Format Details: Jewel Case
Description
... The Impressions' Big Sixteen". I can still remember the first copy I ever saw, hanging in the window of "The Melody Inn" - the hippest record shop in Stanford-Le-Hope, Essex and, luckily for me, my local record shop. It was in a drop-down strip of plastic that also housed an import copy of James Brown's Try Me album, Motown Magic and The Late, Fantastically Great Elmore James. All four were second-hand, which showed an unbelievable lack of taste on the previous owner's part. I later found out from the young, ultra-aware shop proprietor Martin Hubbard - my original musical mentor, and the man who later gave me my first job in the record business - that they belonged to an ex-mod called Ron, who'd 'grown up' and traded them in for Procol Harum and Grateful Dead albums, having declared to himself that "Soul was sh*t". Silly fella..." For weeks, Big Sixteen and the others blazed brazenly from the Melody Inn's window, almost daring me to buy them all. Like most kids on a limited budget, I could ill afford to even think about that, as I barely made enough money from various paper rounds, shelf-filling and eventually, a Saturday job at the 'Inn', to pay for all of the singles I wanted to buy, let alone long players (even second-hand ones!). The weekend before my 14th birthday, it was still there in the window. Someone had 'tried' JB, and someone else was experiencing the 'Magic' of Motown. But Elmore was still inexplicably up for grabs - and so was Big Sixteen. With birthday money looming large, I knew it would be mine within the week... ...Inevitably, it wasn't. Someone came in on the Saturday and bought it. I'd never asked Martin to save it, because I was convinced that everybody in my home town knew that I was going to buy it as soon as I had the money. My disappointment had to be assuaged by a just-arrived copy of The Rhythm Of Major Lance, which Martin recommended as being a good 'consolation prize', from the same source and was probably part-exchanged for Piper At the Gates Of Dawn", "Surrealistic Pillow" or something similar - as Big Sixteen. Nice make-do if you can get it, of course. ...I still have that copy of TROML. Sadly, by the time I was working for a living and could afford to buy albums on a regular basis, Big Sixteen had been deleted. Down the years I managed to get every one of its fantastic tracks on other albums and/or singles, but I never did own that album, with its simple yet memorable cover image and its content of a dozen and four of the greatest records ever made. At least, I didn't until it eventually added another 12 tracks and re-emerged triumphantly, in 1988 and in CD form, as Kent's Definitive Impressions. This was the first compact disc to offer an exhaustive overview of the Impressions' superlative ABC-Paramount recordings. And, despite several others that have followed in its wake, it's still the only one that lives up to its title from beginning to end... ...Now, after a very lucky (for us) 13 years as a m
Tracklisting
Z.Z. Hill
Wilson Pickett
Willie Bollinger / Willie Walker
William Bell
William Bell
Wee Willie Walker
Warren Raye & The Infernal Blues Machine
Walter Jackson
The Impressions
The Impressions
The Impressions
The Impressions
