▶︎ Golden gassers: an Aussie cheapo label

I found this record in amongst my bedraggled 45s. How it got there, I can't imagine. (Surely I didn't buy it? Nah, must be one of my brother's...)

This was a cover of Herman's Hermits' Mrs Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter (written by Trevor Peacock of Vicar of Dibley fame). The B-side was a version of The Seekers' hit A World Of Our Own, by The Jaybirds. This places GF-1025 in 1965.

It's one of a series sold in the 60s at service stations by Golden Fleece, the Australian petrol company later bought out by Caltex. John Maloney has also posted a shot of this one, and the B-side, along with three others from Golden Fleece, to the Odd Labels forum at Whirligig.

Welcome to the world of the cheapo label, companies that put out cut-price soundalike versions of current hits. There's a group at Yahoo! called Cheapo Labels: it's fairly inactive at the moment, but its home page usefully lists about 40 cheapo or budget labels.

One of the fascinations of the cheapos is the discovery of well-known artists recording under other names. The Hit Records Project, devoted to one of the better-known US cheapos, mentions Sandy Posey and Bobby Russell, both of whom recorded for Hit under a number of names.

There is also some interest in the cheapos from soul fans: see, for example, Soulful Kinda Music's discography for Herbert Hunter, aka Leroy Jones, who recorded for Hit, and Jeff Lemlich's post to Bomp about soul recordings on Hit and Spar.

Australia's Golden Fleece Top Hits singles were recycled from the Embassy label, recorded in Britain and sold there at Woolworths stores (see the follow-up post by Brian at the Odd Labels forum). British site 45rpm.org.uk has a label shot of an Embassy single by Johnny Worth, better known by his pseudonym Les Vandyke, who wrote for the likes of Adam Faith and Eden Kane, and also wrote, for example, Little Pattie's Australian hit Dance Puppet Dance. (See also The Flies - Doin' The Mod.)

Into the 70s, albums of soundalike tracks were issued, some of which famously included pseudonymous recordings by a young Elton John. His efforts have even been reissued, on the Chartbusters Go Pop! CD (see Richie Unterberger's review at All Music Guide).

Golden gasser? On Top 40 radio, that was an oldie, aka a blast from the past, a mouldy oldie. Golden Fleece, petrol, gas... Get it?

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See also follow-up post Budget labels, Embassy Records.

▶︎ Eight Records on the Radio, Summer of 1966-67

A list of songs that I heard on the radio December 1966-January 1967:

The Cryan' Shames - I Want To Meet You • The Innocence - There's Got To Be A Word! • Twice As Much - True Story • The Small Faces - My Mind's Eye • The Settlers - Till Winter Follows Spring • The Cyrkle - Please Don't Ever Leave Me • The Righteous Brothers - On This Side Of Goodbye • Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra - Summer Wine

 

To listen to them on my playlist click here: Spotify.

This must be from the summer vacation of 1966-67, December or January, going by the release or chart dates of the songs. In Australia our summers begin in December, and the new school year starts around the end of January. I was sixteen, about to start my final year of high school. For a few days, as I heard a new song I liked on the radio, I wrote it down on the back cover of a foolscap writing pad left over from the school year. If I knew the label I wrote that as well, probably because at the local music shop it was easier to order a record if you could tell them the label. I was in Swan Hill, a town on the Murray River in northern Victoria.

In reality, I couldn't have afforded even one-half of one of those records, let alone eight. It’s only recently that I’ve finally got hold of every song on the list, helped along by the coming of the Net, file-sharing, and emailing mp3s, as well as CD reissues of every other song ever recorded.

I've heard of kids back then keeping their own charts, their personal Top 20 of current favourites, complete with hit picks, new entries, and drop-outs, as they got hooked on a song then got sick of it. A guy from Delta, British Columbia, who uses the name Taliesyn, had his personal charts published in the local paper: nowadays he regularly posts them on Usenet. I wasn't so organised. I just wrote a bunch of songs in Pentel Sign pen on the cardboard at the back of a writing pad. I didn't even manage to find the same coloured pen each time. Years later, I threw out the pad, but tore off the list for nostalgia's sake.

The list doesn’t include any huge international hits, and some of the artists are barely known, but they were being played on the radio, probably on small-town stations such as 3SH Swan Hill, 3BO Bendigo, 2QN Deniliquin and 2WG Wagga. Regional radio stations back then usually had their own eager young disc jockeys on their way to the big city, and they would have had some say in the music they played. Some of the songs might not even have been heard on big city stations like 3UZ in Melbourne.

