

So the well-documented tape chain ends at an object that cannot identify itself properly. Catalog number, label copy, and sleeve all read as the record they no longer contain. What settles it is a count you can make in a shop in ten seconds, before you pay, and the rest of this edition is that count, the two pressings that reward it and the one disc that carries the complete album.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

This is the Reference Checks buy list: the publication’s record of reference picks, one row per title, built from the same verified record the editions are built on. 70 titles as of November 6, 2026.

Picks are the reference editions as of each verdict date, roughly May to November 2026. Audiophile pressings sell out and repress, and a few digital picks are already out of print, flagged inline. Confirm grading condition before you buy. New verdicts are added with each edition. If a new pressing is released and has evidence to change the reference position, the list will be updated and shared via NOTES. Where an edition of Reference Checks covers a title, the full evidence chain is in that edition, free at referencechecks.fm. All of these titles eventually will have their own edition.

A free subscription opens the rest of this list, including the verdicts.

Edition №10

I’ve been listening to Cocteau Twins since 1984. I’ve seen them live twice and met them once, where I had a brief chat with all three members and got a signed copy of the setlist from the gig. Another of their records has been the most-played album I own since the year it came out; that one gets its own edition eventually. This edition is about Blue Bell Knoll, the record they made once they finally had the room and the time together.

They had built the room two years earlier. Tired of working on other people’s clocks, they rented a unit on an industrial estate in School Road, North Acton, and put a studio inside it themselves. What they had not had since Treasure was a long, uninterrupted block in it, all three of them at once, to make a proper Cocteau Twins album. Blue Bell Knoll is that block.

You can hear what the time bought. “From the very first day of recording proper,” Simon Raymonde has written, “it felt like the shackles were off.” The ten instrumentals he and Robin Guthrie wrote sounded so complete going down that there was very little left to do at the mix. They were producing as they wrote. Speaking to Long Live Vinyl in 2019, he described them getting carried away enough to fill 23 of the 24 available tracks before Elizabeth Fraser had recorded anything. One track left, for all of her vocals. The story comes from interviews. His memoir does not mention it. The record is lush and unhurried in a way a few days at a time could never have produced, and Raymonde has called it a quantum leap forward from Treasure.

The tell is in the catalog number. Four decades of reissues and remasters sit downstream of that room, and the original is one letter away from the version to skip. Careful buyers still take the wrong one home.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Edition №9

The Dark Side of the Moon spent 736 weeks on the Billboard 200 between March 1973 and July 1988. Until this spring I had never owned a copy.

I was a big fan of The Wall as a kid. My childhood best friend and I would call our local radio station begging them to play "Another Brick in the Wall," the long version that runs "The Happiest Days of Our Lives" into Part 2, and wait for hours with our tape recorders to grab a clean recording. I never dug into the back catalog until the Wizard of Oz play-along business. A college intern named Charlie Savage wrote it up in The Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, having picked it up from a Pink Floyd newsgroup: start the album as the MGM lion roars and the album and the film run together. Savage's piece said the first roar. The third roar is what everyone settled on later. I was in college, and everyone had a version of it.

Gilmour, Waters and Mason have all denied it. Alan Parsons, who engineered the record, gave the denial that explains it clearly, because his is about equipment. “There simply wasn’t mechanics to do it,” he told MTV in 1997. “We had no means of playing videotapes in the room at all. I don’t think VHS had come along by ‘72, had it?”

That is the sentence that got me listening properly. Parsons was engineering at Abbey Road on a Studer A80 16-track, and the limit he is describing is the condition the whole record was made under. I have a much better appreciation now for the musicianship, and for what they got done at a point when the technology was moving far slower than it does today. I am still not going to a laser light show at a planetarium. I have spent time with the record and it holds.

There is an expensive audiophile market around this record and I have no stake in any of it. You can spend upward of $750 on a sealed audiophile pressing. Both of the objects that win start near $35 before shipping.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Reference Checks is a Twelve Bar Studio production. If you’ve ever bought a record everyone praised and wondered why yours didn’t sound like the one they meant, that’s the problem I started it to solve. My listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and kept out of every verdict. Research uses AI tooling; the verification and the editorial are mine. See Editorial Process

Edition №8

You can own this record and still be missing the thing Blue Note paid for twice.

Norah Jones had finished her first album when her manager called to say the label had refused it. “I had a pit in my stomach and my manager at the time, Shell, called me and said that they rejected the record.” She had one deal and she assumed it was gone. “I was also just scared that I was going to lose the deal and it was over.”

