Photograph by Lisa Dartt
History is most often told about the winners. Certainly, the majority of what we know about pop-music history concerns the performers who sold millions of copies—or wound up influencing people who sold millions later.
But there’s always music falling through the cracks. All over the world, dreamers throw bands and singers into studios, hoping their little label might become the next Motown or Atlantic. Since 2004, the Numero Group has been excavating those cracks, and some two dozen CDs have appeared, collecting extremely obscure yet entirely deserving records that few had ever heard before outside of the people who recorded them. Numero is based in Chicago and led by three fanatical record collectors—Rob Sevier, Ken Shipley and former St. Louisan Tom Lunt.
Those who shopped at the original Streetside Records on Delmar in the 1970s may remember Lunt as the enthusiastic clerk who introduced them to dozens of life-changing albums. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming one of the leading executives in the company before leaving Streetside (and St. Louis) in the mid-’80s; he worked as a copywriter on accounts for everything from Miller High Life to Green Giant to McDonald’s. (That was in Warsaw, where he relocated after being laid off in the U.S. “Pretty typical advertising career experience,” Lunt says dryly.) A few years ago, he returned to the States, worked freelance advertising jobs and lived in semiretirement. “One evening,” he says, “I met Ken Shipley in—where else?—a record shop. And we talked about the Numero concept. A year later, we were in business.”
Their first release was entitled Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Label, a collection of soul records released in Columbus, Ohio, during the early ’70s, that was as full of passion, intensity and hooks as anything coming out of Philadelphia or Detroit at the same time. Yet none of it was familiar. And as Numero has revealed through a whole series of further compilations, this was only the tip of the iceberg.
“We tend to major in ‘eccentric soul,’ which has turned out to be our most popular category,” Lunt says. “There are so many of these recordings out there, so we feel we’re curating a library of unknown soul and R&B. The Folkways of soul, if you like.”
Numero has also released power pop, folk-rock, world rhythms and one delightfully quirky gospel set. “That’s my favorite release,” Lunt says, referring to Good God! A Gospel Funk Hymnal. “I tend to think of gospel as ‘the hard stuff’—the source of soul. If you’re not listening to gospel, you’re not hearing it all. Good God! kind of points out how little distance there is between the club and the church—it turns out God loves funky.”
In October, Numero unearthed long-forgotten records from the East St. Louis–based YoDi label with Eccentric Soul: The Young Disciples. Allen Merry, who played with the likes of Ray Charles before running YoDi in the late ’60s (the label, run from East St. Louis’ South End Community Center, was Merry’s way of diverting neighborhood kids away from crime and drugs), was shocked, as many of these long-forgotten entrepreneurs are, when contacted about bringing this music back. “I didn’t respond when they wrote me,” Merry says. “I didn’t think it made any difference anymore. But eventually I talked with some of the guys who had been on the records, and we decided we had nothing to lose. One thing about Numero, you can trust them. They’ve kept their word with me … not like people in the old days.”
Lunt has loved music all his life, and now he’s found a way to feed his passion and contribute to expanding historical knowledge about it. “We’re creating a library,” he says. “Our releases don’t exist simply as discrete objects. Each release is connected via our purpose: to curate and preserve great unheard and under-heard music.”
Read about all the Numero Group releases and a whole lot more at numerogroup.com.
