SIMON & GARFUNKEL Bookends SEALED 1968 Columbia 1ST PRESS RARE HYPE & POSTER
$
230
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Description
Vinyl: Mint! Sealed! This is the Original 1968 Columbia 1st Pressing! NO BARCODE! KCS 9529. Classic Rock. Classic Folk Rock. One of Simon & Garfunkel's Definitive albums that presaged the Singer-Songwriter boom of the '70s. One of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time!! allmusic gives it 5 stars!!
See Review Below!
Cover: Mint! Sealed!! (see photos) Has the two Hype stickers, including the elaborate transparent title sticker which also hypes the included Full Color Poster. This is ultra rare because this would've been discarded when the record's cellophane seal was broken, torn off and discarded. Also has a price sticker. The shrink has one tiny tear on the front cover under the title. Nice high gloss on cover. Front and back of cover artwork and text are rich, clear and bright, with minor wear. Seams, corners and spine are solid and clean. No writing. Spine print is crystal clear. No bumps nor creases.The record appears straight; when I look down with one eye down all 4 edges there's no big, ominous bow to it that would suggest that it's warped.I will gladly accept the return of Sealed records as long as they have not been opened (i.e. as long as they are still in the condition I sent them in). Every record has a "fingerprint" of imperfections in the seal and/or the cover and I separately photograph and keep these details to prevent fraudulently returned items...yep, there are a few rotten apples out there!) I will not accept a previously sealed record that has been opened, even if the complaint is that the record is warped. This is why I look down the edge of all 4 sides of the record, to assess for potential bowing. Look for that in the description of the covers of all my Sealed items. Thanks! By the way, I've never (knock on wood!) had a buyer complain that they received a warped Sealed record. :)
Goldmine Standards.
U.S. Shipping: FREE domestic shipping! Tracking included. Combine any additional albums and they're also shipped FREE! If you wish to take advantage of my COMBINED SHIPPING deal, simply select your records by clicking on "ADD TO CART" on the main listing page. Do this for all of your selections and then go to your cart to checkout. Your combined shipping discount will be computed automatically.
All records are packaged securely with the vinyl sandwiched between two cardboard stiffeners and shipped in a custom cardboard record mailer box.
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Why buy a first or early pressing and not a re-issue or a ‘re-mastered’ vinyl album?
First and early pressings are pressed from the first generation lacquers and stampers. They usually sound vastly superior to later issues/re-issues (which, in recent times, are often pressed from whatever 'best' tapes or digital sources are currently available) - many so-called 'audiophile' new 180g pressings are cut from hi-res digital sources…essentially an expensive CD pressed on vinyl. Why experience the worse elements of both formats? These are just High Maintenance CDs, with mid-ranges so cloaked with a veil as to sound smeared. They are nearly always compressed with murky transients and a general lifelessness in the overall sound. There are exceptions where re-masters/re-presses outshine the original issues, but they are exceptions and not the norm.
First or early pressings nearly always have more immediacy, presence and dynamics. The sound staging is wider. Subtle instrument nuances are better placed with more spacious textures. Balances are firmer in the bottom end with a far-tighter bass. Upper-mid ranges shine without harshness, and the overall depth is more immersive. Inner details are clearer.
On first and early pressings, the music tends to sound more ‘alive’ and vibrant. The physics of sound energy is hard to clarify and write about from a listening perspective, but the best we can describe it is to say that you can 'hear' what the mixing and mastering engineers wanted you to hear when they first recorded the music.
AllMusic Review by Thom Jurek [-]
Simon & Garfunkel quietly slipped Bookends, their fourth album, into the bins with a whisper in March 1968. They are equal collaborators with producer/engineer Roy Halee in a multivalently layered song cycle observing the confusion of those seeking an elusive American Dream, wistfully reflecting on innocence lost forever to the cold winds of change. Bookends opens with an acoustic guitar stating a theme, slowly and plaintively. It erupts into the musical dissonance that introduces "Save the Life of My Child." Its uneasy rock & roll frames highly metaphorical and ironic lyrics and a nursery rhyme bridge. "America" is a folk song with a lilting soprano saxophone in its refrain as a small pipe organ paints acoustic guitars, framed by the ghostly traces of classic American Songbook pop structures. Two people travel the landscape by bus searching for the track's subject, eventually discovering that everyone else on the freeway is too. Its sophisticated harmonic invention is toppled by its message; "America" becomes an ellipsis, a cipher, an unanswerable question. "Overs," a study about the end of a relationship, contains Halee's ingenious use of sound: lighting a cigarette and inhaling and exhaling its smoke underscore the story told by the melody and lyrics. In a two-minute field recording of the voices of old people collected from nursing homes by Garfunkel, disembodied voices reveal entire lifetimes in a few seconds. "Old Friends" carries the message deeper. Simon's image of two old men sitting on a park bench sharing memories and their fears of the changes surrounding them is indelible. A horn section threatens to interrupt their reverie, reflecting the chaos they perceive, but is warded off as the gentle melody returns and fades into the album's opening theme. In "Fakin' It," Simon reveals the falsity inherent in modern life -- it's better to appear to have it together than reflect the struggle of not being able to: "This feeling of fakin' it/I still haven't shaken it/I know I'm fakin' it/I'm not really makin' it." The album's final three tracks, "Mrs. Robinson" (the iconic theme song from the film The Graduate), "A Hazy Shade of Winter," and the album's concluding track, "At the Zoo," offer a tremblingly bleak vision of the future rooted in the lives of everyday people who "fake it," living an illusory dream publicly while trembling with confusion and fear in private (no matter one's generation), subverting the Madison Avenue notion of the "generation gap" simply and honestly. Bookends' problematic, disillusioned themes, sometimes disguised in wry humor, striking arrangements, and augmented orchestral instrumentation, portray the sounds of people in an American life that they no longer understand, or understands them. Simon & Garfunkel never overstate; instead they observe, almost journalistically, enormous life and cultural questions in the process of them being asked. In just over 29 minutes, Bookends is stunning in its vision of a bewildered America in search of itself.
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