Although the story has many other dimensions, particularly the involvement of group harmony guru Bob Abrahamian who had access to Joe Lopez’s transfers and discussed the Marlynns record (mentioned in the story) with him. He has also been instrumental in identifying material from the master reels, but this truncated version of the story doesn’t mention him.

Full transcript below:

Like many great mysteries, this one begins with the extraordinary claims of a strange man.

“Every record store like this (Record Dugout) has a character like Joe Lopez,” says Numero Group’s Ken Shipley. Shipley, along with Rob Sevier, one of his two partners in the Chicago-based record label, has spent the last six months untangling a mystery that spans five years and 500 reels of recording tape, though it begins with Lopez, decades earlier.

It’s a buried treasure tale that also gets at the core of what Numero Group does and why that work matters. Sevier explains that though he didn’t know Lopez, he knows the type. “One of those guys who just shows up and spins yarns, one of those ‘I’ve got all the Chi-Lites master tapes at my house,’ kind of guys.”

Numero, which Shipley and Sevier founded along with Tom Lunt a decade ago, has grown to become one of America’s premier reissue labels.

The label, which has garnered Grammy nominations, operates out of a bungalow in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood and specializes in unearthing the lost legacies of boutique soul labels and artists of the ’60s and ’70s. The label then reissues new versions of the recordings.

But Numero’s true vocation is pulling a thread of truth from yarns such as Lopez’s and following it to a holy grail of old recordings rotting away in someone’s closet. With that task in mind, the two are headed to 63rd Street and Austin Boulevard with boxes of hundreds of old reel-to-reel tapes.

The story of the tapes begins in 2007 at Record Dugout where Steve Batinich, a lifelong collector, sells records as well as baseball and music memorabilia. It is a place where other collectors come to flip through vintage LPs and trade tales of their finds.

One day Sevier was visiting with Batinich when Dugout regular Lopez came in and began bragging about his piece of a fabled trove of Chicago soul recordings. This particular collection has gained an almost mythological stature among Chicago soul music die-hards: the Ed Cody tapes. Lopez tells them that he used to work with Cody in the mid-’60s when Cody was an engineer at Stereosonic, and he has many reels of Cody’s work in his possession, including tapes of unreleased sessions of The Jackson 5 and Chicago harmony soul group The Marlynns. Lopez says he is considering pressing some recordings, as The Marlynns records are quite valuable on the soul music collector market.

Sevier was skeptical. “It seemed unlikely that Joe Lopez could have worked on these sessions, because he would have been, like, 12 at the time.” Cody, who spent the ’60s and ’70s bouncing between Chicago studios and running small labels and is what Sevier calls “a bit of a hermit,” flatly refused all offers and entreaties for his audio archive. The prospect that somehow the tapes had been parsed out to Lopez seemed dubious.

Sevier thought little of the exchange with Lopez until several months later in 2008, when a freshly pressed Marlynns 45 rpm single showed up for auction on eBay, with the seller feigning ignorance of its provenance. Sevier created an alias to bid on it, and after winning the auction left public feedback saying the singles were bootlegs. The alias he created for no reason other than a humorous whim, BobMiner2007, was the name of an employee of Record Dugout. What happened as a result kicked off the odyssey of the Joe Lopez-Ed Cody tapes and another amazing Numero Group find.

Shortly after Sevier won the auction, Lopez stormed into Record Dugout and accused the real Bob Miner of ripping him off, effectively proving that Lopez did have the Marlynns masters he claimed and possibly others.

“That is our opening salvo,” Shipley explains. “That is our first knowledge of the existence of the tapes.”

From there, the tale of the tapes begins a circuitous route: A record dealer from Madison, Wis., contacted Shipley with a report of a storage unit in Rockford that contained hundreds of reels purported to be Chicago soul recordings. The unit’s owner was asking a half-million dollars for the collection. Then, acetates from various small labels Ed Cody worked with over the years began showing up at record fairs. By 2011, it became clear that someone who had access to sessions Cody recorded was parsing bits of them into the music collector underground.

Then a year goes by with no news of Lopez or his tapes, until Batinich gets a call in August from Lopez’s widow (he died of cancer). She had a storage locker full of these reels and was wondering if Batinich might be interested in them. Batinich struck a deal with her for the 500 unlabeled, decaying boxes of tape. Having no idea what was on them, only hopes of what could be, he reached out to the people who might know: Numero.

The terms of the deal were simple: Batinich would sell Numero whatever it wanted, but on the label had to identify and mark what it could. Fearful of missing something important or unheralded, Numero began dutifully combing through each and every tape, inventorying and labeling as best it could.

