Prior to recording Circa I had made 4 records as a leader, starting with Strange Omen for the label Candid.
That recording featured Bruce Saunders on Guitar and Glen Velez on percussion and was my first experience of the trials and tribulations of being a leader. The session was scheduled to be a one-day hit, starting about 7pm and going until we finished. We were fairly well rehearsed and so I didn't think this would be a problem.
After the first take I was thrilled in that the music sounded better than I expected.  We were playing better than we ever had. This was true of the second take as well. On throughout the night the music was sounding good and I was feeling relieved, being that this was my first recording as a leader.
We were about 50% into the recording when on one of the playbacks I heard what sounded like the piano "warble," meaning the pitch dropped for a split second and then returned to normal. It was very minimal and no one else in the room heard it, so I wasn't sure U actually heard it. We listened, checked back for it several times, and eventually the engineer and the producer convinced me I hadn't heard anything.
We went on to the next take and I was feeling considerably less confident. I felt like I had heard something and it was hard for me to imagine that it was only a momentary glitch. Upon listening back to that playback the producer did hear the glitch as well. It turned out that the tape machine was faulty.
This ended up compromising every take we had recorded up until then. Our only option was to wait until the tape machine from another studio uptown became available, sometime around 2:30 in the morning they guessed, have it brought down to our studio, which they estimated would take about an hour, and begin again around 3:30 or 4 in the morning.
This is what we did. Strange Omen was recorded from about 4am, to 7:30am. And, those takes didn't sound near like the first ones.
That was my first lesson in releasing music commercially. I couldn't put a disclaimer on the CD saying that this record was made under duress, or that there was a better version made but we had to dump it. And because the record company had put up money, they needed to release it to try and get some of their investment back.
I learned something about letting go from that.