Garethx

As Shinehead says "It's Not Easy" is a Mann/Weil song with maybe the most obviously soulful reading being Malcolm Hayes on Liberty. I have a bit of a soft spot for the folk rock version by The Will-O-Bees on Date.

Looking for a nice copy of Art Gentry "Merry Go Round" on Onyx. best, gareth

The popsike link is a listing of a bootleg. The one in your ebay link is an original.

edit.

Looks great. I'm after a clean original of the Jimmy Hughes on Fame 1002 if anyone can help.

Bear in mind that the Yellow Magic Orchestra version is not intended to be taken entirely seriously. The Orchestra's main man, Ryuchi Sakamoto, was as much conceptual artist as musician, a kind of Japanese David Byrne. The "Japanese Gentlemen Stand Up Please!" chorus gives it away as not being the most serious record he ever made. For all that it's probably funkier than The Bamboos version.

I'd often wondered about this. Eddie Daye was more of a bandleader than a lead singer per se, so these could indeed be the same Four Bars. As you point out the geographical location is broadly similar. No idea about the fifties group. Vic Marcel was a good singer and I love his RCA single "You Still Got Me". All sides of his RCA 45s are at least pretty good though. I'm afraid I know practically nothing else about him so am looking forward to any concrete answers in this thread.

I could be completely wrong on this but isn't it only the deadwax which tells the different mixes apart visually, not the labels? The labels for each mix of "DYKWLI" state SP-1 and a master number 200079 whether it's 200 or 201. Don't think there is a copy with "200079-2" on the label, whether it be the red, yellow or white demo. I had a red label copy with the 'inferior' mix. For what it's worth I think this is the rarest variant but the version of "Do You Know What Love Is" is nowhere near as good and it isn't just the different intro, it's the entire rhythm track which has had extra layers of percussion (handclaps and tambourine) added. It plods along where the other one glides. The vocal take sounds identical on both.

The original flip of 'Tighten Up" was "Dog Eat Dog" on both Ovide and Atlantic. The Atlantic 45 with "Tighten Up Part II" was released around a month after the original issue, so the radio success of Tighten Up was pretty rapid. "A Thousand Wonders" was only ever a US 45 by The TSU Toronadoes.

It takes the best part of half an hour to change and set up the cartridge on my Rega tonearm, so cartridges aren't easily swapped as they might be with say, a Technics arm.

The problem is that styrene should really be played with a different stylus to vinyl pressings, conical as opposed to elliptical. The conical stylus, particularly at the cheaper end, has a reputation for 'gouging' vinyl however. The correct stylus at the correct weight can improve the fidelity results dramatically. Styrene can actually withstand far more tone-arm weight with the correct stylus. Too much weight with the wrong type however and you're essentially cutting a new groove in the record. Too little weight and you're getting flutter and distortion as the needle is being buffeted by the grooves. The ideal situation is a separate turntable armed with a different pick-up for each type of record. Maybe realistic in the home but a problem if playing records at clubs.

She's Fire is the better record, hands down. It's actually got a classic collision of harmony/melody that the best vocal group stuff should have. The Combinations is a throwaway two-chord drone-piece by comparison. Forget about the tempo alone for once!

Wow. Thanks for that info on the Laurie 45 Steve. I had never even wondered if there were earlier versions of Salty Tears. Now I know. Geoff I'm assuming that just like Bacharach or Carole King, Teddy Randazzo was less of a lyricist than a composer who usually wrote in conjunction with a dedicated lyricist.

