Dixie Dregs
Dregs of the Earth

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

If you want to hear what happens when five virtuoso instrumentalists manage to combine their talent for Jazz, Rock, Classical and Country (thank god there aren’t any vocals) into a potent mix that defies classification and breaks all the rules, this is the one. It reminds me of Ellington’s famous line that there are only two kinds of music: good music and bad music. This is the kind of music you may have trouble describing, but one thing’s for sure -- it’s good. In fact it’s really good.

This is the most amazing album the Dregs ever recorded, and now this wild amalgamation of rock, jazz, country, prog and classical music has the kind of sound I always dreamed it could have. It’s rich and smooth like good analog should be. It’s also got plenty of energy and rock and roll drive, which is precisely where the famous Half-Speed falls apart.

Few audiophiles know this music, and that’s a shame. This record is just a delight from beginning to end.

I’m apparently not the only one who noticed how good the album is: in 1980, Dregs of the Earth received a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.

This vintage Arista 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 Dregs of the Earth 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 even as late as 1980
• 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.

What We're Listening For On Dregs of the Earth

• 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.

Biggest Problems

The typical pressing of this album is a little rolled off on top, a tad veiled and smeary in the all-important midrange, and somewhat compressed —- you keep wanting to turn up the volume to get it to come to life, but it’s already playing loud enough, so what can you do? Most copies have plenty of bass, but it often lacks definition.

But the Hot Stamper copies show you just how correct this album can sound. The tonality of the individual instruments is perfection. All the parts have plenty of room to work in; you can find any line from any player and follow it throughout the song. This is what the transparency and openness of the best copies is all about -- they never run out of space, they never get congested.

A Desert Island Disc

This is a Desert Island Disc for yours truly. For a record to come to my Desert Island, said record:

1) Must have at some time during my fifty years as a music lover and audio enthusiast been played enthusiastically, fanatically even, causing me to feel what Leonard Bernstein called “the joy of music.”

2) I must currently respect the album, and --

3) I must think I will want to listen to the music fairly often and well into the future (not knowing how long I may be stranded there).

How many records meet the Desert Island Disc criteria? Certainly many more than you can see when you click here, but new titles are added as time permits.

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 recordings.

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

We consider this album the band's masterpiece. Others that belong in that category can he found here.

Side One

• Road Expense
• Pride O' The Farm
• Twiggs Approved
• Hereafter

Side Two

• The Great Spectacular
• Broad Street Strut
• I'm Freaking Out
• Old World

Rave Review

If you were a Dixie Dregs fan in 1980, by this time you knew just what to expect from a new album of theirs. Beautiful, majestic ballads, southern flavored rockers, a blazing bluegrass romp, at least one smokin' prog tune, and maybe a little classical thrown in. This one does not disappoint. For their first major label release (they had just switched to Arista records after starting out on Capricorn) the Dregs created what may have been their finest album yet.

The absolute highlight here is "I'm Freaking Out", which starts with a jazzy jam, and turns into a symphonic prog tour de force. It's easily up there with the best the Dregs have ever recorded.

The rest of the album is your usual extremely listenable and inventive Dregs fare. The bluegrass selection, "Pride O' The Farm" is good, but slightly slower than their usual bluegrass fare. They fixed that in concerts, where they sped the song up to jaw dropping speeds.

This is a definite must for any Dregs fan.

- Review by "Evolver," ProgArchives.com