Paradise Studios co-owner/engineers Kirt Shearer (left) and Craig Long
To commemorate Tower of Power’s (www.towerofpower
.com) 40th anniversary, drummer David Garibaldi has been mining his personal collection of rehearsal and gig tapes dating back to late 1970 for digital restoration and CD release. Garibaldi, a TOP member from 1970 to 1980 and from 1998 to the present, is overseeing TOP’s East Bay Archive project, which presents previously unreleased recordings that offer aural snapshots of the band’s evolution.
So far, the project has yielded Volume 1, a two-disc set comprising both sets of a gig recorded on April 23, 1973, at K-K-Katy’s nightclub (Boston). “I think young people coming up today don’t get a chance to be in a band like this and experience music the way that we have,” Garibaldi says. He also confirms that future releases are in the works.
Garibaldi brought his selected tapes to engineer Kirt Shearer, who co-owns Paradise Studios (www.paradisestudios.net) in Sacramento, Calif. “I’ve recorded there and I’m familiar with his work, and it’s a great studio in Sacramento,” Garibaldi says. “And Roger Smith, our keyboard player, lives in Sacramento and has worked with Kirt a lot and recommended him.”
“We’re doing more mastering and restoration [projects],” Shearer says. “My partner is Craig Long, and we’ve been in our current location since 1986. Sacramento is a market that doesn’t have a studio on every corner where the production staff has 25 years of experience. We’ve become known as the place to track your basics or complete a project, or have it mastered, or have a problem fixed that somebody can’t handle in a smaller facility or at home. It seems like every seven years or so you have to look at your business plan and make sure it still works.”
