Darondo: Let My People Go (coke bottle green vinyl) [UBIQUITY]

Why you'll love it

This Luv N' Haight pressing comes on coke bottle green vinyl and adds three previously unissued tracks remastered from the original tapes. "Didn't I" sold some 35,000 copies around the Bay Area and later turned up in Breaking Bad.

This edition

• Coke bottle green vinyl
• Includes previously unissued recordings
• Remastered from original tapes

About the album

William Daron Pulliam drove a white Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud with DARONDO on the plates and dressed in a white fur coat and snakeskin shoes, which tells you most of what you need to know about his confidence. He backed it up, too: in the early 70s he cut three singles for Ray Dobard's Music City label in Berkeley and opened for James Brown at Bimbo's 365 Club.

"Didn't I" is the slow-burning heart of it all, a falsetto ballad rediscovered decades later when Gilles Peterson spun it on BBC Radio 1. The title track and "Legs" are raw, rattling funk, "I Want Your Love So Bad" was his first record, and "How I Got Over" digs into gospel. Ubiquity tracked him down in the 2000s, and he gave his blessing to this 2006 collection.

Producers have sampled him ever since, which is a tidy second career for a man who once had his own name on a number plate.

Also at Kops: more Darondo on vinyl · browse Classic Soul

Tracklist

Listen

On Ubiquity / Luv N' Haight (cat# LHLP048), a reissue of the 2006 compilation.