LRC Album Discography
The LRC
(Lester Radio Corporation) label was a jazz label founded and owned by Sonny Lester, noted jazz
producer and former co-owner of the Solid State label and owner of the Groove Merchant label. Sonny
Lester was also the artist of record on a number of albums on Roulette in the early 1960s, including a
couple of racy (for the time) "how to" records, namely How to Strip for Your Husband and How
to Belly Dance for Your Husband, which featured vocals by Ann Corio and "Little Egypt,"
respectively. (Not to mention the followup albums, More....)
LRC was actually a continuation of Lester's Groove Merchant label. Groove Merchant had been distributed by Pickwick, and when that agreement ended and Pickwick International purchased Groove Merchant, Lester retained and reissued the last four Groove Merchant albums as a start to the LRC label in April, 1977, and signed the four artists to LRC. The four albums only changed the first digit in the catalog number, going from Groove Merchant 33xx to LRC 93xx, starting with 3312/9312. The LRC label was distributed by T.K. Productions in Miami.
In addition to the four initial artists, Lonnie Smith, Joe Thomas, Jimmy McGriff, and O'Donel Levy, LRC eventually also signed Jimmy Ponder and the B. Baker Chocolate Company, and these six artists had all fourteen of the albums released during the T.K. distribution days. The label released a mere seven singles, again by the same artists.
Interestingly enough, the switch from Pickwick to T.K. distribution corresponded with the end of Lester's albums making the R&B album charts. While the earlier Groove Merchant offerings by the same artists tended to make the R&B album charts, none of the LRC albums did. This begs the question of whether T.K., disco distributor supreme, was the right distributor for LRC, either because T.K. was so identified with disco that jazz buyers balked, or because T.K. didn't have the right approach for pushing jazz records.
