Sep 24, 2017

Thoughts on My Father's House on NEBRASKA LP (addendum)

About a year ago, I wrote my thoughts on a longer, alternate version of My Father's House in four consecutive posts (here to here). On this subject, I had, and still have, one trivial question to be answered: Which version, standard or alternate, was originally included on the cassette tape (CBS/SONY 25KP 868) released in Japan?  Commercially, the alternate version first appeared in 1985 on the Japan-pressed copies of NEBRASKA CD,
  Various Japanese releases of NEBRASKA and an official poster
distributed for the
promotion in 1982.
including those exported to the U.S. and Europe where they were manufactured as the first edition. According to the Brucebase website, this was because the U.S. Columbia Records have mistakenly sent the different master tapes (pseudo-stereo mix) to CBS/SONY for pressing CD in Japan. So, logically, the version on the cassette, which is released in 1982, must be the standard, shorter take without a synth code, just like that on the vinyl album. So, why I got to think about this?

Years ago long before starting this blog, I noticed the following interesting posts concerning the take on the Japanese cassette, which are still readable in a Steve Hoffman Music Forums' thread that has been initiated in 2004 (Does my Springsteen Nebraska CD have the long version of "My Father's House"? ; here). In this thread, someone made an inquiry post (found as post #14) as follows:

    This thread forced me to play my 2 copies of Nebraska, my original 1982 JPN. vinyl press and my
    1999 JPN. paper sleeve CD. Neither has the long version of MFH. 
    
    Would ANY original vinyl have this long version?
    Would the JPN. orig. CD have the long version?
    Would the US orig. CD (made in Japan?) have the long version?
 
    Help!

Then, there was a response (post #16) by someone to the above:

    1: No. It only came out on a Japanese promo cassette. (the underline made by this blogger)
    2: Yes
    3: Yes

This reminded me of those old days of air-checking
FM-radio program back in high school.

The responder responded to the inquiry post confidently, and based on his other posts on the thread, seemed to be very knowledgeable about these stuff (and so what he said seemed believable). This has made me try to seek and examine the promo cassette version of the track. So far, I haven't got the answer yet. This is simply because I have not been able to locate the promo version of the cassette which must be extremely rare even if it existed (The oldest promo cassette in my collection is for BORN IN THE U.S.A.; see here). OK, then what about the regular commercial version of the cassette?  I own few of regular cassette releases for Springsteen titles, and recently obtained a worn-looking used copy at 300 JPY. Fortunately, the 35-year-old tape was not worn or damaged, replayed well on my equally old Nakamichi deck (a low-end model, BX-2, also released in 1982), and sounded still excellent. However, what I heard was exactly the same as the standard take, although on this occasion I enjoyed listening to the whole album in a long autumn night.

Read three consecutive posts starting from here for the updated information.

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