John Gary Williams LP--what is the story?
faux_rillz
14,343 Posts
My copy of this record has a Stax center label and a sleeve bearing the Stax logo in several places--it also has a Stax catalog number. However, three stickers with the Truth label logo--and a separate catalog number--have been applied to various points on the sleeve, presumably to cover up the Stax logo/cat. no., except they were applied in the wrong spots. Does anyone know what the story is? I can understand going to the trouble of trying to package it as a Truth release if there was already an LP in the Stax catalog with that cat. number, but I don't think there is.See (not my copy):
Comments
Maybe it was important that it be nominally released via Truth for tax reasons...
i realize this doesnt help you any with info... just sharing.
though i will say that ive written about this record a few times. its one of my current favorites. great all the way through.... hes got a killer 45 as well daniel. kinda pricey but dope.
I thought you people knew about records!
Yeah, I like it too. He has another 45 in addition to "Whole Damn World..."? I know that one gets money, but it's actually on the album. Unless the 45 has an alternate version.
im out the loop dude... i dont know anything anymore.
yeah the Whole Damn World is the pricey one. i was always under the impression that it was a different sounding track then on the LP. maybe im wrong... had it once years ago before i was really diggin the sound.
his other one on the label is some religious sounding one. i dont remember the title but i have it at home.
his cover of "Open Up Your Heart" is dope.
The copy I sold recently did not have Truth stickers. His 45 is on the Stax label. The version of the 45 is not an alternate version, Northern Soulers covet
I just assumed it was due to last-minute confusion on exactly which label/subsidiary would release it (this was a promo, BTW)
I think that really boils down to Northern soulers ONLY wanting 45s, not the 'rarer' pressing... you can't play out LP cuts anyway
faux_rillz: exposed as a Northern Souleur!
According to Soulsville, U.S.A., Rob Bowman's bio of Stax, by the time they launched the Truth label they were in serious financial trouble with distributors and whatnot, and for some arcane reason there were quite a few releases that came out on Truth and Stax simultaneously.
That's a non-album cut, apparently.
I gotta reread that chapter of the book; I don't think I knew who Williams was when I last read it a few years ago.
Williams had been knocking around Stax for quite some time - he was a former member of the Mad Lads before he made that album.
The Truth label is mainly covered in the 1974 and 1975 chapters. They must have been going through some shit, 'cause they couldn't even think of a clever label name...all Truth was was just Gospel Truth with one word removed (even the label design was identical).
The man was probably trying to get paid. According to Peter Guralnick in Sweet Soul Music, the place was guarded by armed men after Al Bell took over in late 1972, racial tensions got inflamed, money issues/IRS investigations compounded, and Stax only went downhill from there. Mike Douglas, Lena Zavaroni, and Billy Eckstine reportedly got six figures for their shit/un-Staxlike albums while old-guard cats like William Bell were struggling to get cent one. Stax was nutty five or six years before they officially folded in 1976. You can notice a little of the conflict brewing at Wattstax if you hear the DVD commentaries and read some behind-the-scenes accounts.
I always understood Gospel Truth to be an awkward/overlapping attempt to cross-market to the Gospel crowd more than a tax write-off. But I suppose the contracts or masters they bought for the Gospel Truth/Truth subsidiary could have had that effect. I wouldn't have put it past them.
I've never heard the album in question, but my curiosity is piqued.
Okay, so the deal was that the relaunch of Gospel Truth as Truth and using it to put out secular artists was intended as a way of circumventing the distribution deal with CBS, which only explicitly included records issued on Stax, Volt and Enterprise.
So that decision must have been right in between the point when the JGW record went to press and when it would have gone out the door.
Ah. Those goddamn lawyers. (smiley face)
I'm sure that if CBS actually cared, their lawyers could have shut it right down--but the real issue was they they had no interest in distributing niche artists like that and, in fact, hadn't been living up to their end of the deal.
http://www.bsnpubs.com/stax/staxc.html - scroll down to "STS-5503."
Yes, it was. Truth (not Gospel Truth) was conceived during this late period. Even though they were still having hits (Shirley Brown's "Woman To Woman"), the company was still, to quote Stax recording artist O.B. McClinton, "A Six-Pack Of Trouble."