Light in the Attic (Lita) Records is my fantasy record company. It is run efficiently by a bunch of guys who care more about artists and their music than, as the multinationals will call it, shifting units — as if something as crucial as music can be reduced to capitalist commodities!
The story of Lita begins, curiously enough, with a motor accident in Madrid, Spain. The unlucky car into which young American student Matt Sullivan crashed was filled to the brim with records — Stooges, Love, Suicide, MC5 … in other words, really good records.
Sullivan introduced himself to his unwilling yet amiable “crash mate”, Iñigo Pastor, who just happened to own the stellar Spanish labels Vampi Soul and Munster Records. The shock of the accident took a proverbial back seat as the two began to talk music. Within an afternoon’s time, a transatlantic bond based on the love of music was formed.
Sullivan ditched his plans for the rest of his European sojourn and began camping out at the Vampi/Munster headquarters in Madrid. Though his and Lita co-founder Josh Wright’s love of music began with high-school radio, in Spain Sullivan was able to see first-hand the actual business of putting out records.
He soon discovered that the thrill of finding a long-lost gem and reissuing it to a grateful public was often tempered by the more loathsome side of the music business: endless unpaid orders, flaky artists and threats of lawsuits from hustlers and frauds.
Once back in the United States States, the master plan began at once. The idea was to build a label that placed as much emphasis on releasing quality reissues as it did on developing new talent. In the late 1990s, the dot-com boom provided much-needed funds for Lita’s humble birth in a basement in Fremont, Seattle.
Ironically, though, it was the dot-com bust that really got Lita going. Suddenly unemployed, Sullivan wasted none of his new-found free time. Instead, he began building Lita from scratch, using a little savings and a lot of tenacity.
With its love of music clear from the lovingly designed covers, Lita — whose albums are fairly easily available in South Africa — has since grown into a successful reissue, compilation and new-releases label. Texas sludge-rockers the Black Angels are an example of the latter with their second album, Passover. An angry, but melodic and psychedelic roar against the war in Iraq, their self-proclaimed “Native American drone’n’roll” will appeal to Velvet Underground, Doors, Dandy Warhols, Neil Young and Joy Division fans, without being too derivative. It is one of my albums of the year.
In 1963, the flight from Jamaica to Toronto took eight hours. Today it’s three-and-a-half. Countless people have made the dwindling journey over the years, but in the 1960s and 1970s there was a new breed of traveller: some of the finest ska, rocksteady and reggae recording artists the West Indies have ever produced. Jamaica to Toronto tells that story with great reggae, soul and funk.
However, my favourite of the Lita compilations is the eloquent Wheedle’s Groove, which tells a similar story, but about Seattle’s Afro-high 1960s and 1970s soul heritage.
Deep Throat and Lialeh were both 1970s porn movies. Even though blue movies do nothing for me, these two soundtracks make my juices flow. While the Deep Throat soundtrack has a certain quaintness that I think will make it wear off after a while, Lialeh, which was the first major black porn movie, has a superb soulful shagging soundtrack, even better than Shaft‘s. Legendary drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie composed, produced and performed Lialeh‘s score while between projects with Curtis Mayfield, Aretha, the Last Poets, the Rolling Stones and James Brown.