We’re a few days behind on this post, but as Robin Gibb’s death caught us in the middle of a hellacious three day death trip to Minneapolis we’ve just found a moment to reflect. There’s plenty of text-based eulogies out there to read, so we’ll merely put a flower on his casket with this Trinidadian yacht-soul version of “How Deep Is Your Love” by Gene Lawrence.
Filed under: Obituaries
At the age of 15, my most treasured asset was a seven ply piece of concaved wood bearing the graphics of a rumored satan worshipper, Natas Kaupas. That deck has fetched over $3000 at auction, and I’m pretty sure mine was snapped in half tackling a rail at the Cupertino library. That summer (1992), Plan B—an upstart skate company—announced themselves to the world via the Questionable VHS tape. Their team was second to none, with Danny Way, Matt Hensley, Sal Barbier, Colin McCay, Mike Carrol, and Rodney Mullen (playing the roll of elder statesman) turning in game changing performances. To say the 57 minute video made me and my cadre of friends feel like total amateurs is an understatement. Our attempts to replicate their complex street style were valiant, but pedestrian. The music in Questionable, however, was much easier to rip.
Using a pair of RCA cables on the VCR out, I managed to cobble together a mix tape of my favorite skate video songs, replete with truck grinds and tail slaps. This tape was on heavy rotation that summer, in various cars, a K-Mart-pilfered boom box, and the Panasonic-brand walkman that accompanied me to and from Lynbook High. And while the tape was culled from half a dozen different videos, it drew heavily from Questionable. Somewhere up in my mom’s rafters is a copy of that tape, and I’m certain the track list is littered with questionable (pun certainly intended) entries that I can’t begin to recall, but I know for certain that the Beastie Boys “Time For Livin’” was on there.
This was hardly my first exposure to the group. My father had gifted me a cassette copy of License To Ill for my 10th birthday, but my parents lax disciplining hardly gave me call to fight for my right to party. In fact, I was more familiar with their material via continuous reruns of The Pick Up Artist on HBO (featuring the infectious “She’s Crafty”) than by their near-constant play on MTV. By 1987 I’d discovered the Dead Kennedys and the Ramones, both of which made the Beastie’s sound downright pedestrian to my pre-pubescent ears. Five years later, a hardcore cover of Sly & the Family Stone’s “Time For Livin’” provided me with a reintroduction to the group and the soundtrack to that summer.
Ain’t nobody got to spell it for me
Ain’t nobody got to yell I can see
Ain’t nobody got the pain I can hear
But if I have to I’ll yell in your ear
I’d love to know a final tally for the number of times I played “Time For Livin’”–I bet it’s in 400s (it’s less than two minutes long). Angry at everything, including my inability to reach what was then my life’s dream: going pro, it became my anthem, my mantra. That song inspired me to go harder, to try crazier tricks and give even less of a shit what anyone thought. The Beastie Boys have succeeded while doing just that for the last 33 years; my skateboarding career ended two years later with a broken hand.
Friday afternoon’s news of Adam Yauch’s passing didn’t cause me to breakdown in tears, but when I got home I did pull out the three Beastie Boys records I have filed and give them much needed spins. I began with the Pollywog Stew 7″, then Paul’s Boutique, and finally Check Your Head. “Time For Livin” is directly preceded by the 30 second interlude “The Biz vs. The Nuge,” but in my original home dubbed version I thought it was the song’s intro and have mentally left it as so. I added four more plays to my all-time tally, re-sleeved the LP and put it back on the shelf. At 15, the concept of “Time For Livin’” meant pushing the boundaries of my own existence. Twenty years on, I’m still trying.
—Ken Shipley
On Sunday, March 11th, the Numero Group lost a close friend and partner. Felton Williams, founder of Double U Sound and the Revival label, passed suddenly while his beloved wife, Ida, was at church. After surviving several heart attacks, his time came. Until the end, he was a vibrant, loving man who never lost his love of the steel guitar or flair for electronics. His story inspired our Local Customs series of releases, and the documentary included with our Downriver Revival release focused on his beautiful character, and we just revisited his vaults and issued some of the gorgeous recordings he made with Shirley Ann Lee. He will be long remembered. Here’s a little outtake from the documentary that tells his story:
We don’t get many visitors to our small Little Village office, which is a good thing, because we’re surly and busy and our office is completely jammed from top to bottom with stuff and people and activity. The most extreme example of the chaos is the critical mass of weird stuff, boxes of LPs, arcane reference books, outdate Caribbean phone books, bicycle tools, handwritten notes, drawings, coffee stains, business cards for businesses that seem only imaginary, setlists for obscure bands that may have never even really performed the sets, long outdated postal ephemera, star trek zines, photocopied comics, National Lampoons, invoices from Papua New Guinea record companies, acetate sticker labels (unused), typewriter ribbons, and pulps that completely fill Rob Sevier’s office, informing and often instigating the research that drives Numero’s packed release schedule. Today it ends.
