Numero Group Announce LP Subscription Club

Numero Group are masters of reissuing rare music, and with their new effort “Project 12″, they’re continuing to do just that. It’s a subscription series where they’re releasing 12 rare or unreleased albums. The subscriptions are divided into three different series: Four from Eccentric Soul artists, four from their Wayfaring Strangers series, and “four plucked from our Private Mind Garden“.

The subscriptions are limited to 1,000 members. The albums won’t be repressed or available in stores. A subscription to each series costs $100 or $250 or all three. While the entire series will be announced in the coming weeks, they’ve revealed the first three albums in the series—find the descriptions below.

94 East: The Cookhouse 5

In 1975, Brooklyn transplant Pepe Willie booked time at Cookhouse Recording Studios in Minneapolis, Minnesota to demo five original compositions. Without roots in the Twin Cities’ insular scene, Willie had no fixed backing group to help realize the arrangements he and vocalists Marcy Ingvoldstad and Kristie Lazenberry had been rehearsing. Willie organized a young cast of backing musicians for the session, among them his wife’s nephew: a 16-year-old guitar prodigy named Prince Rogers Nelson. Known colloquially as “The Cookhouse 5″ these recordings showcase Prince’s instantly recognizable guitar playing, seasoning to perfection 94 East’s short-but-sweet songbook. A crucial document concerning the origins of the Minneapolis Sound, the B-side boasts instrumental versions of each infectious tune, providing an even greater vantage point from which to admire the Purple One’s expressive playing style, already evident in his formative years. 

Circuit Rider: 2

Beneath the shroud of mystery surrounding the Circuit Rider LP is its mercurial, difficult, and wildly creative producer, Thorn Oehrig. After turning his penchant for biker lore into an acid-scorched eponymous LP, he continued recording with a motley cast of musicians and collaborators over the next few years, plotting a follow-up that was never quite completed. The original buzz remains across this unheard blast of angel dust. Dark hobo tales and rambling tunes, etched in alternately noisy, shambolic, and transcendent performances, channeling an alternate reality where Tom Waits is a mass murderer. 

Jimmy Carter & the Dallas County Green: Summer Brings The Sunshine 

Don’t let the postcard-generic cover art fool you, Summer Brings The Sunshine stands head and shoulders above nearly any major label country rock album crowding mid-’70s record bins. Next to the hundreds or even thousands of slick productions flowing out of Nashville and Los Angeles, Jimmy Carter scoured his rural Missouri surroundings for farmhands and semi-pros alike to lay down eight farm-isolated originals in 1977. Tasty female backing vocals, languid pedal steel, and feisty guitar licks abound on this exalted and near-peerless slice of Cosmic American Music. 

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