I'm reminded of a problematic EP project back in 1993. It was a from-scratch remake of a nightmare recording of a band who'd had no experience in a studio, and thought they could turn up at 10 in the morning (dead strings, clapped-out drums whose heads hadn't been changed in 12 years....I could go on), record most of the day, demand everything be their way in the mixing and whatnot, and emerge with a fully professional-sounding, finished, duplication-ready master by 10 the same evening!
The band themselves weren't the problem. It was their self-styled prima-donna 'manager' eejit who was the cause of the problems. The band generally acted like so many quiet puppies around this eejit, but once he was out of the loop, things went better.
The remakes were a great improvement over the first batch, just the band and myself at the sessions, no-one else. I did the mixing and mastering in solitude. The results weren't the greatest, but the band were seemingly pleased with the final product, much improved over the initial efforts.
It was perhaps five months later when cassette copies of their EP were at last manufactured and were to be made available. I soon saw a couple of the band members, and asked them how the tapes sounded. They told me the cassettes I'd made them off the master sounded much better. I got a copy of the finished tape, and even before I gave it a listen, I saw where it went wrong. Eejit had had his name put on them as 'producer' even though he'd been barred from the studio, and the songs were in a different sequence as well.
And the sound....horrid. The extreme bottom and top ends were very boosted, into distortion, more reverb had been added, the midrange sucked out, and there was some other weird texture on the top end I later learned was 'aural exciter'. Unlistenable, like it had been run though a graphic EQ set like a V.
The rhythm guitarist and I discussed this. He told me the band were not happy with the tapes. We decided to pay a visit to the firm who was going to duplicate the cassettes, to find out what had happened, and to see what could be done about it.
We met the person who'd been involved. He told us Mr Eejit had said the tape was horrible and wanted something done about it. There were no proper monitors; this worthy was listening to everything on a small speaker designed for in-wall installation that was sitting on a chair. And doing whatever he did based on what was coming out of that.
He was doing a 'customer's always right even when wrong' thing. I explained that Eejit had no say in it, and since my name was on it it must represent what I produced, etc. I understood how he was caught in the middle of this fray, and asked him to please ring me in future if something like this was to happen again. I don't think he was too hip to that idea though, sadly.
They were unwilling to print new labels to reflect proper credits and song sequence; in the end we settled for me remastering the songs to a new DAT tape to reflect the sequence shown on the labels, with the tapes to be made from that.
Moral--if you are engaged by a band to engineer and produce something, supervise the manufacturing as well!