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Digging For Sonic Gold


danswift

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One of the dudes on the NS Forum recently acquired this cool bunch of Mother plate stampers, reel to reel studio masters and acetates from the fantastic but long defunct San Francisco .Bay Area Golden State Recorders.

 

https:/dia.org/wiki/Golden_State_Recorders

 

Thought some of you lot would appreciate seeing this too so I thought I'd post it on here.

 

Golden State is particularly close to my heart as some criminally unknown and under appreciated music came through there which I've searched for over the years.

 

A lot of other more famous musicians also came through the doors there but that's another story altogether.

 

I picked up this cd around 2007 and it's a belter, well worth checking if you're a fan of Bay Area Funk & Soul.

 

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I also posted this from the cd in the Saturday Night Funk thread last night but theres only me and Antti ( A-Skate) who seem to contribute to it so I'll just include it here instead..

 

 

 

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Cornelius Flowers AKA Snooky & The Cosmic Flowers.

 

 

Nice break at 00.00 .

 

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Thats awesome i hope they put it back on wax!

Yeah, I hope they do,that would be cool.

 

I really have to take my hat off to some of the Northern Soul fellas when it comes to digging for records..to say they go above and beyond in their dedication to the music would be a major understatement.

 

I've heard some pretty incredible stories over the years from some of these dudes..far too many to tell here, but heres one that someone was telling me only recently about a guy and his buddy who would go over to the States on digging missions and dress as hobo's so they could go searching for Soul records in rough locations and neighbourhoods without getting harassed and hassled by the locals .

 

What these two would do was they'd get all hobo'd up and go to the record store they wanted to explore where upon their arrival, the owner would more often than not, loudly yell at them to get the fuck out of there... so what they would do then was pull out a huge wad of cash, politely explain who they were and ask the store owner if he would kindly lock the door so they could look through his stock for an hour or two undisturbed and of course once the owner saw the cash on display they would be more than happy to oblige them.

 

These dudes would then get to work, buy up the records, sling the store owner a few extra dollars and then call for a cab when they were done and get the hell out of there and repeat the process the next day at another rough location in a different part of town !

 

 

Hehe...Fucking genius.

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Haha crazy. Yeah ive heard a few things about those kind of missions for soul records....

In fact the whole art of digging is something ive only experienced on a completly superficial level compared to those days... ive always had the internet... i used to go to silly lengths to dig online but its still a maaaaasive advantage... and yeah ive had plenty of fun in dusty crates too but the old way is incredible compaered to how easy we have it now.

 

Im always amazed by stories about dj leacy rocking up to american breakdance events and schooling even zulu nation crew on rare breaks... boss

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Diggin runs, although highly fascinating & rewarding, were/are an extraordinary boring proccess. I always hated having to go through incredible ammounts of horrible music until a good cut comes out. I mean, my taste would become so intoxicated to bad drums, awful vocals & riffs or destroyed grooves, that I usually ended up surpassing good samples during the first hearing, so I had to repeat the whole process twice just to make sure I haven't left out anything useful. Though, nothing beats finding an unused sample or a b-side cover with a killer instrumental extention. Actually, I believe that diggin is more rewarding even from beatmaking itself, like finding and writing down a new melody vs playing it again.

 

Truth be told.

 

Also, hauling crates back home was always painfull to my back.

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Ive never gotten much from digging the soul/funk/jazz sections, it feels at the same time too easy and too highly taxed - Ill go go those sections and pick up a few £5 records, rarely even pick up anything above unless its something I want to keep and listen to, but even then theres something about searching the bargain bins, more aptly charity shop bins. Having a listening station in the shop is great for that £5 a record mark, but theres something magic about getting home and having a stack of £1 records and getting a ton of beats out of them. Whats more I find often that I cant find the thing that made me buy the record in the first place if I listen first and buy later...

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I always loved digging...

 

note that says digging, not dogging (thanks in advance)

 

The internet wasn't really the place it is now back when I was still searching for stuff so there was still tons of places you could go to and get a good score with old vinyl.

