This week the Amoeba Hollywood Soul LP collectible wall got a serious overhaul. Recent collections featuring sealed Motown/Tamla classics along with Northern Soul rarities, Private Press oddities, Disco gems, Modern & Boogie monsters as well as chunks of Zapp and Prince. All the LPs featured in this posting will be hitting the walls soon-- keep checking back, as new items will be trickling out all month!

Last week, while visiting the San Francisco Amoeba Music store, standing in the hip-hop aisle gazing at its thousands upon thousands of vinyl and CD titles I found myself drooling in awe. The seemingly endless selection is like an encyclopedia of hip-hop, which is what I mentioned to Luis (the store's hip-hop buyer), who offered to do a quick run-through video tour (above) of Amoeba SF's truly amazing hip-hop section for those who have not recently or ever visited the Haight Street store. This section offers the most comprehensive Bay Area rap selection (including tons of DVD titles) I have ever seen -- thanks in large part to Luis, who really knows and cares about the Bay's homegrown hip-hop flava.

One aisle over from hip-hop is the soul / r&b section and it is damn good, too, with an exhaustive selection of soul from the very latest back to the classics of bygone decades. In that section I ran into Dr. Goldstein of Free Gold Watch (the nearby Haight district store that makes some of Amoeba's T-shirts and was featured on the Amoeblog last week) and knowing his love for both soul and Amoeba I asked if he would do a quick run through tour of the Amoeba SF soul section. He obliged (video below) and made the very good point, especially in these MP3 happy days, about how when you buy a CD or record you are getting an artifact -- not to mention much higher quality audio.

No muffin tops, but the farmer's daughter knotted shirt look was obviously once the rage amongst musical studs. Plenty of late summer looks to be found here-- plan now, as we're bound to have another couple of nasty heatwaves before the fall cool down.

The music world lost yet another star recently when Fayette Pinkney of the Three Degrees died last weekend in Lansdale, PA, a result of acute respiratory failure according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. She was only 61 years of age. Pinkney, who was an original member of the Philly soul trio, lent her powerful voice to the 1970s soul hits “When Will I See You Again?” (see video below) and “T.S.O.P. (The Sound of Philadelphia)” (aka the theme song of the TV show Soul Train).

The video clip above was recorded for the BBC in 1975 for a special that aired on the UK channel in July of that year. The above excerpt from that special includes the group performing the aforementioned Soul Train anthem, "TSOP," and also their first big UK hit, "Year of Decision."

When the Three Degrees first formed in the early 1960s Pinkney was still a student at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia. As a part of the Three Degrees she contributed to helping define "the Philadelphia sound." In their time the Three Degrees were considered by many to be a Philly version of the Supremes.