Bruce Botnick, Engineer – Reviews and Commentaries

1970 – It Was a Very Good Year, Especially for Dave Mason

masonalone

1970 Was a Great Year for Analog Recording

This album appears to be criminally underrated as music nowadays, having fallen from favor with the passage of time.

It is a surely a MASTERPIECE that belongs in any Rock Collection worthy of the name. Every track is good, and most are amazingly good. There’s not a scrap of filler here.

The recording by Bruce Botnick is hard to fault as well.

1970 was a great time in music. Some of the best albums released that year (in no particular order):

  • Tea for the Tillerman,
  • Bridge Over Troubled Water,
  • Moondance,
  • Sweet Baby James,
  • Tumbleweed Connection,
  • After the Goldrush,
  • The Yes Album,
  • McCartney / Self-Titled,
  • Elton John / Self-Titled,
  • Morrison / His Band And Street Choir,
  • Deja Vu,
  • Workingman’s Dead,
  • Tarkio,
  • Stillness,
  • Let It Be — need I go on?

Even in such illustrious company — I defy anyone to name ten albums of comparable quality to come out in any year — Alone Together ranks as one of the best releases of 1970.

The Doors – Energy and Raw Power Are Key

More of the Music of The Doors

Reviews and Commentaries for The Doors’ Debut

Reviews and Commentaries for the Music of The Doors

What to listen for you ask? ENERGY and RAW POWER. Few audiophiles have any idea how well recorded this album is, simply because most pressings don’t do a very good job of encoding the life of the master tape onto the vinyl of the day, regardless of whether that day is in 1967 or 2017.

The first Doors album is without a doubt the punchiest, liveliest, most powerful recording in the entire Doors catalog.

Huh? I’m guessing this statement does not comport well with your own experience of the album, and there’s a good reason for that: not many copies of the album provide strong evidence for any of the above qualities.

Most pressings are opaque, flat, thin, veiled, compressed, lifeless and sound exactly the way so many old rock records sound: like some old rock record. (more…)