Ken Shipley of the Numero Group likes to say that the company presents an alternate version of music history–one written by the losers. Back in February 2003, when he and co-owner Tom Lunt decided to start a reissue label, Shipley already had good reason to sympathize with dreamers who’d come up short.
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Lunt, now 52, was likewise at loose ends: he’d just returned from a difficult year in Warsaw, where he’d overseen Polish marketing efforts for McDonald’s as a creative director for DDB. “It was a pretty miserable experience,” he says. “When I got back I felt like I had post-traumatic stress syndrome.” Before DDB he’d worked at Leo Burnett for 13 years, handling campaigns for Reebok, Coke, and Harris Bank, among others, but his first love was music–in the 70s and 80s he’d been one of the five original employees for Saint Louis indie music retailer Streetside Records, and he’d long wanted to run a label. “I went off into advertising,” he says, “yet my heroes were always people who ran record companies: Ahmet Ertegun, Mo Ostin, Lenny Waronker, Stan Cornyn.”
Shipley and Lunt turned out to share a vision for a reissue label: it would focus on genuinely obscure artists and imprints in a way that would appeal to a general audience.
The song had been released by a short-lived independent label called Capsoul, run by Bill Moss, a radio DJ in Columbus, Ohio. Founded in 1970, Capsoul put out regional hits by groups like the Four Mints and for a time looked like Columbus’s answer to Motown; when Moss lost his financial backing in ’74, though, it quickly folded. Years later the master tapes for every record in its catalog were destroyed in a flood. Crushed, Moss wanted to erase the label from his memory, so he loaded his remaining stock into his car, drove back to the factory, and had the vinyl melted down and recycled. He went on to become a notable figure in Columbus politics: a Democratic nominee for mayor, an urban activist, and an outspoken school board member.
Numero’s next releases, scheduled for late October, are a compilation of rarely heard power pop from the 70s and 80s, curated by Jordan Oakes, editor of the defunct Saint Louis fanzine Yellow Pills, and an anthology of material from Chicago’s Bandit Records, a soul label run by producer Arrow Brown in the late 60s and early 70s. Brown’s artist roster was an oddball collection of his girlfriends, children, wives, and other family members.
Local drummer Craig Garber, of skate punks Monster Trux and the “cine-metal” band Twenty Four Frames, was killed in a construction accident earlier this month. Garber, aka GMC, was working as a carpenter at a building site in Lyons on September 11 when a forklift dropped a crate he was standing in and he fell 40 feet. He was 32. His bandmates hope to organize a tribute concert at the Double Door.
