Garethx

Only ever seen Gentleman Four on styrene.

Why no ZTS codes then Steve? Queens Litho would have provided typesetting for many pressing plants in the New York Metropolitan area, including Columbia in Pittman, NJ. Why separate styrene presses of "Any Day Now", one with a ZTSP code and one without if both from the same plant?

Because Columbia always identified their presses with a very systematic ordering code and either stamped or scratched matrix for all clients. I have a copy of Chuck Jackson "Any Day Now" / "The Prophet" which is a Columbia press and it's stamped and labelled as such. Also the typefaces are different sets. Columbia Pittman typically used Franklin Gothic Black for titles. One of the key signifiers of the plant Scepter Wand usually used for styrene is the stars used in the typesetting to denote the plug or play side. These are different from practically any other label. Mercury/Philips/Blue Rock used 'stars' to do this on demos but they are an asterisk-like device rather than the five pointed star used on Scepter, Wand, Bamboo, Bunky, Garrison etc.

Indeed Tony. That's the styrene plant I'd like to identify. It's not Columbia, or Bestway or Shelly or Monarch. It doesn't seem to be any of the Mercury/Philips ones either.

Ah yes. Steve. I see now it was distributed by Bell, but owned by Luther Dixon.

Those vinyls like the Chuck Jackson, Johnny Copeland etc. were pressed at a factory called Sonic in Brooklyn which also pressed ABC Paramount 45s and LPs. It may have been owned by ABC.

Of course Dave. Come to think of it are there regular issues of either The Anglos or The Masqueraders in this format? Think I've only ever seen WDs of either.

Does anyone know the identity of the plant which did the bulk of the Scepter/Wand styrene? While they used Columbia in Pittman NJ for certain titles these all had ZTSP codes on the labels. As Dave Flynn mentions above there are Monarchs too for some titles. Again these are easy to spot because of the Delta codes in the matrix. Then there are the screen printed no-paper Bestway presses on titles like Ed Bruce and Scepter-distributed labels like Gold. The plant I'm thinking of is the one which made the Garrison 45s and the majority of the Scepter/Wand styrene titles. There are some vinyl anomalies too. Obvious one is The Masqueraders "Let's Face Facts" on a completely different label layout: white with serif-typeface Wand logo. These look to me like they were pressed at an unidentified New York plant which handled many indie labels like Genuine, Frisky, Tarx etc.

Maxine Brown's "Let Me Give You My Lovin" is on both vinyl and styrene.

I personally think Dusty Springfield was a great stylist who made some fabulous records but when you read detailed accounts of the making of "Dusty In Memphis" you have to wonder if her carefully spliced together phrase-by-phrase recording style was not the diametric opposite of the emotional release of soul music. But I've got to repeat my assertion above: if you think there was no racial dimension to the history of soul music you are in denial. The politics of race in America are the very ferment of what became soul music. Nothing happens in a vacuum and the political and social context in which the music happened and developed is everything in this case. Being touched emotionally by a piece of music and therefore finding it 'soulful' in a broad sense is a different matter to it being Soul with a capital letter. Karen Carpenter's voice can move me on occasions but was she generically and specifically a Soul Singer?

