One girl's life

When I was a kid, I wasn't exactly glued to the phonograph, but I never got too far away from it either. In 1965 (not quite twelve) I'd started buying those magical little plastic wafers, and while the newest stuff was always to be found at the Big Stores, there was much joy to be had browsing through the obscurities, not least because they were often cheaper. One common discount-store practice was to bundle three singles, carefully placing one I might actually have heard of on the outside of the package, and letting the lot go for a buck. I picked up lots of old Motown map-label singles that way.

Spiegel, the Chicago mail-order house, offered record players in several price ranges, and during this period they offered bundles of 45s for cheap; I remember snagging a pack of twenty-five, complete with incredibly-shoddy cardboard carrying case, for something like $4.99. To my despair, there were only twenty-four different titles in the pack: for some reason, they'd thrown in two copies of Wand 171, Nella Dodds' "Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers" b/w "A Girl's Life," one of which I bestowed upon my sister.

I knew Wand, vaguely: they were a corporate cousin to Scepter, and the Kingsmen had wound up there. The Dodds record sounded nothing like the Kingsmen, though: this was soulful stuff, somewhere between girl groups and Motown, and it stuck in my head for several decades despite the fact that I'd never heard it on the radio.

Once Al Gore got around to inventing the Internet, I went hunting down other Dodds sides, which turned out to be not so easy a task: she'd become a favorite of the Northern Soul fans in England, and the six singles she'd cut for Wand were commanding big bucks in the collectors' market. I wished I'd held on to that second copy of "Finders," which, it turned out, was her second single: the first had been a cover of the Supremes' "Come See About Me," an album track (from Where Did Our Love Go) that hadn't been scheduled for a single release on its own. "Come See About Me" got airplay on the East Coast, and eventually word of it got back to Berry Gordy, Jr., who wasn't going to stand for this sort of thing and put out the Supremes' version in a hurry, despite the fact that "Baby Love" had been released just last month and was still making chart noise. Diana and company got their third consecutive Number One; poor Nella was cut off at the knees.

I covered a lot of this territory in my Single File review of "Finders Keepers", but I'm mentioning it here because at long last, the wizards at England's Ace Records have gone through the Scepter/Wand vault and reissued on CD all six of Nella's singles, both A and B sides, plus three previously unreleased tracks. As usual with Ace, the documentation is superb, and from it I learned not only what she looked like (rrowr) but that I shouldn't even be looking (when she cut those first sides she was not yet fifteen years old). And you may have seen her anyway: she has a Bacon number of 2.

Posted at 6:59 AM to Tongue and Groove


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