DESCRIPTION:
NO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT INTENDED - (Atco 125) This arrangement of 'Silent Night' by Bobby Darin is clearly one of the most beautiful you'll ever hear. It was one of 14 Christmas themed tracks that he recorded between August 18th and August 21st, 1960 at United Recording on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The collection of recordings was packaged as 'The 25th Day Of December With Bobby Darin' and released in both monophonic and stereo on October 24th, 1960. (One track, 'Christmas Auld Lang Syne' was not included in the LP and issued as a single only). The stereo version of the LP was pressed in a small quantity and are quite rare to come by. What made those stereo LP's all the more desirable is the fact that Atlantic (and the world) suffered an irreparable loss in February 1978 when a fire destroyed most of its tape archive, which had been stored in a non-air-conditioned warehouse in Long Branch, New Jersey. Although (fortunately) the master tapes of the material in Atlantic's released back-catalog survived because they were stored in New York, the fire destroyed or damaged an estimated 5000-6000 reels of tape, including virtually all of the company's unreleased master tapes, alternate takes, rehearsal tapes and session multi-tracks recorded between 1948 and 1969. Atlantic was one of the first labels to record in stereo, and many of the tapes that were lost were stereo 'alternates' which would have also included the stereo tapes of Darin's Christmas album. For 38 years, the surviving stereo examples of the Bobby Darin Christmas sessions were thought to only be found on the original copies of the vinyl record album. In 2013, while researching another Bobby Darin project in the Warner Vaults, James Ritz was fortunate to have unearthed the mistakenly filed stereo master of the album which then ultimately saw it's first worldwide release in stereo on compact disc.