What was there? According to Sevier, “Dross, mostly. Recordings of baseball games. Transfers of LPs. Polka. Unknown gospel choirs. A Kool & The Gang radio spot. Someone’s anti-drug version of ‘Purple Rain.’” But Lopez had, at some point, separated some of the tapes, labeling them in a rudimentary way — “blues” and “good soul” — and had set aside a batch of recordings he felt were notable. Sometimes he was right, sometimes not, but his efforts gave Numero a little bit of a head start.

“Eighty-eight tapes,” Shipley says. That’s how many Numero ended up buying. The other 400-odd are in boxes with Sevier and Shipley, headed back to Batinich’s shop to continue their journey, whatever that may be, possibly to be parsed out to other labels, other interested parties or the trash collector.

“Did you burn CDs of the good stuff for me?” Batinich asks. Sevier shakes his head. “Any rockabilly?” Sevier’s answer is again, no. “This is a second copy of Amazing Farmer Singers’ ‘I’ve Got a Telephone In My Bosom,’” offers Sevier, holding up a small reel. He has no encouraging news for Batinich, as Numero has picked these boxes clean of their gems.

Of the 88 tapes Numero acquired, more than half have been identified, Sevier guesses.

“It’s about 25 percent is stuff that’s already been released, most of it legitimately,” he says. “About 10 or 15 are masters of Clarence Johnson-produced recordings. The next 25 percent is stuff that is in a real gray area; we know how complicated it would be to license and release it, and it’s not even worth it. Another 25 percent is indie stuff, our wheelhouse, that we have identified and in some cases people we already know and have worked with. Then the other 25 percent is stuff we have no idea what it is, and it runs from pretty awesome to totally awesome.”

Sevier’s favorite track among the pile of still unknowns is the strangest song they’ve found.

“It’s mysterious in origin and in what the band was trying to achieve,” he says with a laugh. “It was only labeled ‘Cemetery Song,’ and it’s a 14-minute psychedelic soul opus that is maybe Halloween-themed. We have no idea. There are no clues, no hints.”

The big finds among Lopez’s tape stash include a very rare single by Chicago vocal group The Ivories, two unreleased Don Gardner songs from his most famous session and the odd album of German hard rock band Epitaph, which happened to record for a local label. There were three unreleased songs from Stax recording artists Sons of Slum and a reel containing “This Love For Real” by Hands of Time, which was produced by Leroy Hutson of The Impressions.

While it’s exciting for Numero to be able to issue crucial singles from known artists, for Shipley and Sevier the most significant work that they have identified is a six-song session by long-dead soul singer Calvin Harris. How they did it makes it seem like these tapes were fated to fall into their hands.

About a year before Lopez’s tape cache took over the Numero office, Sevier was talking to Earl Wiley, a local booking agent-turned-producer, for research on an unrelated project. Wiley told him a story about a group “stealing” a song from him. In 1972, Wiley was in Cody’s Stereosonic studio producing a recording with an unknown but talented singer, Harris — a demo meant to showcase both Harris and Wiley’s talents. Nothing ever came of it, and the tapes essentially disappear. The following year, Wiley hears a song from his Harris demo, “Love Won’t Pay the Bills,” but it’s being performed by another group, Elevation, but has no idea how they got the song. Cody was the engineer on both sessions.

Forty years go by and then, one day, Numero engineer Haley Fohr cues up a tape at the Numero office, and Sevier and Shipley immediately recognize “Love Won’t Pay The Bills” as it comes out of the speakers. And it’s not the Elevation version; it’s the original. This is the lost Calvin Harris session.

“We had to be there, at that house, at that moment, in order to identify what was on this tape,” Shipley says.

From the 88 tapes, Shipley says, Numero will issue, tops, a handful of 45s. The rest they will archive for safekeeping.

“Someday, someone — a museum, another label, an archive — is going to want this,” Shipley says. “We are interested in saving what are historically significant. If Lopez’s widow just hadn’t called Record Dugout, I can guarantee these tapes would be in some landfill right now.”

Just when we were prepared to take our 45 box and go home, NPR’s Oliver Wang went ahead and unleashed a thousand and a half words on Eccentric Soul: Omnibus. Mea Culpa.

The salient bit is this:

Reissue labels generally fly below the radar: it’s the albums or compilations they put out that are supposed to be the main focus. With Numero though, from very early on, the label itself established its imprimatur via a few distinctive features: a consistent packaging style, meticulous liner notes featuring interviews with original artists and producers and perhaps most importantly, a sense of exclusivity without snobbery, education without pedantry. Numero releases often make you feel like you’re learning something important without overselling that point.

Read the whole mess here.

Not to be outdone, the Onion’s AV Club has a longish Q&A with Numero ringleader Ken Shipley.

