Nature’s Time – The Way I See It – Far Out

I am basically posting up this 45 to see if anyone can chime in with more info about it. Apparently it is pretty uncommon & seems for me to be ungoogleable. One thing that really bugs the hell out of me is when I find a record but don’t know the story behind it. I don’t know what it is about me, but some of the stories associated with music & record collecting really grab me & I have often found myself wondering what was up with this 45 when I have given it play.

The two tracks are the instrumental ‘The Way I See It – Far Out’ & the vocal ‘I Can’t Play Your Game’. ‘The Way I See It’ is funky, while ‘I Can’t Play’ is a jazzier/bluesier offering. The instrumental is definitely the standout, while although not all bad, the vocal cut does not reach the same level.

What I have gathered about this record from a few other people over the year or so since I found it is that the record was pressed in Arizona. That is it unfortunately. The label itself gives little more to go on. Both sides were written by a Charles McGowan whose initials probably formed the name of the label CEM (speculating here though). Another thing a few people brought to my attention is that it is known because Dante Carfagna played it a while back.

Being in New Zealand really tends to seperate you from the rest of the soul/funk 45 collecting scene & since there are very few people I have met here that collect soul/funk 45s with the same voracity I do, sometimes it feels like I am collecting in a vacuum. So the inevitable “How the hell did a copy of this 45 make it all the way to the bottom of the world?” is one of the things that I wonder about too. The plain fact is that whenever the local store here gets a lot of 45s in I put in hours going through them to pull out the soul/funk ones. At some stage around a year ago they got in what must have been 50,000 45s that came in a shipping container from the US along with boxes upon boxes of LPs. Of course there are thousands of dross 45s but every now & then you get lucky. I don’t really know what made me pick this 45 out of a box that was probably otherwise full of country 45s (maybe the phrase “Far Out” got me interested), but the moment I needle dropped it I knew it was a sound that was right up my alley. Over the last 12 months I have begun to realise that my record karma must have been pretty on point that day. But truthfully, when I coughed up the $2 along with a bunch of other $2 45s I bought in bulk that day, I had no idea what I had found, just that I knew I liked the music. Let’s face it, when things are said & done what more is record collecting than finding great songs on a format that you love & little scores like this are what keeps your faith in record hunting intact.

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