The deal was unusual to begin with. Bruce Lundvall heard her demos and offered to sign her to Manhattan Records, the more pop-facing label down the hall. She turned it down and asked for the jazz one. Michael Cuscuna, who had run Blue Note’s reissue campaigns since 1984 and consulted on its signings, put her case plainly: “She was a jazz artist, playing piano and singing standards with an acoustic bass and a jazz drummer.”

She asked for Craig Street to produce, after hearing New Moon Daughter. Street took her to Allaire Studios in the Catskills with Bill Frisell, Brian Blade, Kenny Wollesen and Kevin Breit. They cut most of the songs you know, and they finished the record.

Lundvall’s objection was that it “had strayed too far from what was so special about the demos.”

Jones assumed at first that the problem was her singing. “I didn’t really understand what it was about it, but I thought maybe I didn’t sing very great.” Listening again, she put it somewhere else. “I didn’t love the way I sounded on them, and there was a ton of guitar.” And: “With two guitar players, at times it was just not balanced for what I wanted.”

So Blue Note paid for the album sessions a second time, and what the second payment bought was less. Arif Mardin took the chair, in his 70s, with Aretha and the Bee Gees behind him. He let Jones bring back the band from her own demos and kept the songs near to how she had first played them. Three of the Street recordings stayed. Everything else came down and went back up with “air” around it.

The album that has sold 27 million copies still has the shelved one inside it, on three tracks. Bill Frisell had played on a whole album with her. He is credited on one song of the album you likely own.

It entered the chart at 139. Eleven months later it was the number one album in America, and it stayed on that chart for 165 weeks. Cuscuna, from inside the label: “It ended up selling 10 million copies on its own steam. It was very bizarre.”

The character of this record is the space around a quiet voice, and Blue Note paid a second album budget to get it. That space is the thing I listen for when I put two pressings side by side, and in my experience it is the first thing a transfer gives up. You rarely catch it going. You just end up with a copy that sounds smaller, and you cannot say why.

Then came the 2022 anniversary, and a great many new objects. Almost none of them will tell you where they came from.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Edition №7

I first heard Glenn Gould while I was working at a record store. It was Sound Warehouse in Dallas, near SMU, the one location that stocked nothing but classical and jazz. I couldn’t tell you which recording was playing. What stopped me was the humming. Under the Bach, a man’s voice is singing along, off-mic and not quite on purpose. Once you catch it you can’t let it go. Two coworkers with a deeper knowledge of classical music told me it was Glenn Gould. He hummed while he played, loud enough to end up on the records.

The more I learned about him, the more he pulled me in. He gave his last public concert in 1964, at 31, and never played for a live audience again. He called the concert a “blood sport” and something close to a force of evil, and he meant it. He walked into the recording studio instead and more or less never left, editing his own takes the way a film director edits a movie, which is close to how he described his process. I still don’t have a good grip on Glenn Gould the man. He was strange, private and complicated in ways I won’t pretend to diagnose. What I have is a deep respect for how unconventional he was willing to be, and a talent that has outlived him by decades with no sign of fading.

He recorded Bach’s Goldberg Variations twice, 26 years apart. Most people who love this music own one of them. Almost nobody tells you the rest: the two recordings were made in different technological worlds, and that gap decides which one you should buy, and on what. One of the two hides a surprise about which copy actually sounds best.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Bill Evans is a performer I never tire of listening to. Half the pleasure is the discography itself: the with-strings records, the overdubbed solo experiments, the duets, the trios he kept rebuilding for twenty years. He was a talented and complicated man, and the records carry both sides.

Portrait In Jazz is the first full statement of the most consequential of those trios, and it kept a secret for sixty-six years. By the end of 1959 Evans had already played on Kind of Blue and was climbing the DownBeat polls, and he was still reluctant about his own career. He let two years pass between his first and second albums because, he insisted, he didn’t have anything particularly different to say. His producer, Orrin Keepnews, put it more plainly: for a while it looked as if just about the only person who didn’t dig Bill Evans was Bill Evans.

What changed was the band. Working opposite Benny Goodman at Basin Street East, Evans lost one trio and assembled another: Scott LaFaro, a bassist expanding what the instrument could do inside a band, and Paul Motian, a drummer who listened as much as he played. On December 28, 1959, about five weeks into the trio’s life by Evans’s own count, Keepnews brought the three of them into Reeves Sound Studios in New York, and they recorded the whole album in a day.

Here is the secret. That day the trio played Autumn Leaves over and over; Craft’s 2025 tape research counted at least thirteen takes. Two different performances reached the public, and for sixty-six years the object you bought decided which one you owned. Most listeners never knew there was a choice.

