Back from the audio place. The good news is that both Po, Po, Po and Birthday Song are on the tapes and the tapes are in GREAT shape. So, as long as I get permission from MGM to include them (hoping that's not a prob, but you never know with these big corps), I shall. Po, Po, Po is terrific AND it's the bloody opening number of the show! That's a major plus. Birthday Song is an amusing one-minute throw-away number, but fun. There are also two reels of "outtakes" - but the splices were falling apart so I'm not sure what those are and I'm not spending the money to find out (not only the transfer cost, but the repairing the splices cost) - what I "think" they are are sections of number included on the LP that were edited out for time reasons, although, that said, how there could be forty-something minutes of edits is anyone's guess. Even if I wanted to transfer and find out, then there's the question of where they go - I don't know this score well at all and I would hate to try and guess where this edited stuff went - it would also require a two CD set, which I'm not willing to do. If money were no expense, I'd remix the entire album from scratch - the sound on the LP is very washy, maybe one of the most heavily reverbed albums I've ever heard, very much like Mitch Miller's Columbia stuff. Interestingly, the four-track session masters have reverb recorded ON them, but it's not so washy - for the LP it sounds like they added reverb to the recorded reverb (normally you would never record reverb - it's added in the mix). So, the four-tracks remixed would sound amazing, but given the sales of Anya, I'm not going down that road.
