Reggae warm up

As promised here are a couple from the batch of reggae 45s I managed to grab on a cold morning last Sunday at a local boot, I say "managed" because my fingers weren’t working very well due to the cold. I actually suffer from Raynaud’s which can make riffling through records difficult on cold mornings (my fingers go white but not blue which would look really scary).

I can offer nothing at all in terms of background to these records beyond the fact that I like them and hope you do too.

The Sunshot 45 is a bit quirky – the K Poppins sticker is covering up another title and the label on the other side quotes Linval Thompson Jah Jah Reder Than Red (actually what attracted me to it), but the grooves contain Keith Poppin and a Version. The vinyl is also incredibly thin to the point that it almost feels like a flexi disc! I think this is a reissue.

After these by way of a sweet and mellow warm up I’m off to the local pub to jump on the Ska Train.

Sister Stern – Last Date 1975

Keith Poppin – Who Are You 19?? 

Another Banksy

There! All it takes is a couple of comments on one of my posts (thanks Davyh and dvd) and a successful weekend of digging to banish my blogging blues and put an end to my latest posting crisis.

There was a little record fair in town at the weekend. It happens roughly quarterly and tends to be focussed on 50s and 60s R&R, rockabilly and early R&B. I think I may have mentioned it before. There are usually a few soul boxes as well and this time one of my favourite dealers made an appearance. He always carries a good selection of soul 45s it seems and this time was no exception. So while the room was filled with the sound of rockabilly on various decks hooked up to speakers, I was pulling soul 45s, spinning them on a portable deck, and desperately trying to hear them with headphones clasped tight to my ears.

I picked up six 45s in the end that I later admitted to Mrs Darce left a bit of a hole in the wallet – “you spent how much?!”. Yes, well, £25 on just one of those 45s sounds a lot to the uninitiated I guess. It’s quite a lot for me to pay as well really, but I know it’s peanuts to many of the vinyl hungry. The rest of them didn’t come close to being that expensive though, and it’s one of these I’m featuring here, and is the one I’m really punching the air about.

A while ago I featured a Bessie Banks 45that was an issue copy of a release I had only ever seen as a same sided demo before. Well here we are again with another Bessie Banks release that, although is out there as an issue, seems to mainly surface as a same sided demo. This was Bessie’s only outing on Volt, neither incarnation are easy to find, and when they do turn up they usually seem to sell for quite a bit more than I paid for my copy. I bought it for the “Try To Leave Me…” side, one of the greatest examples of soul music you could wish to find, mellow and deep all at the same time. But turning it over what did I find? Another song in the same mould almost as good as the A side, and that puts this 45 fair and square in the “killer” category. 

I notice that “Aint No Easy Way” has very recently made a couple of appearances on YouTube.  But apart from that there doesn’t appear to have ever been a “buzz” about this song. It clearly warrants some “buzz”, and Bessie Banks is a singer held in high regard too, in soul circles at least; so I wonder if a batch of issue copies have been found recently in some forgotten warehouse and are now trickling out into the wild? Certainly the only picture of it on YouTube shows a copy just like my latest prize – an issue copy with a promo stamp on it.      

Bessie Banks – Ain’t No Easy Way 1974

And the sublime…

Bessie Banks – Try To Leave Me If You Can 1974

There are a couple of car boot sales ‘round abouts that are continuing on into the winter. Sunday’s early morning visit to one of them (where I had to cope with malfunctioning fingers due to the cold!) turned out to be worth it too. A nice little batch of obscure reggae 45s, mainly of the Lovers variety. Some of those next time.

One minute of your time

I’m conscious it’s been some time without a post again. I’ve sort of lost the beat of this thing recently. It’s partly because I have become completely obsessed with reading a couple of record collector forums – Waxidermy and VG+ – which seem to take up most of my online time lately. I’m what’s known as a lurker on them at the moment and it's possibly just a phase... but there again I am in the process of trying to register on VG+ to allow me to post (Waxidemy is a bit more intimidating and heavily US biased, and quite frankly I struggle to keep up with the lingo sometimes). Anyway, registering on VG+ is proving difficult and I’m beginning to think that is a good thing because if I end up posting on the forum as well as reading it could be curtains for this blog – and I don’t want that to happen.

I was chasing a Cynthia Sheeler 45 on ebay recently but in the end the bidding ran away from me. To make myself feel better l have been playing this 45 a lot, the only one of hers I do own. Once again I have Sir Shambling to thank for bringing Cynthia to my attention. She has a lovely voice and didn’t record enough.

I particularly love the subtle change of gear and what amounts to an extended outro on this song. And it’s on my favourite label!

Cynthia Sheeler – One Minute Of Your Time (1973? originally) 

Boss Hat Trick!

Picked this LP up today for a £1 in a local charity shop. I have a big grin on my face.

This is the third Reggae album I have picked up for peanuts in recent weeks, and none are trashed. More from the others in the weeks to come no doubt.

This particular track has been on repeat this afternoon. 

Lester Sterlin - Reggae On Broadway  1969  

Where was I?

Ah! Sorry, forgot to say last time: I was off on holiday. Mrs Darce and I swapped the endlessly indifferent (or is that just plain bad?) weather here in the UK for 10 days of endless sunshine in Spain. Nerja to be precise – we can thoroughly recommend it!

Back now. Back yesterday actually, and the first thing we did was go out for lunch at a local hostelry – it’s difficult to break the habit. In the front bar there were just us and one other couple. Then, a group of four ladies (what lunch) arrived and sat close to us. Close enough that we could not help but hear their conversation. One of the group had just come back from her holiday - in Nerja! How spooky is that?

