Still groovin'

No-longer-Young Rascal Gene Cornish talked to his old hometown newspaper this week, and he touches on one issue that's always nagged at me:

I don't know if I'd call it "infancy" or not — stereo recordings started to appear in quantity around 1958, a good eight years before Gene and the boys got their first big hits — but I suspect he's right about no one knowing how to mike things. The Rascals did enough of their own production to earn label credit, alongside Atlantic stalwarts Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin, but this was still the era of the 45, and the mono single mix was the one that counted. "Good Lovin'," the band's second single and first Number One, sounds particularly heinous in stereo. While the instrumental mix isn't too awful for a period piece, Felix Cavaliere's lead vocal is panned back and forth between the channels: the opening "One, two, three!" ping-pongs back and forth, and in the second verse, the voice changes sides in the middle of a syllable. Ask me my opinion, my opinion will be: get the reissues with the mono mixes — or see if you can find an original 45.

One other cool thing about the Rascals, now that I'm thinking about them: their publishing company was called "Slacsar," which is "Rascals" spelled backwards, the sort of thing you didn't see too often. (Eric Burdon's second group of Animals had a publishing unit called "Slamina.") And I never have decided which Rascals track was my favorite: it's either "You Better Run," a stomper with a growling Gene Cornish guitar riff, or "How Can I Be Sure," an atypical Eddie Brigati lead in waltz time, of all things.