I'm a big fan. "Hurt So Bad" must be one of the great standards of 60s US music and it seems almost impossible to make a bad recording of the song. Little Anthony's version is definitive but I'm also a big fan of the Grant Green, Byrdie Green, Susan Rafey, Nancy Wilson and Baby Washington versions among others. "Gonna Take A Miracle" is a similarly iconic song. Annabelle Fox's "Lonely Girl" is a truly remarkable song and arrangement with at least five distinct musical hooks: really clever but also really beautiful. In some ways he deserves to be ranked alongside Burt Bacharach or Carole King as one of the great American tunesmiths but the work of his classic period never really broke out of the world of 'Black Music' and into the mainstream pop charts very often or for too long. He got to work with Frank Sinatra on the Cycles album with artistically satisfying results but you get the impression that he was happy working on the kinds of projects he mostly undertook i.e. with more 'soulful' vocalists. I know it's taken on the aspect of a handbaggers anthem but "You Gotta Let Go" by Marcia Hines is also a really special song by him and his then wife, Vicky Pike. I've often wondered how this came to be only recorded in Australia and whether there are Amercian versions floating about somewhere on tape. It's from around the same timeframe as their wonderful "Salty Tears" by Thelma Jones and it would be nice to think there's a version by that great singer waiting to be unearthed at some point.

FOR SALE: 6Ts ANNIVERSARY 45 LORRAINE CHANDLER "YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE" / THE METROS "MY IMAGINATION" MINT MINUS CONDITION £60 INCLUSIVE OF UK SPECIAL DELIVERY paypal only thanks. Thanks in advance for any interest, gareth

Have never understood the appeal of this record and am amazed at the prices being quoted for the second issue. Sold an original on ebay (to a fellow forum member as it turned out) a few years ago and it struggled to reach double figures.

Trying again for this...

"Deceiver" on an A&M 45 is great modern soul. Could once have been a big record on the UK scene, but wasn't. "Strawberry Letter 23" is a classic of course and even better than the Shuggie Otis original for my money.

Will 'melt' styrene particularly badly and is not particularly good for vinyl. As others have said there are better solvents if you wish to remove glue residue from labels.

I have a spare Lorraine Chandler / Metros if anyone wishes to purchase it.

We're pretty lucky to have the chance to own these tracks on vinyl. Thinking back to the Hopkins Brothers thread imagine what a set of exclusives these would be if never issued and how much longevity they'd have as one-offs. So many great ones but a special mention to Chuck Jackson, Carla Thomas and The San Francisco TKOs. Taken together as a whole it's a wonderful testament to the club, its promoter and the taste of the crowd.

I would sell to a dealer only if I had not bought them from dealers at book prices over the years. It would be economic madness to re-sell at wholesale value items which had been purchased at retail if there is no necessity to sell. If all the records had all come from what I believe the Yanks call 'crate-digging' expeditions then fine. But a collection bought from UK dealers, even over a long period of time when across the board values were lower is still only ever going to worth a fraction back to those same sources. Drip feeding the better items out to fellow collectors does no good whatsoever in my experience. The cream goes really quickly, then the money gets frittered away on living expenses or (maybe worse) on flavour-of-the-month type records with none of the staying power of established rarities. If you've got the discipline to save the money from record sales then that's great but few people actually do. Then you're left with the lesser records everyone else has in their 'theoretical sales box'. In theory For Sale but to all intents and purposes un-shiftable for any worthwhile monetary gain and hardly worth a trip to the post office in order to mail them off. You say that the collection goes well beyond the Top 500 and I don't doubt it does, but sadly it's only really the Top 500 (in perfect condition) type items which will fetch decent money in the wider world outside this cosy enclave. Sounds 'yet to reach their potential' never amass anything like as much as you'd expect they might. Records might seem expensive while collecting but if you're trying to sell them as an amateur they can often seem quite the opposite.

Very few people have a collection worth a life changing amount of money and this site is littered with stories of folk who've sold a collection only to regret it before starting to collect again. Unless you absolutely have to sell in order to keep a roof over your head I personally would not do it.

Sounds like yours is a vinyl original.

Thanks for the info about another release of that 45 Bob as that helps to join a few of the dots. I knew there was a local issue but never having seen one I had no idea where it was from. This Larry Sanders was based in the South for parts of his career. Bits of The Sound Of Soul album were cut at Muscle Shoals Sound and of course "Blues Time In Birmingham" places him in Alabama too (with a Mobile distributor's address) so strong evidence pointing to it being the same artist.