The Righteous Brothers - On This Side Of Goodbye (Carole King – Gerry Goffin) This is my favourite from the list, and the only one I still listen to regularly. It’s also my favourite Righteous Brothers song, a big production of a moody Goffin-King ballad, a bit in the vein of The Righteous Bros' earlier records with Phil Spector. I’ve never understood why this isn’t better known, or why it wasn’t a hit. (I also have a version by Alan Price that has a different arrangement, a different feel: not in the same league, as much as I like Alan Price.)

Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra - Summer Wine (Lee Hazlewood) #2 Melbourne, #7 Brisbane #4 Adelaide  This was a bigger hit in some Australian cities than it was in the USA (#49 Billboard), recorded by seasoned producer-singer-songwriter Lee Hazelwood with his younger client, daughter of Frank Sinatra. Australians were nuts about this duo, especially in Melbourne and Adelaide, where they had seven Top 40 records, compared with three nationally in the US.

The Small Faces - My Mind's Eye (Ronnie Lane - Steve Marriott) #4 UK Regularly included on Small Faces Best Of… collections, thanks to its success in the UK.

The Cyrkle - Please Don't Ever Leave Me (Susan Haber) #43 Adelaide American band, associates of The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel. Their best-known song was Red Rubber Ball (1966), written by Paul Simon with Bruce Woodley of The Seekers, a hit in the US and in Australia.

The Innocence - There's Got To Be A Word! (Don Ciccone) #37 USA The Innocence were Pete Anders and Vini Poncia, who also recorded as The Videls and The Trade Winds (New York’s A Lonely Town, 1965) and as a duo under their own names. They produced the original version of Zoom Zoom Zoom, by Our Patch of Blue, covered by Australian band Cam-Pact.

The Cryan’ Shames - I Want To Meet You (Jim Fairs) Jaunty pop song with harmonies by Chicago band, popular in their home region, whose version of Sugar and Spice is on Nuggets 1. I Want To Meet You was written by Cryan’ Shames guitarist Jim Fairs.

Twice As Much - True Story (Andrew Rose – David Skinner) Recorded for Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label by duo Andrew Rose and David Skinner. They had a bit of a hit in the UK with Sittin’ On The Fence (1966, #25), written by Mick and Keith of The Stones. The A-side You're So Good To Me was covered in Australia by The Kinetics (1967, #29 Melbourne). David Skinner is mentioned elsewhere at this blog for co-writing P.P. Arnold’s Everything’s Gonna Be Alright.

The Settlers - Till Winter Follows Spring (Kent, Jones, Fyffe) Pop-folk song, pretty much in the vein of The Seekers, by group from Birmingham. This is on the anthology Autumn Almanac, one of the Ripples series of compilations of 60s British pop obscurities (The Settlers' Major To Minor is on Dreamtime, another in the series).

What does the list say about either my musical tastes at the time, or the playlists of the stations I was listening to? Let's face it, these songs are mainstream pop: no garage rockers or frantic r&b here, and the Righteous Brothers' nod to soul stands out amongst all that jaunty, sunshiney jingle-jangle and folk-pop harmonies. (Ah well, it was Summer, after all.)

One more thing I noticed: there are five American records, three British, and none from Australia. Sorry, mate.

▶︎ Northern Soul

There are a lot of Northern Soul compilation CDs about these days (I'm a bit addicted to them myself), along with Northern Soul websites and Net radio shows.

'Northern Soul', though, is a curious musical classification. Newcomers have trouble getting a handle on it, and even those immersed in it can struggle with a definition.

As Simon White of the Metropolitan Soul Show put it in a recent thread at the Spectropop Group, The Northern Soul Scene is a law unto itself and frankly you either understand it or you don't. (Spectropop Message #3346, 12 Feb 06)

Dave Monroe bravely offered a menu of characteristics: four-on-the-floor beat, upbeat tempos, "uplifting" lyrics..., strings, "soul bells" et al, but added: I might not be able to tell you what it is, but I know it when I hear it. Interestingly, the problem of defining Northern Soul always seems to lead us back to medieval philosophy. (#3368, 13 Feb)

For a start, Northern Soul isn't called 'Northern' for being recorded in the North of anywhere: a lot of it happens to have been recorded in the north of the US, but that's a red herring. Southern Soul, yes, might be soul music recorded in the south of the USA, but Northern Soul isn't its opposite.