Here’s the take home quote:

We have really passionate people over here who look for these great moments of recorded history that have fallen between the cracks. The hope is that if you keep the entire catalog in print, if you keep everything out there and in circulation, songs really can’t be lost. They’re just waiting to be discovered by somebody else. Rian Johnson wasn’t with us in 2005 when we started working on Twinight, but he was there in 2011 when he had this idea for a movie and the song struck him. It’s an important part of the movie for him, and when you touch people like that with music, you’ve done the job that the song was supposed to do in the first place. It just took a lot longer to get there. 

Get lost in a flurry of sound clips and words here.

Finally, last night this little Boston Phoenix gem showed up in our Google Alerts:

A massive cup-runneth-over of 45 45s that gives lavish treatment to 90 sides of criminally ignored funk and soul radness.

All 50 of those words are here. 

Here’s a few more while we have you here:

Numero has achieved a reputation for quality both in content and in presentation andOmnibus certainly lives up it, raising the bar such that I can’t imagine what they have in store for their second collection.—Consequence Of Sound

Numero Group, one of the country’s leading reissue labels, crams 45 45’s and a hardback book into a portable case that’ll appeal to anyone curious about the genre’s golden years.—New York Magazine

Chicago Magazine stuffed it into their gift guide.

But really, that’s kinda it. To the many freelance writers and magazine editors out there who will point to not being serviced with the release we ask, “How many $250 box sets are showing up in your mailbox on a regular basis?”

Hop to kids, we’ve got less than 100 copies in our warehouse.

This has been sitting in a desk drawer for the last year. There seemed like no more appropriate date than today. Sure it’s a form letter, no doubt written by his secretary, but we have a feeling that Light: On The South Side was cracked open and thumbed between conversations about the debt ceiling and the hunt for Bin Laden.

It’s become standard practice for businesses to stay neutral in matters of politics (Koch Bros. notwithstanding) in hopes of not alienating consumers. Numero was founded on the principle that if you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing. Every person in our office voted for Obama, and we’re damn proud of it.

About a year ago, Duff McDonald—a writer for the New Yorker, Fortune, Vanity Fair, et al—began kicking Numero’s tires for a piece about how in an industry in record decline, we were beating the odds and succeeding. Earlier this week, the article hit newsstands and mailboxes, nestled in-between NASDAQ indexed corporations in Bloomberg Business Week. You can read the full text here, or check the spot on info graphic below for our “recipe” for success:

About the photo. The whip-smart Daniel Shea was sent over to our office to shoot to the madness. He went well over his three hour budget, but we hardly noticed as we were too busy recreating the cover to Minor Threat’s “Salad Days” 7″:

Having written about so many Numero releases during my time at Wax Poetics, I was surprised to learn upon my arrival in Chicago that these same titles, those that I had spilt so much honest ink over, were just okay sellers. And while Kid Soul seems a consistent draw, Soul Messages from Dimona and Brotherman seem to have plateaued somewhere in the fiftieth percentile. Soul Messages chronicles the origins of my absolute favorite international vegan soul food franchise, and Brotherman is a thoughtful collection of sophisticated scratch tracks for a Blaxploitation flick unrealized. What else needs to be said? So while I look forward to researching, developing, and catapulting many new Numero titles into the marketplace, I felt compelled to post a few of these articles—to reintroduce myself to all of the label’s fantastic supporters, and reintroduce these fantastic records to folks who may have passed them over in the past. They’re very good records. But don’t take my word for it [cue Reading Rainbow sound bite]!

Follow them from the back streets of Chicago to the slick neon lights of the big time (our 2010 Syl Johnson Complete Mythology box set is up for historical album and liner notes.)

The Numero founders will be heading into town early to present a screening of Stony Island over at Cinefamily.  Director Andrew Davis and co-star Susanna Hoffs (of the Bangles) will host a Q&A and Numero DJs will spin tracks before and after the screening.  Limited tickets may still be available, but they’ll definitely go fast.

And for his part of the Grammy’s run up, Syl is playing a sold out show at the Echo, backed by the Breakestra on Saturday February 11th.

Our main man Syl Johnson is busier than ever and the press are trying to keep up.  Check out this great piece on Syl in the Los Angeles Times as well as the in depth podcast about Syl and his musical legacy over at Soul Sides.

Pitchfork

“There is a certain optimism and spirit of hard work in these recordings that makes them an exciting body of work to listen to all at once.”

Dusted

“This sort of dedication to source materials is something of a Numero standard, but in this particular case it still has the power to astound. Echoing the ethos of Boddie’s original venture, this thing is a labor of love and it shows in every aspect.”

