Posted on 01/17/2025 5:45:41 AM PST by Red Badger
If anyone was likely to find a lost musical treasure in Philadelphia, it was Max Ochester. At 14, he was selling hand-selected records to sample-hungry hip-hop stars including Pete Rock and Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. Now 47, Ochester has devoted his life to digging up rare vinyl and studio tapes, reissuing albums, recording forgotten artists and preserving the illustrious musical history of his home city.
In the early summer of 2022, he received a tip from a vinyl collector that a large collection of reel-to-reel studio tapes was for sale in a foreclosed house in the Philadelphia suburbs. When Ochester arrived there, a woman led him through the unfurnished house to a sunroom at the back, where the tapes were packed into 40 cardboard boxes. Ochester looked inside a box that was open. He saw tapes marked ‘The Intruders’, ‘Billy Paul’, ‘The Ebonys’ – legendary Philadelphia soul artists from the 1970s. He was excited and paid a few thousand dollars for the collection. It took three laborious trips with his car to move the boxes to his warehouse.
As he went through the haul, he found a single box of unmarked two-inch multitrack tapes. They were in box files that looked like the ones used at Sigma Sound Studios, where most of the 1970s Philadelphia soul hits were recorded. Apart from the word ‘scrap’ in pencil on one of the box files, nothing was written on the tapes, and Ochester assumed they were blank. They sat in the warehouse for two years, until June 2024, when Ochester went to Philadelphia’s Elm Street Studios to record one of his artists with producer/sound engineer Brendan McGeehan.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
David Bowie Ping!..............
Great story! Thanks for posting. I love these rock history stories.
You can see the conundrum the guy’s in. He can’t sell them, he can’t release them, all he can do is own them, physically.........
Yea, that’s like finding a big wad of cash on the street, but you can’t spend it.
David would be amused...................
He can listen to them, and apparently let others listen to them in private.
Yes, he can, but that is time consuming.............
A fascinating read. I’m not a David Bowie fan, but it’s a great story, kind of like Howard Carter finding King Tut but not being able to show off his discovery.
"Oh oh, oh, oh, you're a rock 'n' roll suicide"
Amazing topic and superbly well written article. Thanks for posting.
“Amazing topic and superbly well written article. Thanks for posting.”
ditto all that
It’s not the side effects of the cocaine
I’m thinking that it must be love
Interesting.
Whenever I hear the following from AC/DC:
“It’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock ‘n’ roll”
I always think:
“It’s a short way to the bottom when you rock ‘n’ roll”
I know it doesn’t always apply...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.