Dionne Warwick
Very Dionne

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.

Folks, don’t expect to see records like this coming to the site too often. We can’t find them anymore in this kind of clean condition, so if you like the lovely Ms Warwick, consider taking this one home and giving her (the record, not Dionne) a spin on your table.

Notice how the limiter on Dionne’s microphone is working overtime. She is practically shouting into it but it never seems to get much louder. Still the energy and the passion come through clearly. That’s the sign of a well-recorded vocal track.

This original Scepter 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 Very Dionne 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 1970
• 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.

You know what’s shocking about a record like this? The fact that the instruments you hear behind and to the side of the vocalist are real instruments, and for the most part they are not really being processed much, they are simply being recorded. How many times do you hear a pop album with sound like that? Almost never in our case, and we play them by the hundreds.

We recently played a Linda Ronstadt album that she did with Nelson Riddle and I can tell you one thing: the sound of that album and this one are on opposite sides of the recording spectrum in terms of naturalness. On a scale of one to a hundred, Linda scores about a two, and Dionne scores 90, maybe more. It’s a joy to hear a record with this kind of sound.

Play this one for your audiophile friends who own and respect the recordings of Dianna Krall, Patricia Barber and the like. Be sure to repeat the phrase "boy, they don’t make ’em like they used to" whenever there is a pause in the music or conversation.

You might also want to ask them if they think the invention of digital reverb was such a good idea after all.

If they’re good analog buddies that you want to keep being your buddies you might not want to say anything at all. Just keep quiet and let their own ears shame them. This is the record that can do it.

What We're Listening For On Very Dionne

• 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.

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.

Side One

• Check Out Time
• Yesterday
• We’ve Only Just Begun
• Here’s That Rainy Day
• The Green Grass Starts to Grow

Side Two

• They Don’t Give Medals to Yesterday’s Heroes
• Walk the Way You Talk
• Make It Easy on Yourself
• Going Out of My Head
• I Got Love

AMG Review

Dionne Warwick concluded an eight-year run on Scepter Records with 1970's Very Dionne. The album's wide variety of styles summed up much of what made Warwick's back catalog so universally appealing. In addition to a handful of new Burt Bacharach and Hal David sides, the platter boasts tasteful reworkings of pop music staples.

As Bacharach and David were ensconced in their own careers -- together and separately -- Warwick, along with her other arrangers, concocted an interesting mix of classic and familiar contemporary tunes, including a live take of "Make It Easy On Yourself," a cut she initially recorded for her first Scepter long-player, 1963's Presenting Dionne Warwick. Although the singer would subsequently state that "Check Out Time" was one of her least favorite Bacharach/David compositions, she opens Very Dionne with an emotive and slightly angst-filled intonation.

The mood is immediately contrasted by the pensive and reflective nature of Marty Paich's score on "Yesterday," which Warwick duly matches by way of her generous and soulful interpretation. Larry Wilcox's treatment of the Jimmy Van Heusen standard "Here Comes That Rainy Day" is a perfect example of the vocalist's significant middle-of-the-road allure. This carries over to the decidedly more modern "Going Out of My Head" and "We've Only Just Begun."

One unmitigated zenith is "I Got Love" from the Ossie Davis Broadway production Purlie. Once again, Warwick -- under Paich's direction -- equals if not surpasses Melba Moore's stage presentation.