I agree, this album is a real grower. I remember when I heard this for the first time on Q8, I probably would have rated it about a '5', partly due to the fidelity being an 8-track tape, but still.
The mix is an odd one - I think at first there's a sense of disappointment because it's probably not how most people would do a quad mix, with the bass in the rear left and the drums in the rear right. Once you get over your own preconceptions and enjoy it for what it is, that's when it starts to take hold in your mind. It's funny actually, the quad mix on this album struck me as being a lot like the mix on Sly & The Family Stone's Greatest Hits, just more evolved. Sort of an interesting pairing with Sly's GH being one of the first Columbia quads and this one being one of the last. There's no quad remix credit on the sleeve, but I have a feeling that the quad mix was done by someone at The Record Plant (or the band themselves) rather than one of Columbia's in-house quad guys. The reason I say that is that their in-house guys would have done dozens of quad mixes by 1976 and probably wouldn't have gone with the kind of instrument placement that was used here. To me this album screams of someone doing a quad mix for the first time; the Columbia quad supremos like Larry Keyes or Don Young would have had tons of trial and error experience by that point. I can deal with the mix as-is (more on that in a bit) but I really wish they'd mixed the drums in stereo (as they are on the original stereo mix) rather than reducing them to mono in the right rear speaker. In his quad mixes, Larry Keyes often mixed the drums in stereo and put them along one side wall, ie in the front right and rear right - I wish they'd done that here.
I actually wondered after reading someone here mention that the quad mix of Laura Nyro's 'Eli' album on the Mike Robin reel had instruments mixed rear-center whereas the 'approved' mix issued by Audio Fidelity had the instruments panned hard rear-left/rear-right, if something similar happened with this album. Basically that maybe this first time quad mixer planned the quad mix of this album with the drums and bass in stereo across the rear speakers, not knowing the limitations of SQ and then at the last minute someone said 'oh sorry you can't have stuff in the rear-center position' so the mixer basically went bam, bass rear left, drums rear right. Doing anything more than that (ie putting bass and drums in the front speakers) probably would have required re-thinking the quad mix from the ground up and doing that at a place like The Record Plant would have taken too long and cost way too much money to be feasible. Obviously this is only a theory on my part, but it feels plausible.
There are a couple of clunkers on the album (Deal With It, Can't Stand To See The Slaughter) but pretty much all of the other songs are really catchy. Let's be honest here, this isn't the best album in Tower Of Power's catalogue, but it is a really good one and definitely worth having. I never really understood that argument anyway - music isn't a race to see who's best, it's a banquet with a lot of different flavours to sample. If it were a race, would we just have one album per artist in our collections because all the others are inferior? Oops, sorry Presence, no room for you in my collection, I already have Led Zepelin II!
The other thing i wanted to mention about this album is that it sounds a lot better and more cohesive when you crank it up. It's a really high dynamic range mix (something like DR14 or DR15) and with the really isolated instruments in the rear speakers it can sound a bit 'floppy' or disjointed if you have it playing quietly. When it's played back a bit louder the natural bleed/mix between the four speakers fills out the sound and makes the album feel like its much more glued together.
Anyway, having said all that, I'd give this release an 8. Michael Dutton did a beautiful job remastering this, both the quad and stereo versions. I think it goes without saying that this new release blows the old Q8 and LP out of the water, but its definitely true, and for about 1/5 the price you'd pay for a copy of the Q8 on eBay. My old go-to for the stereo mix was the 1993 Columbia CD pressing, but the new SACD bests it both in sound quality and dynamic range (Columbia CD: DR13 Dutton SACD stereo layer: DR14) so I'll happily retire the old CD.
