The Feel It Advent-ure 2025: Door 16

 The next three records in this year’s Advent-ure are all late entrants, they dropped through the mailbox only a few days ago.

Lou Johnson must have liked a bit of yomping – and the circus. In a short period of time in the 60s he had records released on Hilltop, Big Hill - and BigTop. All were distributed by Bell. These labels were all run by the music publishing company Hill & Range which was run out of the Brill Building in New York, home to more than a few significant songwriters such Bacharach & David, Leiber & Stoller, Goffin & King. And Jeff Barry & Ellie Greenwich. Importantly (for them), Hill & Range had control over the recording output of Elvis Presley in the 50s and 60s.

In fact Lou Johnson had the only documented 45 issued on Hilltop - It Ain’t No Use, arranged by Burt Bacharach, a truly great record which is actually worthy of it’s own label! I have a copy of it and I must give it it’s own post here sometime. It bears a catalog number (551) in the same 55* range as Big Hill. 45Cat actually conflates the two labels. There were a few labels named Hilltop in the US in the early 60s so I’m guessing they changed the label name to Big Hill to avoid any possible copyright challenges. Lou also had the only releases (three) on Big Hill before he moved over to Hill & Range’s main imprint – BigTop. Possibly they were planning to focus the different labels on different musical genres but then thought better of it.

My copy of this 45 sits in it’s nice original Bell sleeve, and is a promo as stated on the label. It was common for promos to have, as well, either a white background colour and/or a printed star on the label to denote the A side. No such thing here. Radio DJs, or distributors maybe, would often also mark the A side with a big felt tip pen star or some such mark. In the case of my copy there is just an A written on one side and B on the other in red felt tip, which makes it very hard to see and a bit pointless. The DJ would have needed to know what he was doing.

And what is in the grooves? This from the 3^rd April 1965 edition of the US music paper Record World; straightforward and on point, life was so simple then:

Lou Johnson– Please, Stop The Wedding 1965