Post #810520 by Digitiki on Sat, Aug 26, 2023 2:47 PM

Correct the “Excursion” was indeed taken from the masters. However I’m pretty certain they were taken from the stereo mixed masters and definitely not a completely new remix of the multitracks if there even was a multitrack recording of the original sessions. I got the story directly from Bob Drasnin years ago. He told me that when Dionysus was wanting to reissue “Voodoo”, he inquired with Tops about the masters. They told him that they no longer existed. So he and Lee Joseph used a virgin copy of Bob’s LP as the Dionysus source. This included all the original tracks. However around that same time “Exotic Excursion” was released by Pickick on CD which Bob took to mean that Tops had not been forthcoming about the existence of the masters. The “Excursion” rerelease is indeed very clean and sounds to be sourced from, if not THE masters, a quality copy of them at least. The only down side is that Pickwick had a policy of only issuing 10 songs (Bob said). So they cut 2 songs.

The sound quality of the Dionysus reissue is excellent though. They decided not to run the recording through “cleaning” software in order to try to keep it as original as possible. I am curious where the master tapes are now and if Pickwick digitized all 12 songs when they ran the tapes.