Here's the whole story from Eric himself. It sounds absolutely fantastic -- if the live '76 tracks are from the Bottom Line gig, I was there! -- and he even smacks down Clive Davis for good measure:
ERIC TALKS "ESSENTIAL"Sony flew me to New York last year, and it was an extremely positive meeting. Talk about "Deja Vu"!
I found myself walking into the lobby of "Blackrock" (otherwise known as the CBS building, or "30 Rock", as they call it in the television series) and I flashed back to the first time I had set foot in that same building, with Cyrus Erie, forty-five years earlier, to meet with our first producers, Sandy Linzer and Mike Petrillo. The circumstances were quite a bit different, this time.
Instead of being treated like a bunch of "know-nothing" teenagers from Ohio (Sandy Linzer was an hour late to our first meeting, in
his office!) I was brought to a meeting room at Sony's Legacy Records, where I met with six men, all probably under the age of forty, who were six of the biggest fans of my music that I have ever met. We discussed different ideas, and aspects of the
Essential project, which was Timothy Smith's initial idea.
The following day, I took a cab to a remastering studio to take part in the first remastering session for
The Essential, with an engineer named Mark Wilder. Mark is Sony's "go-to guy" when they want the absolute best. When my cab arrived, I realized that the studio was in the same building, same address, and same physical space that used to be The Record Plant, the studio where all four Raspberries albums were recorded! "Deja Vu, indeed"!
All of the old analogue masters had been carefully converted to digital, so Mark could work his magic on them.
The track we started with was "Get The Message," which I probably hadn't listened to in forty years. While I was initially a bit hesitant about "Get The Message"—because, in reality, it was a one take track, intended by the producers to be the "B" side of the single, and, in their own words, they wanted it to "suck"—by the time Mark had finished, about an hour later, and I began to see what could be done when you have a genius engineer and today's technology, I was actually excited about the track.
We went on to remaster maybe eight or nine more of the tracks during that session, which covered everything from Cyrus Erie, to the Raspberries, to my solo stuff on Arista, to a live track recorded at The Bottom Line in New York in 1976, which Tim had located in England, and even a track from the Geffen album.
Well, I received two CD's, representing 28 of the 30 tracks yesterday, all remastered. I took them out to my car (equipped with a Bose Surround Sound system) and cranked up the volume.
It was a religious experience.
The difference between any previously "remastered" disc and what the original sounded like, I would estimate might be about 2% better. The difference between
this remastering and the original versions? Maybe 300% better.
You might remember me talking about how I was disappointed in the recorded version of "My Girl." I had gone into the studio thinking it might be the first single because I heard it like "Frankenstein," and Jimmy Ienner heard it like "Tinkerbell." Well, guess what? It's now everything I heard in my head. It's "Frankenstein" all right, and so is "Last Night."
In my conversations with Mark Wilder, during the remastering, it became clear that everything I've learned about the "sonics" of recording over the years, and could convey to Mark (Do you think we could add some 100 cycles to the kick drum? That's the frequency that makes the kick drum punch you in the chest. And could we add a little bit at 40 cycles to the bass? That's the frequency that makes the whole bottom end of the record warm and deep and BIG! And how about a little bit at 22,000 cycles so the strings open up and I can hear the resin on the bows?) all paid off. Mark is clearly a genius, and pretty much every single song he touched became better. Not by a little bit, but by MILES!
It would be a mistake to think of this double CD release as "just another compilation." I can tell you, you have never heard most of these songs, until you've heard them on this package.
Tim Smith told me Sony isn't planning on marketing this record to 50 and 60 year olds (no offense). He heard my first solo album when his older brother brought it home and played the daylights out of it. He fell in love with it. He was seven years old, at the time. He wants to bring my music to a whole new generation of fans. 20 and 30 year-olds, who have probably never heard of me. How fun!
I've written a few sentences for the liner notes about each song. Another of Tim's goals for this package is to show people who only know me as a "balladeer," that before Arista Records, I was a rocker, and I didn't stop rocking after "All By Myself." Mark Wilder did a
brilliant job on "It Hurts Too Much" and "Tonight you're Mine." And the "live' version of "That's Rock 'n Roll" recorded at the Bottom Line, in 1976, TOTALLY RAWKS!
A certain "iconic" record executive once told me "Once you go 'pop', you can never go back." I beg to differ, and this record will prove just how wrong he was, once and for all.
Peace and love,
