savaloy dip **UPDATED**

Ok, ok. So I didn't buy this one, but even better, I got it as a gift in the mail (one copy all the way from England). I certainly would have paid for it given the opportunity, but Alan Price's 1974 album, "Savaloy Dip," was never even issued in the first place. I had been dying to hear this record for ages, and it is only through the kindness of two perfect strangers that I am now able to say that I have. To the best of my knowledge,    "Savaloy Dip" hasn't surfaced on the internet yet, and I know for a fact that it is featured on very few traders' bootlists. I doubt that the delightful individuals who went out of their respective ways to grace my mailbox with this presently unreleased gem would want to be mentioned here by name, but they should certainly know that I will never put this album on without remembering their thoughtfulness.

That said, here is what I can tell you about this album:

"Savaloy Dip" was slated to be Alan Price's follow-up to his rather successful 1973 album, "O Lucky Man!," but the recording company (Reprise) rejected it for unknown reasons, and it was unfortunately never released. Somehow, a copy of the master tape was still delivered to the Ampex plant in Illinois, where an unknown quantity of 8-tracks were manufactured before Reprise was able to pull the plug. Although Reprise issued orders to destroy all manufactured copies, at least a few of them escaped and have since been discovered and preserved for posterity. After the album's rejection, Alan decided to scrap all of the material except for one track, "Between Today and Yesterday," around which his proper follow-up to "O Lucky Man!," 1975's "Between Today And Yesterday" would be based.

Additionally, I can unbiasedly tell you that the Reprise execs who gave the orders to scrap this album were a bunch of idiots. I've only listened to it twice through since it came in the mail this afternoon, but it is every bit as wonderful and thoughtful as I could have hoped. This album should be listened to neither as a discarded, dug-up, orphaned, or aborted project from Alan's musical past, nor as a botched musical experiment to fill the gap between "O Lucky Man!" and "Between Today And Yesterday." "Savaloy Dip" definitely stands on its own as a meritous album in its own right. Prepare yourselves for a truly wonderful album by one of my favorite artists!

I really don't know anything about the lineage of this copy. I can tell you it's got to be at least a 4th generation cd-r, probably higher. All tracks were copied to my computer with EAC. I used a very light filter on them to remove some of the tape hiss, and I patched the title track, "Savaloy Dip," back together, as it was originally split up across two sides of the 8-Track. I did the best that I could, but if anyone out there would care to give this thing a proper re-mastering, I'll gladly send her/him the original .wav files.

**UPDATE**
I received another copy in the mail last week, and it's obviously sourced from the same 8-Track tape, but from the first listen, I could tell it sounded slightly better than the first one. Anyway, I decided to go ahead and do a spectrum and frequency analysis of the track, "Over and Over Again," from each disc. If you're interested in this kind of thing, feel free to have a look at the results. The graphic on top is from the first disc that I received and originally posted, while the one on bottom is from the second disc that I just got a few days ago. Now, I don't have a great eye for this kind of thing, but you don't really need one to see (on the spectrograph) that the first copy has gotten mangled somewhere along the line. Also, a sharp dip in high frequencies is present on the frequency analysis of both copies. Normally, this indicates that what you've got is .mp3 sourced, but this may be a result of the original 8-Track transfer instead. Once again, if there's anybody out there with an informed opinion on this matter, please chime in.

Now, on to the good stuff. I've been doing a sufficient amount of tinkering with Audacity since I originally made this post, and as a result, went about fixing up the title track, "Savaloy Dip," in an entirely different way than before. I also ran a slightly lighter hiss removal this time around, with a minor rumble correction. The earlier posted copy definitely ended up sounding a too muddy as a result of the filter I used, and I really do apologize for that. I think I did a pretty decent job on this one though. My most recent purchase, which, believe you me, you'll be hearing about in the next couple of days, certainly had a lot to do with the better production value on this updated copy. That said, my original offer still stands to anyone interested in giving this fantastic album the makeover it's been so unfairly deprived of for the last 34 years. If you downloaded the previously posted version of this album, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE replace it with the newly posted one, ESPECIALLY if you're planning on circulating it in any way. I guess that's all. This has been a long and draining update, so please ENJOY!

 03. (original) 
 03. (repaired) 

   04. (original) 
   04. (repaired) 

     05. (original) 
     05. (repaired) 

The tracklist and download link are in the comments section below. Delete your old copy, enjoy your new copy, and please let me know what you think!