Enter, Pete Weiss...

Picking up where we left off, what we were left with at this point was a general dissatisfaction with the results of making a vinyl transfer of The Judgement of Paris for use on the anthology, leaving us only the option of going back to the original 16-track masters (the stereo master tapes having burned up in a fire some time ago). This would mean, essentially, making new mixes based on the original Bruce Baxter mixes -- which were brilliant: subtle, careful, but at the same time bold and visceral. We at Casa Nueva knew just the guy for the job.

Pete Weiss owns and operats Verdant Studio in the rolling hills of Vermont, about two and a half hours north of our Boston HQ. There he presides over a remarkable array of every kind of gear imaginable -- gear that would be useless without Pete's incredible musical sensibility, innate artistic empathy, and vast technical savvy. We called him up and explained the position we were in. He quickly and generously offered to do a "test mix" to see how we ("we" at this point being CN and Kevin) liked the results. The digitized master tapes were sent to him, and not long after, a mix of "Tootsie 2" arrived in our inboxes.

Any reservations we had about re-creating or somehow tampering with history quickly evaporated. Pete got as close to the original levels, EQ, and stereo positioning as humanly possible, and by going back to the original masters (as opposed to the third-generation vinyl), the quality of the sounds was markedly improved. Pete promised to only use outboard gear from 1981 or before, to maintain historical accuracy. Almost immediately we struck a deal to have the whole of The Judgement of Paris restored (we prefer that word to the word "remixed") at Verdant.

One track -- the closing cover of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" -- was not able to be thusly restored. The original tape suffered some well-intentioned-but-eventually-fruitless decisions made in the mid-'80s. So on the finished product, we did leave that as a vinyl transfer (although masterfully massaged by Pete Weiss to match the tenor of the newly restored tracks).

With The Judgement of Paris sourced, we now had to worry about the bonus tracks, which were to be drawn from a range of sources. We'll get into that journey in the next entry...