"Eleven Bees, Four Wasps, A Turtle ..."

Artists aren't always the best judges of record production. This shouldn't be a surprise - engineering and production require skills other than getting blown on the tour bus and disintegrating your septum. Ray Davies always seemed an odd choice for the Turtles to produce their Turtle Soup album, and the result was nothing too special. There was something dry and flat about the sound, the aural equivalent of cereal box card. Well, turns out that his production was hacked about after the event, and a load of lush stuff either blowtorched or hammered into the studio floor. It sounded too much like the Turtles, apparently, and not the kick-ass rock band the portly comedians wanted to sound like. You can read the story on an internet, but that's the crux of the biscuit.

So flash forward to (DATE HERE ED) [go fuck yourself - Ed.] and Rhino and Kaylan and Volman decide to restore Davies's original production for re-release. Swell idea, right? Except that somehow - maybe leaving Davies out of the deal didn't help - they fucked the whole deal up and produced this rotten-sounding piece-a-shit "remix" that's even worse than the original rotten-sounding piece-a-shit, which now sounds pretty nifty in comparison. They also dressed it up in a facepalm WTF? cover - a Rhino speciality at that time. Why pay a designer when the kid down at the copy shop will do it for a free album?

Will we ever hear the great album that's hidden behind all this? Do the tapes still exist? Why am I asking you? Anyway, I'm guessing that's where Ray Davies's outside production career stalled.