I’m sure many of you are familiar with the seminal KISS album Destroyer. As you may or may not know, the last track “Do You Love Me” is followed by a “hidden” track of distorted sounds, commonly known nowadays as “Rock and Roll Party”. The CD editions handled this two ways: the first CD pressings (circa 1987) had “Do You Love Me” as one continuous 4:57 track with “Rock and Roll Party” included, the two separated by silence. On later pressings (starting with the 1997 remaster) “Do You Love Me” and “Rock and Roll Party” were split into two separate tracks. (All digital releases were modeled after the 1997 release, and thus “Rock and Roll Party” is a separate track and listed by that name.)
With this all in mind, it begs this question: how do we handle the track times/recording associations for the vinyl and cassette pressings? On no physical release of the album is “Rock and Roll Party” mentioned or acknowledged; on every release image with times I’ve seen thus far “Do You Love Me” is printed as having a track time of 3:33 (example). I’ve currently thought of 3 ways to handle this:
Use the 4:57 recording and modify the track list accordingly (changing the time from 3:33 to 4:57 and using the track title “Do You Love Me / [untitled]”)
Use the 4:57 recording and leave the track name/time as printed
Use the 3:33 recording and add “Rock and Roll Party” (listed as “[untitled]” since it is not named on the release) as a separate track with its own time
What do you all think is the appropriate course of action? Alternative suggestions welcome!
If it were me, I would do #1 or #3 depending on intent. If you think they intended them as separate tracks, list them separately or one track then list them together.
Of course it is hard to tell what their intent was, but the best guess may be how were contemporary releases shown? You could match the style they were using at that time.
When was the vinyl or cassette released? If it was released at the same time/same lable as a CD, you could match the style of the CD. So in your example, I would think a circa 1987 vinyl/cassette would match the 1987 CD style (#1). If it was in 1997, then it would be style #3.
That’s just my thought, I’m certainly not the expert, but it makes sense to me!
It looks like all the releases before 1997 were 9 tracks and after (with one exception) were 10 tracks. Sounds like 1976 would be 9 tracks, which would mean option #1.
I don’t think you should do it as 9 tracks because that’s CD thinking. There is no hard-coded track index on vinyl so I would separate each song. If you’d asked someone in 1976 I don’t think they’d have said it was a second song on the 9th track, but a 10th track.
As for the title, remember that:
“If the track is widely known under an unofficial name, you can use that name between square brackets…” @hawke might have an opinion
Yes, vinyl records typically did have individual tracks that were separated by thin rings on the vinyl surface, where the grooves were spaced wide apart. You can see it on this image at Commons; the turntable is currently playing the first track, then (going towards the centre) four more tracks follow. Track 4 is clearly the shortest and track 5 the longest of them all.
It’s actually not silence – there’s no groove there at all. When the record is being cut the engineer can push a button to advance the cutting stylus more quickly for a short time (about 2 seconds; IIRC this is why the CD has a semi-standard gap of 2 seconds)
It’s as @chirlu and @Hawke said and it was for visual convenience, so that the we listener could skip to desired track.
That semi standard of 2 seconds silence was also used for cassette players to fast forward auto skip to the next track as well.
