[78-L] TOPS artists (was Bud Roman..Who he?.. )

[David Lennick]

Intersound owned Pickwick, and probably the rights to a ton of 40s labels like 
Black & White, and had just sold it off when I started working for them in 
1990. Too bad because there would have been legal access to a lot of great 
material, if not the original masters. Instead they wound up on horrible CDs on 
a label called Simitar or something like that, which I think disappeared quickly.

dl

Jeff Sultanof wrote:
> I once interviewed Cy Leslie, who started Pickwick, Design and a whole batch
> of other budget labels. A fascinating man who impressed me as being a very
> up-and-up businessman. Whatever records he put out he had deals on
> (including Frank Sinatra) or he'd purchased the labels outright (Tops). He
> made a deal with Capitol to get the rights to issue recordings that were not
> in print. This is how he wound up issuing a number of sides Capitol never
> issued, and he put out Sinatra albums using tracks that Capitol deleted from
> their catalog. He also engineered the deal where CBS Video obtained home
> video rights to the MGM catalog, and he described to me the separate deal he
> made with CBS TV to get the rights to put "The Wizard of Oz" out on VHS and
> Beta, since the TV network had exclusive broadcast rights at the time.
> 
> He was very proud of the Pickwick operation.
> 
> Jeff Sultanof
> 
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Steven C. Barr <stevenc at interlinks.net>wrote:
> 
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Dan Van Landingham" <danvanlandingham at yahoo.com>
>>> The Jonny and Jack you mentioned:were they Johnny Wright(married to Kitty
>>> Wells)and Jack Anglin?Anglin was killed in a 1963 car wreck that Patsy
>>> Cline attended at the time of her death.I had a TOPS
>>> 45 of "Why,Baby,Why" and it was as good as the version I heard by George
>>> Jones.I don't see much
>>> country on TOPS but I do see alot of '40s-'60s country on albums leased
>> by
>>> Pickwick on labels like
>>> Design,Stereo Spectrum and several others.I believe Bill McCall,at Four
>>> Star Records,leased those
>>> masters to Pickwick.The artists were the likes of Jimmy Dean,Patsy
>>> Cline,Maddox Brothers and Rose,
>>> Charlie Ryan(of "Hot Rod Lincoln" fame),Wynn Stewart and Slim Willett of
>>> "Don't Let the Stars Get in
>>> Your Eyes" fame from '53.Bob Sandy is the only TOPS country artist that
>>> comes to my mind at the pr-
>>> esent.
>>>
>> Pickwick (et al) seems to have reissued (legally or otherwise...?!) whole
>> bunches of recordings
>> originally from fifties-era "indie labels" and other "unlikely to sue"
>> sources! I recall (but no longer
>> own) an LP which near as I could figure came from mid-thirties
>> transcriptions...I aurally verified
>> that the tracks were NOT taken from the ARC recordings of the tunes...!
>>
>> And it does seem possible that they could have used the various tracks that
>> appeared
>> "semi-anonymously" on the various multi-track 78's of the fifties...?!
>>
>> Steven C. Barr
>>