Billy Joel - Cold Spring Harbor (Original Mix) (1971) (A MIKE SOLOF GUEST POST)

Billy Joel's 1971 debut album, "Cold Spring Harbor," has issues. It's a long and tangled tale. But the gist of it is because Joel was just starting his music career, he didn't have much control over the production of the album. And he had wound up signed to a marginal record label that did a lot of dumb things, including forcing a producer on him he didn't get along with, who produced his songs in ways he didn't want. But the worst thing of all was that the final master was accidentally sped up by three percent for all the songs! That may not sound like much, but it made his voice sound strangely high. Joel hated it with a passion, but there was nothing he could do. In retrospect, his voice was naturally higher at that time, since it was still changing in his early 20s, so that made the problem worse. He would sound noticeably different on his next album, just two years later.

Joel also signed a terrible record contract, though luckily it ended up being for just that debut album. That means that, even until now in 2025, he's had no control over that album. In 1983, after Joel became a superstar, the record company remixed the album to fix the speed problem. But they made lots of changes Joel didn't approve of as well, including hiring musicians to add new parts to some songs. The kicker though was that the version that finally got rereleased with those changes STILL hadn't fixed the speed problem! Seems like that was a clown car of a record company.

And that's how things still stand today, with the original version having issues, and the remix version having other issues, and both versions running too fast. In short, there's no good version of this album.

So guest poster Mike Solof decided to fix this. He took the original version and adjusted the speed of all the songs. But he also lowered the pitch of the songs by six to ten percent, depending on the song. That was an effort to make Joel's high voice at the time sound more like the voice he's had for all his other music. 

There's a lot more to the story behind this album and its problems. I recommend you watch the HBO Max Billy Joel documentary "And So It Goes," released just a week or so ago as I write this in August 2025. It has a whole section about it. Also, here's the Wikipedia article on the album, which explains a bit:

Cold Spring Harbor (album) - Wikipedia 

But mostly, check out the PDF Mike made that's included in the download file. It has some interesting quotes from Joel himself about the problems with the album and its remix, and Mike explains more about the things he did to fix those problems. 

This album is really a gem that has never gotten its due because of all the problems mentioned above. It's still not perfect, since some production choices can't be undone. But hopefully you'll be able to hear it in a brand new light with this improved version. 

This album is 33 minutes long.

01 She's Got a Way (Billy Joel)
02 You Can Make Me Free (Billy Joel)
03 Everybody Loves You Now (Billy Joel)
04 Why Judy Why (Billy Joel)
05 Falling of the Rain (Billy Joel)
06 Turn Around (Billy Joel)
07 You Look So Good to Me (Billy Joel)
08 Tomorrow Is Today (Billy Joel)
09 Nocturne [Instrumental] (Billy Joel)
10 Got to Begin Again (Billy Joel)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/H7Kon97T

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/03UwPXPdpG7f1Bc/file 

This is the official cover of the album. However, that's in black and white. I used the Kolorize program to colorize it, since I wanted to make it a little different to show this is an alternate version.

Paul McCartney - Portland Building Ballroom, Nottingham University, Nottingham, Britain, 2-9-1972

Here's a timely post, if you're into bootleg collecting, like I am. Just a few days ago (as I write this on the last day of July 2025), a bootleg emerged on the Internet for the first time. Actually, this recording of this concert had been well known by Paul McCartney fans for a long time, because this was McCartney's very first concert with his new band Wings, since he'd been a member of the Beatles in the 1960s. But the audience recording had poor quality. The news is that a much, much better version has emerged, and that's the version I'm posting here.

Unfortunately, some people privately hoard interesting music recordings for whatever reason. (If you're one of those people, please share, before most of the interested people pass on!) In this case, somebody had a reel-to-reel recording of this concert, and didn't share it for decades. A reel-to-reel recording is still an audience recording, of lesser sound quality than most soundboard or FM radio bootlegs. But it also indicates a recording device of significantly better recording ability than the typical tape recorders people were sneaking into concerts at the time.

