Numero Group – 071 402.57MB FLAC
This particular copy already carries several different histories at once. The original Numero Group release is visible underneath Oakland Public Library labels, catalog stickers, barcodes and the circular RB classification marker. The front photograph shows four young men in matching patterned stage clothes gathered around industrial-looking metal equipment, smiling directly into the camera. The image has the confidence of a group photograph made before anybody knew which recordings would survive, which careers would continue, or whether somebody fifty years later would still care enough to put the photograph on another record.
Then Oakland Public Library places MAIN LIBRARY across the upper-right corner.
Another label says MAIN / CD / RB / ECCENTRIC.
The object has been classified.
Soul music becomes library material.
That is a particularly satisfying fate for a compilation whose entire purpose is rescuing recordings that could easily have vanished.
Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul series operates almost like an alternate map of American soul music. Instead of beginning with Motown, Stax, Philadelphia International and the other enormous institutions already permanently written into popular history, the series keeps moving into smaller cities, local labels, failed singles, regional producers, groups that never broke nationally and recordings that survived because somebody happened to keep the tape or the record.
This volume turns toward Cleveland and the Saru label.
The collection was released in 2018 as the twentieth installment of Eccentric Soul and gathers twenty-five recordings connected to Saru and the musicians and producers moving through its orbit around the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. Bobby Massey of the O’Jays was one of the central creative forces around the label, writing, producing and developing artists while Cleveland was creating its own soul ecosystem outside the better-documented centers of Detroit, Memphis and Philadelphia.
That geography matters.
Cleveland does not need to become another Detroit for these recordings to matter.
The compilation works precisely because it preserves what happened there instead of measuring everything against somebody else’s commercial success.
The track list immediately reveals how interconnected the scene was. Out Of Sights appear repeatedly. Elements return again and again. Pandella Kelly appears twice. Sir Stanley, The Ba-Roz, The Ponderosa Twins, Bobby Dukes, David Peoples and Michael Bell pass through the sequence. And sitting among them are two recordings by the O’Jays, captured before the enormous Philadelphia International chapter that would make their name familiar almost everywhere.
The O’Jays’ “Now He’s Home” arrives as track two.
Later comes “Shattered Man.”
Knowing what happened afterward makes those appearances strange. History encourages us to hear famous artists backward, as though everything they recorded before success was inevitably pointing toward the records that finally became famous. But nobody inside these sessions could listen from the future.
At the time, these were simply records being made.
The rest of the compilation keeps that perspective alive because most of the names do not arrive carrying decades of cultural recognition. The listener has to encounter the recordings without celebrity doing the work first.
Even the song titles form their own emotional sequence.
“For The Rest Of My Life.”
“Now He’s Home.”
“Stand In For Love.”
“Bound.”
“Son In Law.”
“Are You Man Enough.”
“Just To Be With You.”
“Can’t Make It Without You.”
“The Last Time.”
“Hey Lady.”
“I Remember You.”
“My Woman’s Love.”
“Baby You Got It.”
“Shattered Man.”
“I Believe.”
“Tears Don’t Care Who Cry.”
“Prove It.”
“Come Back Boy.”
“You Made Me Beg.”
“I Was Wrong.”
“Love’s Needed.”
“Got To Make It Right.”
Read without hearing a note, those titles already create a world of attachment, masculinity, need, pride, failure, memory, pleading and attempted repair.
People leave.
People return.
Somebody needs to prove something.
Somebody begs.
Somebody admits being wrong.
Somebody tries to make it right.
That language is one of the reasons old soul recordings can remain emotionally immediate even when the production, fashion and recording technology clearly belong to another era. The circumstances change. The human mess underneath them barely does.
The Out Of Sights become almost a recurring character across the compilation. They open the record with “For The Rest Of My Life” and return with “I Can’t Take It,” “My Woman’s Love,” “Baby You Got It,” “Tears Don’t Care Who Cry,” “You Made Me Beg” and “I Was Wrong.” Their repeated appearances give the collection continuity without turning it into an album by one group.
Elements perform a similar function with “Son In Law,” “Hey Lady,” “Prove It,” “Just To Be With You” and the final “Got To Make It Right.”
That last title is an excellent place to stop.
After seventy-five minutes of love, homecoming, promises, masculinity, memory, tears, rejection, regret and pleading, the collection does not finish with triumph.
It finishes with repair.
Got to make it right.
The phrase feels almost applicable to archival work itself.
A recording is made.
A small label releases it.
Perhaps it sells locally.
Perhaps almost nobody notices.
The label disappears.
People move on.
Copies are lost.
Master tapes scatter.
Decades pass.
Then somebody begins looking again.
Numero’s work does not change what happened commercially to these artists, but it changes whether the evidence remains available. A forgotten record cannot be made into a hit retroactively, but it can be returned to circulation.
That is what this CD physically represents.
And then this particular copy enters yet another circulation system.
The Oakland Public Library barcode on the back reads 3 2141 04552 2079. The orange-red disc has another library number pasted directly across it and an OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY / MAIN LIBRARY ring around the center hub. These are not decorative additions. They belong to the working history of this individual copy.
The library needed to know what it was.
Where it belonged.
Whether somebody had taken it home.
Whether it came back.
The front cover may originally have presented Numero Group’s careful archival reconstruction, but the Oakland stickers document another stage of the object’s life that Numero could never have designed.
Somebody checked this out.
Probably many somebodies.
The disc entered different homes.
Different CD players.
Different rooms.
Maybe somebody recognized the O’Jays.
Maybe somebody discovered the Out Of Sights.
Maybe somebody chose it simply because the library sticker said RB and ECCENTRIC.
That uncertainty belongs to the object now.
The cover photography becomes especially effective in that context. These young men are not presented as mythological stars. They look like working musicians posing together around equipment, wearing coordinated clothes because being a group also meant looking like a group. The interior photograph brings four faces close together, practically filling the jewel case with them.
The image says people before history.
The back cover says songs after history.
The library stickers say circulation after both.
There is also something wonderfully appropriate about an Eccentric Soul release becoming public-library property. Numero’s entire series is built around challenging the hierarchy created by commercial memory. A record that failed to reach a national audience does not become musically worthless because fewer people bought it. A singer who never became famous does not disappear from the recording.
The archive can put everybody back into the room.
That is what these twenty-five tracks accomplish.
Cleveland becomes audible as more than a footnote between Detroit and Philadelphia.
Bobby Massey exists not only as a former O’Jay but as a producer and organizer surrounded by other musicians.
The O’Jays temporarily become one group among many instead of the inevitable stars of the story.
Out Of Sights and Elements receive enough space to develop identities across multiple tracks.
Pandella Kelly, Sir Stanley, Bobby Dukes, David Peoples, Michael Bell, The Ba-Roz and The Ponderosa Twins get another opportunity to enter somebody’s ears.
Then the disc ends.
The jewel case closes.
The Oakland Public Library labels remain stuck to the plastic.
Another archive has passed through another archive.
And the music is still available for somebody else to find.
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