This Month's Colgems Upload: The Colgems Singles Collection

I have been fascinated with the Colgems label since childhood, and my Monkees records are among my most cherished possessions.

However, as an adult, I have been able to dig a little deeper into the Colgems catalog, and found that the label not only was home to the Monkees, but to a slew of other acts at one time or another, including the Lewis and Clarke Expedition and Hoyt Axton.

I have wanted to post the Colgems single catalog in chronological order for the longest time, and now is the time I start this project.

This first piece of the catalog contains 11 songs, which amounts to five singles--or is it six. You see, Colgems rush released the Monkees "A Little Bit You, A Little Bit Me"/"She Hangs Out" in the midst of the Don Kirshner controversy. It was pulled almost immediately, and I, personally, have never seen the 45, although it is rumored to exist--but I have since been alerted that it never actually came out in the U.S., only in Canada. So what I did is that rather than upload one of the album versions of this song, I uploaded the version heard on the TV show. It is less a horn section, which makes it a bit different from other versions of this song.

Hoyt Axton had a long career, both as a singer and actor, and on this collecton is his lone single for the label.

The Lewis and Clarke Expedition, which featured future country star Michael Martin Murphy, was perhaps Colgems' second most successful pop act, although in comparison to the Monkees, they weren't really too successful. I have included their charting single in this collection.

Stay tuned for further volumes of this series. I promise you that the material will get rarer "as we go along" (the title of a Monkees B side from the movie "Head").

You can access the first volume of this catalog in the files section at http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/albumania/