In I Made You A Mixtape, we ask our favorite musicians, actors, writers, directors, or whatevers to strut their musical savvy: We pick a theme, they make us a mix.
The mixer: Ken Shipley co-founded reissue label The Numero Group in 2003, and it’s since evolved into a multi-format, multi-genre music company. It’s discovered and resurrected long-lost soul acts, punk bands, and avant-garde films. One of Numero’s most important roles is as a curator of what’s now called the Eccentric Soul universe, which seeks to document what the label dubs “lovingly mishandled soul labels” like Columbus, Ohio’s Capsoul and Miami’s Deep City. The label’s latest and greatest project is its Eccentric Soul box set, Eccentric Soul: Omnibus, which includes 45 different 45s from different long-forgotten artists, plus a 108-page book documenting the scene from which each act came. Given that—especially after this project—Shipley knows so much about the world of forgotten soul cuts, The A.V. Club asked him to make a mixtape of his favorite Eccentric Soul tracks the label’s ever reissued.
The A.V. Club: How do you define Eccentric Soul?
Ken Shipley: Eccentric Soul is hardly my concept. It’s a concept built by one of my partners, Rob Sevier, and it started out as a mix CD that he made for me that was all off-the-wall, left-of-center soul stuff—out-of-key singers, weird instrumentation, kid groups—things that never really had a shot at being on the radio.
Once I heard the CD, I really loved the name and we began piecing together a project that ultimately failed because it wasn’t a very good idea. [Laughs.] But from there sprung a great idea, which is to compile these really small and obscure labels and scenes and producers into one cohesive package, as a way to preserve some of the history and great music that we thought was in danger of falling through the cracks.
As far as the musical content is concerned, the parameters have expanded over the years. The first one where we realized we weren’t really making true eccentric soul anymore was Twinight [Eccentric Soul: Twinight’s Lunar Rotation]. These are hits—well, they really weren’t hits. They had a tremendous pedigree: great session players, great musicians, and great singers. But for the most part, Eccentric Soul before that was real left-of-center, underground, mixed-up, sometimes amateurish soul music, and we’ve expanded the parameters from there. For Omnibus, we went back to our original roots, which was to look at really cool one-off records and find unique opportunities for them. Things that we really wanted to do something with, but there was just no project that they ever fit into.
Theron And Darrell, “I Was Made To Love Her”
Smart’s Palace is a record that came together very unexpectedly. It was one of those things where Dante Carfagna and Josh Davis said, “You guys should look into this stuff,” and we said, “We’ll get to it, we’ll get to it.” Finally we were on this trip that was getting us near Wichita, and I said, “Let’s try to go to Wichita.” As soon as we sat down with Dick Smart—Darrell came over that same day and John Smart and all these Wichita cats came out—we realized that there was a great record here. They drove us around Wichita and showed us where their original club was, the original record store, and the studio and all these great little places. The record emerged out of the experience of going to Wichita and living there for a little while.
Summits, “Sleepwalking”
KS: Summits… even their name is great because it’s the name of the bus stop that was at the end of the line. That record, Red, Black, And Green Productions, came together because we’d used a song by The Promise on Home Schooled: The ABCs Of Kid Soul, and the producer, R. Hosea Williams, was someone who for years I had tried to convince to do more than just license us this one song. I said, “Look, we’ve paid you thousands of dollars over the years on just one song. Think of what we could do with 20.” And he finally relented.
We went to his house in Maryland, and he took us out to his garage and was like, “This is everything I still have,” and it ended up being so much tremendous material. Summits were just one of five or six groups that we discovered in that garage. There was this brilliant Father’s Children LP that really makes me want to go harder and faster in some ways, as far as discovery is concerned, because you realize how many things are just rotting away in a garage. They’re a year away from being put in the trash.
Family Connection, “This Time”
Pat Stallworth, “Questions”
KS: Two very different groups. Pat Stallworth had been a dream for years. Since we got into the Boddie Recording Company archives three years ago, we’d been calling Bill Jacocks saying, “Hey, we’ve got this tape of yours that we’ve found in here,” and he’d keep rebuffing us. He was the first black news anchor in Cleveland, a longtime sort of minor celebrity, and really didn’t rank Numero as a company that could do anything for him. He tried to do it by himself for a while. Finally, I really sort of raked him. [Laughs.] “Hey, you keep talking about how you’re going to do this, and then nothing ever happens. Why don’t we actually do something?” After months and months of negotiation, I think we went to 10 or 15 drafts on that deal to get it done.
As far as the Family Connection is concerned, that was a record that I had fallen in love with half a decade ago and always wanted to do something with, but seemingly there was no way to really thread them into anything larger. They’re from Middlebury, Connecticut, and there’s not a lot of soul music that came out of Middlebury, Connecticut, much less all of Connecticut. So there was just never any opportunity to do anything with it, but I reached out to the group and we found the master tapes, we found these business cards, we found all these little details and elements that convinced us it was a song that had to be done.
