Garethx

Originals were pressed at Bestway.

Marv Johnson on United Artists.

I don't see the Liberty part of his career as jazz. He made some fine music though. From the British film "It's Trad, Dad" a great Burt Bacharach tune.

She's Gone is one of the great Chicago ballads. Nice find.

But none of the Gene McDaniels records ever played on the Northern scene were ever conceived as any kind of soul music, even Walk With A Winner. At that stage in his career he was very firmly a pop singer who just happened to be an Afro-American. What have Green Door, Tower Of Strength, Chip Chip, Hang On etc. got to do with soul music?

Gene McDaniles=pop; Timi Yuro=soul?

Don't agree with comments stating that Timi Yuro never made a soul record–her version of "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby" on Frequency produced by Willie Mitchell surely qualifies on every level. Although Timi Yuro can be characterised as a Pop singer in the generic sense there was a huge amount of soul in practically everything she sang and her importance as a singer of tremendous emotional depth is there for all to hear. Skin colour is irrelevant on this one because she was the real deal. Recorded at Wessex Sound in Islington, meaning in the same room as Anarchy In The UK and Blue Is The Colour. Strange but true. But back on thread neither of these records is rare.

This is the conundrum the Northern scene has faced since about 1975, maybe even much earlier. If new blood is coming on the scene at any time there's always a fantastic wealth of 'back catalogue' to get into. How do you ignore great, great records which you're hearing for the first time? No-one ever landed knowing everything. In the beginning they're all 'newies' to young ears in a sense. I know when I started in the early 80s there was something of a backlash against what were seen in some quarters as the excesses of the 70s. The manifesto seemed to be be 'no oldies and no pop'. In retrospect I wasted a lot of money collecting flavour of the month newies, unknowns and the current modern soul of the time. I wish I'd picked up things like The Salvadors, Don Varner, Lou Pride, The Del Larks–and on and on–at mid-1980s prices. I also wish I could have admitted to myself that a lot of the pop monsters of the then recent past–like Jay Traynor and others–were just great records. Some of those 'Building Block Records' are just undeniably good. They're not the be-and-end-all, however. There should always be room for some innovation and progression. In order to innovate or progress you've got to start from a firm foundation. Knowledge and good taste. You can't really buy either. They can only be acquired through bitter experience and a willingness to learn. As the pool of yet-to-be-discovered vintage soul has got smaller and smaller I think it's crazy that the DJ ranks have swollen in inverse proportion. Qualifying all the above I've never really been a DJ and never wanted to be. I'd imagine that starting out now with the intention of being a disc jockey on the rare soul scene (without first being a dancer and/or collector) would be daunting, not to mention slightly pointless. I wouldn't stand behind the decks at a proper allnighter unless I was confident that very few people in the room could play my set. Otherwise what is the point? You've got to be ruthless about the quality of what you're playing. I think that genuinely only comes from being around the scene for a period of time. Immersing yourself in the history on one hand and keeping an ear to the ground for genuinely fresh material on the other.

£40 is too cheap for this on Sheridan House.

Aside from all the technical and clerical questions I must just say how much I love this particular vintage of Detroit soul–personally much more than the Golden World type of sound. Records like these two Karen 45s, the Jimmy Delphs version of "Am I losing You" and the Emanuel Laskey pictured above sound great now but probably would have been largely passed over by UK Northern Soul fans in the mid '70s as just collection-fillers.

Yes. I was wrong in that 15XX is a catalogue number rather than a master number.

That's one of the Atco distributed ones. You can tell which plant it was pressed at by a note at the end of the matrix on the label. KA-19576-then a two letter code which Atlantic used to denote pressing plants: SP for Specialty in Pennsylvania, PL for Plastic Products in Tennessee, MO for Monarch, California, BW for Bestway in New Jersey, AM for ARP in Michigan etc.

Also the Karen version of "Let Me Down Easy" by Bettye Lavette and a couple of the later Capitols 45s: both issues "When You're In Trouble" with different flip sides. Those are all pressed at ARP, like "Dancing A Hole In The World" on Carla which has a Ter-Mar master #. I think these two later Karen 45s–The Volumes and Jimmy Soul Clark–form a distinct series. Both pressed at Archer and the only use of this particular logo.

