Traffic
John Barleycorn Must Die

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

This vintage UA pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of John Barleycorn Must Die Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1970
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

Flute and Snare

The flute (a major element of the music if you know the album) is much airier here than it would be on most copies. Chris Wood's sax, which is a key part of many of the best tracks, and beautifully recorded I might add, is potentially amazing sounding as well, with good body and lovely harmonic texture.

Note how little processing there is to the sound of the horns and woodwinds, how real they sound. This is unusual, to say the least in the world of pop records.

Some Tough Tests

We learned something new a while back, and we learned it by simply running into an amazingly transparent copy that made it clear -- for the first time -- exactly what Winwood was doing on the piano with his left hand. There are two musical figures that alternate: one, involving the lower notes, which tend to be blurry, obscured and murky on most pressings, followed by two, the right-handed higher notes, which are usually much more clear and audible in the mix.

Only the very best copies let us "see" the bass notes of the piano so clearly and correctly. Next time you want to compare different pressings of Barleycorn, pay special attention to the lower notes of the piano on "Glad." It is our contention, backed by mountains of evidence, that no two copies of the album will get that piano to sound the same. (It will also help if you have large dynamic speakers with which to do the test.)

Getting the voices right on "Stranger to Himself" is practically impossible; if the voices are full, smooth, yet breathy and clear, you have that rare copy that actually gets the midrange right. Not many do.

Tubey Magical Acoustic Guitar reproduction is superb on the better copies of this recording. Simply phenomenal amounts of Tubey Magic can be heard on every strum, along with richness, body and harmonic coherency that have all but disappeared from modern recordings (and especially from modern remasterings).

What We're Listening For On John Barleycorn Must Die

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt -- Andy Johns and Brian Humphries in this case -- would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Size and Space

One of the qualities that we don't talk about on the site nearly enough is the SIZE of the record's presentation. Some copies of the album just sound small -- they don't extend all the way to the outside edges of the speakers, and they don't seem to take up all the space from the floor to the ceiling. In addition, the sound can often be recessed, with a lack of presence and immediacy in the center.

Other copies -- my notes for these copies often read "BIG and BOLD" -- create a huge soundfield, with the music positively jumping out of the speakers. They're not brighter, they're not more aggressive, they're not hyped-up in any way, they're just bigger and clearer.

We often have to go back and downgrade the copies that we were initially impressed with in light of such a standout pressing. Who knew the recording could be that huge, spacious and three dimensional? We sure didn't, not until we played the copy that had those qualities, and that copy might have been number 8 or 9 in the rotation. Think about it: if you had only seven copies, you might not have ever gotten to hear a copy that sounded so open and clear. And how many even dedicated audiophiles would have more than one or two clean original copies with which to do a shootout?

One further point needs to be made: most of the time these very special pressings just plain rock harder. When you hear a copy do what this copy can, it's an entirely different - and dare I say unforgettable -- listening experience.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Track Commentary

The Tracklist tab above will take you to a select song breakdown for each side, with plenty of What to Listen For advice.

Other records with track breakdowns can be found here.

A Must Own Folk Rock Record

We consider this Traffic album a Masterpiece. It's a recording that belongs in any serious Rock Music Collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• Glad

The last portion of this track has some really interesting percussion and organ effects. Traffic were trying to break out of the standard pop song format by letting this song wander into psychedelic territory for a few minutes at the end. It's now become my favorite part of the song.

The reason you want to pay close attention to this part is because it helps you to judge the transparency, immediacy, and top end extension for the whole side. It should be amazingly clear and open-sounding. On too many pressings, the percussion instruments are blurred and lost in the mix. On a Hot Stamper copy they'll be right in front of you, allowing you to appreciate the interplay among the musicians as they contributed their various parts.

• Freedom Rider

You'll need lots of top end extension for this song to sound right. On many copies the double tracked flute solo in the middle of the song will be aggressive and irritating, but on a Hot Stamper pressing, the flutes will sound airy and breathy with a reasonably good sustain.

• Empty Pages

The quality of the voice is what really sets the best copies apart. Winwood is much more present on the better copies. He's recessed on most and that's just not where he needs to be for the song to work musically. He needs to be right up front, surrounded by the air and ambience of the studio. The transparency found on the better copies will give you precisely that.

This track is also a good one for making the case that records like this are made to be played LOUD. At moderate levels Winwood's vocal gets lost in the dense mix. Turn it up and there he is, front and center. When they mixed this song our guess is they mixed it at loud levels, because those are the only levels at which it really works.

Side Two

• Stranger to Himself
• John Barleycorn

The acoustic guitars that open up this song are absolute perfection on the better copies - Tubey Magical analog at its best.

This is the real test for side two. The acoustic guitars should sound rich and sweet. You'll notice at the beginning of the song that they are a little dull. The last thing in the world you want to do, however, is to brighten them up, because when you do that, as some mastering engineers have in the past, the harmony vocals and the percussion and the tambourine become much too bright later on in the song. You have to strike a balance between all the elements. That means Steve's voice at the beginning needs to be a little reserved so that the harmony vocals later on will come in right.

• Every Mother's Son

This song is almost always noisy. The domestic pressings suffer from bad vinyl and virtually every British copy we've seen lately has been beat to death (but not this one!).

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die

After a turbulent year in the spotlight as part of the supergroup Blind Faith, Steve Winwood began 1970 disillusioned with the music business and facing an all-too-common reality: He and Traffic, the band that broke up when Blind Faith come knocking, owed United Artists two more records. The keybordist and singer, then twenty-two, went into the studio right away, composing songs for what he expected would be his first solo album (working title: Mad Shadows). A few songs in, wanting more musical energy than he could generate himself, Winwood asked two of his old cronies from Traffic, drummer and sometime singer-lyricist Jim Capaldi and woodwind player Chris Wood, to stop by. Before long, Traffic was reborn.

John Barleycorn Must Die collects the music the three made during a feverish round of sessions; there are long expanses of jamming punctuated by brief sections featuring Winwood's searing vocals, a template Traffic would use on later works. Barleycorn retains the crusading spirit of the band's first two albums while moving into even more improbable realms -- among them old English balladry (the title cut), jazz-rock fusion (the instrumental "Glad," a most original appropriation of New Orleans-style piano), existential rock ("Empty Pages"), and an introspective shade of soul ("Stranger to Himself").

The band's range is impressive, as is its unconventional instrumentation -- at times Winwood supplies bass on the organ, and is accompanied by just drums and saxophone. Still, the salient characteristic of John Barleycorn, and what separates it from everything else of the day, is its earthy, unpressured feel. The tunes, most written by Winwood and Capaldi, sound like they sprouted during superfriendly jam sessions. Though they're built on strong fundamentals -- old-fashioned verse-chorus discipline -- they're ruled by a marvelous wildness, a sense that the ad-libbed explorations are as important as the hooks. Later, Traffic and others got snarled in brain-cramping attempts at prog-rock wonkery. Here, though, the band sounds utterly grounded. As the grooves percolate effortlessly along, it becomes clear that unity, not any technical skill, is what makes the music levitate.

Jim Harrington, 2005.