Golden Groups [1985 / 1993]

Digging through some 1950s trenches of regional group doo wop that you've never heard of and pulling out some gems from LA and New Orleans 🙌

Today’s compilation:

Golden Groups
1985/1993
Doo Wop / Rhythm & Blues / Rock & Roll

You really have to love how much more regionalized American pop music used to be. The idea that a song could be extremely popular in Los Angeles and receive massive airplay on a major radio station there, but not make any inroads in New York, is something that doesn't really exist all that much anymore. A lot of American culture's been flattened over the past half-century or so by being widely beamed up and disseminated on a national scale instead, and while cities may still produce their own unique subcultures, they're not as easily accessible as they used to be for local folks, because, for one thing, radio is continuously dying, and even for those local radio stations that are still around championing local music, their listenership tends to be very low. There used to be a time in which your own city's local music scene was a whole lot more palpable, but nowadays, way too many of them are cloistered. Businesses you walk into are playing national contemporary hit radio or some satellite station that has nothing to do with your own immediate surroundings, and as a result, places lose their distinct and individual character. Of course, the other side of this coin is that everyone only wants to listen to the best no matter where it comes from, and obviously the best comes from multiple places; but if we could just bring back some kind of balance that makes sure to promote local music along with stuff from elsewhere in fairer portions, maybe our cities would be able to regain more of that essence that makes them so different from one another. Imagine going to another city in the same country, tuning into a popular contemporary station there, and hearing music that you would never hear back home? It's something that used to happen a lot more often.

At least that's my take on things. Bring back robust regional music infrastructures that make this enormous country more interesting, nuanced, and culturally diverse! 🙏

Anyway, with all that in mind, here's some 1950s buried treasure from the group doo wop wing of Specialty Records, an operation that had a knack for bringing talent out of both the cities of Los Angeles and New Orleans. Specialty had some highly popular acts on their roster at certain points, including Little Richard, Larry Williams, Lloyd Price, and Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, but the purpose of this release was to blow the dust off of a whole bunch of stuff from acts that didn't achieve much of anything on a national scale, and in some cases, had recordings that went entirely unreleased too. If any of these acts were ever known while on Specialty, it was far more likely to be locally than anything else.

And digging into these more regionally-oriented crevices of the past is my bread and butter; it's a motivating reason for this blog's whole existence. Doses of the classic, nationally-charting oldies are great, but those comps, as good as they are, are also dimes-a-dozen. Give me oldies that are a hell of a lot more obscure and that didn't get nationally distributed, and you've got my interests fully piqued.

So, with this album—which was first released as a 16-song LP in 1985 and then expanded into a 25-song CD in 1993—we have a whole bunch of music from a whole bunch of folks that you've probably never heard of in your life, and despite that fact, it still contains a pretty healthy amount of gems. And I guess part of the reason for this consistency in quality was label head Art Rupe's own ability to bring amateurish teenagers into his studio and make them sound like seasoned pros. A lot of this stuff has a bit of a looser quality than your typically big doo wop hits, but Rupe could clearly get a resonant harmony enacted and bring the best out of his lead and bass vocalists too.

A bunch of acts on here appear more than once, and I really think the one with the highest batting average is Arthur Lee Maye & The Crowns, whose frontman also managed to simultaneously be a pretty damn good Major League Baseball player as well. The guy went pro in sports and music at around the same time, and in 1964, managed to bat .304, slug 44 doubles, and sell 500,000 copies of an album; and those music sales weren't some novelty crock; people bought Arthur Lee Maye's records because he was a genuinely gifted and charismatic singer. You can hear it here in every single side that he recorded with the Crowns for Specialty that are included on this album, only one of which appears to have gone officially released, "Gloria," which Wikipedia says was the group's most popular single, but this album's own liner notes refute...

Favorite song of mine by this group that's on this release is "Cool Lovin'," because Arthur Lee puts some pretty neat gravel in his voice 😎. Check it out:

Also, with the rock & roll explosion came Art Rupe's adaptation of it too. On this comp, we've got both sides of the only record that a group called The Pentagons would ever cut for Specialty, who'd later go on to score a couple national Billboard hits for themselves too. The b-side of that record, "It's Spring Again," combines a pretty standard leader-and-backers doo wop vocal arrangement with surging and soaring bursts of primordial rock energy that contain those freewheeling and brashly clanging guitar chords that defined so much of the genre back then. And when those ringing chords play alongside a contrastingly cooing backing harmony, it's satisfying.

So, in short, plenty of oldies comps are great, but they're also so often duplicative, serving up the same songs that most others do. Ones that plumb the depths of their vaults like this one does in order to provide us with a highly unique slate of tunes are assuredly more valuable and cherishable, and they're a type of compilation that I wish there was a lot more of. There was so much more regionality in music than there is now, but you don't seem to see enough compilations that care to cover it in depth too much. Good on Specialty Records for preserving these and bringing them to the public's attention.

Highlights:

The Chimes - "Tears on My Pillow"
Arthur Lee Maye & The Crowns - "Don't You Know (I Love You So)"
Tony Allen & The Champs - "Nite Owl"
The Chimes - "The Chimes Ring Out"
Benn Zeppa & The Zephers - "A Foolish Fool"
Arthur Lee Maye & The Crowns - "Cool Loving"
The Metronomes - "She's Gone"
The Pharoahs - "My Little Girl"
The Twilighters - "It's True"
The Chimes - "Chop Chop"
Arthur Lee Maye & The Crowns - "Gloria"
The Pentagons - "It's Spring Again"
The Pentagons - "Silly Dilly"
The Monitors - "Our School Days"