Earlier in July 2025, Beatles fans AdamBound and Juan Cena noticed this reel-to-reel recording was on sale. They bought it, then they improved it. For instance, they corrected the speed, as it ran a bit slow. Then they posted it at the Beatlegs forum, which is where I got it. In addition to sounding better than all previously known versions, it was seven minutes longer, including a second version of the song "Give Ireland Back to the Irish."

I made some additional changes to further improve the sound. One problem was that two songs were cut off right at the beginning, "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and "Bip Bop." Only a few seconds were lost in each case, as the recording person was a few seconds slow hitting the "record" button. I found another bootleg from just two days later, in Hull, Britain, and used that to patch in the missing seconds for each song. That's why those two have "[Edit]" in their titles. "Lucille" and "Long Tall Sally" each had drop outs that lasted a couple of seconds in the middle of the songs. I patched those up using music from elsewhere in the song. That's why those two are edited too.

Furthermore, I made three big changes to all the songs. One was that the voices on stage were quite low during all the banter between songs. I boosted those considerably, so now it's easy to hear what McCartney and his band mates had to say. Secondly, I used MVSEP to remove all the crowd noise during the songs while keeping them at the ends of songs. Third, I boosted the lead vocals relative to the instrumental parts when I thought that helped, which was for most songs. Thus, this album should sound even better. Still not a soundboard, but getting there.

The band performed two short sets. Clearly, the first part of the first set wasn't included in this recording. We know other songs were played, since McCartney made reference to playing "Lucille" for the second time, when there's only one version here. (There are two versions of "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" though. Since the band had just formed, they didn't know that many songs yet.) Aside from the first "Lucille," we don't know how many other songs were missed. But judging by other set lists from the days just after this concert, probably only a couple others, maybe a little more.

McCartney wanted his new band to get better performing some concerts before they dig really big concerts and faced the scrutiny of the press. So they came up with the idea of just spontaneously showing up at universities and giving concerts before any media hoopla could catch up with them. They chose universities because there was guaranteed to be an audience of interested young people gathered together there. This concert was performed during lunch time to a packed room of only about 700 to 800 people. That was a far cry from the huge stadiums McCartney performed when the Beatles went on tour!

There are a lot of very interesting stories connected to this concert. But I don't have to write about them here, because there's a lovely webpage all about this concert, which you can find here:

Wings concert at Nottingham University in Nottingham on Feb 9, 1972 (Lunchtime) 

It has lots of quotes from band members and audience members, photos, and much more. I strongly recommend checking it out. That same website has another interesting page about the events that led up to the concert:

Wings departs for their University Tour • The Paul McCartney Project 

This album is 54 minutes long. 

01 Blue Moon of Kentucky [Edit] (Paul McCartney)
02 talk (Paul McCartney)
03 Give Ireland Back to the Irish (Paul McCartney)
04 talk (Paul McCartney)
05 Help Me (Paul McCartney)
06 talk (Paul McCartney)
07 Thank You Darling (Paul McCartney)
08 talk (Paul McCartney)
09 Wild Life (Paul McCartney)
10 talk (Paul McCartney)
11 Bip Bop [Edit] (Paul McCartney)
12 talk (Paul McCartney)
13 Shuffle Blues (Paul McCartney)
14 talk (Paul McCartney)
15 The Mess (Paul McCartney)
16 talk (Paul McCartney)
17 My Love (Paul McCartney)
18 talk (Paul McCartney)
19 Give Ireland Back to the Irish [Second Version] (Paul McCartney)
20 talk (Paul McCartney)
21 Lucille [Edit] (Paul McCartney)
22 talk (Paul McCartney)
23 Long Tall Sally [Edit] (Paul McCartney)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/6ggzcJbt

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/D6OdYMft1UfMpef/file 

The cover photo comes from this exact concert. I could only find one photo known to be from this concert. It was in black and white, but I used the Kolorize program to colorize it. Then I used the Krea AI program to improve the quality.