Attachment 17038
I didn't have much of a background in making music, other than learning to play tunes on the piano by ear, and trying to master the harmonica, but that didn't go far. I did eventually learn to read music. I started loving music at a young age, about 3. My parents, especially my father, was a big Jazz and Blues fan. and I grew up in the late '40s and '50s playing his 78 RPM records [[big city '30s and '40s Jazz, City Blues, and Jazz ballads, Boogie Woogie, and Jump Blues. We used to visit family in Chicago twice a year on long vacations, where I heard the beginnings of R&B and greasy Doo Wop ballads. My Uncle had a grocery store on The South Side, and we used to hang out with him there.
So, in 1953, I started asking my parents for records for my birthday and Hannukah [[Flamingos, Moonglows, Spaniels, Dells, Drifters, Platters, Orioles, Five Echoes, Five Chances, El Dorados, Dominoes, etc.). When I was eight, I started buying my own records[[78s), mainly from the 2 for a Dollar, 3 for a Dollar and 20 cent bargain bins in the South side record shops, and what R&B records crossed over into Pop, and would be available at home in the Downtown Winnipeg record shops. I also checked the charity thrift shops after going to one with my parents, and discovering that they had loads of old used records. After 45s were more prevalent I was able to amass tonnes of R&B, Blues, Jazz and Gospel records. We moved to Chicago in 1959, in South Chicago, just near the edge of The South Side; and my father opened a grocery store deep inside that district. I worked there, and went crazy scouring the record shops, thrift shops. junk stores and furniture stores, and record distributors' warehouses. I amassed many thousands of 45s fairly quickly. In addition to loving the 1952-54 greasy R&B ballads best, my other favourite music became the 1959-64 Detroit and Chicago R&B transition to Soul music. I loved early Motown and related Detroit recordings so much, that when I first had access to a car, and then my own car from 1963-1966, I used to drive to Detroit 2 Saturdays a month, to spend all day hitting the good record shops, thrift stores, junk stores and the like for obscure Detroit records and Motown cut-outs that might never get to Chicago. I ended up getting hundreds of rare Detroit and Chicago '60s records, grabbing every one I could get my hands on. I became an expert on Soul record releases from those 2 cities.
I moved to L.A. in Fall 1965 to attend UCLA. My parents followed, and my father bought a grocery store in The Crenshaw Area of Southwest L.A. [[the more affluent portion of L.A.'s Ghetto). I worked in his store on weekends and evenings. After Motown moved to L.A. in 1972, I started meeting people there, and made several friends. I started working with them in 1974, being hired to work on an ambitious project to release previously unreleased recordings on an LP series. For the first several years, it was only loosely planned. We had to look through The Motown Vaults, going through the tapes and records [[vinyl demos and acetates), and listening to everything we hadn't heard, and categorize it by style, and grade it for potential release [[or not). That went on from 1974-1978. We prepared lists for all 10 of the first group of LPs. The release was ready to start in 1979.
Unfortunately, Motown put no marketing behind the project, and only started releasing the LPs one at a time, and releasing it on their budget label, Natural Resources. With no marketing, nobody knew about it, so it sat in the bins not selling. Because it didn't sell at all, the higher-ups in the company decided to jettison the "From The Vaults" series project. So, our 6 years of hard work might have come for naught. But, at least, after project producer, Tom DePierro left to start his own Soul record label, Airwave Records, in 1980, and I joined him as a partner, two more Vault-based previously unreleased recordings LPs were released in 1981 and 1982, and then, in 1984, many of the remaining unused cuts we had planned to be in our 10-LP series, were used in Motown's 25th Anniversary LP series. So, our work wasn't in vain.
I worked with Airwave from 1980-85, marketing in Europe, trying to write songs, learning to use a mixing machine and providing a little input into the premixing on a few recording sessions, but mostly doing administrative work, and in-house accounting.
For several years, our offices in The Hollywood & Vine Building were between those of Mickey Stevenson [[after he had left MGM, shut down Venture and people Records and became an independent producer), and Bunky Sheppard, when he was running his own new labels out of L.A. I learned a lot from both of them. I had also talked to some people while at Motown about the earlier days in Detroit, as well as asking old-time Detroiters who had had connections to that City's music industry during the 1960s when I visited Detroit back in those days.
Since then, my only contact with the music industry has been acting as an advisor on Oldies CD projects for Ace and Kent Records, especially those related to '60s and '50s Chicago and Detroit labels, providing rare records for re-mastering when master tapes are unavailable, providing record label scans, and editing and providing consulting on CD booklets' articles about the labels and artists.
I also learned a lot about labels, producers, arrangers, session players, and artists, and companies and their owners from reading a lot of articles about them and talking to people in the business, researching articles in recording industry journals, as well as reading posts here on SDF, back from the start in 2001 until about 2010, when we still had a lot of posters who had been working in the music industry in Detroit during the 1960s. I have a photographic memory, and all that information I've picked up since reading my first record label in 1950 until now is still stored in my brain, even if some of it is more difficult to bring to my attention now, 70 years later!
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