bk said: "Pippin said: "Of course the best will always be Elaine Stritch’s horribly flat caterwauling on the last held out “we loooooooove”. The engineer finally fades out her mic and it makes me laugh every time.
Close second- on the OBC of “Anyone Can Whistle” during “me and town”, The men are doing backups of “doo doo waaaaah, doo doo wadda wah” near the end of the song and one guy forgets to cut off, so you hear one final plosive “D”. It makes me smile."
The engineer didn't "fade out" her mic - she was on the group mic - if he'd faded that the entire group would have gone, not to mention that they're in the band mics, too.
Very amusing thread. Half the stuff in this thread aren't "mistakes." For example, there was no wrong trumpet note in Rose's Turn. Mr. Thomas Z. Shepard decided that the trumpet "cracked" a note in the overture - but it was good enough for Mr. Lieberson and Mr. Styne (and it's VERY exciting) and therefore it's a whole lot of special chutzpah to "fix" something that wasn't broken. He also replaced a phrase of Merman's because HE found it more emotional. Well, no, sorry - the cast album of Gypsy was and is, in its original version, one of the greatest cast albums ever made. It would be one thing to fix something that WAS broken,, that was badly done, but you don't fix Gypsy. One does wonder how Mr. Shepard would feel if some other producer listened to the masters of Sweeney or Sunday in the Park and decided to "fix" some stuff because HE/SHE thought it was better. Methinks he would not be happy at all.
Again, much of what's in this thread are not mistakes. People hear things differently. Someone posted that silly thing about The Color Purple. But that's why the cast albums of old have an excitement and energy that is sorely lacking in the cast albums of today."
Well put. The only actual "mistake" I can think of on a cast recording is the (generally great) studio recording of Porgy and Bess by Goddard Lieberson where Lawrence Winters (an excellent Porgy) flubs his final line. Instead "But you'll be there to take my hand" he sings "But I'll be there to take my hand." I've tried to listen really close and convince myself he's re-phrasing the line as "But I'll be there to take thy hand," which would not be the correct lyric, but at least would make sense. He doesn't. He says "my hand." I guess with the sound quality of vinyl and the sound reproduction systems of the time, it was assumed this would not be heard clearly enough to be noticed.