Genre: soul
Rating: *** (3 stars)
Title: Shout!
Company: Okeh
Catalog: OKM-12111
Year: 1965
Country/State: Los Angeles, California
Grade (cover/record): VG/VG
Comments: mono pressing, writing on the back side; white label DJ copy with playing instructions
Available: 1
GEMM catalog ID: 4292
Price: $40.00
Cost: $66.00
I originally picked this one up at a yard sale and put it back down 'cause I thought it looked like a slice of lounge act crap ... Luckily I had second thoughts and reclaimed it just as someone else was about to grab it ...
Formed in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, these guys apparently have a rather convoluted background. Carver Bunkham, Carl Fisher, Dave Govan and James Johnson discovered a mutual interest in music while attending Los Angeles' Jefferson High School. Prior to their incarnation as The Vibrations they'd recorded as The Jayhawks and The Marathons. Over the next five years they became mainstays on the California soul club circuit. They also garnered a reputation as a strong live act, which may have been the reason Columbia's Okeh subsidiary signed them to a recording contract in 1964. 1964 also found the group adopting a new name - The Vibrations.
Curiously, while packaged to give the impression it's a live set, most of 1965's "Shout!" isn't !!! The flip side medley 'What'd I Say-Shout' sounded like a concert effort, but that'was the exception. Elsewhere the set serves as a "best of" effort compiling material from the group's first five Okeh singles. Included were:
- 1964's 'Watusi Time' b/w 'Sloop Dance' (Okeh catalog number 7205)
- 1964's 'Keep On Keeping On' b/w 'Hello Happiness' (Okeh catalog number 7212)
- 1965's 'Ainīt Love That Why' b/w 'End Up Crying' (Okeh catalog number 7220)
- 1965's 'Talkin' Bout Love' b/w 'If You Only Knew' (Okey catalog number 7228)
- 1965's 'Misty' b/w 'Finding Out the Hard Way' (Okeh catalog number 7230)
Musically the set offers up a weird mixture of surprisingly good soul moves, coupled with occasional slices of ghastly MOR. It's almost as if Okeh were trying to take a page out of the mid-1960s Berry Gordy Jr. marketing book and find a way to market the group to both soul and white audiences. Needless to say, the group's strengths lay in soul numbers such as 'Talkin' 'Bout Love' and Watusi Time''. Naturally, their MOR moves proved the bigger commercial draw - their dreadful cover of 'Misty' hitting top-100 pop and top-40 R&B.
"Shout!" track listing:
(side
1)
1.) Talkin' 'Bout Love - 2:11
2.) Misty - 3:16
3.) End Up Crying - 2:20
4.) Watusi Time - 2:18
5.) Ain't Love That Way - 2:12
6.)
Finding Out The Hard
Way - 2:05
(side 2)
1.)