Numero Group: By The Numbers

As our research into the strange and mysterious world of Dale Warren continues, it seems like every day we’re finding some creek that feeds into the 24-Carat Black river. While Warren’s time at Stax, Motown, and Shrine are well documented, he wrote or produced dozens of tracks for an equal amount of Detroit micro-indies. Two of these songs appear on our forthcoming collection, taking on vastly different forms than their originals.

The first of these is Bobbie Dee’s “I Don’t Love You,” issued on Carl Cisco and Tom Shannon’s Marquee label in 1968. Bobby Dee was one of the many pseudonyms of Robert Dunson, who would later sing for 24-Carat Black as The Mighty Manchurian. While the original is a smoldering guitar workout, Warren dialed it back for this adaptation. Hearn gives an operatic performance, letting the horn section fill in the gaps the earlier version filled with crunchy guitar.

Warren dredged Lake Sinclair’s outskirts once again with “I’ll Never Let You Go,” stripping away the beautiful pizzicato that dots the Tiares rendition on the Leona label, taking the virginal girl group reading and adding a churning sexuality.

Excuse the lack of label scan, the interweb has apparently never actually seen a copy of “Gone! The Promises Of Yesterday” on Volt. On our title track, Warren revamps his schmaltzy Mad Lads production, enlisting Hedda Suddeth from Chicago kid-soul up and comers Eight Minutes for variety and bringing the instruments to the front of the fold in the final mix.

When Dale Warren passed in 1994, he took with him any knowledge of what he wanted this second 24-Carat Black album to look like with him. Was it going to be made up entirely of reworked material? We’ll never know as there were only three tapes that were salvageable. What is certainly clear is that Warren wasn’t interested in merely re-arranging these songs, but reinventing them.