Is it possible? Is is true? A perfectly good Modern Sound/Hit Records collection? Yes, and it's what I have for you today. Quite a nice surprise after the last ordeal--er, the last offering. Today's fake hits range from competent to memorable, with especially good versions of Rainy Day Women #12 and 35, When a Man Loves a Woman, and Where Did Our Love Go. Up Tight is perfectly fine, too, though I'd have preferred a little more... soul? Pep? But it's quite decent. Decent, too, is the lone Hit Records original (or, fake fake hit), Up Town Down Town, penned by Bobby Russell and appearing in its single form as Uptown Downtown. It's fun and catchy--it has earworm potential. More work than usual required in the de-clicking department this time, but since the tracks are so good, I didn't mind. Luckily, I had the Hit Records Where Did Our Love Go on another LP (like all cheapies, these guys reused material), so I swapped it for the badly-off band on this disc ("band" in the old-fashioned sense of an LP track). I can't believe I'm saying this (well, typing it), but this one's a winner. I'll have to save my sarcasm for a future Modern Sound post.
Download and enjoy. And they even give the artist credits (whether real or made-up) on the jacket. I feel like I'm dreaming....
DOWNLOAD: Leaning on the Lamp Post (Modern Sound MS 1031)
Leaning on the Lamp Post--The Chords
How Does That Grab You Darlin--Betty Richards
White on White--Fred York
Where Did Our Love Go--The Houstons
What Will My Mary Say--Tony Christopher
When a Man Loves a Woman--Leroy Jones
Rainy Day Women #12 & 35--Bobby Brooks
Washington Square--Music City Five Plus Ten
Up Town Down Town (Bobby Russell)--Fred York
Up Tight--Richie Brown
(Modern Sound MS 1031)
Lee
14 comments:
Considering your praise for this LP, I may not be asking this at the right time, but - was Modern Sound the worst of the cheap labels? I always thought so, but probably because they have the sloppiest graphics. I am not a connoisseur of the music contained therein, like you!
Wow! That takes some thought. I guess I would have to settle on Pickwick, which provided so many atrocious '60s fakes for Bravo, Grand Prix, Hurrah, Song Hits, and Hit Parader, and who knows what others. Synthetic Plastics Co. did some '60s stuff, but most of what I've heard is competent. Hit Records did some atrocious stuff, but it also put out some good ones. Pickwick was the most consistently awful--I featured the Pickwick fakes of "Good Vibrations" and "Help Me, Rhonda," and it's like they weren't even trying--the latter, especially, sounds like high school kids practicing in their garage. It's hard to know who was guilty of what in the 1960s, but Pickwick seems to be the outfit behind the worst of the worst. Some time back, I put up posts of Hit Parader and Song Hits stuff (named after the mags), but I don't think those posts remain. The thing about Hit Records, that even the total misfires sound like they tried, if that counts for anything. Pickwick, I'd have to say. Of course, they became known for their sound-alike LPs in, I think, the 1970s. I would think Pickwick had more dough to devote to its fakes--Hit Records seems more like a shoestring operation--so that figures into my choice, too. Pickwick could have produced halfway decent tracks, as did SPC and Tops during the 1950s.
I know I did a stereo Pickwick "Help Me Rhonda" not too long ago. Part of a 16-latest-hits type oddity that I'm guessing they provided the tracks for. Yeah, here it is: https://musicyouwont.blogspot.com/search?q=help+me+rhonda The "Good Vibrations" mockery is no long up--I'll have to revive that, if only to show how bad bad can be when it comes to fakes. (Someone explain my obsession with this stuff!)
My first exposure to Pickwick was in the early 70s when they had begun the soundalike era, which often was pretty good. Thanks to you and a couple other bloggers I've been exposed to the other side. Actually my all-time favorite soundalike is Pickwick's Shaft cover LP, by "Soul Mann and the Brothers". Of course Soul was actually Sy Mann, Mr. Switched-On-Santa, a pretty prolific keyboard man and arranger.
Thanks for introducing me to all the music I'd never hear elsewhere, Lee.
A perfectly acceptable version of Washington Square.
I enjoy instrumentals. I'll admit to occasionally listening to Al Caiola or even Billy Strange. Not really fakes being mostly guitar versions although Billy didn't shy away from vocals in his early years. Al borders on Jazz. I'm a big fan of Hard Bop.
As far as obsessions go, I tend to collect cheap low quality CDs of Anton Bruckner symphonies. If you can explain mine, I'll explain yours.
Keep up the good work, my friend.
I agree about Al--he had a strong jazz sound. I think he sounds like a jazz picker even when he's just playing melody notes in octaves. This Washington Square version is quite good--it's an odd selection, being a marriage of pop-folk with the brief Twenties-comeback phase that happened with "Hello, Dolly!" A little later, there was the Joplin revival. Thanks to "The Sting," millions of folks must think Joplin was all the rage during the Depression. Some studio exec must have decided that playing the actual radio and phonograph music of that era--Russ Columbo, Dorsey Brothers, Leo Reisman, etc.--would give the flick less zing.
I see a lot of albums that I think would fall into this same series, and think about you when I see them. I just can't bring myself to grab them. I'll spend my $1 on weirder stuff, like Capitol's Silver Platter Series or soundtracks to films I've never heard of. :)
Thumbs up on this one!
Wow. I think of Pickwick a re-issue label, not a fake-hits label. I guess it's what I buy from them. Had no idea.
They became one of the big cheapo labels about 1959/1969, buying up Tops and releasing junk LPs on Acorn, Design, Happy Time (awful kiddie stuff), Rondo, and--on Mayfair and Golden Tone--Tops material. Their main fake-hits labels, based on what I've run into, were Hurrah, Bravo, and Grand Prix. They even released a 1962 78 (!!) on Bravo, which I posted here: https://musicyouwont.blogspot.com/2018/07/hurrah-label-78-rpm-from-1962.html
That's way late for 78s, of course. There was also standard junk-label stuff on Bravo. The Pickwick Capitol label reissues started in 1966. Then came reissues from the back catalogs on other labels. Most Boomers (except me!) remember Pickwick's 60s and 70s sound-alike stuff, though I wasn't into rock, so I don't have any of their fake group names handy, but they did credit entire LPs to fictional bands. It's the earlier (pre-mid-60s) Pickwick fakes that most Boomers don't seem to know about. It doesn't help that the Pickwick stuff often failed to identify itself as such, as with the Hit Parader and Song Hits singles sold in Charlton Comics ads and, I assume, in the namesake mags. I guess that, technically, Pickwick was a distributor moreso than an actual label, though by the mid-60s, it was using the Pickwick name on its LP labels. I don't pretend to understand the marketing side of this stuff. That part conforms to nothing I recognize as logic.
The back catalogs OF other labels, I meant to type....
When a Man Loves a Woman was sung by Hit Records warehouse worker Thomas Henry who also had some releases under his own name on Spar and other Nashville labels. I consider it an awfully good song, too back the quality of the vinyl used on these albums were pretty low.
Thanks for the artist ID!
Fascinating info about Thomas Henry.
Apropos of nothing, Percy Sledge's other (semi-)hit, Take Time to Know Her, is one of my favorite soul singles.
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