The master tapes in the booklet contain an interesting revelation:
It appears this quad mix was done by none other than Elliot Scheiner, judging by the 'ELS' notation. I haven't figured out who 'SAM' is - a cursory search of A&R Recording engineers didn't turn up any obvious candidates, but it's probably someone who was a tape operator or junior engineer at the time.
Scheiner worked at A&R from about 1967 or 68 through 1975, so the dates on this line up with this, and further confirmed by the fact that Scheiner engineered
another album (
What You Feel is How You Grow by Don Cooper) produced by Tom Dawes, who produced
Energized, around the same time.
There are no credits on the stereo LP of
Energized aside from Dawes production credit, but I have to presume that Scheiner did the stereo mix as well and that's why they went back to him to do the quad mix. The surprising thing is that the stereo mix was done in late 1973 (and released in January 1974) and the dates on these master tapes say March 1975, more than a full year later. By this point Foghat had already released another album (
Rock and Roll Outlaws in November 1974) and were about to start work on
Fool for the City, so it's kind of surprising that they went that far back to remix an album that barely scraped into the top 40 more than a year earlier. The only thing I can think of is that Bearsville footed the bill for the quad mix, and then Warner (who distributed them) either didn't like the sound of the mix, or knew they were getting out of quad by that point (the last Warner quad was Graham Central Station's
Ain't No Bout a Doubt It in July 1975, though Elektra carried on into early 1976) so it got shelved.
Rock and Roll Outlaws is on Mark's list of unreleased quads so maybe they intended to remix that one as well, but it was originally done at a non-quad studio (Suntreader Studios in Vermont) by Nick Jameson (who'd end up becoming the band's bass player as well, on
Fool for the City) an engineer with no quad experience as far as I can tell.
I think this new information adds some interesting texture to both Scheiner's career (we only knew that he did the quad mix of Enoch Light's
Brass Menagerie 1973 album before this, and he mentioned in an interview working on the
21 Trombones album) and also the story of Warner's quad program as well. The fact that they were commissioning quad mixes of year-old albums in 1975 (the Average White Band quad mix was also done in 1975, almost a year after the stereo) suggests that they weren't gradually winding down that year, and that whatever the decision was to get out of quad must've come pretty abruptly and without much notice. Whatever you think of the quality of this mix (maybe it could've used a more sympathetic remastering to alleviate some of the 'congestedness') it's cool that it finally found its way out of the vault, even 50 years late.
Supreme Commander of the Allied Surround Forces (Northeastern Theater)
@sjcorne has reached out to Sgt. Scheiner to see if he remembers anything about doing this mix, so hopefully we should have some kind of confirmation (or denial) in due course.
