All 5,000 vinyl copies sold on the very first day, and the album was written about in the Rolling Stone and profiled on N.P.R. And last March, nearly 50 years after the music was recorded, the band's first and only album, "Laugh to keep from Crying," was released. But it's 50 years old and things change hands.// AND even though we have the master tapes, //This is all about getting mechanical rights from the publisher in order for us to license the music.Ĭhristopher Booker: In the case of Nat Turner Rebellion, the class was able to find the publishers and strike a deal. Here's the songwriter, here's the producer. You know, you open up these boxes, there's papers in there saying here the composers. Marc Offenbach: You know, it's like following the trail of who really owns it. Marc Offenbach : We might want to reach out to band members if we can find them.Ĭhristopher Booker: This is where professor Marc Offenbach's class comes in.For two years, he and and his students were dedicated to figuring out if they could release an album of Nat Turner Rebellion recordings on their student run Mad Dragon record label. So what if what if we put this together? We could actually make an album that never actually existed. You know, Joe Jefferson was the bandleader who went on to write a ton of hit records in the 70s and we have a lot of material and there was never an album released.
Toby Seay: The Nat Turner Rebellion project was one where - 'here's this music that is good and I've never heard of them.
Recording 14 tracks between 19 - the band only released 3 singles. Why did no one ever hear this?Ĭhristopher Booker: One such recording from the archive comes from a band called The Nat Turner Rebellion. Why did this succeed? Why did this not? This is fantastic. Toby Seay: Any archive is full stories waiting to be had./ There is stuff that's renowned. That's just him singing live with the band. That makes these to me, fairly intriguing for educational purposes because you are stepping one step back into the recording process and you can dig into musically individual players and you can look at production wise decisions that were made.Ĭhristopher Booker: Toby Seay and his team have digitized tracks by many of the marquee names from the archives.Ĭhristopher Booker: Can we hear just his vocals?Ĭhristopher Booker: Everyone from Stevie Wonder to David Bowie.whose early version of his 1975 hit "Young Americans" sounds notably different from the version that was released.Ĭhristopher Booker: The piano is so different. Toby Seay: Right, so you can listen to individual performances to individual musicians. In these particular tapes you have individual tracks side by side on a piece of tape where you record individual pieces of the recording, so these aren't the final product.Ĭhristopher Booker: So on one track is the drums, one track is the saxophone? Toby Seay: What's here is, About 7,000 reels of tape on about 10 to 12 different formats. This is where super duo Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff would produce an endless array of hits Sigma Sounds Studios had two things going for it: Tarsia's ability to deploy the latest in multi-track recording technology and a roster of unbelievable local studio musicians to record with. I mean, I think that one is the one that I land on as a great identifier for Philly soul.Ĭhristopher Booker: Founded in 1968 by sound engineer Joe Tarsia. "For the Love of Money," The O'Jays., "You'll never find another love like mine," Lou Rawls. For me, I feel like it's anything Teddy Pendergrass. They had an imprint that was identifiably Philly. Large string sections, horn sections, beautiful vocal arrangements. Toby Seay: They were churning out records that were hits, but they weren't just churning out records. Toby Seay: When you think about Stax, Motown, Muscle Shoals, Philly has to sit in there.Ĭhristopher Booker: Toby Seay is the Director of Drexel Audio Archives, which houses the Sigma Sound Studios Archive. Sitting in a basement of Drexel University in downtown Philadelphia, they hold one of the most comprehensive records of the city's musical history: the recordings of Sigma Sound Studios. The famed downtown space recorded some of the biggest hits of the era.īut, as the NewsHour Weekend's Christopher Booker recently learned, even though the studio has since closed, there may be more sounds to come.Ĭhristopher Booker: The faded and peeling labels do little to celebrate just how remarkable the contents of these boxes are. Hari Sreenivasan: Throughout the 70's, if you were a soul or R&B singer, recording at Philadelphia's Sigma Sound Studio meant you were big time.
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