The reissues have multiplied since: original mono and stereo pressings, audiophile cuts from three boutique houses, a Japanese disc collectors chase, downloads off a later master. The differences start with which Autumn Leaves is actually in the grooves. The work is knowing what each object holds, and which one holds the recording best.

Share

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Edition №5

The Head on the Door was my way in, the album and the first time I saw them live. I was a teenager, part of the OG New Wave crowd, too young for anything past a teen club. I hadn’t heard much that sounded like The Cure, and it was their slow, dark songs that reached me, a perfect companion for that 80’s teenage angst.

Then Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me and its tour came in 1987, right in the middle of my teenage years, and it sent me digging into the older, atmospheric records. For a couple of years The Cure was most of what I played. I considered them an element of waver religion.

Disintegration is the last of their records that connected with me, and even then only partway, because I could already hear the turn starting underneath it. The band was reaching for something bigger and more commercial, and that’s where they began to lose me. Everything after did less and less, and I kept going back to the early records.

Here’s the odd part. Disintegration is the record most people call their masterpiece. It’s been cut and recut for 37 years, in versions that measure and sound very different from one another. The one most people buy today, the one that streams and fills the reissue bins, is almost never the one you want.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Share

Edition №4

In the early 90s I was a classical voice major at the University of North Texas, in Denton, Texas. It’s a small town, but it has one of the best jazz schools anywhere, so jazz all over the place. A coffee house, a couple of dive bars, One O’Clock Lab Band open rehearsals, a bar somebody retrofitted in a former Pizza Hut. I’d go hear amazing players, students from all over the world, UNT faculty and whoever was passing through our dusty little town.

For two years, I had a volunteer slot DJ-ing at the college radio station, which was an all-jazz format, and that’s really where I got into Miles. Before that I only knew his late electric stuff that was current at the time, and it never did much for me despite Bono’s support. A friend at the station told me to go back further and handed me a CD of “Someday My Prince Will Come”. I started digging and didn’t stop.

This album comes from a strange moment for Miles. For context, we go back to March 1961, in an old converted church on East 30th Street in Manhattan, the same room where he’d made “Kind of Blue” a couple of years earlier. His classic band had broken up. Bill Evans moved on. Coltrane had quit the year before, Mobley was Miles’ new tenor, and yet Coltrane came back for two days to play the title track and one more. Mobley takes a solo early on, and a few minutes later Coltrane, the guy he’d replaced, comes in over the same changes. I didn’t catch that detail the first few times through.

That was sixty-five years ago, and the tape’s been cut and recut more times than I can count, in stereo and mono both, which was the way Davis and Macero meant it to be released. The copies aren’t the same, and the easy one to find is almost never the one you want.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Share

Edition №3

“What’s Going On,” the title track of Marvin Gaye’s 1971 album, was written by Obie Benson of the Four Tops. His own group refused to record it.

Renaldo “Obie” Benson, the Four Tops’ bass vocalist, was on tour in May 1969. The Four Tops’ bus pulled into Berkeley on May 15. Benson watched Berkeley police shoot buckshot into the crowd at People’s Park. One person was killed. Another was permanently blinded. 128 were hospitalized. The day is still called Bloody Thursday. Benson started writing “What’s Going On” after the tour and finished it with Motown songwriter Al Cleveland. The Four Tops refused to record it. They said it was a protest song.

Benson took the song to Marvin Gaye. Marvin liked it but wanted The Originals to cut it. Benson kept after him and eventually offered to give him a cut of the royalties. Marvin recorded “What’s Going On” at Hitsville USA on June 1, 1970.

There was more in motion than just Benson’s song. Marvin’s brother Frankie had served three years in Vietnam as an Army radio DJ and returned to civilian life in 1970. The conversations between them after Frankie came home reached past the title track and shaped the album that followed. “What’s Happening Brother,” recorded the following spring, came directly from those brotherly talks. The Benson sketch became the title track. Frankie’s IRL experience became the spine.

The opening saxophone line that defines the title track was a creative accident. Eli Fontaine, a Detroit session player, was warming up over the backing track. Marvin stopped the tape and sent him home. They already had what they needed. Fontaine protested he was just goofing around. Marvin told him goofing around was the take. Talk about an efficient use of studio time!

