Just realized how similar these are and that it's the same "auteur," J. Mckinney a.k.a. Johnny Lemac....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QDdYIP9N5s

Edited February 5, 201213 yr by weingarden

And just found this thread, shedding further light:

Soul in the parks did a great interview with him Lee Mckinney and another band member the other singer I think.. Same guy.

Edited February 5, 201213 yr by Prophonics 2029

The faster Johnny LeMac is a better tempo and arrangement than the JV cut (in my opinion)-although both are very good. Clearly, he just took his same song and gave it a different treatment. I assume that the J-V is the original. But i don't know for sure. I bought the J-V new. It was a V-J label, when they were going out of business due to the overspending by new ("clueless") management in L.A. Calvin Carter produced that in Chicago. I think it was during the Exodus run in late 1965. Could someone upload a scan of the Johnny Lemac?

BobA -when was the latter released? Was this the Chess or Brewtown release? I assume the Brewtown was the latter, in the early '70s.

Edited February 5, 201213 yr by RobbK

I interviewed Johnny McKinney (RIP), who is Johnny LeMac, he tells the whole story in his interview, it's on my webpage www.sittinginthepark.com

sippin wine is only on chess, there were milwaukee-chess connections at the time (e.g. harvey scales).

calvin carter did run J-V, but it had no Vee Jay connection

I interviewed Johnny McKinney (RIP), who is Johnny LeMac, he tells the whole story in his interview, it's on my webpage www.sittinginthepark.com

sippin wine is only on chess, there were milwaukee-chess connections at the time (e.g. harvey scales).

calvin carter did run J-V, but it had no Vee Jay connection

So, then VJ was already out of business when J-V operated? I thought it was the same time that Exodus was being run by VJ's people (name change due to Vivian and Jimmy's lawsuit against their LA managers). I had thought that Customa Music was VJ's other publishing after Conrad (Vivian and Jimmy) and Tollie (Vivian, Jimmy & Ehwart Abner), to divide royalties between Vivian, Jimmy and Calvin. Maybe J-V had no direct connection to VJ, in that Vivian, Jimmy and Calvin couldn't operate as VJ after it had gone bankrupt, and was currently in litigation. But, that was also the situation with Exodus (was it not?). It wasn't a subsidiary of VJ, but was VJ's same people, operating a new company (but even using masters that had been paid for by VJ during their operation. I'm sure that Calvin got at least some of the money to operate J-V from Vivian and Jimmy (thus, the letters J and V in the label name). I doubt that Customa Music was owned outright, just by Calvin, alone.

This was a similar situation to ours at Airwave Records. We went bust as "Airwave Records", and immediately reorganised a new corporation, "Airwave International", with the identical staff, and started releasing records on that label, which appeared almost as a continuum of "Airwave Records". No one noticed any difference.