Category: default || By jt3y

Remember those watercolor paint sets you used to have as a kid? Imagine having to paint pictures without any greens. Oh, you could get by mixing blue and yellow, but it would be annoying.

Or, imagine that suddenly you couldn't get strawberry ice cream. Again, there are dozens of flavors of ice cream, so it wouldn't be a terrible problem, and you could always chop up strawberries and mix them up with the vanilla ice cream, but it would be aggravating.

That's something analogous to the problems that oldies lovers have faced for 30 years. The man who holds the copyright to literally hundreds of the biggest pop music hits of the 1950s and '60s refused to release them in any form --- tape, CD or LP --- after the early '70s.

I'm talking virtually everything by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell, The Orlons, The Dovells, The Tymes and early recordings by Bob Seger, Don Covay and The Kinks, along with dozens of so-called "one-hit wonders" --- groups that had one or two popular records, but then faded from view.

So if you were a DJ or just a music buff who wanted to play '50s and '60s pop, you could paint a musical picture using records that were put out by Motown, Capitol, Atlantic and Chess, but everything on the Cameo, Parkway and Wyncote labels was out of reach, unless you found a scratchy 45 rpm record in a thrift store. (This, by the way, helps to explain the oversaturation of Motown artists on oldies radio, even though Cameo-Parkway had more hits on the charts from 1960 to 1967 than Motown, and why it's been easier for years to get Hank Ballard's version of "The Twist" than Chubby Checker's better-known hit version.)

Who was responsible for depriving oldies buffs of their bad rock fix? The man's name was Allen Klein, and he was a record promoter who, among other things, managed Sam Cooke, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones for a time. In 1967, his company, ABKCO, acquired control of Cameo-Parkway Records, a major independent label in Philadelphia that had fallen on hard times. Soon, there were allegations of stock market fraud made against Klein, along with lawsuits and countersuits. Klein served a brief prison sentence in 1979 for income tax evasion.

But why wouldn't Klein re-release the old records, maybe to raise some money for his legal problems? No one knows. Pure stubbornness, maybe? Since he'd been tangling legally with many of his stars, and had been attacked and vilified by the press, perhaps it was spite. Klein withdrew from the public spotlight and became a virtual recluse.

Or perhaps Klein thought that by withholding the product from the market, he could drive up the demand. Well, it worked. As record collectors (and we can be an odd bunch; the movie and book "High Fidelity" have a lot of truth to them) concocted wild conspiracy theories, the careers of many of the stars whose original recordings were buried in the ABKCO vaults faltered. Some went back into different recording studios and badly remade their old hits, so they'd have some current products to sell.

More often, though, bootleggers made pirated recordings of the original hits, transferring those scratchy 45s to CDs made overseas, where copyright laws are less stringent. (And in a few cases, they make them in this country and just label them "Made-in-Wherever" to try and circumvent the law.) These were CDs that were "mastered" in someone's basement, and most of them sounded like it.

In any event, a big chunk of rock 'n roll history has been missing for a long, long time. True, that was hardly a threat to western civilization, but it was a little sad.

So imagine my surprise the other night when, doinking around on the Internet, I stumbled onto the ABKCO website, which was promoting a box set called "Cameo-Parkway: 1957-1967."

No ordering information. No track listing. No suggested retail price. This had to be a joke, right?

Nope. Apparently, with almost no publicity, ABKCO (still controlled by Allen Klein and his family after all of these years) has issued a four-disc box set of Cameo-Parkway rock and pop.

Did I say almost no publicity? Scratch "almost." I could only find a handful of reviews of the set, one each in the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Detroit Free Press, another in the Ottawa Citizen up in Canada. Apparently there was a feature on NPR's "Fresh Air" a while ago as well, but I missed it.

A check on Amazon's website revealed that not only is the set legit, it contains 115 songs, which is unusually generous for a box set. And the list price is less than $60, meaning that some online stores are selling it for a little as $45.

Needless to say, I almost broke my arm ordering one. (Order your copy by clicking on this Amazon link, and Tube City Online gets a tiny little cut. And thank you!) A search of various newsgroups and chat rooms reveals some people kvetching because the songs are in mono, not stereo, but that's a little like complaining about the Statue of Liberty for turning green because it's made of copper. These songs were recorded to be heard in mono, after all.

Most of the people in the target audience for Bobby Rydell or The Orlons were listening to the music on transistor radios or portable record players (the iPods of their day), which were hardly know for their breathtaking hi-fi sound. Would stereo be nice? Sure. But the lack of it is hardly a deal-breaker. (It just goes to prove that some people will complain about anything.)

Hell, a lot of us oldies freaks are just going to be thrilled to finally be able to paint pictures with all of the colors again ... maybe while eating a big bowl of strawberry ice cream!

...

Correction, Not Perfection: I wrote last week that Cox's store on Fifth Avenue in Our Fair City was built in 1955 and expanded in 1972. That was wrong; the new addition was constructed in 1968, according to Gerry Jurann's "Looking Back" column in a recent issue of The Daily News. Mea culpa.