Family Connection really is the epitome of eccentric soul. It’s a group that wasn’t in the major soul scene, even though they participated in Boston and New York and as far South as D.C., but they’re off the path, they’re not working in the same sort of circles as in Philly or Chicago or L.A. They never had the opportunities that a group stationed in a major city would. Even though they were so close to New York, they never were able to break free in the way they probably should have.
Bob & Fred, “I’ll Be On My Way”
KS: Two guys that we know so very little about still. We made The Big Mack Label in 2006, but we still know so little about label owner Ed McCoy. The first time we met him, he insisted on meeting in a restaurant. The second time we met him, he insisted on meeting in a radio station. The guy’s not necessarily trustworthy of people who want to come in from the outside world.
In the early ’90s, all these British people were looking for Bob & Fred and The Grand Prixx, and they were coming to him and buying those records for five dollars. He later found out they were selling for thousands of dollars. He felt burned by the business; he was just so untrusting that it took us years to get him to be interested in working with us. Finally he was.
Kool Blues, “I’m Gonna Keep On Loving You”
KS: This is from Capsoul [Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Label], where it all really began. Me, Tom [Lunt], and Rob going down to Columbus, Ohio and sitting in this guy’s living room and trying to pitch him on the idea that we were the guys to resurrect his legacy and preserve it. I remember we had this little white MacBook, which probably seemed really chic in 2003. We had this little PowerPoint presentation we put together that was like, “This is what we want to do. This is how we envision doing it. This is where we think the consumer is and the marketplace is going.” It was this very professional thing, and it actually worked. Now we would probably never do anything like that. We do this much more loose kind of thing where we go in and say, “These are successes that we’ve had before.” There’s not as much speculation when we make a record in 2012 as there was when we made one in 2003.
But [Capsoul label owner] Bill Moss is such a trooper. He really made Numero able to be a company because without doing that record, we would never have been able to make any of the records that came after it. It set the tone for the entire label.
AVC: Do you get nervous about going into people’s homes and trying to convince them to work with you? You guys were recently the subject of a Spin feature that made the process sound a little hairy.
KS: I don’t really get nervous going into bad neighborhoods or going into people’s houses anymore. I get more nervous that we’re not going to be able to get something done in time more than anything. I’m always concerned that I didn’t do a good enough job of selling the concept of, “Hey, your legacy should be preserved, and even if we’re not the right people to do it, somebody should do it or you should do it. Someone should take on the idea that your music is in order and your photographs are in order, so if people in the future want to come back and say, ‘Who were the Soul Emotions?’, somebody can say, ‘The Soul Emotions were these three girls from New Orleans. They made two records.’”
Those are important things that I think are just on the cusp of being lost. And my disappointment only really comes from not being able to get something done that I really feel should be done. Really, otherwise, the worst thing that can happen is that you get shot.
AVC: That’s no big deal.
KS: That’s a story. “Guy from reissue label goes to dangerous neighborhood, gets shot, emerges victorious with master tapes.” [Laughs.] There’s almost something poetic to it.
Them Two, “Am I A Good Man”
KS: That song was the reason I knew we had to make the Deep City record, because it was so haunting and so beautiful. The world has sort of proved us right. It’s been sampled by Ghostface Killah, 50 Cent, and a bunch of other rappers. It’s been in a bunch of television shows like Luck and Hung, two funny four-letter shows. It’s an infectious groove from a very infectious label.
All the stuff that came out of Florida at the time was being ruled by these two schoolteachers who were selling blood to make records. They were funneling every dollar they had into trying to make records, trying to make hit records. They ended up succeeding, just not at Deep City. Willie Clark went on to produce Betty Wright’s big hits, won a couple Grammys, and then when the money train ran out, went back to teaching. That’s a classic Eccentric Soul story: the guy that, despite the fact that he’s got gold records on the wall, lives in a two-bedroom condo. [Laughs.]
The Commands, “Hey It’s Love”
The Webs, “Little Girl Blue”
AVC: These are from a new compilation about the Dynamic label you have coming out.
KS: It’s a preview of some things that we have coming out.
Abie Epstein was a guy that ruled San Antonio in the ’60s. He had more labels than I could probably name right now, and he did Tex-Mex, he did soul, he did garage, he did country, he did rockabilly, he did everything. But Dynamic was primarily a soul label that he ran, and The Commands were the top band that he’d ever produced.
They had a pretty large hit in “No Time For You.” They were four guys who were all stationed at the nearby Lackland Air Force Base, and that Air Force base had a circuit where you could go and perform, and that circuit was called Command. So they were The Commands. They produced five records for the label; one of them ended up being kind of a largish hit, and the rest didn’t do anything. The group disbanded as they got drafted to Vietnam, and they never lived up to their potential because they never got the opportunity to.
The Webs were a group that later cut an incredible song called “It’s So Hard To Break A Habit.” That was probably their most widely known song, but before that they were just some guys managed by a guy named Walter Whisenhunt. I think they were from Houston, and they ended up getting in touch with this wild character in San Antonio who had a studio and access to some money and the ability to make a go of it.
Dynamic closed in early 1969 with hardly a bang; it was more of a dull whimper. Epstein moved on to become a massive real-estate magnate in San Antonio. He basically built San Antonio.
