Garethx

Hi Ady Always suspected they might be Don Julian and the Larks trying to cash in on the British Beat boom by calling themselves The English Men and recording in a dreamy pop harmony ballad style. The phrasing of the vocals and certain idioms used in the lyrics betray them as 100% black Americans I think. For what it's worth I think this is a charming record for all its idiosyncracies: it's been in my hypothetical sales box for a long time, but on the occasions I play it I always think "that's actually really good" and decide to keep it. A few years ago John Manship's site listed the Bobbi Row 45 on another label, Safe, for £250.00; I wonder if anyone has a copy on that logo or whether it was just a typo?

Funk fans offload this record from time to time as I Who Have Nothing is seen as overplayed old hat (albeit a classic) on that scene. The current high price is probably due to soulies picking up on the Loneliness side of the record. A gem indeed.

I'll probably never own an original of Betty Fikes and The Passions sublime I Can't Lie To My Heart on Southbound because of the one-time popularity of their pretty ordinary version of "Prove It To Me". Strangely enough writer Dan Brantley's own version of (You've Got To) Prove It To Me on Federal is truly excellent.

The Icemen on Ole-9: never cared for the dance side, but the midtempo side, It's Gonna Take A Lot To Bring Me Back is as good a soul record as any laid down in a New York studio in the 1960s; sheer brilliance.

Nice. Good price too.

Could have been done by someone in the library at a radio station rather than a fan.

Seeing as the Stardom 45 is heavily indebted to the Jackie Ross hit Selfish One it could be dated from around '64-'65. The Big City 45 is a good few years later: mid '70s I'm guessing, so it's quite possible that the guy's voice matured quite a bit in the intervening years: I think they sound like the exact same singer: his phrasing and tone is similar on all the tracks mentioned. Sam has an acetate of unreleased tracks by him which he reviewed very enthusiastically in Manifesto a few years back. I haven't heard those and wonder if anyone who has can comment.

I thought that was a bit of subterfuge to keep people off the scent of the record.

That's the one, thanks Dave. Nice piece of Staffording too.

My views on everything are fundamentally wrong. I'm very glad that the internet exists for people to point out the error of my ways.

My point about the raised XXs on the Hemisphere copy was that it isn't the crappy thin, dull Monarch styrene, but a more robust material pressed wherever many of the Shrine 45s were: it's not a million miles from Richmond, Virginia to Washington D.C.; someone will know the name of that pressing plant but I can't recall it off the top of my head. The majority of the Fairmount presses are crappy Monarch styrene which should be avoided if possible where an alternative exists. The one for sale on the funk board was possibly crappy styrene (no scan so impossible to tell) so maybe you had a lucky escape Ian.

Lucky Davis on Highland and Lucky 'Jamal' Davis are the same guy, as is Mr. Lucky on Stardom. All his records are great.

In conclusion I'd say go with the Hemisphere if you can't find a Fairmount vinyl in the short term.

Hi Ian I was referring to indie kids rather than high priests of disco-funk.

Hi Joan I would rank them in order of rarity: 1. Fairmount east coast vinyl (blue and white striped issue, magenta logo); 2. Fourmount west coast styrene (black, blue and orange dj copy); 3. Hemisphere red issue styrene. The Hemisphere styrene has a raised X in the run-off like Shrine singles. The Monarch west coast Fairmount styrene press is really much duller in sound than the Hemisphere. Play them side by side and you'll notice the difference is really marked. Both 2. & 3. have been around in similar quantity for years. 1. is much scarcer in my experience.

The Fairmount east coast press (vinyl) plays loud and clear, but is much, much rarer than either the Hemisphere or Monarch Fairmount variants (I didn't know it existed until fairly recently). The Hemisphere copy plays very dynamically so shouldn't be sniffed at. The Monarch Fairmount copy is dull and plodding in comparison to the other two but looks nice. A phenomenal dance soul record which always elicits much interest from non-northern soul fans when you play it to them.

I wonder how many people are aware this group was once Vito & The Salutations? A great record which seems to be undergoing another small revival.

They say self knowledge comes with age Ian!

Like this?

There is no styrene press. The slight difference in the appearance of the two discs above comes from Kenny's copy being photographed and Tim's being scanned from the Record Collector article he did, the depth of the dip in the plastic has been flattened out somewhat in the image, but it's clearly still there. Also the typesetting is exactly the same on both and I can only conclude they're both clearly vinyl from the same source. Looking at the images close up again I'd always thought that there was a figure (100 or 1000) next to the OK writing on the Tim Brown copy. On closer inspection it could be a set of initials: NW or DW.

