Thanks Robb 'cos I didn't know the Contours song. I always thought they only did Just a Little Misunderstanding.
Billy Butler is a new name to me. Good stuff and it sounds like it might have been a Northern Soul favourite. Perhaps it was.
Cap. the video is unavailable. Now of course I'm curious to find out what it was.
You've been keeping that quiet, Robb. Can't thank you enough for pointing me to this great wee song.
There are hundreds of Motown recordings that are as good - probably 300-400 that were never released on vinyl. I worked as a consultant to Motown for most of the 1970s, combing through their tape vaults to find previously unreleased recordings from 1959-1970 to release in a 5 or 10 LP album series. For 8 years, we listened to hundreds, or maybe a thousand or two recordings, and discovered several hundred we would recommend be released. That was because from early 1964 through when the company moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in mid 1972, they recorded in their own one, and two recording studios (after mid 1966) 24 hours every day, so there were thousands of recordings of a couple thousand high-quality recordings that were never released on vinyl.
Unfortunately, when the series finally started releases in 1979, there was no marketing push behind the first LP, and it didn't sell at all. So, the rest of the project was cancelled. We had slated song lists of 12 songs for each of the 10 proposed LPs. That meant that only 12 of the 120 songs we chose had been issued on vinyl. In 1980, our re-issue (Oldies) project director and I, and a few other workers there left Motown to form our own Soul music record company. After we left, the company used our recommendations to issue one more Vaults-related each, in 1981 and 1982. In 1984, for Motown's 25th Anniversary had 25 LPs released on their most iconic artists and groups, with many of those including a handful of vaulted previously unreleased 1960s songs from our lists.
Luckily for Motown and music fans, the best several hundred of the rest have since been issued on CD and digital sales. So, I'm sure that if you like the mid-1960s Motown Sound, there are meany pleasant listening experiences awaiting you. And, yes, "It's So Hard Being A Loser" was played on The Northern Soul Scene. Many of the rare Detroit and Chicago recorded Northern Soul "hits" were "discovered by Northern fans through me, especially from about 1976 through the early 1990s.