(An impressionistic panoramic photo of what it looks like on a normal day.)
Today, Sevier is moving his quarters, delicately, in hopes of not upsetting the mojo built up over the last five years of chaos that begets order. Although a larger office awaits in the piecemeal restoration of the Numero office that’s currently happening, change is hard to take. The centerpiece of the office is the prize wall:
Thank you notes, Christmas cards, letters and drawings from prison, collages, glossies, Public Safety warnings, funeral cards, tickets for canceled shows, cookies that are too elaborate to eat, and postcards from obscure historical societies. It will be available for viewing for a few more days before portions of it are donated to the Smithsonian.
Filed under: A Light On The Southside, Obituaries | Tags: Light On The South Side, MIchael Abramson
Early Monday morning, our friend and collaborator Michael L. Abramson peacefully succumbed to his long battle with kidney cancer.
Based in Chicago, Illinois, Abramson had contributed photography to numerous national and foreign magazines and his work has been exhibited at museums and galleries including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Milwaukee Art Museum, and The Philadelphia Art Museum. In 1978, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in response to documentary work on the South Side of Chicago.
Michael’s important historical photographs of Chicago nightlife in the mid-1970s were the centerpiece of Numero’s double album/book hybrid Light: On The South Side, which has received accolades globally—including a Grammy nomination—for this remarkable portrait of a rarely documented and lively Chicago scene.
Of Michael’s work, the writer Nick Hornby says:
“There is something extremely poignant about these pictures: there comes a point where the transience of the laughter and the music, the booze and the cigarettes and the drugs, pushes us into a contemplation of the mortality of the participants, and then on to our own. And life has always been shorter for the inhabitants of the South Side, too—at the time these pictures were taken, the average black male would just about see his sixtieth birthday, but not much beyond that. Carpe diem means that little bit more when the dies are in shorter supply. This is a special book, about one tiny corner of the world over a handful of evenings a long time ago; but that tiny corner of the world has, for decades now, meant a great deal to an awful lot of people scattered all over the world.”
Mike was a real mencsh, a true gentleman, and an important artist. We will miss him tremendously. If you’re out tonight, lift a snifter of Hennessy for him. He preferred Scotch, but it seems appropriate.
As previously reported, Yellow Pills has been put on life support. Many of you expressed sincere gratitude for this long-misunderstood piece of our catalog, and we thank you for your support during this difficult time.
At 12:54 PM, April 30th 2010, Yellow Pills: Prefill’s slipped quietly into eBay’s abyss. The final copy was shipped to Aubrey Brown. Aubrey, if you’re reading this, please take care of it. The staff briefly considered signing it, but that seemed a bit self important, even for us.
For those that missed out, we encourage you to find the record by hook or by crook. We’re even selling off the remaining booklets, slipcases, and tray cards for the low, low price of $3 (postage paid).
We were saddened today by the news that our friend Ada Richards passed on Tuesday. She was visiting her son in Atlanta when she suffered a sudden heart attack. We talk to Ada pretty often. By The Numbers readers know her from her letters to us (written from the point of view of her friends at Botsford Hospital in Farmington Holls, Michigan). Numero fans also know her music from our Good God! Born Again Funk compilation.
Ada will be remembered more in Detroit for her generosity as a successful local businesswoman with a small chain of beauty parlors who was known to share from her surplus. After her retirement she was known for her volunteer work. We consider ourselves lucky to have gotten to know her.
