Shrine Part 4

"He told me what others didn't tell me: that people had been to see him and that a lot of DJs caved," Singleton says. "Everyone was trying to protect their market share. Motown seemed a little more motivated."

"All we knew," Raynoma later wrote in her autobiography, "was the best distributors, who didn't want to lose Motown affiliations, wouldn't help Shrine."

Berry Gordy didn't return calls for this article. But the head of his sales force at the time, Barney Ales, later Motown's president, said he didn't remember Shrine and didn't think Motown could have caused its demise.

"It's an impossibility to stop a song of any value," says Ales, now retired and living in California. "If you're not successful, you blame somebody else."

Shrine had been bankrolled largely by a group of young Wall Street investors who, according to Singleton, pushed hard for quick results. The man who introduced those investors to Singleton says they groused about it for years.

"Nobody is happy to lose money," says Dimitri Villard, who moved to Washington after graduating from Harvard and who later became a Hollywood movie producer. "But there was always the feeling the money wasn't spent well."

By 1967, the pressure of keeping the label solvent had taken a physical and mental toll on Eddie and Raynoma. They were married by then, and commuting every week to New York and working for other labels to keep cash flowing in. Singleton's doctor warned him that if he kept up the pace, he'd die.

The Singletons departed Washington dispirited and broke, leaving boxes of vinyl in the basement of 3 Thomas Circle, boxes that were eventually shuffled to that doomed warehouse on 14th Street. "It cost me everything I had, everything I could muster," Singleton says of his struggle to get Shrine aloft. Today there are no townhouses at Thomas Circle, just office buildings, chain hotels and a church.

Singleton would remain in the music business for years, working as Nina Simone's manager for a time, then move to South Africa in 1998, where he is now trying to start yet another label, called Mother City Entertainment Group. Looking back, he vividly recalls his impulse to leave Washington without any of the vinyl he'd labored so hard to produce.

"I didn't want to carry any memories with me at that time," he said. "It was too painful."

Shrine's incorporated life -- bookended by two of the most notorious assassinations of the last century -- didn't last long. But the label has never really gone away, and not just because it's been so avidly mythologized and scavenger-hunted on the other side of the ocean. In the city from which it sprang, Shrine has lingered, ghostlike, in places like Theotrice Gamble's home.

Sitting at his dining room table, I asked if it was all right to give his phone number to British collectors, some of whom will be thrilled to learn there's a third copy of "Do What I Want." It'd be a pretty quick way to make $4,000. He thought about it a moment and shook his head.

"No," he said. "Don't give them my address, either. There's no way I'm selling this."