2 Classic Albums Plus

High quality compilation !!!About Eddie Cochran, if you like the roots of the rock you should hear it !!!About the seller: ★★★★★ Thank you for an easy, pleasant transaction!Thanks from Brazil !!

Have only listened to one of the discs but love the old songs. Great buy.

This appealingly priced four CD set will appeal to those looking for a tidy collection of Eddie Cochran's studio work for other artists. The 53 tracks that make up disks 3 and 4 are (I assume) Eddie's session work for other artists, no noticeable vocals from Eddie. 36 of the 46 tracks on the first two disks are by Eddie Cochran, another eight are Eddie as half of The Cochran Brothers, and two more are Jerry Capehart featuring The Cochran Brothers. For those unfamiliar with Eddie's early collaborative work with Hank Cochran, it doesn't bear much resemblance to his later rock and roll, it's closer to fifties hillbilly than rockabilly. (Sidebar: Eddie Cochran is not part of the duo Jewel & Eddie who appear on disk four, he just did session work for them.)Complete tracklisting will be posted in Comments. The two Eddie Cochran albums are both contained on disk one:Singin' To My Baby (1957)Memorial Album (1960)"Singin' To My Baby" was a surprise to me, it veers seriously into light pop territory rather than rock. Although both albums originally contained twelve songs, four songs are duplicated between the two. The label Real Gone Jazz doesn't repeat the tracks on "Memorial Album", so it winds up being eight tracks in length here. Unlike the James Brown box set where they opted to not repeat "Try Me" due to space limitations of a CD, disk one runs a little more than 51 minutes so this was a judgment call.What's interesting here is that some of the versions on this box are different than those included on the two LP set Legendary Masters or the UK 20 song compilation, The Singles Album. As a result I find myself wondering about the tracks left off "Memorial Album" - were they actually duplicates or is it possible they were the familiar single versions not contained on "Singin' To My Baby"?* "Completely Sweet" sounds like an entirely different session.* "Twenty Flight Rock" is a different version, with backing vocals. Sounds like a different session.* "Three Steps to Heaven" also sounds like a different session; it's more subdued and starts with the second verse.* "Hallelujah I Love Her So" sounds like the familiar take but without strings.* I'm not sure how to describe "Jeanie Jeanie Jeanie". It sounds like the familiar single but it's got weird echo artifacts at :10, :15, :37, 1:11, and 1:44. I compared it to the tracks contained on Legendary Masters and The Singles Album and neither of those suffer from these distracting flaws.The actual material on disks three and four is a karappe shoot. These disks were the selling point, the differentiation for me. I was hoping it might wind up being something like The Roulette Story or the CBS Rockabilly Classics series. The 53 tracks may be of higher value to a real aficionado of that era but to me a lot of these are just table scraps. Mamie Van Doren recorded some fun numbers but they aren't included here (apart from "Beat Generation" which is plagued by horrible audio). Jody Reynolds' "Beaulah Lee" is a dead ringer for Elvis' "King Creole". The Four Dots' "Don't Wake Up The Kids" is a lift from the Coasters' "Yakety Yak". Bottom line, maybe a fifth of these will last in my playlist. Barry Martin's "The Willies" is great fun, it had me laughing.This is a tough call but this box set's rating teeters between 3 and 4 stars due to the sound quality on some of the tracks. Although this is a four CD set, the 36 Eddie Cochran tracks could all fit on a single disk. His solo material here sounds fine (except for "Jeanie Jeanie Jeanie"), but the rest is hit or miss. Now, I'm no audiophile, no altar of home audio electronics here, but on a number of the other tracks it sounds like one of two things is going on: heavy-handed audio cleanup utilities were used that make some of the rare tracks sound like karappe, and some sound sourced from low quality mp3s. "Jelly Bean" by the Tigers just plain hurts my ears. Mamie Van Doren's "Beat Generation" is one of several that sound like they were sourced from Napster ten years ago; I'm guessing the original file had a 32k bit rate. The processing on Bob Denton's "On My Mind Again" renders it a fluttering mess, as though it was recorded on a traveling tour bus with the thwoop-thwoop-thwoop of open windows. I understand that with extremely rare records a lot of slack is needed but it's better to just put it out as is rather than impose unrecoverable damage with arbitrary or automated pop and click filtering.In sum, this is a box set for Eddie Cochran collectors but for the enthusiastic newbie I would speculate that The Eddie Cochran Story (4 Disc Set) might be a better option. Just be forewarned that its first disk looks to be mostly Cochran Brothers material. For a more concise collection I unreservedly recommend the twenty track The Singles Album.

Am a big Cochran fan, having his session work makes this a must for other Cochran fans.

The first 2 discs are okay but you probably have those already if you're a fan. The third and fourth discs are pretty poor quality seemingly sourced from some very worn out 45s. Your call. P.S. No info on the writers and no booklet.