My first 2023 music purchase was not yesterday's James Brown charity shop offering but an actual album from an actual record shop. Old school and controversial I know but that's the way I rock.
The shop in question was Europa Records in Stirling which is allegedly the largest record shop in Scotland. It is an interesting place. You enter into a relatively small shop selling new and collectable vinyl and a smattering of CDs. You then go out to a small covered outdoor yard area prior to entering a second large space selling an impressive amount of second hand albums and singles.
I had only ever been there once before and on that occasion I don't think I got as far as the back.
I came away with the album above Best of the Box Tops a cheap and cheerful compilation on Sounds Superb/Music for Pleasure. There is no date on it nor one offered on Discogs but I would guess it is from the mid 70s.
They were, as I'm sure many of you are aware, a band from Memphis who were active from 1967- 1970. Their front man was Alex Chilton who went on to become part of Big Star and who laterly collaborated with Teenage Fanclub and the BMX Bandits prior to his death in 2010 aged just 59.
The blurb on the album cover states that The Box Tops may not have received world wide recognition on the scale accorded to the Beatles and the Beach Boys yet they were in many ways the definitive pop group of the Sixties. Maybees aye or maybees naw but there is no doubt that The Letter is on of the great under two minute pop songs and that they did excellent covers of the songs of their producers Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham
The Box Tops - I Met Her in Church
Let me be the first say that Al Green's version of The Letter is better than that of the Box Tops
ReplyDeleteIt would appear that the CCM readership has let you
DeleteA proper record shop? I am stunned and disappointed to discover one of my idols has feet of clay. I'm not sure I'll recover from this.
ReplyDeleteThe thing to say about The Box Tops' The Letter apart from how great it is, is how could they allow it to be so short!! Did no-one in the studio think, Hang on we've got a great song here let's give it another verse 'n' chorus and stretch it to at least 2:30! A future thread for you - great pop songs/tracks that come in at under/around 2 minutes. Adam Faith's What Do You Want? is for starters.
ReplyDeleteMy old band used to do a nifty cover of The Letter. We had to extend it. We had arguments about what was a verse and what was a chorus (ie. is that 1st 'verse' actually a chorus and that 2nd 'verse' just a slightly altered chorus?). We finally agreed that it only had 2 verses and a chorus. And its true... thats all it has. Repeated. And repeated. Brilliant song.
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