I expect loads of history to be rewritten here but the essence of soul is Rhythm & Blues written and sung with a Gospel flavour in the harmonic structure and the style of delivery. Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, The Impressions, The Valentinos, Ben E. King, The Drifters, The Falcons, The Miracles, Joe Tex. These are the building blocks. The building blocks were not white artists unless you're willing to delve deeper into the whole history of American popular music and include the influence of artists like Bing Crosby or Johnny Ray or Peggy Lee on all singers regardless of ethnicity. There may have been important white figures on the business or technical side: Jerry Wexler, Rick Hall, Jim Stewart, The Chess brothers, Bert Berns, but to say that Soul music had no racial dimension is a crass denial of history. Obviously soul was for a time a hugely popular and influential musical movement in the US and there were loads of regional offshoots among black and eventually white artists: the white artists infected with the soul virus for that time included: the blue-eyed soul of The Righteous Brothers in LA; the beach bands of the Carolinas; the self-contained white soul bands of Long Island which spawned artists like The Rascals and Billy Joel; the western Pennsylvania scene which begat The Temptones, Jaggerz and Magnificent Men; the Muscle Shoals scene of Dan Penn, Eddie Hinton, George Soule etc. Of course there was a British dimension as well, Georgie Fame, The Spencer Davis Group, Alan Brown Set etc. Lots of these branched out pretty quickly to become something else: Southern Rock, Soft Rock, singer-songwriter pop and so on and so on. Soul was the acme of musical fashion for a moment in time. The offshoot white music was still capable of being aesthetically 'soulful' (Evie Sands, Hall & Oates, Laura Nyro etc.) but was it strictly 'Soul' in form and content? I'd argue not. Stevie Winwood in Britain is a very good example. His music always had that soul flavour somewhere because of his singing style but it went off in myriad other directions too over the course of his career. For white artists Soul was a fashion to be grafted on to their music in order to give it hipness or currency; that isn't to say these artists didn't love the original soul music deeply, as they clearly did. But from a perspective of strict content once the fashion moved on, so did they. Soul continued to be made and arguably taken to new aesthetic heights by OV Wright, Al Green, The Soul Children, Candi Staton and many other artists, but this was very much music made for a Black audience once again. If these records and artists crossed-over to a white demographic it was a very welcome by-product, but it's interesting to me that by the mid-1970s there were very few (if any) white artists trying to copy for example Al Green, in the same way Dan Penn had tried to model his style on Ray Charles or Bobby Bland ten years earlier. Obviously that's not the whole story of Soul, but to me it's a helpful way of looking at the phenomenon of 'white soul'.

I take your point Sebastian, but there is a real difference because of the non-EU status of goods from the US, and indeed the rest of the world. Trying to get reimbursed by the US postal service for the full amount in the case of loss or damage when the declared amount has been falsified is surely going to create a problem for someone in the chain. The increased International charges from the US seem to be an attempt to build insurance and administrative costs into the process on one hand, and to deter untaxed international trade on the other. This scenario has never happened to me but I wonder if anyone has tried to claim say, $1,000 when the declared value for customs authorities is $5. Particularly if the transaction has happened outside Paypal.

Some sellers are happy to undervalue shipments for customs while others seem uneasy about it. I suppose you have to ask yourself if you would be happy to lose the 'real' amount of money you paid if something should happen like loss or damage in transit. Imagine the scenario of a four figure record getting snapped into pieces while its custom declaration is $5. If you pay through paypal you still theoretically have a paper trail of the spend but the seller would then face awkward questions about fraudulent behaviour: particularly if they are a professional seller who pays taxes as a business. You can see why an increasing amount of US sellers are shying away from posting items internationally. For an item over three figures it's probably easier to ask the seller what their attitude to the customs declaration is before you make a bid or commit to buy. It seems like anything with a higher valuation will take much longer to arrive as well, as it has to go through the additional channel of getting VAT-rated and the so-called handling fee being added at this end. This topic has come up a lot of the years but is really biting as tax authorities try to get a handle of the sheer volume of international trade through ebay. I don't know what the figures are now in 2013, but as long ago as 2009 ebay had a turnover which, if it were a country, would have placed it in the top thirteen of world economies. The USPS have adjusted the price of their international services and their methods of meshing with other countries postal and tax collecting services to try to reflect this. It's unavoidable and probably irreversible, but is part of buying things from the US now. You have to wonder why the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic were so lax on it for so long.

Steve Mancha by a country mile. Mad Lads is a nice group record though. Steve Mancha is one of the finest Detroit soul records. The Professionals is unconvincing and yet again ('cause we've debated it for years on here) I question whether this is Steve Mancha on lead as mentioned above. Mancha had a highly distinctive voice and this sounds nothing like him to my ears.

I'm sure the one Sebastian has posted above is a boot. Simplest way to tell is that the '7' in the logotype is solid black, whereas on the original the same figure is composed of thin horizontal black lines. One thing I've always wondered about: my copy is the yellow label Seventy 7 first press which conforms to the first variant neckender lists above. The last few seconds of the record 'flutter' as if the tape is being slowed or the cutting lathe being disturbed through the mastering process: the last bit where she sings "took to long… to come home". Is this the same for the Impel version and indeed all subsequent presses of the record?