 

I also travelled a lot more back then because of the day job which took me all over the place so there was always a new city or town somewhere for me to discover and which also meant new record shops to plunder !

 

Had so many good hits over the years and amassed a lot of great finds for little money which is obviously the best way to do it..collecting mostly Funk and Soul records was relatively easy back then because hardly anyone wanted those kinds of tunes anymore and even the Northern Soul scene had gone kind of quiet, experiencing something of a fallow period and that meant only one thing .

 

People wanted to sell records and I wanted to buy them .

 

Market stalls and car boot sales were also always ripe for the picking too back then ..it's rubbish now in comparison but I've had some terrific hits from those places where people didn't have a fucking clue what they were selling.

 

Theres nothing quite like the smell of rat piss,damp vinyl and rotting paper at 6 am in the morning when you're directed towards a cardboard box full of records by some moody old git munching on a dodgy looking bacon sandwich when you arrive at those kinds of places.

 

Top tip..always take a flashlight,they come in real handy for inspecting the deadwax on records.

 

The first thing I always asked whenever I entered a shop or approached a stall holder was "do you have any old Soul records that I could look at please" and more often than not the answer would be "oh them old things, yeah here you go those are 50 pence each "

 

Ho,ho ho..Christmas comes early for Dan.

 

The best score I ever had was around Xmas 1996 when I was looking at this guys crappy market stall at 7 in the morning while we were erecting a tower crane in some dump of a town centre and which was full of trash like Jim Reeves,Engelbert Humperdink and damp sleeved Abba lp's with the faces of the band peeling off ,just shitty stuff at like 30 pence or something..nothing, a total bust, when I spotted one of those 45 boxes that people used to keep their singles in back in the 70's.

 

I looked inside and there was around a dozen or so tunes in there and as I looked closer I could see that these were someones old Northern Soul 45's.

 

 

I started to leaf through and couldn't believe what I was seeing.

 

Soul Brothers Six ' I'll Be Loving You'

Kurt Harris 'Emperor Of My Babys Heart'

Timi Yuro 'It'll Never Be Over For Me'

Sam Dees 'Lonley For You Baby' and several other highly collectible records, all originals, not reissues or bootlegs..

 

Fucking hell..my heart was beating so hard I'm surprised the bloke didn't hear it but I managed to control myself and asked him how much the records in the box were.."Pound each" came the reply.."picked them up yesterday from another trader..figured someone might like them"

 

Yeah, i fucking like them I thought to myself..no fuckers getting these but me.

 

I'll take em all, I said. will you sell me this box too ?

 

You can ave' the box mate if you're buying em all.

 

I couldn't give him the damn money quick enough cause I was convinced he'd made a mistake...he had, but he didn't know it..a fucking huge one, in fact. hahahaha

 

The records in that little box were worth roughly around a grand in total at that time...the Timi Yuro record alone will set you back £1.5000 these days,that is if you can actually find it.

 

God, I miss those days ...the internet has properly ruined the art of old school style digging now more or less but it was fucking good while it lasted plus the vast majority of my once treasured collection is long gone now anyway.

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ugh that snooky break though.

 

i need to get rid of all the chaff i've picked up over the years though.... either by blind buying charity shop stuff or (more commonly) people giving me massive boxes of records because i might find something in there..... but it turns out to be music from hell..... some stuff has to be kept though as a reminder that making skipless skratch records is not as weird and pointless as it sounds..... like my "bagpipe reggae" 7"..... how the fuck did it get made? how did they get to the stage of doing a photo shoot? like no one, at any point, let that niggling feeling at the back of their brain (and presumably in the rest of their brains) take over and say "guys this is really really fucking shit".

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My mate recently picked up Eddie Bo's We're Doing It (Thang) on 45, in a charity shop, for 50p.

 

I've got more digging disaster stories than successful ones.

