Shrine Records Part one..
The band is drunk. Not falling-down drunk, but more than tipsy, and it's only midnight, which means the band will soon be loaded. Edgewood Studios on K Street is packed with musicians and well-wishers, including Bo Diddley, who lives nearby. And over in a corner stand the Cavaliers, a five-man vocal group and the stars of this session, here to record a rowdy, 2 1/2-minute R&B track called "Do What I Want."
It's the autumn of 1966, and this is the Cavaliers' last chance. Every member of the Washington group is about 30 years old, which is borderline past-it in the pop business. The group knows that if "Do" doesn't chart, the dream of singing and touring full time is doomed. But it's hard to worry tonight. There's a party mood at Edgewood: The musicians, more soused by the hour, keep fumbling the tempo, and to give the song some roadhouse ambiance, the crowd is whooping and shouting through each take.
A couple of weeks later, a local label called Shrine Records releases "Do What I Want." It flops. Bass vocalist Theotrice Gamble will hear his group once or twice on the radio, but that's it.
"We were kind of disappointed," recalls Gamble, now 68, sitting at the dining room table of his house in Silver Spring. "We didn't give up right away, but then I drifted away and I haven't been in touch with anyone in the group since."
Gamble reaches under a stack of papers and pulls out a copy of the 45 recorded with his friends decades ago. "In all my years of singing, this is the only remnant I have," he says quietly. "And this is my only copy."
There it is. Groove-worn from years of spins. Sheathed in a rumpled white cover sleeve. Rightthere on the table.
What Gamble doesn't know is that this seven-inch slice of vinyl is a coveted treasure in England, where American soul is fervidly collected. It's a craze that started in the early '70s, when a handful of British clubs began to host marathon, pill-fueled all-nighters of soul singles by artists who'd been long forgotten in the United States. For deejays, the trick was unearthing great tunes that nobody else owned, that couldn't be heard on any other dance floor. The scarcer the record, the better.
No soul records, then or now, are scarcer than Shrine's. Founded in 1964, the label hummed to life in a townhouse at 3 Thomas Circle NW, hoping to do for Washington what Motown had done for Detroit: turn local talent into national stars. It was the dream of a producer and songwriter named Eddie Singleton and his wife, Raynoma Gordy Singleton, a businesswoman with perfect pitch, loads of pluck and a singular credit to her name. She and her then-husband, Berry Gordy, had founded Motown.
But after releasing nearly two dozen singles, Shrine ran out of money and, having failed to send even one song up the charts, the label folded in 1967. Then its luck got even worse. Most of Shrine's overstock was stashed in a warehouse owned by a company called Waxie Maxies on 14th Street, and during the Martin Luther King riots of 1968, the warehouse burned to the ground. What little Shrine vinyl had been given to performers or sold was all that remained.
For British soul connoisseurs, the story of Shrine's life and fiery demise held an irresistible allure. The fans revered the music, too, which is less polished and noisier than Motown's. For years, hard-core Shrine-o-philes have been flying to Washington to scour the bins of local record stores and comb through area estate sales. Some have posted signs ("Shrine records wanted!") on D.C. streets. All are searching for acts whose names are rarely uttered even in their hometown: the Counts, Tippie and the Wisemen, Les Chansonettes, the D.C. Blossoms, Leroy Taylor and the Four Kays, the Enjoyables, the Epsilons.
"It's still incredibly popular," Dan Collins, a British soul collector, says in a phone interview from England. "For 30 years, we've been coming to America to buy Shrine singles, to the point where we've got more of the stuff than you do."
As it happens, the Cavaliers' "Do What I Want" is one of the holiest of the grails hunted by overseas collectors. Until this afternoon in Theotrice Gamble's house, there were just two known copies. He owns the third. Sitting at his dining room table, he learns for the first time that this single is worth far more than its weight in gold. Conservative estimates put the auction price of the single at about $4,000.
Gamble absorbs this news with stoical awe.
"My, my," he says after a pause, looking at the record and slowly shaking his head. "Unbelievable. . . . Unbelievable." He pauses again. "I thought we'd been forgotten long ago."
