The intro to "China Grove" is one of those riffs that was tailor-made for the era of AM radio. It grabs your attention. How did you record that?
Tom was using his Echoplex for a delay; it was too noisy so we had him record without it. Ted and I told him we could add it in the mix. He said, "Are you sure?" But when we mixed it, we forgot to add that effect!
That sounds like it was a significant problem. How did you get the echo back into the mix?
At that time, we [Ted Templeman, Lenny Waronker, and Landee] mixed everything simultaneously in stereo and quadraphonic. I made a new stereo mix by combining the quad mix to stereo and adding the effect in the intro and breakdown. We did this after the album was mixed. I don't remember if we ever did anything about the quad mix not having the effect.
In 2020, Rhino re-released the quad mixes of the early Doobie records, and audiophiles rave about those reissues. But I remember Ted telling me that he thought that recording and mixing with quad in mind was not enjoyable at all.
Working with quadraphonic ended up being a waste of time. The Amigo Studio A control room was built for quad, and we made quad mixes for every new project. At first, it wasn't so bad; we made some quad mixes and they sounded pretty good. But they were to be released on vinyl. When JVC brought in a quad system and played back quad disks in Studio A, they sounded horrible. Still, I think if you played the original quad master tapes today, they'd sound pretty good.
