On the 23rd August 1964, the first 45 was released by Loma Records. That 45 was Billy Storm's I never want to dream again (There in a garden) / Baby don't look down. It was issued as Loma 2001.

Loma Records was set up by Warner Bros to cash in on the growing and lucrative market for 45s. Whilst the powerful entertainment corporation had a firm grip on the adult music market, and thus the 12" LP, it had no hold over the rapidly expanding teen sectors and their insatiable need for the 7" disc, especially those featuring the increasingly popular soul and R&B sounds that pervaded the popular music charts nationwide.

Motown, Stax, Atlantic, King/Federal and others were riding the crest of a wave that in many respects they had helped create themselves. Seeing with undoubtedly envious eyes the commercial successes these labels were having, senior executives at Warner’s decided that it was time to join the bandwagon; perhaps more precisely, to jump on the soul train!

How strange then to launch a product with the core purpose of making money from this growing sector, but to not give it sufficient budget to finance a good crack at success.

What were the Warner Bros executives thinking when they hired an experienced music industry hand - Bob Krasnow, formerly with King records - as general manager of the fledgling label? Did they actually have success in mind? Did they perhaps believe that taking money from young people was like proverbially taking candy from a baby?

Perhaps they just weren't serious about achieving real commercial success in this sector. Perhaps, as industry 'grown ups' they didn't take the teen markets seriously. After all, Warner's was the "Hit after Hit" film studio. They were in the business of making large scale Hollywood films and had at their fingertips a roster of silver screen stars; they were successful in providing adults with music from the likes of Frank Sinatra (Sinatra became a sizeable Warner Bros shareholder when his own Reprise record label was merged with Warner's music division in 1963), and entertained millions around the world with even bigger stars like Bugs Bunny!

They had made inroads too, into television and had great success with series like Maverick. Perhaps the executives at Warner's just didn't think that there was enough purchasing power in what was still, literally and figuratively, an immature market.

Whatever the reasons, forgoing management nurturing and restricting the new-born musical offspring’s ability to suckle on the life-sustaining and growth-giving milk of its parent’s cashflow was a formula guaranteed to produce a sickly child with stunted growth. As parents, Warner Bros failed right from the start.

The company seemed to have no real bond or pride with a child that, given its future, was destined to mix in racial circles its parents perhaps secretly disapproved of. Perhaps herein lay the real problem – Warner Bros had no experience of marketing its products to the teen markets, let alone to the non-white racial sectors.

Of the eight records released by Loma in 1964 at the start of its short life, three were tracks that had already been released on other labels having been licensed cheaply for Loma by guardian Bob Krasnow. Loma 2002 (The Singers) is probably the most mediocre release on the entire label and originally appeared on Le Bam a year before.

Why anyone would want to re-release these two sides of flat pop is a complete mystery. One would have thought that to get noticed among the young record buying public, Bob Krasnow would have sought to make a strong impact and not offer something so insipid and instantly forgettable. One guesses therefore that it was really cheap to licence.

It gets worse...

Bob and Earl (Loma 2004) had a promising 45 lined up for release in the form of Everybody Jerk (Loma 2003 by Clyde and the Blue Jays was also a "Jerk" song and thus shows that at least the label was trying to stay in tune with the current big dance crazes). However, this 45 is elusive thus indicating that it didn't make it big, if indeed it made it at all.

In an unforeseen twist of fate, Everybody Jerk would be released in both the UK and Germany some five years later when Warner’s sought to cash in on the success of the re-released Harlem Shuffle.

Gene Page produced both Harlem Shuffle and Everybody Jerk. In effect, Gene Page was Krasnow’s first real significant label signing, earning as he did, credits on releases 2001, 2003 and 2004 in his first few months with Loma.

Loma 2005 - Little Jerry Williams (I'm the lover man) - had already seen action on the Southern Sounds label. The next Loma 45, by the enigmatic blues performer Lucky Carmichael, had actually been released in Chicago on the Pam label TWO years earlier. It was old.

The A side of Loma 2007, Come go with me by Sugar n' Spice, was a cover of a song made famous seven years earlier by The Del Vikings. The flip, Playboy 'borrows', very boldly and very blatantly, the brass arrangement that made Betty Everett's The Shoop Shoop Song so catchy. Gary “Monster Mash” Paxton produces both sides.

Of those eight releases from 1964, we have just one remaining, and another cover version, this time of Chris Kenner's Something you got. Loma 2008 was recorded by Reb Foster, a popular LA radio DJ (broadcasting out of KRLA) and music promoter who would go on to greater things through his associations with bands such as The Turtles, Steppenwolf and Three Dog Night.

Bearing in mind the sometimes 'scratch-my-back' nature of the record industry at that time, one wonders whether studio time was offered in return for radio time: whether indulging Foster by allowing him to cut his own 45 was seen as a means of securing more favourable exposure for future releases over the LA airwaves. Why else should a radio DJ, and very obviously one lacking in any real singing talent, be given a release? To reinforce this unsupported notion, it's interesting to note that the flip is a bluesy instrumental, Quetzel and Jude, and thus doesn't feature Foster at all. One presumes that this track was performed by the house band who got credited along side Reb as The Rogues.

Of note on this 45 is the producer – Sonny Bond – whose name features on both sides. Embarrassingly for Loma, the surname is spelt incorrectly – one of a handful of typographical errors made by those responsible for setting Loma labels – and it should actually have read Sonny Bono.

That then concluded 1964, the first year of Loma's short life. Surely things would improve with the arrival of 1965?

Think again...

The first release of the new year was a rendition of Shirley Bassey's big-voiced James Bond theme tune Goldfinger. The film was a box office smash in 1964, so Krasnow would have been working on the basis that anything holding on to the tails of Bond's dinner jacket would have a good chance of success. Except that Loma being Loma, Krasnow didn't find an equally big-voiced female to take on the daunting vocal challenge set by Bassey. Instead, unbelievably, he sent in a man.

Step back up to the microphone please, Mr Billy Storm...

To be continued...