LA Times - Wednesday, April 25, 2001
By Associated Press Writer

COXSACKIE, N.Y.--Bob Irwin's life is tangled up in audiotape -miles of reels filled with sounds of shaggy-haired singers and jangly guitars. Case in point: Irwin recently finished a mono master of Bob Dylan's "Bringing It All Back Home" so it could be pressed in vinyl. And he smiles at the thought of unspooling and restoring the waist-high stacks of tape outside his studio from the likes of The Lovin' Spoonful, Mitch Ryder and Nancy Sinatra. He calls it the "buzz that never goes away."

If it sounds like Irwin exists in a time warp, he does. It's called Sundazed Music-a small but successful record label borne of the tireless 44 -year-old's love of music and knack for rescuing old recordings.

Sundazed's specialty is blasts from the past and reissues of old chestnuts, with an emphasis on American rock and pop from the '60s. "if I didn't own a record company and you came over to my house," he says, "... I'd play these same records."

Sundazed is headquartered in Irwin's hometown of Coxsackie, on the Hudson River. Through the front door of a stately 19th century building are shelves stocked with CDs from bands like the Druids of Stonehenge and the Neanderthals, and the young staff would look at home in an espresso house. The back stairwell wall is checkered with pictures hinting at Irwin's wide experience in the recording industry: There's a picture of Irwin with Santana, Irwin with John Denver, Irwin with Roger McGuinn, Irwin with Iggy Pop. Irwin helped produce reissues for those artists, often through his work for other labels. He acts as the aural equivalent of an art restorer -working off timeworn tapes to bring luster back to reissued releases.

Irwin started his musical restoration work back in 1989, after leaving his job as a record-store manager to start Sundazed with his wife, Mary. Early Sundazed releases tended toward reissues of the '60s garage and surf music he loved. The quality of those releases attracted notice from major labels, which enlisted him for reissue projects. Irwin soon found himself poking through major-label tape vaults, finding forgotten reels and feeling like a kid given the run of a candy store.

All the while, Sundazed grew. While '60s rock remains its core identity, the label also sells releases of country artist Buck Owens, R&B great Lee Dorsey, and Sonny & Cher. It offers seven -yes, seven -Nancy Sinatra CDs. In all these cases, Irwin is pursuing his holy grail: a perfectly produced record in a perfect package.

"You will never see us on the air -as long as I'm alive -on late-night TV with a repackaging of '60s songs that you don't need to hear," he says. The soul of Sundazed is Irwin's "analog room," a mixing and mastering studio retrofitted with pre-digital equipment capable of handling obsolete tape formats from the '60s. This is where Irwin is often found fiddling with spools of pop history. He talks about his mint-condition, tube-driven, 1958 three-track machine the way other men might talk about their vintage Chevy Bel-Air.

Recapturing the right sound can be excruciating. In working on a compilation of Simon & Garfunkel for Legacy, Irwin set up a New York City studio just like the duo's studio circa 1966. Since there was no decent stereo master to work with, he tried to make it sound like the first press of the vinyl. But is that kind of loving care worth it so a new generation can hear Nancy Sinatra sing "Light my Fire"?

Apparently yes. Those reissues came during a boomlet in her popularity and "blew the lid off things" for Sundazed, says Irwin. It helps that a Sundazed album selling between 15,000 and 30,000 is considered a successful release. The little label can lavish attention on projects major labels couldn't be bothered with.

For instance, there's Alexander "Skip" Spence, who recorded the cult album "Oar" in 1968. Spence was leaving the band Moby Grape and heading for a life in and out of mental institutions. The album-a snapshot of an unglued mind -has become a cult classic. For the Sundazed release, Irwin restored the tracks, added some new ones from the same session, and packaged it with new pictures and liner notes.

That sort of attention has given Sundazed a reputation as one of the top reissue labels, said Tim Neely, book editor and researcher for Goldmine. "They treat it with care and they just don't slap it out there," he said. About a fifth of Sundazed releases are vinyl, which Irwin considers a "recession-proof product." Vinyl records have not only refused to die, he notes, but sales have gone up in recent years as more people have been lured to the romance of dropping a needle into a groove. Some audiophiles believe vinyl offers a warmer sound than the digitized music of CDs.

"As long as we have the core of vinyl collectors, they're rabid enough so that it was the most important thing in their lives," Irwin says. "I know it was true in my life."

Sundazed struck deals allowing it to issue vinyl versions of old albums still sold by major labels as CDs. Sundazed began offering old Byrds albums on vinyl last year. This month, the company began selling "Bringing It All Back Home," the first of Dylan's catalog to be committed to vinyl by Sundazed. It is the original mono mix out of print since 1967.

Other Dylan albums are on tap for future release: "Blonde on Blonde" and four other albums are up next. Add that to Irwin's other projects, and he notes happily that he won't live long enough to get all the music he wants out. He plans to get Love and MC5 out on vinyl, and the Spencer Davis Group and O'Jays out on CD. There are plans for a Nancy Sinatra "early years" release.

And there are those tapes in the hall and more tapes in some vault, somewhere, waiting to be found.