1551 seems to be a master number rather than a catalogue number, which is K100. Maybe intended to be an Atco distributed record, but never used. Not all the 1500s are Atco distributed. The Sharon McMann for example is a RCA custom pressed job without any Atco distribution.

Jerry Cook exists on real Hollywood and Scranton pressings. Are some of the Scrantons boots? All of them? The real Scranton one has the 'triangle with IAM' stamp. The real Hollywood one has the daisy-wheel mark. Looking at popsike I can see a couple of examples where a dodgy Jerry Cook has sold for more than it perhaps ought to, but similarly I can speculate that there might well be a couple of examples where the original has sold for peanuts and the respective buyers and sellers are going by the labels only.

Printing the two colour blank Capitol labels would be absolutely the easiest part of the enterprise. I'm not doubting that there were probably such blanks laying unused in the Capitol Hollywood offices or pressing plant in the early 70s. Remember that Capitol had switched to a different 45 label some years earlier. The bootleg is a facsimile of a Capitol Scranton pressed 45. Capitol sold that plant in 1973, having switched to the labels with European style friction grips by 1968, which were pressed at Jacksonville, Illinois and Winchester, Virginia. The thing which makes this 45 so interesting is the typesetting. The copies of Alexander Patten we know as definite originals are the Capitol Hollywood pressings: 'daisy wheel' or 'asterisk' pressing mark and typesetting by the firm Bert & Co. The Scranton-pressed titles used a completely different set of fonts and were typeset by a company called Keystone in Pennsylvania. These are the fonts used on the Alexander Patten 'boot' variant. It's a very definite tell and something a bootlegger would most likely never have gone to the trouble to replicate in the early 1970s. Why not just replicate the existing, known, Hollywood-pressed release with its Bert & Co. fonts? Why arouse suspicion by producing something which didn't look exactly the same but which looks so authentic? If it was Soussan he never again went to the same trouble with any major label release. Why not do an Earl Wright as well, something I've never seen on a Scranton-type 45? The Alexander Patten doesn't use the International Union of Machinists stamp which Scranton pressings usually had, something I used to think was the end of the matter, but recently I got some (definitely original) Beach Boys Capitol 45s from 1966 which didn't have them either–that's what got me looking through the pressings box for AP. I don't know the definitive answer to this, but I find it interesting that a bootlegger went to such trouble when a US Capitol original of this 45 was not a huge money item in the UK at the time.

When these boots first surfaced our understanding of the entire record manufacturing process stateside was much more limited. I recently dug out my Alexander Patten pressing and compared it to genuine original 45s manufactured at Capitol's Scranton, Pennsylvania plant. It's identical in terms of typesetting and the absence of certain markings which we all once thought a genuine Capitol 45 'should' have. This is complex and worth opening a second topic for this 45 alone. Bottom line is that Capitol manufactured 45s in at least three factories. Each pressing will have different layout and different manufacturing markings. When these Alex Patten copies first appeared it was different enough from the first US copies for people to scream 'Boot!' but now I'm actually unsure.

For Sale: Ronnie McCain This Time I'm Gone / Too Much of a Good Thing Triode T-116-F Really clean vinyl and labels. Conservatively graded at VG++. SOLD Thanks for interest. gareth

Wanted Vee-Jay VJ-697 THE DONTELLS "I'm Gonna Tell The World" c/w "Ain’t Cha My Baby" Sorted.

The first issue is one of the Modern Soul scene's genuinely rare originals if you ask me. Never showed up in quantity. Stuart Cosgrove found the first small handful and then Soul Bowl got a minuscule amount a few years later. I'd be surprised if there are more than a dozen genuine first issues known.

There's some good information on the record and on Cathy Carlson herself via Anthony Reichardt's great youtube channel here. A good example of an artist who had a pretty long career on major labels, working with some top names without ever really having anything approaching a hit single.

It's already gone to a good home.

Thanks.

How much should this go for on USA Atlantic? Not Jamaican. In unplayed condition.

Diane & Annita–the Wand act–only released on French Vogue EP. Think the Mindbenders slightly predates Patti Labelle & The Bluebelles version.