Crown Records - budget lps
Burns
2,227 Posts
I've got a slew of Crown label records, especially a bunch of latin cha-cha lps, which are really good.
My question, if these are budget lps were they reissues of some sort? I read they were of the B.B. King/ blues side, what about the latin schitt. Some of the records on the crown label have to be original right?
My question, if these are budget lps were they reissues of some sort? I read they were of the B.B. King/ blues side, what about the latin schitt. Some of the records on the crown label have to be original right?
Comments
old country dudes that do a cover of Billy Preston's "Outta Space"
They did, but it was usually bogus versions of the hits fleshed out by original material, like Heavy, Heavy, Heavy by Lee Akers & the Electric Generation (covering Blood, Sweat & Tears'"And When I Die" surrounded by third-tier country music). Or Hey Jude by the Underground Electrics, which featured a version of the Beatles hit surrounded by over-the-top psychedelia. The singer on this album had a deep country & western baritone that had no business singing these songs; most of the other tracks were Blue Cheer-ish versions of old blues songs that Crown had the publishing rights to, like "Dust My Blues" and "Boogie Chillen."
Lots of good music on Crown. And fun exploit records.
I have the above mentioned Ike Turner on the wall with a gorgeous Fazzio cover. Fazzio is a guy I would like to know more about. I have a Jackie Kennedy Fazzio cover with a fold out picture stand on the back.
The one time I met Joe Bihari (president of the whole Crown/Kent/Modern/etc. empire), I asked about Fazzio. He surely remembered him, although he had no real stories or anything. But he does know that Fazzio is dead.
A friend and I have joked for years that we should start a Fazzio gallery. Just about all the artwork I've seen of his was on Crown covers, although there is one Gloria Lynne LP on Everest that has a Fazzio portrait.
You met a Bihari? I don't know much about them, but impression was you would need to take a long shower afterwards to remove the slime.
Is Crown that different from United, Superior? Are there no Fazzio's on those labels.
I used to have a wall of Fazzio's, but they are all gone.
Best I can tell there is no decent Fazzio gallery online. I also have dreams of finding original Fazzio oil paintings of the covers. In my dreams the artists sat for him while he painted.
I met him three years ago in New Orleans. I was there for the two-day Ponderosa Stomp festival at the House of Blues. During the day, they had panel discussions featuring several key people from rock & soul's past, and one such discussion focused around Joe Bihari, who was - and remains - still alive and was there to tell the story. However, the man must have known about his shifty reputation. Bihari had these quick bios of the people he worked with in the fifties written on sheets of paper, and everytime the moderator (festival coordinator Dr. Ike) tried to open up the floor for a question-and-answer session, Bihari stalled him by reading one more bio, as if he were afraid that somebody's niece or nephew might use the Q&A to complain about the $$$ their relatives were cheated out of in 1958. No such thing happened - matter of fact, Bihari showed up at the actual Stomp concerts, and there was always some drooling 45 collector sitting next to him asking detailed questions.
As for me, the two things I'd asked about were his Rudy Ray Moore involvement (Moore was probably the last big seller from the Modern/Kent stable, in the 70s) and about Fazzio. He seemed really impressed that in a room full of people who wanted to hear about B.B. King or Etta James, here I was asking for stories about Moore. Or as he put it (rough paraphrase), "this is the first question I've heard that wasn't about music!"
Both were just two more labels in the Modern Records stable. There are Fazzios on the later United and Kent repressings from the seventies, but they are mainly reissues of older Crown records from ten years earlier.