Bread
The Best of Bread

A Better Records Desert Island Disc if ever there was one. And believe me, there are plenty of them.

This vintage Elektra 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 The Best of Bread 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 1973
• 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.

Ballads and Rockers

Side one is where the famous Bread ballads are found ("Make It With You," "Everything I Own," "Baby I'm A Want You" and "If," just to name four of the six, the other two being nearly as good).

Pay close attention to the sound of the drums. (We really like the way famous session player Mike Botts' kit is recorded, not to mention his Hal-Blaine-like -- which means god-like -- drumming skills.)

Side two is where the more rockin' songs are.

What We're Listening For On The Best of Bread

• 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 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.

Recording with Tubey Magic

On the better Hot Stamper copies, the ones with especially sweet and rich analog sound, the credit obviously must go to their brilliant engineer, Armin Steiner, the man responsible for recording some of the best sounding, most Tubey Magical Chart Topping Pop Rock for this band throughout the 70s. As would be expected from success on such a scale, Steiner has more than a hundred other engineering credits. He's also the reason that Hot August Night is one of the best sounding live albums ever recorded.

When you find his name in the credits, there's at least a chance that the sound will be very good. You need the right pressing, of course, but the potential for good sound should be your working hypothesis. Now all it takes is some serious digging in the record bins, tedious cleaning and even more tedious critical listening to determine if you've lucked into a diamond in the rough. Or, if you prefer, allow us do all that work for you. After more than 30 years in the business, we're gotten pretty good at it.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus and maybe a bit better 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 originals.

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.

A Must Own Record

The Best of Bread is a recording that belongs in any serious popular music collection. Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• Make It With You
• Everything I Own
• Diary
• Baby I'm-A Want You
• It Don't Matter to Me
• If

Side Two

• Mother Freedom
• Down on My Knees

A tribute to The Beatles! If you can find a song that sounds more like The Beatles than this one, I'd love to hear it. The guitars, the harmonies, the beat -- even the instrumental break, with a guitar solo right out of George Harrison's playbook -- everything here sounds Fab!

• Too Much Love
• Let Your Love Go
• Look What You've DoneI

Side one is the Ballad side. Side two is the Rock side. This is the only track on side two that really lets you compare the sound of sides one and two with similiar material. This song starts out like a ballad and halfway through changes into a rocker. If you have a good side two, this song should sound every bit as good as the gorgeous ballads on side one.

• Truckin'

AMG Review

This is what the All Music Guide had to say about the first album, but it applies equally to all their early material:

"This is effectively the birth of Californian soft rock, as David Gates and compatriots blend the folk-rock of the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield with a distinctly British melodicism and a streak of sentimentality borrowed from McCartney. The result is a modest little gem, with more strange turns than you'd expect from their reputation -- including soaring falsettos, spiraling melodies, rough guitars, and, best of all, a set of tightly-written, appealing songs."