Songfacts: Did you guys ever record anybody we've heard of?įinch: Let's see, Betty Wright, George McCrae, Bobby Caldwell. The way business worked back then, if you had a handful of artists and everybody sold just a little bit, it was the same thing as making a hit record, because it all adds up.

Henry was just trying to make some local chart action happen. There were a lot of R&B records coming out, like Benny Latimore and Betty Wright. There was this 8-track studio upstairs on 1-inch tape, and people would go back there and just start recording away, and then whenever something was worthy of coming out, Henry would have it pressed, because there were local pressing plants all over south Florida back then. So, it was like, Wow, wouldn't it be a great idea to mix this information center from the front part of the building, and then in the back of the building there was this little funky R&B recording studio where people would go back there and record. You know, when you're young you're really clairvoyant and you can see all kinds of stuff. You couldn't buy it directly from the record company, you had to get it from the distributor.Īs a kid I was paying attention to everything. Sometimes records from manufacturers would come in from Louisiana, Memphis, or Nashville, go to his distributor, then go back up the United States.

Whenever there was a buzz in the record industry, Henry would know about it, because his distributor was very, very hot, and he used to service all of the record stores around the southeast region of the United States. They would handle all the labels, and they definitely captured what was going on at any given moment. It was actually called Tone Distributors, which was a huge block-long warehouse and a very powerful one-stop independent record distributor. Rick Finch: Well, it wasn't called TK Records until we had a #1 record with George McCrae (' Rock Your Baby'). Carl Wiser (Songfacts): Tell me about TK Records.

Richard finch kc image