Ecstasy, Passion & Pain had a number of hits in the 70's on Roulette records, "Touch & Go" arguably their best. By the 80's, surviving Disco Sucks as a beloved classic, I still couldn't get enough of it, so I made my own extended edit. Around the same time, Roulette records was acquired by Sunnyview records, where my friend Claudia Cuseta was in charge of Club Promotion. Claudia surprised me one day saying she had the master tapes of "Touch & Go" & said she wanted me & Tony Smith to remix it. This is about 1985, & I had only done a few less memorable low budget remixes, so I was looking forward to this. I already had this rough edit for a direction & we used that for a framework. We mixed it at a brand new Studio I had never heard of before located in hell's kitchen. As usual, time was tight, but we managed to get what we needed done before time was up, at the time we were quite happy with it.
It was the weekend & when we we're done we decided to take it to Larry at the Garage. A few days earlier I had just finished my edit of "Let's Go All The (Way Down)" Brenda & The Tabulations for Polygram, so I brought that too. I hadn't done many remixes at this point, & certainly nothing I felt strong enough about to bring Larry, but I felt really good about both of these. When we got to the Garage, the night was going full steam, & when I came up to Larry & told him what I had for him, he seemed very excited. He already had the next record cued up, but he went right to the reel to reel to cue up "Touch & Go" & played it next. As he mixed it in, me & Tony ran down to the dance floor to check it out. It had a longer more dramatic intro than the original, but you could tell most of the crowd knew it & seemed excited. As we listened I thought something sounded off with the EQ, as the song progressed the EQ continued to bother me. People danced & it still went over well, but me & Tony looked at each other & said "we need to fix this".
Sunnyview budget was done, so we didn't have the option of going back in the studio to fix it, but it hadn't been mastered yet. A little later Larry also played "Let's Go All The (Way Down)"... & that did sound really good, so I felt a bit redeemed. The problem with "Touch & Go" was the studio, & even though we thought it sounded great there, their sound was very deceiving, & sounded nothing like that outside of their studio, especially in a sound room like the Garage.
I went to the mastering session to oversee a lot of specific changes, I had one more shot to get it right. It's rather unorthodox to expect that much change in a mastering session, but I was very fortunate that the mastering engineer was Tom Coyne. It was my first time meeting him, but he was extremely nice to me. He already knew this classic record & seemed a bit excited to work on it. I thought I was pushing it with all my specific requests & changes, but he was amazing & seemed to appreciate that I really knew what I wanted & he also seemed quite proud with what he could do to bring the sound back to life.
A few weeks later when I brought it back to Larry, he still put it on pretty quickly... & this time it sounded right! Larry smiled at me & finally the pressure was off. Compared to editing, I really haven't done that many remixes, but editing seems to regularly play a major roll... as it did in "Touch & Go", Danny :)