Very Special

Detroit keyboardist and bandleader Lyman Woodard passed away today at age 66. For record heads like myself Woodard's name will always be synonymous with his group's classic 1975 effort, Saturday Night Special - a wonderfully lo-fi set of moody electric jazz and laid back funk (and one soulful vocal, "Creative Musicians," which provided the inspiration for a Florian Keller comp series). I won't attempt to eulogize Mr. Woodard since, other than a few random stories about the good ol' days that Dennis Coffey told me, I don't know anything about the man and his career that you can't Google yourself. But what I can tell you is that Saturday Night Special has always held great sentimental value for me as it was among the first serious records I got turned on to by an old collecting mentor, Mr. Sang Woo.
Sang had been exporting soul and jazz titles to Japan for several years by the time I was introduced to him through mutual friends at the Roosevelt Hotel record show in the early '90s. Not surprisingly I think he only really kept a table at the shows as a way to get in early and check the other dealers' stock as he was an extremely prolific and meticulous collector himself. Sang didn't just fill holes in his vast collection (which seemingly encompassed every known quality soul, disco-boogie, or jazz-funk album in existence - major label or private press), he was also constantly minting up on stuff he already had. In other words if a copy of a record in his collection was even cut cornered or saw-marked it was just a matter of time before it was out the door once he came up on, or swapped for, a non-cut-out copy. I think he was the first person I knew of who kept a sealed copy as well as a play copy of his particularly desirable titles, even though he wasn't a DJ.
Later my "digging" friends and I would make occasional excursions to Sang's apartment in Clinton Hill near Pratt Institute (where he studied design) to absorb some info on rare titles, or get our busted album covers cleaned up. Being art-savvy, Sang was skilled at masking the ring-wear on covers that had seen better days by retouching them with char coal, colored pencils and such. When he passed me my first copy of Magnum's Fully Loaded as a hand-me-down (having, of course, minted up for himself) the cover had been fixed in this fashion. Split seams were repaired via glue paper strips he would paste from the inside out. He was like a one-man album cover restoration service. While non-record-collecting folks might dismiss this sort of stuff as the epitome of nerd-dom I always considered it the consummate hardcore appreciation of the art of album packaging.
These visits also meant there was the chance to pick up a copy of something cool Sang turned up on his latest buying trip. Sometimes I'd ask him if he knew anything about a particular title I was after and he'd sit there for a moment thinking before disappearing into a mysterious back room where all the records were kept - always closing the door behind him. (Maybe it was a courtesy to his roommates, or maybe - understandably - Sang didn't want a bunch of record fiends pawing his stuff, but no one ever got back to there as far as I could tell.) After a few moments he'd return with the record in question, and if you were lucky his asking price (in retrospect always ridiculously fair, even if we didn't always think so at the time since we were always broke) would match the amount of cash in your pocket.
On one such visit to Sang's he had just scored a batch of sealed copies of his latest discovery, the Lyman Woodard Organization's Saturday Night Special. Upon seeing the cover I remember thinking to myself, there's no way this album isn't great. And, of course, a cursory spin of its memorably fuzzed out electric piano grooves confirmed this. Sang always had these narrow metal record carrying cases in his sitting room from which he'd seemingly magically pull just the number of copies as there were guests in attendance. His asking price was as usual very reasonable - even for a bunch of broke-ass dudes trolling for new sounds.
As the years passed and the record shows became less eventful and the collecting community's activity shifted more and more to specialty shops like A-1 and TSL, I lost touch with Sang. A few years ago we happened to cross paths again and he told me that he'd moved out to the sticks of PA, and gotten married and started a family. He was essentially out of the record game and had been for several years. Nonetheless every time I put on Saturday Night Special - which, coincidentally, I'd been listening to again around the house for the past week or so - I'm reminded of him and those formative collecting days of wayback.
R.I.P., Lyman Woodard. Salute, Sang Woo.