The Mandells: Now I Know (Hourglass, 1969, 7″)
Soul single out of Chicago.
It’s surprisingly hard to find much about the Mandells even though they recorded over half a dozen sides for mostly Chicago labels such as Moneytown and Trans World.1 I don’t love their entire catalog but what I do like, I really love. I originally posted this in 2009 but as I’m going to revisit a few other of their singles over the next couple of days, I thought it’d be apropos to bring it back into rotation.
What I marveled at in 2009 was how the single blended “Chicago-style sweet soul vocals with that deep, deep bass, the chicha-chicha of the hi-hat patterns…with a string arrangement to boot.” Still killer.
365 Days of Soul, #76
- Hourglass was a NY label that, I think, pick up “Now I Know” for broader distro after the original Trans World pressing blew up on Chicago radio. ↩
chatter