GET SOME, LEAVE SOME

Billy (Sugar Billy) Gardner: I Got Some
I Got Some (alt. mix)
From 7″ (New Day, 1960s)

On my recent trip up to the Bay for 45 Sessions I stopped by the Groove Merchant first (as I often do). Cool Chris had something special waiting for me: this Gardner 7″. It was to complete a trade we started last fall but it meant a lot more than getting a bad ass record.

As I wrote about before, the first time I ever laid eyes on this 7″ was when Matthew Africa brought it in to KALX for a fundraiser show. From henceforth, it was a single I associated with him, probably even more than Gangstarr’s flip.¹

On top of that, Chris gave me his own personal copy, one he got in a trade a dozen years ago from DJ Shadow, and a single that, as Chris put it, “hadn’t left his play crate in 12 years.” As Chris, I and Matthew all had a short-lived monthly together in San Francisco in the early ’00s, it meant a lot to have the single linking all three of us.

This trip down memory lane aside, I did learn something new about the single: the b-side is an alternative mix of the song. As you can hear, they throw in some super-reverbed guitar on top of the drum break (!) and it winds its way back into the song throughout this arrangement. I don’t happen to think it works that well so thank god for Side A. All said, I found this rather unusual – I can’t think of too many other cases where a single has two different arrangements/mixes of the same song on each side (vocal/instrumental flips, sure, but two different vocal mixes?).

As a favor to me, Chris put a tiny green dot on “the right side.”