Murmaids - "Popsicles And Icicles"

Yah Shure wrote: I bought a mid-to-late-'70s vintage Chattahoochee 628 vinyl pressing around 1980. It sports the tri-color label design, and aside from Stan Ross losing the "Supervised &" portion of his engineering credit, everything else is still there. The title and credit fonts are most definitely '70s vintage, and the B-side is "Blue Dress", with no writer credit listed (it's credited to Ruth Conte (Yardum, Chattahoochee's owner) on a copy shown on Discogs. The reason I bought it at the time was that it was a far-better quality pressing than the crackly-at-birth original vinyl copy I had (with "Huntington Flats" on the flip.) It is almost certainly a Wakefield pressing, characterized by the pronounced, LP-like raised outer edge. Phoenix-based Wakefield pressed other boutique California label 45s during the late-'70s, such as Laff and the later Hudson & Landry 45s on Dore, as well as an Oink label re-recording of that label's original version of Elmo & Patsy's "Grandma." Another oddball late-'70s vintage Wakefield pressing: Robert Preston's 7-inch, 33 1/3 "Chicken Fat", which used the same CF-1000 catalog number as the original 1962 Capitol Custom edition, but replaced the Capitol logo with that of the United States Jaycees, the organization which had been distributing the disc since '62. The title and artist fonts were about as close as anyone could come to matching those of the Keystone Printed Specialties originals, but the mastering of the record, itself, was a bit lacking in the upper frequencies, compared to the Capitol. (As one who was blessed/cursed to have been old enough when this was first issued, I have a real love/hate attitude toward this record. While radio got by with airing the edited 2:12 "disc jockey version" on the flip side, our class had to endure the entire 6:30 "school version" exercise routine daily. It was great fun, but it also got old pretty quickly. Naturally, the seemingly three-ounce tone arms on the school's institutional Califone record players would shred every other record in sight except *that* one.) When given well-mastered cuttings, Wakefield's 45s were consistently the most durable and quiet of the mid-'70s, in my experience. Most of the Minneapolis-based labels sent their locally-mastered Sound 80 Studio cuttings to Wakefield for pressing, and the quality never disappointed, particularly when it came to resistance to cue burn (as huge of a regional hit as it was around here in '75, I never encountered a cue burned on-air copy of Northern Lights' "Minnesota" on the original Wakefield-pressed Glacier label.) Yet, some of the California-mastered Wakefield pressings I have aren't in the same quietness league. The Chattahoochee name may have seemed an odd choice for a Southern California-based record label, but owner Ruth Yardum was an Atlanta native. If nothing else, its appearance on "Popsicle"'s 45 labels and station surveys introduced or reinforced the correct spelling for many an impressionable youth. On the other hand, knowing how often those same surveys mangled label spellings over the years... :)

Re: Chicken Fat. Heard this, the Hap Palmer annoyances
too often in my too many years in special ed. Didn't
like them then, I despised them. Chicken Fat I mind
much less. Your post reminds me of my youth. And my days
as a young DJ, and assistant engineer. My own 45 of
"Popsicles & Icicles" is a late Wakefield pressing. That
is a quiet, flat, centered pressing of superb quality,
well mastered from great tapes.

Edited by KentT