tarkusnj
400 Club - QQ All-Star
My fav is Songs in the Key of Life. I think he played most of the instruments on that double album... Incredible
Stevie Wonder Quad?
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Yeah, the word has always been that Stevie owns and retains his stereo masters. It wouldn’t be shocking if the same were true for his multi’s and/or quad masters (if he’s ever even been aware of any quad masters…).
However he is also apparently quite stingy in allowing the original masters out of his hands for remastering - and that might not be good news for quad releases or atmos mixing…
Actually, it looks like there was a lot of help on that album...
krnewman
Member
There is a Stevie Wonder quad album and it is excellent. It was released under the name “Minnie Riperton.” If you have not heard this Q8, quad reel, or SQ LP yet and you want to hear what Stevie Wonder would do with quad, you are in for one hell of a treat.
Thank you for alerting us to Minnie Riperton it appears that two SQ LP's/Q8s "Perfect Angel" and "Adventures In Paradise" were released on Epic. I have heard the name "Minnie Riperton" before but was otherwise clueless about her. It would make a great DV two-fer!
I think most of the pertinent info has been covered already, but yes, it seems that a bunch of Stevie's "golden era" albums were mixed for quad but never released.
Margouleff and Cecil apparently did Talking Book, though during my brief association with Margouleff he couldn't remember the specifics of it, or indeed any quad mixes that he'd done, including the Isley Bros. 3 + 3 which he has an actual credit on the back of the quad LP for.
Baker Bigsby said in his Red Bull Music Academy interview that he'd mixed 4 albums for quad, Music of My Mind (1972) through Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974).
So I think we can safely say those exist, or existed at some point. Who knows for sure with UMG and their 2008 vault fire, but it's been said that nothing of the Motown archive was stored there (and stereo fold downs of the quad mixes of Diana Ross' The Last Time I Saw Him and the Jackson 5's Greatest Hits have been issued since then so it seems the masters still exist) so we can at least remain hopeful for the future.
Motown's quad release history is a little strange - In the May 11, 1974 issue of Billboard, a Motown rep said they were preparing a "Best of Diana Ross" compilation for Q8 release (and that they'd made no decision about a quad LP format) but then they released two live albums (Marvin Gaye Live! and Diana Ross Live at Caesar's Palace) on Q8 in the US a few months later, and that was it. Similarly, in Japan they released a couple of Live in Japan CD-4 albums in late 1973 (Jackson 5 and The Supremes) and then in November or December of '74 they started releasing more, at the rate of 2 or 3 a month for the next 5 or 6 months through mid-1975.
My feeling is that in both the US and Japan, the release of the initial two live albums was basically a trial balloon to gauge demand, and in the US it failed whereas in Japan is succeeded, so they got more releases. I also suspect that JVC Japan probably footed a lot of the bill for the CD-4 cutting and distribution in Japan, as CD-4 was their technology and they were trying to promote it, and that probably made the decision to say "yes" easier for Motown.
It's also worth noting that despite the fact that the majority of these albums came out in Japan in late 1974 and early 1975, they were all originally released in stereo in 1973 or earlier (with the exception of the Temptations 1990, which was from 1974) and a couple of them (The Supremes & Temptations TCB and Rare Earth's Get Ready) were from 1969, suggesting that Motown had been accumulating quad mixes for quite a while, and then given up stockpiling sometime in early 1974. To me that suggests that allowing them to be released in Japan was basically a way for Motown to get some use (and money) for these mixes that were already done, rather than that they were mixed specifically for release in Japan.
Bringing this back to Stevie Wonder, my educated guess is that the reason these quad mixes were never released is that the contract he signed with Motown in the early-70s granted him full creative control, and I think that would probably extend to having to "OK" the release of these quad mixes. For labels, low hanging fruit is music where the artist has no say in how it's exploited, which is why you see albums from smaller bands reissued all the time, and licensed out to smaller labels, whereas bigger bands seem to move at a glacial pace (if at all) by comparison. It's entirely possible that it wasn't even that they asked Stevie and he said "no", it could be that they just put out the stuff they could put out without having to ask anyone, and didn't even approach Stevie at all about these quad mixes for fear of tipping the money-making apple cart of a guy who was surely the most profitable on their roster.
