RENAISSANCE MINSTRELS VOLUME IV
Company: Contra Band Music
Matrix Number: TB-5020-A / TB-5020-B
Release Date: March 1974
Country: USA
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SIDE A
1. I'm Down (The Beatles)
2. Coochy Coochy (Ringo Starr)
3. Step Inside Love (Cilla Black)
4. You've Got To Hide Your Love Away (The Silkie)
5. That Means A Lot (P.J. Proby)
SIDE B
6. Happy Xmas (War Is Over) (John Lennon & Yoko Ono)
7. Bangla Desh (George Harrison)
8. You Know My Name (The Beatles)
9. Sie Liebt Dich (The Beatles) (incomplete)
10. Give Peace A Chance (Plastic Ono Band)
11. Cold Turkey (Plastic Ono Band)
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Source: all official recordings
Sound Quality: Decreased compared to the originals, excess of high frequencies in many tracks, very scratchy source for track 4.
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COMMENTS
Technically a pirate, this records includes a few Beatles and solo tracks, together with a cover and two Lennon-McCartney songs written for other artists, resulting in a meaningless compilation of no interest.
RELEASES
1. March 1974 (photo below the title). The first pressing had an insert reproducing the typical Renaissance Minstrels illustration, in poor quality and the inner sleeve was, as typical of the early 1974 CBM releases, in brown paper; the jacket had the Fish drawing printed on the back. Everything in this record is of poor quality. The disc had white blank label, and the pressing was poor, with some small bubbles and defects,
2. Late 1974. The subsequent repressings were similar to the original; they had a normal jacket, without the Fish drawing printed on the back, and the disk, on blank white labels, had normal white inner sleeves.
1975-1976. The King Kong release. The record reappeared under the cheap Kong Kong series, retitled RENAISSANCE 4, with an insert in small size with the King Kong logo and the TB-5020 number, pasted over the jacket of the record Conjunto Almas Borincanas by Raffie Quiñones. The 1975 pressings had white blank labels, those from 1976 red label with pirate. We cannot exclude that some records with other labels used by the company in that time, red with King Kong or yellow with red small Godzilla, were used as well, but we did not see any such record.
INTEREST. Exclusively interesting for specialized collectors. **/*
THE STRAWBERRY RECORDS COPY
In 1985 it was included in the Strawberry Records series in colored vinyl, with the full color sleeve and labels common to the series. The matrix number is TB 5020 RR A / TB 5020 B. All the copies that were seen are on green vinyl.
INTEREST. A graphically nice record, of course valuable only for collectors of the entire series. **.