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Review of Half Pint's "Recollection"

© Ryan A. MacMichael

During the 1990's, Half Pint wasn't releasing any full-length LPs, so a number of record labels released "Best-ofs" in order to keep Pint's name on people's minds. VP released (Half Pint), Sonic Sounds dropped 20 Super Hits, and Hightone released Classics and Classics in Dub. In 1998 and 99 Pint released two studio albums, but in 2000 there's a new audience for compilations of his older material: the younger, college crowd that listens to the Long Beach Dub All-Stars.

Since Pint's done a good amount of touring with LBDAS, countless new fans have been discovering the material the rest of us knew about all along. Sure, the Hightone and VP collections are still readily available, but who better to give this new audience a collection than LBDAS' record label, Skunk Records?

Skunk's release of Recollection coordinates well with the current nationwide LBDAS/Half Pint tour (sure enough, they had it at their merchandise booth at the show I attended). It's a compilation of 11 tracks and one dub hand-picked by the Skunk Records crew from the extensive Half Pint catalog.

Most of the tracks you'd expect are included: "Winsome" (covered later by the Rolling Stones as "Too Rude"), "Cost of Living," "Level the Vibes," "Loving" (which inspired the Sublime mega-hit "What I Got" and was redone on Pint's recent Closer to You), and "Greetings," but there are some surprising inclusions as well.

One is "Great Stone," which originally appeared on 1990's One Big Family and then again on the semi-hard-to-find 20 Super Hits. This is the first time in recent memory it's been available on CD. The thing is, I'm not quite sure why the guys chose this song above, say, "Freedom Fighter" or even "Substitute Lover." It's a great cut, sure, but not one of the first 20 or that come to my mind. Ditto goes for "When One Gone," a cut that appeared on vinyl on 1987's Level the Vibes and on CD on RAS's Victory the same year. Again, a very good cut, but others could have certainly taken its place. I wouldn't have even minded seeing some of his rarer singles that never made it to an LP. One great choice could have been his hard-to-find duet with Barrington Levy from 1988 titled "Go Do It," or his cover of Slim Smith's "Tears on My Pillow" or maybe "Jah Love is Pure and Clean."

While I'm criticizing, I was apalled by the liner notes -- generally reggae CDs are good about giving proper credit to the musicians and producers involved, but Recollection actually does something worse than leaving the sleeve blank: they print, "Production, mixing, mastering, and musician credits can be found throughout his other albums." But maybe I'm just hypersensitive since I'm biased towards Pint (running his web site and everything). After all, they did plug the web site.

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