Garethx

Hi Val just click on the 'watch on youtube' link directly beneath 'Embedding disbled on request'. Happy new year BTW.

Completely unrelated to the band in question but of tangential interest in that it's live footage of a generally pretty rare 45 being played live there is also great footage of Standards of Living "Cut Up Mr Kool" (as The Marlon Band) on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiDL0w09FK8

Guitar Ray on Shagg has a point of really bad flutter or tape-slowing in the last minute.

Definitely a different vocal take from my 45 of this.

Thanks for posting this Alan. My question is this: if John had a few hundred where are they all now? I can appreciate many of them being in the hands of collectors who never deejay but the resale market in this particular title has been a veritable trickle during the twenty odd years of it being an extremely popular dancefloor record. Figures in the hundreds just don't add up to me. If there were hundreds of them about we'd see them come up for sale on ebay or being sold on the forums. We'd be hearing original copies being hammered at every local soul night by collector/djs up and down the country and internationally too. That is simply not the case in my experience.

The orange issue of Judy Freeman is certainly a hard one compared to the yellow DJ but I'd be interested to see if it fetches much more of a price. Remember the dj copy has two sides and the labels don't look radically different (orange vs yellow isn't as much a difference as between 60s WDJ and stock copies of RCA titles).

Hi Steve. No doubt your recollection is completely correct but the find was less than two dozen copies all told. Probably took them years to shift even that amount until someone had the bright idea of playing the thing on the Northern scene. Garry was probably delighted to get fifty quid for any of them.

The b-side of the bootleg of All Of My Life is by a completely different, unconnected group. Think we've discussed it on here before. The four sides on the acetates are the coupling on the M-Pac 45, Starting Over and All Of My Life. On the acetates each released side is coupled with an unreleased side if that makes any sense.

First deejay I heard play Hank Mullen in a club was Paul Sadot. The Strange World Of Northern Soul eh?

Absolutely nothing to stop anyone else doing the same Nev.

Listened to it last night and it was pretty fascinating. Practically all the good records have been well known and collected for an appreciable time. Some of the less familiar sounds were jaw-droppingly bad and so out of kilter with the current flavour of the rare soul scene in 2012 that it would take someone with Ian's chutzpah to play them in a venue. Sam Williams Singers sounded like something the Twyla Tharp ensemble should be dancing to (not a good thing for a 'soul' record) while a few of the white major label things were gratingly abysmal. I'm all for left-field programming but some of these were stretching the definition of 'music' let alone 'soul music'. That thing on HBR was laugh-out-loud poor. Where it was good was in terms of Ian's enthusiasm. I liked his description of almost fainting when he heard the Connie Stevens 45. It's great that Ian can still get a buzz from collecting and that came over really well. He remains a great raconteur. On a technical note was it just me or was everything pitched-up so much that some records were almost un-listenable? To rave about Willie Wade as one of the greatest records ever and then play it at +10 so that all the delicacy of the arrangements and vocals were lost is a bit of a head-scratcher. Overall a fascinating listen though.

"Demanding Man" is odd on a few levels. One is that very few copies exist in pristine condition. Most I've seen have been well used with all the telltale signs like WOL and play damage (as opposed to damage from poor storage of unsold stock) so it must have got out to consumers in the local area. Over the years I've come to think that the other side "Gonna Step Aside" is the better record. That really does have the intricate, soaring harmonies which made them such a talented group. "Demanding Man" is still awesome Northern Soul though.

I don't get why there's never any interest in this 45 as both sides are exceptional. Better than Jimmy Bo Horn by a country mile. Two of Jackie Avery's best songs and two of the finest sides ever cut at Fame during the classic era. Regarding the Jimmy Bo Horn 'soul pack' stories I've heard it for years but I don't think anyone on the forums has ever owned up to receiving one via such a route. It may well have gone in such packs but the quantity found between John and Garry was really miniscule. It's not like the title was lying around on shelves in huge quantity. More a case of there not really being an audience for the record on the dance scene of the time.

A few of the non-Atlantic distributed 45s on Henry Stone's labels from the late 60s are pretty scarce. Jimmy Bo Horn on Dade is the most obvious example but there are others. As Dylan mentions the local-only Benny Latimore on Dade is definitely scarce.

Interesting list that. Funny how certain things on it have been de-rarified since, like Cashmeres, Johnny Summers, the two LaSalle 45s. Pretty much everything on it has come up for public sale at one time or other since it was compiled, although I can't recall seeing Classics on Yan-G do so. Even Junior McCants and Esther Grant have made an appearance. Doesn't mean they're still not super-rare though (like a few others on the list.) Would say that June Jackson remains pretty rare and probably deserves to go on the list on the topic about common label / rare 45s.

Great publicity photo:

I think that's a typo. Presumably meant to be the Shann release of the USA single?

I can admit when I'm wrong. A quick scan of popsike reveals one Monarch-pressed, styrene copy of April Stevens. I'd take a wild guess that there are one hundred vinyl copies to every styrene one though.

Styrene is as old as the 45 itself: just after WWII. This is all in response to your assertion that the MGM records you listed were styrene, They're not, with the exception of that strange later issue of Spyder Turner with a Monarch delta number but with the classic black / multicoloured MGM label. I agree with your point that Okeh 45s up until '63-'64 would have been vinyl, but seeing as there are practically no Okeh 'soul' 45s before then it's a moot point (The early Roy Lee Johnson 45s are probably on the 'soul' side of Blues Ballads but they are first and foremost blues records). Walter Jackson's earliest 45s were on the main Columbia label. The majority of what we think of as a classic Okeh soul single was issued on styrene alone, with a few exceptions. The examples I mentioned are records I own and I'm sure there must be isolated examples of others.

Okeh was founded in 1918. The soul era was a comparatively short part of its history. Hence my comments.

The odd Okeh 45 from their soul era is on a vinyl issue (off the top of my head I have Little Foxes and Major Harris, i.e. late titles) but the vast majority is on styrene. MGM was noted for vinyl pressing and handled many outside clients in addition to its own labels. East coast Atlantic 45s and LPs for example were pressed at MGM in New York state until about 1966 when they moved production to Specialty in PA.

Yes. There is a later press of the Spyder Turner on styrene but the first press and all the other titles are vinyl. MGM pressed very high quality vinyl too.

^ A very good price for something of that quality.

You are a lucky man. No Curtis King here, sadly.

Another long-standing deep soul rarity is Eugene Evans "Too Much Pain" on Hollywood, a label where not much else seems to fall into the rare or scarce category. I wonder what the consensus is on its rarity? One mint copy went through ebay last summer which I somehow missed. it was listed for the other side, which is also great and a reminder to use both titles in a saved search. That's one copy I've seen for open sale in practically twenty years of looking and begging for a copy. I would be interested to know who amongst us owns this 45.