Crush All Boxes [#2]

The "Final" Crush All Boxes

Mark Pinske, January 26, 2003

Crush All Boxes was a title that we had used a couple of times and was an album that we changed also a couple of times.

The actual "Final" finished Crush All Boxes was mixed by me and Frank and we did the master tape on the Ampex 102 1/2 inch machine with Telefunken "C4-D" noise reduction. It actually had a "Truck Driver Divorce" mix on it that I did featuring the "Figet" Emu keyboard setup that was awesome and it had a "C instruments" mix on it as well. It was never released or played on any Radio show.

The Crush All Boxes that was played on the radio was an early collection of songs that we were working on at the time for Tinsel Town Rebellion & some of You Are What You Is. This was way before the actual final Crush All Boxes that we did later. Frank was trying to save the name for another double album. Which is what we finally did. Frank was not settled on some of the performances and we ended up doing studio over-dubs on a number of the vocal tracks and mixing most of those songs again after they were re-done. Not everything was re-done, but as you know Frank liked to edit one song right into another (usually right on the down beat) so we mixed and match final mixes until it played right for both of those albums. We would have as many as 5 or 6 different mixes of each song many times and sometimes the mixes would include a different vocal or guitar solo etc with edits from other cites. Frank liked to play with takes until he felt he had the best ones from certain tours etc.

When we finally got the real Crush All Boxes done, Bennett Glotzer (Frank's Manager) said the record company did not want a "double album" and that they only wanted a single album. So we put the final mix tape in the vault and started on The Drowning Witch album.

None of the actual finished takes from the (what I call real) Crush All Boxes album were ever put on any record while I was still working with Frank. (At least not until after 1986). Marqueson said to me much later that they never found the real master in the vault. It was just in two white boxes with my hand writing down one side that said Crush All Boxes and on the top of the cover I had written "C4-D". We later started doing everything digital and/or without and noise reduction so even the machines were no longer in the studio to transfer that set of master tapes.

[...] I seem to remember for sure that we stuck Crush All Boxes in the vault the same day we started on "No Not Now" for the Drowning Witch album. Because I didn't take the Telefunken C4-D units off of the two track until then and Crush All Boxes was the only masters we ever did on the 1/2 inch two track that had C4-D noise reduction. I remember Frank saying that we were going to start using it on everything and then we didn't because we went to the Agfa 468 tape which let us bias higher and then we got much hotter levels on the half inch and stopped using any noise reduction at all.

 

 

Research, compilation and maintenance by Román García Albertos
http://www.donlope.net/fz/
This page updated: 2020-11-01