Down By the Jetty

It wouldn't seem that an album as lean and brutal as Dr. Feelgood's classic 1975 debut Down by the Jetty would lend itself to an extravagant double-disc expanded reissue — part of the point of the album was stripping rock & roll down to its very basics, right down to releasing the album in a mono mix; it sounded as stark as the black & white photo on the cover — but EMI's 2006 double-disc "Collectors Edition" reissue proves otherwise. The first disc presents the original mono album, remastered, with five bonus tracks, all but one — a version of "(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66" released as the B-side of "Roxette" — previously unreleased studio outtakes. The second disc is comprised entirely of unreleased material, the centerpiece of which is a never-heard stereo mix of the album along with stereo versions of the four studio bonus tracks, with the remaining six bonus cuts being live performances from 1974. As it turns out, the stereo mix is pretty much a curiosity — it's not as hard-panned as fake '60s stereo, but the separation dulls the diamond-hard edge the band has in the virtual mono mix, and that edge has always been one of the most appealing things about the record. Nevertheless, it's certainly worth hearing for Feelgood fans — at the very least it confirms their suspicions about why the original mix of Down by the Jetty is so powerful — and the rest of the bonus material is fantastic. All the studio cuts hold their own with the proper album — indeed, "(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66" tears it up so hard it's hard to believe it was relegated to a B-side — and the live cuts, comprised almost entirely of covers of classic blues and R&B songs, are limber and muscular, a little lighter than the relentlessly tough album proper but somehow more endearing because of that since they prove that the band was more versatile in terms of mood than they're sometimes given credit. Add to that Will Birch's typically excellent liner notes and this "Collectors Edition" is a hard one to resist for any fan of Dr. Feelgood, pub rock or rock & roll at its hardest.