I take your point about drying times for printed parts Paul, but I was referring to machine times (not including lead-ins etc.) for the stampers and I maintain that none of this would be expensive in relative terms in answer to the question "why press only six; wouldn't that be too costly". Another thing's occurred to me: both known copies are WDJs as opposed to what you call "regular copies" Paul: no need even for the stage of using blank mauve Soul labels. As has been noted before Motown used a number of pressing facilities throughout the states, and it was useful of Phil to state that he has seen dedicated Motown Test Pressing labels from several of these facilities. Could it not be the case that ARP used the label format of a WDJ for a handful of copies rather than pressing at least 1,000 WDJs as may have been the norm with, for example, a Miracles or Four Tops 45? All I was trying to say was that technically and from a production point of view this was all entirely possible and plausible. I'm not particularly getting behind the theory that only six were ever pressed (I simply don't know the truth like all of us here), just working backwards from it seeing as it is the closest we have to a 'horse's mouth' description of what actually happened. If someone close to the Motown production office or the pressing plant had ever definitively said "we pressed up thousands of them and skipped the lot" then we could pour water on the "six copies only" theory. However I don't think anyone has ever said that. Bernie Ales' story about his wife punting copies out at a yard sale can be taken with a huge pinch of salt, I think. No mauve issue copy has ever come to light, despite people searching high and low for over thirty years and the images which appear on the internet of an apparent regular issue copy are fakes.

The only time and money spent on this would have been the time spent on: 1. Producing the stamper from lacquer (half an hour); 2. Producing artwork (say ten minutes); 3. Producing black plates then overprinting existing blank Soul labels (half an hour tops) and then: 4. Sticking six lumps of plastic onto the stamping bed, letting them cool and puting them in sleeves (ten minutes). 5. Posting or delivering the finished records to Motown in Detroit. All the above processes would have been completed by salaried staff members of the pressing plant at no extra physical cost to Motown or ARP. All records pressed for Motown at this facility would have gone through this process. The difference with the FW release is that the project was abandoned and the further large-scale manufacturing did not take place. The costly part of the enterprise is promotion and distribution, neither of which took place in this particular case. The unit cost of manufacture is pretty minimal, certainly to a relatively large company like Motown, which might have had ten other projects being manufactured at the plant that week. As mentioned earlier in the thread there are isolated instances of this happening with other Motown releases like the Patrice Holloway VIP single, so FW is not unique in this respect. What makes it unique for a Motown product is the escape of the stock to the Northern Soul scene in Britain and the subsequent massive popularity of a record which exists in very small quantity. This happens all the time with rarities from other quarters (which exist in small numbers for a host of other reasons), so it was bound to happen with at least one aborted Motown project. On a tangential note I'd like to ask John Manship if he was disappointed with the price which The Ringleaders acetates fetched in his auction last year. To someone of my generation (in my early 40s) these records are at least as interesting as Frank Wilson from a scene history point of view, just as good and actually rarer.

I didn't say they were test pressings Pete, although effectively they were. Manufacturing a vinyl test pressing uses exactly the same process as manufacturing the final product: that's the entire point of them, to see if the stamper produced from the master lacquer exhibits any problems in terms of quality. Also, we need to be clear about how labels were produced. The pressing plant would have had a large quantity of 'blanks' for a client like Motown: essentially the finished record label minus the credits particular to the individual release, all printed using four colour process with a screen ruling to produce the logotype and the colour background, which would then be overprinted (using offset lithography) with the credits in black ink for this vintage of Soul label release (silver in the case of Gordy and Motown releases). The credits on styrene records were overprinted using letter-press rather than offset lithography (it would be great if any printers on the board can explain the difference between the processes). If you're test pressing a record for a client who retains blanks at the factory you would tend to use the blanks. I know Atlantic had dedicated test pressing labels, but can't remember seeing a similar thing for Motown.

The Barbara Lynn Atlantic album is superb: every home should have one. Sorry, don't have a spare.

Andy's post is a good one, but the point about the actual number of copies pressed is one of pure speculation. Record pressing at the time wasn't like offset litho printing: it wasn't a case of stopping a machine while it was spewing out hundreds of copies of any item: stampers could be used one at a time for vinyl records (I believe styrene pressing is a different process: the plastic is injected into the stamping mould rather than placed by hand onto the pressing surface). It is and was eminently possible to press single copies of records: there is a fascinating website dedicated to one-off pressings of records; mostly coloured or composite coloured vinyl pressings done privately by pressing plant workers of records they took a particular shine to or by artists they were fans of. It's possible that pressing plant workers pressed 'overs' of the Frank Wilson record but given that he was an unknown at the time unlikely. If the order from Motown was for six copies then six copies plus one or two for the factory files would have been pressed. Once the order came through from Motown for the pressing run to be abandoned the stampers would have been destroyed and maybe the file copies too.