May 22, 2019

Thoughts on My Father's House on NEBRASKA LP (Update 1/3):
The alternate take with synth coda on regular vinyl pressing!!!

Still, I'm not certain if what I report here is totally NEW information to you, readers and visitors of this blog, since I believe many, if not all, of you are knowledgeable collectors of his music. At least for me, however, this probably is the biggest surprise in this decade, and one of the most exciting findings in my career as a vinyl collector of Springsteen's records. As you know, an alternate take of My Father's House, notable for its extended instrumental coda, happened to be pressed on regular CD in Japan due to mishandling of the recording between the U.S. Columbia Records and CBS/SONY Japan. It was when his sixth album NEBRASKA was for the first time reissued in the then cutting-edge music medium in 1985 domestically and for export to the U.S. and Europe. Thus, it is a general consensus that no vinyl copies of this album, which is originally released worldwide in 1982, exist that contain the alternate version of this song.

You can't know if the track is an alternate take, as far as you simply watch the grooves.
You need to play and give a listen to it.
—  Shown is an erroneous U.S. copy of NEBRASKA
with a blank label on Side 2, pressed at the Columbia Records factory in Carrollton, GA,
according to the matrix number information on the dead wax space.
(Note that this copy has nothing to do with the one here I'm talking about)
Meanwhile, it has long been known that the album's acetates and early test pressing vinyls include this long version in place of the common take. Moreover, there have been vinyl LP copies in circulation from several countries, which contain a typographical error on the B-side label listing as if the alternate take were on the disc [i.e., the wrong track length (5' 43") is printed on the label instead of the correct one (5' 03")]. Nearly three years ago, I wrote and summarized this subject, which has been posted here as four sequential blog articles (from Part 1 to Part 4), followed by an addendum a year after these posts (All posts are assembled here). Since then, I had never thought that I would write about this topic once again.

And it was about a month ago when I did some leftover work at home listening to this acoustic album for a serene night. Right after the penultimate track on Side 2 was supposed to finish playing, to my total surprise, I heard the quiet synthesizer coda leaching out from my audio speakers. It was a very unusual and startled moment because I knew I was not listening to the CD or digital audio files, but was playing an old, analog disc of an import LP which I purchased recently in my efforts to collect those misprints. Needless to say, I adjusted the volume level up and repeated playing the last part of this track by lifting up and down the tone arm again and again on my manual turntable, to confirm whether what I heard was indeed real or I was just hallucinating. Every time I tried, that synth coda came out discreetly through the speakers with some light surface noise and clicking.  
Yes, there it was — I found the alternate version of My Father's House on a commercially available regular LP pressing.
— To be continued.


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