I mentioned this in the poll thread for America's
Holiday, but the photos of the quad master tape boxes in this series are a wonderful inclusion for people interested in the history of the format and also the technical side of the music-making process.
The other titles in this batch didn't yield any previously-unknown information - Roberta Flack's
Killing Me Softly and Donny Hathaway's
Extension of a Man had quad remix credits on the sleeve (Bob Lifton and Tom Dowd, respectively) and Hot Tuna's
Burgers has nothing on the master tape box other than the tracklist - but the quad master tape boxes for
Summer Breeze have a couple of interesting revelations.
The first is that this is the first quad mix that can be definitively attributed to
Dave Hassinger, a legendary producer and engineer whose work included records by the Rolling Stones, Electric Prunes (who he also managed), Love and the Jefferson Airplane in the '60s, and Donald Byrd (it's possible he did the quad mix of
Black Byrd), The Blackbyrds, Seals & Crofts (obvs), Linda Ronstadt, Little Feat, Aretha, and many others in the '70s.
The master tape for side two has two credits: 'D.H.' (obviously Hassinger) and 'J.A.' - I believe this 'J.A.' is probably
John Arrias, who was an assistant engineer and tape operator at Sound Labs during this period.
Aside from being a producer and engineer, Hassinger was also the owner of Sound Labs, a highly regarded studio in Hollywood, and recorded and did the original stereo mix of
Summer Breeze. The interesting thing about the quad masters for Summer Breeze is that they have a notation on them stating that they were received (probably by Warner's tape library) on July 27th, 1974, which means the quad mix was done nearly two years after the original stereo album (which was released in September 1972) came out.
This also means that despite being S&C's first hit album,
Summer Breeze was actually their third quad release, chronologically - their first was
Diamond Girl, which was released in September 1973 as part of the W/E/A group's initial batch of 25 CD-4 Quadradiscs, and it was followed by
Unborn Child in February of 1974, pretty much day and date with the stereo version. I haven't checked the Library of Congress Catalog of Copyright Entries but I think it's a safe presumption based on the 7/26/74 date on the tapes that
Summer Breeze was on the market in time for Christmas of that year.
I suspect the reasons for going back and remixing a two-year-old album for quad in 1974 were two-fold: one was that WEA were trying to bolster their quad catalog with more older "evergreen" titles, and
Summer Breeze joins Black Sabbath's
Paranoid (1970), Jethro Tull's
Aqualung (1971), Deep Purple's
Machine Head (1972), and the Doobie Bros.
Toulouse Street (1972) as albums that were reissued in quad in 1974 and 1975. The other reason, I think, was that after two top-10 albums in
Summer Breeze and
Diamond Girl (which both produced top-5 singles) S&C entered 1974 with a thud by releasing
Unborn Child, a stinker of an album which made it no higher than #14 in the Billboard charts and yielded two even more disappointing singles, neither of which made it any higher than #60, so Warner probably wanted to get some more "popular" product on the shelves and a quad release of
Summer Breeze fit the bill.
On the stereo side of things in 1974, they also released "old" product, buying up the rights to the duo's first two independent albums (a self-titled release from 1969 and
Down Home from 1970) and reissued them as a double LP
Seals & Crofts I & II, followed by a Greatest Hits album in 1975 so I think it's fair to say Warners could see which way the wind was blowing with regards to S&C's commercial popularity and were doing what they could to monetize it while there was still time.
And albums were so short back then, that they should do 2 at a time.