I’m catching up on my many recent boot sale finds now. A few weeks ago I picked up this little collection of 45s. A mix of ska, rocksteady, reggae, and soul.      

They were all sleeveless and all looked pretty trashed – reggae records, at least, always are it seems – but at 10p a pop it was worth a punt. And they cleaned up very nicely; not a hop, skip or a jump between them. Some inevitable surface noise, but it all adds to the atmosphere. (Curiously the soul records in this bunch are all on labels beginning with the letter M - I left a few ZZ Hill 45s on MHR behind as well, although, now, I don’t know why). Wiping away the dirt at least took them back someways towards the Sixties sweaty basement mod hangout where they must surely have first spun their magic.

As another two weeks have passed since my last post I thought I would pick four of these to play by way of a catch up. The first is appropriate as I have spent much of the last couple of weeks sat on a beach in Spain reading Lloyd Bradley’s comprehensive history of reggae, and Jamaica – Bass Culture. It is also perfectly fits the description of "moody and magnificent". Any link between the second and a certain current high profile UK news item is, I assure you, purely coincidental. "Ole!". Both are B sides but deserve much more. The third and fourth are both “on the money” soul sides so to speak.

Enjoy! 

    

Roland Alphonso And The Beverly’s AllStars – El Toro  1967

Max Romeo – She’s But A Little Girl  1968

The Larks – Philly Dog  1966

Bettye Swann – I Think I’m Falling In Love  1968  

File under whimsy?

What’s that hiding in that mutilated sleeve? 

As promised here is another 45 I was very happy, and surprised, to find at a local boot fair recently. A lady was selling a few boxes of singles at 3 for a £1. I bought £3 worth, including this one. The boxes contained a very unusual and eclectic mix, certainly not something you normally find at boot sales. It transpired her husband works for a local second hand record shop, one in fact I rarely visit now as, in my experience, I have rarely found anything worth buying and they seem to be equally rarely willing to buy anything off me! (I am not alone here either, and I wonder where they get their records from!).

Anyway, by offloading at a boot sale I think they missed a trick with this one. None other than Mr Allen Toussaint had a lot to do with this record. The credits tell you he arranged it, they also tell you he wrote it – Toussaint often used his mother’s name, Naomi Neville, in writing credits around this time – and he is undoubtedly playing piano on it. The ALON label was a vehicle for much Allen Toussaint output in the early to mid Sixties. Hold a mirror up to the label name and of course NOLA appears. (Try and scan it though and the results are not good – as Ana-B has already pointed out).

The record sounds somehow familiar to me. It’s possible I suppose that I have heard it before here. Back in 2006 I was relatively new to the blogging game and Home Of The Groove was an early destination for me. Reading the post (again?) and its comments I learned that this track, or at least its basic form, was originally used as the backing track for Benny Spellman’s “The Word Game”.

It is a very difficult to categorise this record by The Stokes. To me it sounds like it would not be out of place as background music to a TV series of the time, something a bit tongue in cheek or a bit skewed - The Avengers for example. Hey! maybe, that’s where I heard it before? Anyway, I like it a lot and I think I will file it under “whimsy”. The sleeve it came in sort of lives up to the whimsical tag too!

The Stokes – Young Man, Old Man 1965

Catching up

This year the boot fair season has, generally, been a disaster. The weather of course has been the main problem. Many washed out weekends; and if it wasn’t raining the fields in which most of these events happen remained too saturated, which led to more cancellations. On top of that my experience has been that even when I did manage a trudge around a damp field there were hardly any records to be found. On more than one occasion this year my swag bag remained completely empty, something I have not been used to before.

This all changed a few weeks ago though, and the record room (the dining room actually, which is now subject to very little dining being as it’s full of records and pets!) is now seemingly awash with boot fair, and charity shop, finds. Just like buses, the vinyl seems to have all come along at once since September started.

Not much of this vinyl has been in the genres I stick to here – i.e. soul, funk, reggae, and jazz - but there has been some.

Where to start?

Two weeks running I have picked up bargains (50p or less) at boot sales from sellers I knew, or discovered, were established record dealers/traders. This ”Curley Moore” 45, for example, I bought from a guy I know to be a dealer who also has his own website selling soul and funk stuff at reasonable (but not cheap) prices, and I’m sure this 45 could have featured and sold for much more than 50p on his website. Occasionally I see him at a local boot fair knocking stuff out at no more than a pound. He has apparently got about 10,000 records in a lock up somewhere so I suppose now and then he has to have a purge, and I guess it’s inevitable that a few pearls will get mixed in to the more general run of the mill bits he is trying to clear.   

He, of course, may not think this 45 is a pearl, and his friend who seems to always accompany him at the fairs certainly didn’t know it, although I think he suspected it shouldn’t have been nestling in a chirpy chirpy cheap bin. Damn, the titles are clues enough!

Even if it transpired that the grooves of this 45 contained rubbish it is certainly worth 50p for the label. Look more closely at the label though and it becomes clear this 45 has a NOLA pedigree – a certain Mr Eddie Bo(cage) is all over the credits and has most certainly has more to do with this 45 than Curley Moore hence my use of the quotation marks above . Dropping the needle confirms that what’s in the grooves is far from rubbish, but also not funk in the classic sense. Two sides that are, I think,  actually more akin to freakbeat than funk, but they really hit the spot. On the A side it’s Eddie Bo playing the organ and in so doing adding the funky icing to the freaky cake.

Curley Moore & The Kool Ones –Shelley’s Rubber Band 1970

Another 45 with another NOLA legend hiding in the credits next time.