Blurt

“The only problem with all of this outpouring of archival largesse from The Numero Group is that they keep setting the bar higher and higher.”

Pop Matters

“This package is as memorable for the unbridled works of genius it brings to light as for the sheer oddities, eccentricities and impressive flops.”

If you were not in the greater Durham area or near your computer on Friday evening, here’s a link to download the set we did on WXDU:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/ibbv45

Nate and Dave were great hosts, and more or less gave us complete run of the station, including bending the playlist a little bit to include our March theme song. Find it in the play list below:

http://www.wxdu.org/plmanager/world/printplaylist.php?show_id=20711

As the Numero van traverses east into the Carolinas today before stopping for an eventful night at Horizon Records in Greenville S.C., we have been holding down the fort over here shipping out the last of the 2011 Vinyl Subscriptions and pre-orders. 2012 Subscriptions are now available at our web store and will remain up for the next few months while the 2011.5 Part 2 Vinyl Subscription will be up until the end of the day tomorrow. In preparation of Numero’s march into Durham there has been a tidal-wave of pro-numero propaganda that has swept through the Triangle, check it out below.

Independent Weekly Cover Feature

Duke Performances Syl Interview

Yes Weekly

Durham Magazine

The Daily Tar-Heel

Also if you’re not convinced to buy the Boddie box set make sure to check out today’s NPR Morning Edition with Tony Cox  at 1:30 EST today with Louise Boddie and Numero Archivist Dante Carfagna, who are going be chatting about the history and music of the Boddie Recording Company. Don’t Sleep.

Speaking about public radio, check out this clip from two nights ago on WFMU’s The Best Show with Tom Scharpling where he gets an unexpected caller.  Note – this is not some kid with a Syl Johnson Soundboard, it’s the man himself. Listen below.

Syl Johnson on the Best Show

Once again, ex-pat homie and NPR correspondent Ed Ward does us a solid and shed’s some light on the man himself, Syl Johnson, for NPR’s Fresh Air today. Clocking in at a little over 8 1/2 minutes, Ward traces Johnson’s musical career from his beginnings in Mississippi and Chicago to his recent success becoming one of hip-hop’s most sampled artists.Take a breather here.

It is officially a slow news week, but there was a small thrill in hearing a song from our Milwaukee friends’ in Kings Go Forth on NPR this morning.  Greg Kot and Dero discussed how their excellent debut has been sadly overlooked and urged listeners to give their recordings and stage show some much needed love. We couldn’t agree more. There was also a nod to Andy Noble’s soul collecting and an off-the-cuff name-drop that we appreciated:

He’s kind of in that same pocket as the Numero Group in Chicago, digging up these obscure 45s from the ’60s and ’70s and highlighting the quality of that music.

Although I don’t think the Sound Opinions folks were aware, the often overlooked Numero release Don’t Stop: Recording Tap was done with Andy Noble’s help.

If this comes off as an extended advertisement, so be it. I can’t think of a label more worthy of additional funding than Numero. Because, as I’ve learned through no lack of effort, there is no bottom to the pool of tremendous music out there—the more you dig, the deeper you get. Numero is on a whole other level from your average record aficionado, and maybe some day they will truly find every obscure piece of wax worth hearing—but I doubt it, and I don’t mind funding the expedition.

Plus who knows what. Visit and have a look.

By being one of the few labels to mention a position on iCloud either way, we’ve inadvertently become one of the talking heads in the story. While we haven’t stopped doing what we actually do (unearth and thoroughly explore obscure music) we have taken short breaks in the busy workday to comment on the unfolding story. Here’s a thoughtful entry from Todd Martens at Los Angeles Times. He frames the conversation in very reasonable terms here.

One thing we’d like to point out is that our concern is not without precedent. Owners of streaming internet radio faced a problem a few years ago when the performance royalties for streaming were retroactively increased and altered. To make clear the parallel, record labels and some independent performers (those who are recordings songs they don’t own the rights to, whether they wrote them or not) are also beholden to copyright owners the same way that internet radio “broadcasters” are.  You can revisit some of those issues here.

Somehow we beat out the Gene Siskel Film Center and Pitchfork for prominent positioning in Time Out Chicago’s Cultural Cloud. We’ll take it.

The Australian critic Jon Dale sent a note yesterday:

“Numero Group – one of my favourite labels, and one whose releases I quietly covet. You’ll be pleased to know I walked into Northside Records, Melbourne’s finest (read: only) soul, R&B, funk etc record store, and as soon as I pulled a Numero release out of the shelves, the shop’s staff descended upon me, plying me with about five other releases they had behind the counter and basically raving with the kind of enthusiasm record clerks rarely muster (being such a cynical bunch of pricks most of the time). It was a nice moment.”