Berry Gordy hated it. He called the title track “the worst thing I ever heard in my life.” When Marvin called him in the Bahamas to argue for it, Gordy asked: “Marvin, why do you want to ruin your career?” When Harry Balk later pressed him to release the single, Gordy named what bothered him: “that Dizzy Gillespie stuff in the middle, that scatting, it’s old.” Gordy refused.

Marvin told him: “Put it out or I’ll never record for you again.” The standoff held through the fall of 1970. In January 1971, Harry Balk and Motown’s sales vice president Barney Ales pressed and released 100,000 copies of “What’s Going On” to radio stations and record stores without Gordy’s approval. The single sold over 200,000 copies in its first week, went to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and held number one on the soul singles chart for five weeks. Gordy reversed and gave Marvin thirty days to deliver the album. The recording sessions took ten business days in late March 1971.

What’s Going On is Marvin Gaye’s eleventh studio album. Tamla released it on May 21, 1971. It sold two million copies in its first year and changed how Motown operated. The reissues never stopped, and they are not equal. In 2022 two editions arrived wearing nearly the same sticker and naming the same engineer. Only one of them is what it claims to be.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Subscribe now

Edition №2

Forty years ago this month, The Smiths released The Queen Is Dead. I have owned a copy of it, in one format or another, for most of the time since, and I still do not have the one that matters.

I found the band at 13, through Meat Is Murder. My mom drove me to Sound Warehouse for the cassette. When the Queen Is Dead tour came through Texas I went to see them at the Bronco Bowl in Dallas, a room in the back of a bowling alley, with a few of my waver friends. None of us could drive yet, so one parent dropped us off and another came back for us. I did not know it would be the band’s last tour. I am fairly sure none of us did.

What followed was the usual teenage version of devotion, and not an original one. Lyrics on my textbook covers. The Morrissey haircut. The fake thick-rimmed glasses and the cardigans, the whole copy of the look he wore through the Smiths years, minus the gladioli. I was one of a lot of kids doing exactly the same thing.

The copies have come and gone since. Cassettes and CDs lost in various moves, replaced, lost again. What I have now is three: a US Sheffield Lab Matrix vinyl, a Japan first-generation CD and an American CD I keep mostly out of habit. Not one of them is the copy the verdict points at.

That verdict lands somewhere specific. Forty years of licensee pressings, remasters and reissues have produced dozens of ways to own this record, and they are not equal. One of them holds the recording best, and it has look-alikes close enough to fool a careful buyer. The work is knowing which copy that is, and how to tell.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

Edition №1 named the verdict on Boxer. This is the other half of that work, and a preview of what the Reference Checks paid tier will read like when it opens to subscribers.

Every paid edition will carry two pieces: an editorial reading like this one, the argument and consequence behind the verdict, and the full chain-of-custody dossier, every pressing, matrix, plant and identifier the research touched. The reading below is free in full, and a short sample of the dossier sits at the foot, so you can see the second half too. The dossier joins the reading in full when the tier opens.

If you want to know when that happens, the free subscription is how you’ll hear about it.

A free subscription opens the rest of this edition, including the verdict.

If you enjoy REFERENCE CHECKS, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If you refer friends, you will receive benefits that give you special access to REFERENCE CHECKS.

How to participate

1. Share REFERENCE CHECKS. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.

Refer a friend

2. Earn benefits. When more friends use your referral link to subscribe, you’ll receive special benefits.

• Tier 1 (3 Referrals) — Reference Checks Field Guide : A designed PDF that teaches you to read a pressing the way the verdicts do. It walks the runout etchings and matrix codes, the grading scale and where it bends in practice, and the path a record takes from master tape to the copy in your hands. The groundwork under every edition, made to keep. If you have ever wanted to stop guessing in the shop, this is where it starts.

• Tier 2 (8 Referrals) — Early Access to the Paid Tier : When the paid tier opens, you are in, comped and ahead of the wall. That means the full evidence dossier behind each verdict, the gray-zone work and the pressings that did not make the cut, and a seat at the quarterly listening session built around an interview with a mastering engineer or the people who made the record. The deeper half of Reference Checks, on the house, before it opens to anyone else.

• Tier 3 (25 Referrals) — Your Record, Checked : Name a record you love and I take it through the Pressing Council, the same evidence-led process behind every edition. I trace the chain from master to lacquer to plant to digital, weigh the forks, and write you the verdict on the version that comes closest to what the recording is, with exactly what to look for when you go to buy it. It is the rarest thing this publication makes, reserved for the readers who brought the most people to the work. Checks are written in the order they are earned, so allow a few weeks.

Visit the leaderboard

To learn more, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Thank you for helping get the word out about REFERENCE CHECKS!