What does it mean to rerelease a record? On the face of it, this is a simple question with a simple answer: you take music that has already existed as a commercial product and reintroduce it into the market. But secondary questions crop up immediately. Does a record have to be out of print to be rereleased? If not, what makes the new version significant? Do you need cutting-edge remastering? Bonus tracks? A new essay by a brand-name critic? A limited-edition colored-vinyl pressing housed in a wooden box and accompanied by a poster of the original album art? The record industry has always grappled with this issue—profiting off of music people have already heard has always been as central to its plan as profiting off of new music. And Record Store Day, which will be celebrated this Saturday, April 20th, offers one set of answers, via high-end collectibles designed to draw customers back to brick-and-mortar establishments.
But Record Store Day represents only a tiny fraction of the equation. On the other three hundred and sixty four days of the year, music no longer exists on or near records. And so the central question resurfaces: What’s a rerelease, anyway?
This week, Motown answers the question by not quite answering it. The label is reissuing Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “What Love Has…Joined Together,” a 1970 album that is one of the rare jewels in the label’s crown. It arrived at a strange time. By the late sixties, Robinson wanted out of the Miracles—or, at the very least, wanted to limit his commitment so that he could spend more time with his family and concentrate on his career as a Motown executive. That plan would be thwarted when the 1967 single “The Tears of a Clown” was rereleased in 1970 and became one of the Miracles’ biggest hits, but the albums released around that time showcase a different side of the group. Robinson, one of the greatest American songwriters, relied more and more on cover songs and outside writers, which resulted in albums like “Four in Blue” and “A Pocket Full of Miracles,” workmanlike efforts that had neither the inspiration nor the intimacy of the best Miracles records. “What Love Has…Joined Together” arrived in the midst of that period of retrenchment and reassessment.
The album is an oddity in many ways. For starters, it’s only six songs long, with a running time of twenty-seven minutes. It opens with the title song, a reworked and extended version of a Miracles song originally recorded in 1962 and covered by acts such as Mary Wells and the Temptations. Whether that counts as an original is debatable, but it’s the only song on the record that even comes close. The other songs are standards by Stevie Wonder (“My Cherie Amour”), Bacharach and David (“This Guy’s in Love with You,” originally recorded by Herb Alpert), and Lennon and McCartney (“And I Love Her”), along with two Motown chestnuts—Marvin Gaye’s “If This World Were Mine,” which he recorded as a duet with Tammi Terrell, and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” a Brenda Holloway hit co-written by Berry Gordy that was later a huge hit for Blood, Sweat, and Tears. The songs, all similarly themed, all handled at roughly the same tempo, flow together; Robinson’s vocals, high and sweet, float over meticulous harmonies and lavish string and horn arrangements.
“What Love Has…Joined Together” is a standout among the otherwise undistinguished Miracles albums of the period. But it’s important for another reason. It’s the Halley’s Comet of Smokey Robinson albums: after the original LP was released, in 1970, and the record got a CD release, in 1992, it has been unavailable. As other Miracles and Robinson solo albums reappeared on CD, sometimes with annoying regularity and opportunistic repackaging, “What Love Has…Joined Together” remained out of print. And over that time, the value of the CD climbed steadily. I remember seeing it in a record store a decade ago for fifty dollars, and thinking how preposterous that was—fifty dollars for a single CD. But the value only increased, and a few years back copies were selling for more than a hundred dollars. I had to beg an older guy I knew to make me a cassette copy, and even then I had to settle for him cutting off “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” about thirty seconds too early. The exceedingly valuable CD is pictured in this YouTube user video of the title song.
Today, Motown rereleases “What Love Has…Joined Together.” Or does it? Motown’s rerelease is virtual—the company has made an MP3 version of the record available on Amazon, iTunes, and other digital retailers. There are no plans for a physical product. The question of rerelease, again, is answered without quite being answered. More people can now hear the music, which is an unqualified good: more people need to hear it. But does this mean that more people possess the record? That’s a knottier question. Many online reviews of the album comment not only on its quality but on its physical fragility, which is directly connected to its scarcity—on Amazon, for example, reviewers discuss the difficulty of preserving their LP despite repeated plays. Albums, like books, have emotional impact as a result of a trinity of content, physical object, and personal history. What happens when the middle term is removed?
