Having listened to this a few times now, I've come to the conclusion that this two-fer is a tale of two producers - one with a sympathetic approach, and one without.
I can't find any information about how Henry Cosby got the job producing
Mirror Image, but I can only guess it was because (as a former member of Motown house-musician collective, the Funk Brothers) as a former sax player he was able to convince either the band, their management or the label that he knew what to do with a band with horns. Cosby produced some of Stevie Wonder's early hits (and co-wrote and co-produced Tears of a Clown with Smokey Robinson) was one of the Motown stalwarts who left the label when it moved from Detroit to LA in 1972, so I guess he was trying to establish himself as an independent producer circa 1974 when this album was recorded.
I'm a big fan of the "fusion" approach to music - I love when different genres of music are melded together and produce a synthesis where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. But in this case, Cosby's approach just doesn't work. I get what they were trying to do - funk, jazz-funk, and soul-jazz were really popular at the time, so trying to inject some of that in to BS&T's sound was a canny commercial decision. But where it falls down is in the execution - firstly with the songs that Cosby and his co-writers (including his wife Patricia, and future R&B singer Sharon Brown) bring in to the first side of the album, which are really by-the-number second-tier R&B stuff, and secondly with the production style, which seems to be trying really hard to mimick the "Motown sound", which would be great if it were 1966, but this is 1974. The signature BS&T horn charts are there, but they sound awkward to me, bolted on to these very earthy, gritty, rhythm arrangements. I also don't think proceedings are helped much by the really trite lyrics ("
Look up to the sky, look up to the sky, look up to the sky, don't let your life go by" etc.) or that fact that both Jerrys Lacroix and Fisher are both pretty generic blue-eyed soul shouters (sort of like the guys on the first Chase LP) that don't have much of a gift for melody. Things improve greatly on side 2 however, first with
Are You Satisfied and then the multi-part
Mirror Image suite, where the band much more fully lives up to its potential, especially given the added jazz pedigree it had gained with the additions of keyboardist Larry Willis and guitarist Georg Wadenius. I may return to side 1 of this LP a bit more to see if I can grow in to it at all, but side 2 definitely falls in to the 'very listenable' category for me. The one thing that you can't deny about this album is that it sounds good, save for the opening track, where there's a massive treble-roll off on the horns - I think this was probably a production choice so that they'd sit underneath the vocals in the stereo mix, but (like a lot of production decisions on this album) it just doesn't work. Much like his work on Derringer's
All American Boy, Don Young's quad mix takes an album that was sonically middling in stereo and breathes fresh new life in to it. I think his quad mixing in the '74-'77 period is easily some of the best that was ever done.
Mirror Image, on the other hand, I think is really fantastic. Jimmy Ienner was the perfect man for the job - not only did he have a good pop sensibility (having produced most of the Raspberries and Three Dog Night hits) he also had an understanding of brass-rock/jazz-rock given that he also produced a lot of the best stuff that Lighthouse (Canada's answer to Chicago and BS&T) did including tracks like
One Fine Morning and
Sunny Days.
David Clayton-Thomas returning to the band may have been the biggest "news" about this album at the time, but for me the most welcome "return" is that Ienner realised that historically the band's strength lay in its arranging abilities (many of their biggest hits were covers) and he pushes that to the fore - all but two of the songs are from outside writers. What I love about the album though, is that despite the variety of songwriters on the album, it feels musically and sonically cohesive because the arrangers are allowed to be as experimental and esoteric as they want in pursuing the "BS&T sound" - I mean who would've ever expected a 4 minute jazz-fusion freakout in the middle of Janis Ian's
Applause? Ienner also shows a real ear for the melody that was missing from
Mirror Image, loading up nearly every song with harmonies of some sort, be they backing vocals, horn parts, other instruments, or even string overdubs. This is a really sweet sounding album, but it never veers in to the too-muchness of Phil Spector's wall of sound approach or anything.
Where
@humprof may have found a "grab bag" of songs and songwriters, I find the variety in styles, tempos and levels of bombast refreshing compared to the same-iness of much of
Mirror Image. Ride Captain Ride is the rare cover that makes the original obsolete, you get credible funk in
Life, and some of the aforementioned enjoyable contrast between the overblown melodrama of
I Was a Witness to a War and the stripped back
One Room Country Shack, which is just DC-T, an acoustic guitar, and some really tasty lead dobro playing from David Bromberg. I'm normally not one for "novelty" songs on albums, because usually the more you listen to them the less funny they get, but I really like the inclusion of
Naked Man on this album. Maybe it's because Randy Newman's lyrics are clever and obtuse enough ("
They found out about my sister/they kicked me out of the Navy") that they keep you trying to figure out the situation the protagonist finds himself in, but it also acts as a nice kind of counterbalance to the record's more highbrow moments, and shows that the band doesn't take itself too seriously, which is nice. And having mentioned all the outside writers, the few tracks that come from within the band are my favourites, especially Ron McClure's
No Show and Bobby Colomby's
Takin' it Home. Both are instrumental showcases, but (especially with
No Show) they're so organic in construction that they don't just seem like contrived vehicles for jazz-solo show-off-ery. The only misstep on this album for me (and that isn't to say it's bad, it just doesn't really go anywhere) is the cover of the Beatles'
Got to Get you into My Life - i think this song is probably pretty inspirational for a lot of bands with horns that started out in the late 60s (I've heard Chicago's Robert Lamm cite it as well) because it was one of the first pop songs of the era that had a big bold brass arrangement, and I think it was maybe that love of the song that led BS&T to be a little too reverent with the arrangement - I wish they'd been a bit more daring with it like they were with the rest of the album. I think what I came to love about this album is that it has the "sound" of the BS&T I like (ie 2nd album through 4th album) combined with some of the sonic innovations of the mid-70s (funk, jazz-fusion) and without the classic rock radio burnout I have on the songs from the Greatest Hits album. This album almost feels like it's from an alternate timeline where David Clayton-Thomas didn't leave the band after BS&T 4 in 1971 and they put out a new album with him 18 months later.
The sound quality of this album may be ever so slightly inferior to
Mirror Image, but Carmine Rubino's quad mix is absolutely fantastic. It seems like everything either recorded or mixed at the Record Plant NYC around this time (Aerosmith, Blue Oyster Cult, Derringer's
Spring Fever) has, to some degree, a kind of flat and somewhat un-dynamic sound, but I think the fact that this was at least recorded at Bobby Colomby's home studio and only mixed at the Record Plant avoids most of these pitfalls. He takes full advantage of the quad soundfield, and there are tons of fun instrument and vocal placements. This is one of those albums with so much going on that I don't think you can fully appreciate all the layers until you hear them "unpicked" in this kind of surround fashion - I can't imagine ever wanting to listen to the stereo version again, unless I'm in some circumstance where I don't have surround playback capability.
Much like the two O'Jays albums that I wrote about yesterday, every previous digital release of
New City sounded like hot garbage - midrangey and overcompressed. Once again this release blows the doors off everything that's come before it. After so many years of living with that crummy CD version, and my own Q8 transfer, it's an absolute thrill to hear this album with both proper bass response and sparkle in the horns for the first time. Even with my misgivings about the merits of
Mirror Image, I think there's at least 1.5 albums worth of good to great material on this disc, so for me it's an easy 9.