In fact, Northern Soul can include soul from the Southern states, for example by New Orleans singer Irma Thomas or from the Memphis soul label Stax.

This is because in 'Northern Soul' the 'Northern' means the North of England, where its fan base originated, and the term wasn't coined until about 1970. In other words, a lot of Northern Soul music was recorded by artists who had no idea they were recording Northern Soul.






New Orleans: that'd be Southern, right? Also appearing on 26 Stonking Northern Soul Greats!



What's more, oddly enough, it isn't all soul. Most of it is indeed soul or soul-inspired pop, and you'll find Motown and Stax and their imitators, but you'll also find catchy, maybe danceable (maybe not) pop music, often with stirring brass arrangements but still pop.

Northern Soul is also noted for overlooked tracks, often by obscure artists, hence the related term Rare Soul, but this is more a matter of availability than musical style. One of the delights of playing a well-chosen Northern Soul collection on CD is the discovery of marvellous songs rescued from oblivion. But once again, this needs qualifying: you'll also find well-known songs and artists on Northern Soul compilations.

In fact, as soon as you offer a definition, you need to qualify it. You might try, for example, uptempo, danceable soul by black American singers. Qualify!

The artists are usually, but not necessarily, black, and not always soulful: I've seen The Four Seasons' The Night and Gary Lewis's My Heart's Symphony on Northern Soul collections (yes, soul is a relative term, but Gary Lewis?).

And not always singers: you'll also find a scattering of instrumentals, some of them funky, or soulful in the Booker T & the MGs way, but some of them sound more like background music to a party scene in a teenage movie from the 60s.

Lynne Randell gets a Northern Soul guernsey for Stranger In Your Arms, a wonderful song, but it's more in the area of classy pop than soul, and the singer is a white, blonde Australian (okay, born in the UK, recorded in New York, but an Aussie nevertheless). David Bell (Spectropop #3368, 13 Feb), puzzles over the inclusion of an obscure Connie Francis B-side It's Gonna Take Me Some Time, and concludes: It seems that every singer has recorded at least one Northern Soul side.






Lynne Randell: Northern? Soul?


Uptempo or danceable? ACE's Once Upon A Time In Wigan CD includes Fats Domino's It Keeps Rainin', a pleasant little foot-tapper, but hardly music to rage to. On the danceability of Northern Soul, Julio Niño comments: personally I can´t always dance to them or don´t always feel like dancing to them. (Spectropop #3330, 13 Feb).

In fact, Northern Soul isn't one "style of music" at all (as early versions of the Wikipedia article had it; now amended). It's an umbrella term for a number of styles, and some of the songs you find there can be surprising. That's because, in its strictest sense, a Northern Soul track is one that was popularised by a deejay at a northern English dance venue. So if a deejay liked Dusty Springfield's What's It Gonna Be, he played it, and if it went down well, it became 'Northern Soul', something that would've been news to those associated with putting the record out in the first place.

As Howard Earnshaw notes: In the 70s the overriding feature of a 'northern soul' record was the 4x4 beats, and uptempo was the key. Nowadays the scene is divided into various sub-sections, with ALL tempos of soul being played at various venues. Not only that, there is R&B (sometimes as early as 1960), Modern Soul up to the present, Crossover, 70s/80s, New 6Ts, Oldies, etc. etc. (Spectropop #3368, 13 Feb)

It's usually agreed that Dave Godin (1936-2004) , the critic, anthologist and label owner, coined the term 'Northern Soul' around 1970, when he noticed that Northerners visiting his record shop in London were seeking out a unique range of obscure American soul 45s. Thus, from the start, the term owed itself to a social phenomenon, an aspect of consumer demand, rather than to a strict musical classification.

According to Simon Frith and Tony Cummings ("Playing Records", reprinted in The Beat Goes on: The Rock File Reader, 1996) the soul boom of the 60s, started in London by the mods, had fizzled out in the south of England by the late 60s , but it persisted in the north and thrived into the 70s, where it supported the famous allnighter dance venues, places like the Wigan Casino and the Blackpool Mecca. While the rest of the world moved on to progressive rock and psychedelia, and American soul itself turned funkadelic, Northerners continued to seek out increasingly obscure soul tracks to keep up the supply of old-style stomping soul.

Eventually, music was recorded especially for the Northern Soul market, but the term was initially applied retrospectively, and it was applied to anything that had become familiar to the patrons of the northern clubs. Thus, what we're looking at here is a social movement as much as a musical genre.