Motown is now under the UMG umbrella (Motown was bought by a venture capital firm in 1988, then sold to PolyGram in 1993, and then bought by Universal in 1998) so licensing is difficult. The issue with Wonder himself is further complicated by the fact that contract he signed gives him full control over his masters - I guess he has a vault somewhere of his own, because supposedly there's never been a digital reissue of any of his albums sourced from the original (original) tapes that he holds, they're all from safety copies in the label vaults. The BBC Radio documentary "Stevie's Wonder Men" (available on YouTube and worth a listen) tells a tantalising tale whereby Wonder supposedly has something in the order of 200 songs recorded during the first half of the '70s with Cecil and Margouleff that have never seen the light of day - it's sad to say, but if he won't allow any of that out, what are the odds of convincing him to release any of his quad mixes?
Just as a postscript to this, apparently Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants from 1979 was also mixed for quad and never released, according to an interview that the album's engineer Lon Neumann did with Okayplayer a while back:
Margouleff and Cecil apparently did Talking Book, though during my brief association with Margouleff he couldn't remember the specifics of it, or indeed any quad mixes that he'd done, including the Isley Bros. 3 + 3 which he has an actual credit on the back of the quad LP for.
Baker Bigsby said in his Red Bull Music Academy interview that he'd mixed 4 albums for quad, Music of My Mind (1972) through Fulfillingness' First Finale (1974).
So I think we can safely say those exist, or existed at some point. Who knows for sure with UMG and their 2008 vault fire, but it's been said that nothing of the Motown archive was stored there (and stereo fold downs of the quad mixes of Diana Ross' The Last Time I Saw Him and the Jackson 5's Greatest Hits have been issued since then so it seems the masters still exist) so we can at least remain hopeful for the future.
Motown's quad release history is a little strange - In the May 11, 1974 issue of Billboard, a Motown rep said they were preparing a "Best of Diana Ross" compilation for Q8 release (and that they'd made no decision about a quad LP format) but then they released two live albums (Marvin Gaye Live! and Diana Ross Live at Caesar's Palace) on Q8 in the US a few months later, and that was it. Similarly, in Japan they released a couple of Live in Japan CD-4 albums in late 1973 (Jackson 5 and The Supremes) and then in November or December of '74 they started releasing more, at the rate of 2 or 3 a month for the next 5 or 6 months through mid-1975.
My feeling is that in both the US and Japan, the release of the initial two live albums was basically a trial balloon to gauge demand, and in the US it failed whereas in Japan is succeeded, so they got more releases. I also suspect that JVC Japan probably footed a lot of the bill for the CD-4 cutting and distribution in Japan, as CD-4 was their technology and they were trying to promote it, and that probably made the decision to say "yes" easier for Motown.
It's also worth noting that despite the fact that the majority of these albums came out in Japan in late 1974 and early 1975, they were all originally released in stereo in 1973 or earlier (with the exception of the Temptations 1990, which was from 1974) and a couple of them (The Supremes & Temptations TCB and Rare Earth's Get Ready) were from 1969, suggesting that Motown had been accumulating quad mixes for quite a while, and then given up stockpiling sometime in early 1974. To me that suggests that allowing them to be released in Japan was basically a way for Motown to get some use (and money) for these mixes that were already done, rather than that they were mixed specifically for release in Japan.
Bringing this back to Stevie Wonder, my educated guess is that the reason these quad mixes were never released is that the contract he signed with Motown in the early-70s granted him full creative control, and I think that would probably extend to having to "OK" the release of these quad mixes. For labels, low hanging fruit is music where the artist has no say in how it's exploited, which is why you see albums from smaller bands reissued all the time, and licensed out to smaller labels, whereas bigger bands seem to move at a glacial pace (if at all) by comparison. It's entirely possible that it wasn't even that they asked Stevie and he said "no", it could be that they just put out the stuff they could put out without having to ask anyone, and didn't even approach Stevie at all about these quad mixes for fear of tipping the money-making apple cart of a guy who was surely the most profitable on their roster.
