VA - Local Customs: Downriver Revival & Burned At Boddie (2009 & 2011)

Between 1967 and 1981, Detroit’s downriver neighbor Ecorse, Michigan, had its very own Moe Asch. Set up in a basement on 18th Avenue, electronics wiz, guitarist, and Ford plant foreman Felton Williams chronicled the musical lives of Ecorse’s citizens and issued them on his Solid Rock, Compose, Cass, and Revival labels. Compiled here are 24 of Williams’ most fascinating recordings, covering gospel (Shirley Ann Lee, Gospel Supremes, Calvin Cooke, etc), group soul (the Combinations), garage-punk (Young Generation), jazz (Bobby Cook & the Explosions), and funk (The Organics, Burgess Band).

The Boddie Recording Company would press any damn thing to vinyl - absolutely anything, from amateur garage rock to basement soul, from preachers' sermons to minimal synth pop... even polka pierogi songs and illicit bootlegs of major artists. The company was the work of Cleveland's Thomas Boddie and his wife Louise, and the wild panoply of different artists, styles, and sounds that found their way to the Boddies' door eventually amassed into the Boddie Recording Company's thousand-line discography, an intense document included inside Numero's Boddie boil-down. Wicked Lester, Hot Chocolate, Harvey and the Phenomenals, Jus' Us, Love For Dollars and Cents, Berlin West, Slippery When Wet... These artists never met each other and didn't play the same clubs, patronize the same music shops, record in the same studio, or even live in the same city. All they really had in common was the few hundred bucks it took to get their dreams chiseled into Boddie's filmsy wax. Pressed at Boddie digs 17 tracks deep into a oddity goldmine, in which anything might turn up, turn on, and turn your head inside out.