Have to agree with this - it's a strange (or at least mostly unsatisfying mix) with the lead vocals and a lot of instrumentation simultaneously in all four speakers at once. The caveat to that would be that since this mix is trapped on two crappy consumer formats (ABC's poorly-pressed QS vinyl and GRT's sibilant and oversaturated Q8s) it's hard to fully judge the merits (or lack thereof) in this mix.
The first side of the album is forgettable to the point of not being worth listening to, but the second side improves considerably, both in terms of mix and also in quality of songwriting. 'I'd Be So Happy' is written by Skip Prokop of Lighthouse (and originally appears on their 1971 album
Thoughts of Movin' On, which was also produced by the producer of
Hard Labor, Jimmy Ienner), 'Play Something Sweet (Brickyard Blues)' is by New Orleans R&B legend Allen Toussaint (who wrote Lady Marmalade for Labelle and Right Place, Wrong Time for Dr. John), 'On the Way Back Home' is by Daniel Moore (who wrote Shambala, which was a top-5 hit for the band a year before) and 'The Show Must Go On' is a Leo Sayer track that was a UK hit for him the same year.
I think something has to be said about the album cover (which features a woman with a doll face and huge bird feet giving birth to a 12" LP) which for me is wildly inappropriate, especially for a band mining the soft rock/MOR/AOR vein like TDN were doing in this era. I'll put my hands up and say I'm not that familiar with the band (so maybe there's something I'm missing) but I don't know how you can put this on the cover of an LP and not feel like it's going to undercut the artistic intent of the music inside, unless you're an NYC punk band 5 or 10 years later. I'm not sure who was advising them at this point, because they wanted to call their next album
Dog Style (and it even made it as far as
test pressings with that name) but thankfully cooler heads prevailed and it ended up being called
Coming Down Your Way. Maybe the poor cover art is sort of a sign of ABC's cheapskatery as a label, I dunno (their other album covers are less offensive, but also equally forgettable) but I was watching that documentary about Hipgnosis recently and struck by how often great albums also have iconic cover artwork, whereas the also-rans almost unequivocally have lackluster or just downright bad artwork. One of my favourite albums of the mid-'70s is Orleans
Waking and Dreaming - a record I think is better than Fleetwood Mac's
Rumours - but it crashed on lift-off thanks to an ill-advised cover photo of the entire band with their shirts off that seems to be an oblique reference to the classic 'I had a dream I was naked in public' dream. Now I'm not saying that Three Dog Night are in the league of 10cc or Pink Floyd or Chicago or anything, but there's something to be said for putting your best foot forward in every aspect of your artistic presentation, and I just don't know how anyone involved could think that the cover of
Hard Labor (or even the title, another pun irrelevant to the music inside) does that in any respect.
Speaking of
Coming Down Your Way (which came out the year after
Hard Labor) this is the one you want to listen to if you want some TDN in quad - a considerably better album (I'd call it great, in relative terms) and much more satisfying quad mix. It's a shame that all this stuff is presumably lost due to the 2008 vault fire because it would have the makings of a great D-V reissue.
I also find it interesting how many Jimmy Ienner-produced albums were released in quad around this time, with some very notable names engineering:
Three Dog Night
Hard Labor (1974) Jay Messina (Aerosmith) Roy Cicala (John Lennon Imagine) engineers
Grand Funk
All the Girls in the World Beware...!!! (1974) Shelly Yakus (Rick Derringer, Edgar Winter) engineer
Eric Carmen - Eric Carmen (1975)
Three Dog Night
Coming Down Your Way (1975) Shelly Yakus
Blood Sweat & Tears
New City (1975) Shelly Yakus (stereo) Carmine Rubino (quad) engineers
Not to mention several Lighthouse tracks he produced featured on Evolution Records samplers, and it was mentioned in the Jan. 10th, 1976 issue of
Billboard that a test cut of a Bay City Rollers album was done for CD-4 - Ienner produced their 1976 album
Dedication (AL 4093) which is only three catalog numbers after the final Arista quad release, Barry Manilow's
This One's for You (AL/AQ-4090).