I'd say some of the Jaber and Grandland records have indeed been Northern Soul for a very long time. The Grandland was played covered-up thirty years ago, and some of the Jaber 45s have had big price tags for almost as long: "Not Too Young" and both versions of "Lover Come Back". The easiest Jaber Title seems to be "Hold On".

Soul Sam's St. Ives Tunes in 1977 "Mirwood Men" "My Girl's Angry" (cover-up) The best stomper I've heard this year. "Johnny Moore" "The One You Love" (cover-up) Already massive at St. Ives. a tremendous mid tempo handclapping sound. Ellingtons "Destined To Become A Loser" Very fast out and out Northern classic with more exposure could take over where the Jewels left off. "Len Barry" "Turn Off The Music" (cover-up) A classic mid tempo item and also a perfect finishing record for any venue. "Barbara Mills" "The Harder They Fall" another floater with a very catchy tune. Another massive sound at St. Ives. Blue Sharks "These Things Will Keep Me Loving You" Ellusions "You Didn't Have To Leave" Eddie Regan "Playing Hide and Seek" Sequins "Too Much Lovin'" Billy Watkins "The Ice Man" Mary Saxton "Take My Heart" An interesting insight into what Sam was playing then and what he thought about some of them. Some of the cover-ups have gone on to be acknowledged classics, while others are maybe memories best forgotten.

Wonder if there is a Cecil Womack demo of this floating about somewhere.

Kris the blue label variant you've posted above is also an early press, contemporary to the black label one and the yellow/orange/black rather than a later re-issue. The first two are from plants owned by Chess (can't identify the first one off the top of my head but that's a clear example of one of their particular typesetting styles; the second one pressed at their MidWest factory), the third is a Monarch press. What is interesting in the variants posted above is that the blue label one has a much earlier master number (in brackets) and if the label copy is to be believed is also forty seconds shorter. There are both Stereo and Mono copies of the "I Do Love You" album so this could account for different mastered versions appearing on the 45. There's no apparent rhyme or reason I can see as to why Chess pressed on so many variants of its labels, as there are even some releases of this period on the much older label stock for Chess (blue) and Checker (maroon), although not of this particular title. It's not even a case of one set of particular labels for one particular plant, so a bit of a minefield.

Others may disagree with me but both The Dells and Tops version of this are pretty terrible records, whereas the Laura Lee still sounds great. She really gets inside the song, which is actually quite wistful and sad. Levi Stubbs and Marvin Junior are two of the finest singers singers who ever drew breath, but for me they both miss the mark on this one.

Interesting you should mention "Gettin' To Me" as that's also an Artie Butler arrangement like the Wiches 45.

Terry's right. Surely at the very heart of everything this is a SOUL scene. To say anything else is revisionism. The people at the Wheel were captivated with SOUL music: the live acts which stuck out and defined the thing were the black American ones. There was an other-worldly cool about them which marked them out as different from the bulk of their UK imitators. It was that coolness, hipness (call it what you will) which made the Northern scene go in its particular direction. The Wheel boys and girls were soul fans who identified with black US culture very strongly: look at the iconography. They were not Pop fans. If anything defined them it was that. Yes of course the odd pop record with the right feel was always there going back to Round Robin on Domain and maybe even before (even that features The Blossoms very heavily and is basically an attempt to make a 'hip' club sound) but the true defining classics are all first and foremost SOUL records: Richard Temple, Edwin Starr, The Salvadors, Tomangoes etc. Maybe Barbara Mills has a lot to answer for: one of the first wave of monster sounds where the ethnic identity of the artist was secondary. The Paul Anka 45 is a very good one and Anka is a skilled vocalist who can pretty much sing in any given style, not a one-off no-hoper. Callello was a great arranger who could make real R&B music and was doing so at the same time (Shirley Scott etc.) but without underground Soul records the scene would not have started, flourished or survived.

What has Northern Soul handed down to the youth cults or music scenes which followed it? Either in terms of specifics or general cultural influences? I'd be interested to know what everyone thinks. There are no wrong answers.

One thing to note though: The Moovers was recorded before Pic & Bill. Aside from that you've got to enjoy this thread. Pic & Bill made some immense records, maybe even the best of the male vocal duo genre.

For me the classic example of 'non-soul in any sense' is Babe Ruth. Other may disagree with me but I think its 'disco beat' is accidental rather than deliberate.