 

I went to Crazy Beat Records in Upminster (a bit dear but a good spot) on a Saturday, hungover to fuck. I pulled shit loads of records out of the racks and took them to the listening booth, got through them all and created a yes pile and a no pile. It was one of those things where you'd listened to so many records that you couldn't remember what made you put it in the yes pile and you had to trust your judgement when you paid for it. Somehow a 'Jimmy Smith Plays Fats Waller LP' made it into my yes pile and I ended up paying £25 for it, only to get it home and realise that it sucks harder the blue rollneck sweater he's rocking on the cover.

 

That still haunts me to this day. I can't do anything with it. No good samples or anything.

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'Jimmy Smith Plays Fats Waller' does sound like it could be promising to be fair hehe.

 

Is it not something that you could just sell on or at least trade then Joe ?

 

Edit.

That record is holding it's price pretty well on Discogs at the moment.

 

I see what you mean by that truly hideous sweater tho...

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My Jimmy Smith record has him doing martial arts on the front. Much cooler!

It's definitely way cooler than the Jadakiss record that you've been so desperate to find for 'one of your students' just recently that's for sure .... :d

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'Jimmy Smith Plays Fats Waller' does sound like it could be promising to be fair hehe.

 

Is it not something that you could just sell on or at least trade then Joe ?

 

Edit.

That record is holding it's price pretty well on Discogs at the moment.

 

I see what you mean by that truly hideous sweater tho...

 

I'll try and shift it at some point, along with a load of other unwanted bits I've accumulated over the years.

 

TBH it's not thaaaat bad. I'd probably listen to it while eating my dinner but not much else. I think it's made worse by the fact that I spent £25 on it!

 

This is more my thing when it comes to Jimmy Smith:

 

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bitter Northerners

Hahaha..

 

We as a people have earned the right to be bitter..just ask your Dad, he comes from the North I seem to recall you telling me...

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is more my thing when it comes to Jimmy Smith:

 

 

Good stuff Joe.

 

Have you heard The Jimmy Smith and Lalo Schifrin lp called 'The Cat' ?

 

Its pretty cool.. I can remember picking up a near mint original copy on the old Verve label for just a few quid years ago.

 

Really nice old school vinyl pressing too on that one and worth checking if you haven't come across it before.

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Smith did some great stuff, but I wouldn't say it represents his output on the grand scheme. There's a CD comp of stuff taken off different Verve albums, cringeworthyly called 'The Roots of Acid Jazz' (don't get me started!). If you can past the sick in your mouth from the title, it's packed with some killers.

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Smith did some great stuff, but I wouldn't say it represents his output on the grand scheme. There's a CD comp of stuff taken off different Verve albums, cringeworthyly called 'The Roots of Acid Jazz' (don't get me started!). If you can past the sick in your mouth from the title, it's packed with some killers.

 

I don't know that one. I've got a Best of... LP with Root Down and Hobo Flats, etc.

 

 

 

bitter Northerners

Hahaha..

 

We as a people have earned the right to be bitter..just ask your Dad, he comes from the North I seem to recall you telling me...

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is more my thing when it comes to Jimmy Smith:

 

 

Good stuff Joe.

 

Have you heard The Jimmy Smith and Lalo Schifrin lp called 'The Cat' ?

 

Its pretty cool.. I can remember picking up a near mint original copy on the old Verve label for just a few quid years ago.

 

Really nice old school vinyl pressing too on that one and worth checking if you haven't come across it before.

 

 

Ha! Yes, I know The Cat very well. Remember a TV show from the 80's called The Money Programme? The theme tune is on this album.

 

I remember, even as a young kid, laughing at how exciting/dramatic the theme tune was when it was just a bunch of stuffed shirts waffling about finance!

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Want to clear something regarding the Internet:

 

You UK guys were always lucky cause you had all the great imports and UK-only versions. We, the rest of Europe (and especially Balkans) never had any great imports and the prices were always super high. The internet was actually good for us, cause we finally had access to all those great breaks, which most of them remained completely unknown to us until Youtube.

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