ruling stride amiss

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The Gamma Rays played around New York a bunch in the early and mid-'90s, but only ever released a couple of singles. "Lovely" (MP3) was one of them--girl-group harmonies (they got compared to the Feminine Complex a few times, if I'm remembering correctly) with an extra-tough bass sound bumping it along. Sari Rubinstein, the singer, is now better known as one of the masterminds behind Rubulad, the greatest floating party spot in New York; she also fronts a very different sort of band called Music From the Mood Expansion Chamber, who are a little like the early Jesus & Mary Chain doing mantra meditation, and are well worth seeing. Concetta Kirschner, the bass player (who also wrote this song; thanks to her for permission to post it!) is now better known as Princess Superstar. (Worth checking out from that page: the video for "Jam For the Ladies," her collaboration with Moby, MC Lyte and Angie Stone.) Concetta reports that she's in London right now, finishing up her fifth album.

I'll be writing about it at greater length in a few weeks, but I'm amazed that The Complete Motown Singles, vol. 1 is a mail-order-only, limited-to-5000-copies thing: what, there are that few vintage-soul fanatics who'd care about it? Motown's still flogging the splintered desiccated skeletons of its big hits on comp after comp, and this time they collect a bunch of interesting-to-epochal stuff that nobody's heard in forty years in a beautiful, well-annotated package, and they figure interest is that minimal? How many copies did the first Stax box sell, anyway? Or do they just want to keep the public image of '60s Motown untarnished by anything any boomer can't hum on cue?

1 Comments

noloveforned said:

i thought that 5,000 copies was extremely limited as well but this is also the early period of motown- before they had their footing. there are only a handful of hits, towards the end...

and that's what i find really intriguing about it... it's a collection of all those "also ran" groups and singles... like that sammy record that came out on dgc in the mid-90s but never got the attention pavement...

so at least the first collection doesn't seemed to be aimed as much at the baby-boomers as the record collectors (the ones that drool at the idea of a 12-volume box set series comprising sixty-some odd cds)...

having said that, my father did email me asking about these releases... he had heard something on the radio... i think a lot of the baby-boomers will balk at the price. by now they're used to getting 3-4 cd sets at costco for $30. my mother went so far as to hypothesize that these would eventually end up there... which they obviously won't...

consider the "complete far side" collection that came out a couple years ago... i remember the far side rather fondly- i have a bunch of books from when i was in jr. high/high school. but i really have no urge to dedicate that much space and money to the far side...

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This page contains a single entry by Douglas published on January 24, 2005 11:58 PM.

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