('Northern Soul' isn't the only retrospectively applied musical genre: for example I doubt that the numerous orchestra leaders and crooners listed at the excellent Space Age Pop website realised they were contributing to the Lounge, Exotica or Space Age repertoires.)

In my own recent rant about terminology (Spectropop #3323, 11 Feb) I wondered whether a newcomer might be misled by the mistaken belief that they are approaching a specific genre called Northern Soul, a recognisable style in the manner of ska or rockabilly or bebop. Although seeking out Northern Soul will put you in touch with some lost soul gems, you wouldn't want to neglect other rare soul reissues from a label like Kent/Ace. They might not have 'Northern Soul' written all over them, but they'd probably be in the area you're interested in.

Finally, Phil X. Milstein added this to the discussion at Spectropop: I'm far from any kind of NS expert, but for my own purposes I've always gone by the rule of thumb that: bari sax included, Northern Soul; no bari, no Northern Soul (Spectropop #3323, 13 Feb). See follow-up post.

I'm not sure that this theory holds up, but then I'm not sure that it's meant to!

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This post refers to a thread at the Spectropop Discussion Group, one of the most informed and civilised music forums on the Net. It's at Yahoo! Groups (free registration required), or go there via Spectropop's main website.

▶︎ At last: the Nick Lampe story

In his professional musical career Nick Lampe sang in a 50s doowop group, toured with Alan Freed, hung out with Dion and Kenny Rankin in Manhattan, recorded an album at Muscle Shoals and, incidentally, put a single onto the charts in Melbourne, Australia. After that, he quit the business, headed for the mountains for a while, and ended up studying for a degree in Psychology. For years now he's been a social worker with disabled people in New York.

Nick Lampe's full name is Nicholas Lampariello. He is a New Yorker, born in Brooklyn, whose musical career goes back to the mid-50s, when he first appeared in the doowop group The Bop Tones on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour.

Out of those early TV appearances came the release of a Bop Tones single on Ember, I Had A Love (an original by the four group members) with the B-side (Be My) Pussy Cat (1958). The Bop Tones toured with Alan Freed, the original rock’n’roll disc jockey who put on shows packed with current singing stars.

(Brian Lee, at doowop site ColorRadio.com, tells me The Bop Tones were from the Bensonhurst-Coney Island section of Brooklyn and the other members, apart from Nick Lampariello, were Bob Kutner, John Ench and Dave Antebi.)

Later, in the 60s, Nick Lampe appeared at The Improvisation and The Scene in Manhattan, in off-Broadway shows, and on the Steve Allen and Pat Boone TV shows. Among his friends and colleagues at this time were Richard Pryor, Richie Havens and two of his mentors, Kenny Rankin and Dion Di Mucci, both credited as spiritual advisors in the notes to Nick's 1970 album It Happened Long Ago.

After heading for Los Angeles, where he appeared at The Troubador, Nick tried his luck with local record companies and was signed to Atlantic. In 1970 he recorded his solo album of original songs for the Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion at the legendary Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Alabama. Flower Garden was the opening track, and it was the single that charted in Melbourne, released in Australia on Atlantic through Festival Records (above).

Nick left the music business for a mixture of artistic and personal reasons.

He had complained to Atlantic chairman and producerArmet Ertegun when he heard the finished version of his album, which added strings and chorus to his six-piece studio sessions. Nick believes his “art had been bastardized with bubblegum”, but that’s how it was released.

In the end, Nick and his first wife moved to the mountains of Northern California with their young son (he appears with Nick on the album sleeve of It Happened Long Ago, right). At this time, Nick’s wife was attempting to recover from the devastating effects of marijuana that had been covertly laced with PCP. During this period, Nick supported his family by playing in bars and on street corners in San Francisco, and later at Lake Tahoe, the Californian ski resort.

Eventually, Nick Lampariello remarried, moved to British Columbia to study for his BA in Psychology, and became a counsellor to victims of abuse.

Nowadays Nick works with disabled children in New York, helping them to develop essential life skills. He says: I don't make much money but I get a lot of love… I'm called Uncle Nicky by some 150 individuals who at one time may not have been able to speak: can't put a price on that. Musically I lead worship for three ministries and consequently I am always involved with music.

I still have my guitar, an old Martin D-18. It's about forty years old and is my love...

(Source: Nicholas Lampariello, by email.
Thanks also to Robert Thompson)