If you haven’t read Bob Mehr’s liners for “Keep An Eye On The Sky,” the 2009 Big Star Collection, try to get hold of a copy. They absolutely nail what it was like to be a Big Star fan in the early days. Here’s a note I sent to Bob upon its release:
“I got my (promo) copy of #1 Record in late ’72 at the college station in Columbia, Mo, where I spun occasionally on Saturdays while playing nights in an R&B band there. In ’74, still in Columbia, but now working at my first record store, I nailed a copy of Radio City (another promo) mostly because no one else working there wanted it. My #1 Record went missing years ago, but I still have that Radio City LP, with “Hit! Please Listen” stamped on the front in red ink. Heard both albums the weeks they came out and, as Peter Holsapple affirms in your notes, never saw a retail copy for sale anywhere.
As if this wasn’t lucky enough, I was one of the early recipients of the “Sister Lover” cassette from fellow St Louisan and fan Steve Scariano’s acetate. A third Big Star album was the last thing any of us expected. And btw, no one’s ever gotten the sequence on that record right. The original is perfect and crucial.
I spent the ensuing years exposing everyone I could manage to imprison in front of my stereo long enough to become infected by “my favorite band that no one’s ever heard.” Every one of those people are my closest friends today.
There were damn few who got this much Big Star so soon and fell in love with them so hard. It’s a small and exclusive club of which I’m proud to be a member. You got it so right in your essay and this member of the Memphis Inner Party, St Louis Division, thanks you for the memory.”
-Tom Lunt
In memory of Alex Chilton, 1950 – 2010
Filed under: Obituaries | Tags: Audika Records, Chicago Tribune, Dannie Flesher, Factory 25, Jim Nash, Mentally Ill, Rocky Mountain Low, Rough Trade Records, Steve Knutson, Strike Under, Wax Trax, You Weren't There: A History Of Chicago Punk
Wax Trax co-founders Dannie Flesher (left) and Jim Nash
“We’re in the business of chaos” said, Wax Trax’s Dannie Flesher in a 1991 interview who sadly passed on today way too soon at the age of 57. There’s a thoughtful and informative obituary in the Chicago Tribune about Danny & his partner Jim Nash’s legendary label/record stores but, if you are looking for something a little more definitive there’s couple of fantastic reissues that came out this year that tell the Wax Trax story in much more detail.
Rocky Mountain Low: Colorado Musical Underground Of The Late ’70s delves deep into Wax Trax’s humble start out in Denver during the winter of ’75. It’s a raw & obnoxious sonic journey of very obsucre and unreleased punk/new wave tracks along with a huge zine filled with notes on all the bands and Wax Trax ephemera – many of the images in the zine come from Numero friend Steve Knutson who was one of the first Wax Trax employees in Denver before he migrated briefly to the Chicago store, and now works for Rough Trade US along with his own Audika Records which has released many of the Arthur Russell reissues.
You Weren’t There: A History Of Chicago Punk 1977-84 was put out by Numero DVD collaborator Matt Grady’s label, Factory 25. The DVD/LP includes a memorable 2hr. feature length documentary about the Chicago punk scene of that era and also showcases a handful of unreleased cuts and ultra rare 7″s like the haunting, “Gacy’s Place” by Mentally Ill and, “Elephant’s Graveyard” by Stirke Under from the very first Wax Trax 12″.
In closing, I think if we compound Flesher’s above statement with Numero’s unofficial motto, we’ve got a solid explanation for our current business model and state of affairs.
“We’re in the business of chaos and our label wouldn’t exist without crazy people.”Yeah, that about sums it up around here these days.
The Associated Press reports that Teddy Pendergrass has died. “The singer’s son, Teddy Pendergrass II, said his father died at Bryn Mawr Hospital in suburban Philadelphia.”
He was 59.
Dave Hoekstra unearthed this story for the Chicago Sun-Times in an article chronicling goings-on at Perv’s House, a Chicago night spot owned by Pervis Staples and one of the the venues featured in our 2009 release, Light On The South Side. According to Staples:
“Harold Melvin fired [Teddy] Pendergrass at my club. He slapped him in the mouth downstairs. They weren’t going to go onstage. Melvin sent a girl out to the car, got the books and told Pendergrass, ‘I own you like I own the Blue Notes.’ They couldn’t get out of town until they did my show. People upstairs were clapping and clapping and they were downstairs boxing.”
If true, it might not have been the most auspicious launch of a solo career, but what a career.
He was one of the signature voices of soul and truly The Sound Of Philadelphia.
Ladies in heaven, beware. Teddy’s home.