Motown is now under the UMG umbrella (Motown was bought by a venture capital firm in 1988, then sold to PolyGram in 1993, and then bought by Universal in 1998) so licensing is difficult. The issue with Wonder himself is further complicated by the fact that contract he signed gives him full control over his masters - I guess he has a vault somewhere of his own, because supposedly there's never been a digital reissue of any of his albums sourced from the original (original) tapes that he holds, they're all from safety copies in the label vaults. The BBC Radio documentary "Stevie's Wonder Men" (available on YouTube and worth a listen) tells a tantalising tale whereby Wonder supposedly has something in the order of 200 songs recorded during the first half of the '70s with Cecil and Margouleff that have never seen the light of day - it's sad to say, but if he won't allow any of that out, what are the odds of convincing him to release any of his quad mixes?
Just as a postscript to this, apparently Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants from 1979 was also mixed for quad and never released, according to an interview that the album's engineer Lon Neumann did with Okayplayer a while back:
Wow. Fascinating info. Who would have thought that, even in 1979, there was still some interest in quad. By then, it seemed pretty much dead.
Stevie needs a reason to make more money so he might consider releasing all that surround/quad stuff, along with all those stereo tunes that never saw the light of day. Can we convince him of some sort of extremely worthy charity maybe?
Great info @steelydave ! Thank you
He was always disappointed that Journey through “The Secret Life of Plants” didn’t do better than it did. Frankly, I agree with him. I think that it was unfortunate the record company didn’t promote it more heavily. By the way, regarding Journey through “The Secret Life of Plants,” to my knowledge, it is one of the very few commercial projects that were done in early surround sound. Now, this was before the surround sound as we know it now existed, with a Quad sound, where there was just four speakers in the four corners. Well, as far as I know, the only other commercial project that was ever done in Quad sound was Frank Zappa’s Yellow Shark Symphony, but Journey through “The Secret Life of Plants” was done in Quad.
I think, to this day, nobody has ever heard it in its surround sound glory. They have only heard the stereo versions because that was the only format that the record company released it in. I keep hoping that one of these days that both Steve and the Frank Zappa family would remaster those projects in conventional surround sound so people can hear it that way.
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Maybe I'm missing something here - and I realize the source is credible - but engineers often say things which don't make sense.
Why would they have mixed Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants to quad in the no-man's land of 1979?
"...one of the very few commercial projects done in early surround"? [Or one of the last done in quad...]
"...the only other commercial project ever done in Quad Sound was Zappa's Yellow Shark"? [This likely would have been mixed in 1993 - after the introduction of Dolby Digital AC-3...]
It's almost as if Neumann is completely unaware of the quadraphonic mixes of the early-mid 70s. Or is looking at what was done with Stevie and Zappa as ahead of the curve rather than simultaneously behind it and in the middle trough of it.
Thanks @steelydave for the follow up! Good info here. When I was in the biz, MCA had Motown. I didn't know the Japanese history.Wow. Fascinating info. Who would have thought that, even in 1979, there was still some interest in quad. By then, it seemed pretty much dead.
Stevie needs a reason to make more money so he might consider releasing all that surround/quad stuff, along with all those stereo tunes that never saw the light of day. Can we convince him of some sort of extremely worthy charity maybe?
Great info @steelydave ! Thank you
I will definitely check out the audio doc!
@gvl_guy , maybe someone can get Elton John to bend his ear?
Probably going to be on back order now...
RIP Maestro...
Possible, I suppose (but highly unlikely IMO). Who was doing this in 1979?
I'm not sure what the point of Bob Clearmountain doing this has to do with Secret Life Of Plants. Clearmountain wasn't doing this in the quad era and he's a mixing engineer; it's what he does for a living so it's really not surprising he does them - with 2023 equipment.
fwiw we know Bob Clearmountain was mixing Quad in the 70's.
Was he doing them for himself in the 70s?
Bottom line (Bob Clearmountain non-sequitur aside)…the Stevie Wonder story doesn't really add up, IMO.
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i haven't got a Cluemountain
was just saying that his Surround mixing goes way back to the Quad days. as for the Stevie story, it does feel unlikely that something would get mixed in Surround when Quad was to all intents and purposes done for and what we know as 5.1 wasn't even so much as a twinkle in the milkman's eye!
Indeed, he did the quad mix of Synergy's Electronic Realizations For Rock Orchestra.
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