From Germany comes James Last. James is a band and choir leader with over 200 gold and platinum awards to his credit! James, his son Ron, and wife Waltrud would come to the US to record backing tracks for some of their albums that they wanted to sound "American." I was lucky enough to get introduced to them by Kathy Kasper, a musician's union contractor.

I recorded tracks for the albums: "James Last," "Non-Stop Dancing" and "The Seduction." I flew to Hamburg, Germany to Deutschegrammophone Studios to overdub strings and mix "The Seduction," a version of the Giorgio Moroder song, which was a top ten record, worldwide. When I went back to the hotel and played a cassette copy, I noticed that the left and right channels were reversed. The next day I informed the German assistant engineer of this fact. "Das ist unmöglichkeit" (that's impossible!) he said my Sony Walkman was reversed not his fine German cassette deck. I nearlly forgot about it until the next day when he came up to me after the session and apologized profusely in half German and English. He said no one had ever notice this problem before, the deck having been wired backwards for FOUR years!

While working on Ron Last's solo record, a horrible thing happened. I was at home the morning of the session at Wally Heider's, LA, when Barbara Lewis, the studio manager called and said there had been an accident. The maintenance tech accidentally ERASED  all 24 tracks of the first minute of one of the songs while aligning the machine. Without going into a lot of messy details (and after all the lawyers got done), in turned out that the studio was not going to pay for the irreplaceable master tape valued at $10,000. The result was that Ron would be compensated with $10K worth of studio time. (right! we really wanted to keep working there!) Ron ended up re-cutting the whole song by tracking down all the players he used both here and in New York. I don't know the name of the tech but I understand that he was out of the business after that.

If you are that guy reading this right now.....no hard feelings... as they say...

shit happens.

Wikipedia

Get Yours Now At Amazon.com!