Listen: Black Cat / Brian Auger & The Trinity
Black Cat / Brian Auger & The Trinity

The daunting task of sorting a file drawer full of receipts houses a small pit in my stomach this time every year. The bit I always forget is the opportunity of stacking album sides it provides in the process. That $10 used Dual turntable from the Warner Brothers employee equipment sale in ’94 continues it’s amortization to a jaw dropping calculation. Yeah, the device still works perfectly.

God bless Vicki Wickham. She donated her album collection years ago to a most worthy cause: me. It’s rainy, cold days in March when they take on an even more intense warmth than usual. Now I will tell you, her taste was, still is, a black music timeline and history book of utmost class. Everything from delta folk to roadhouse RnB, it’s all there. And anything British from the era that did quality justice to those many genres, well that’s there too.

As a result, a beautiful original mono copy of Brian Auger & The Trinity’s DEFINITELY WHAT on Giorgio Gomelsky’s Marmalade Records was too glistening to pass over. I ended up playing both sides, and as usual, got sidetracked from the receipts over to the wall shelf, pulling out all Brian Auger related 7′s.

As with the ending of ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’, ‘Black Cat’ benefits from his lightning keyboard hand slashing on the fade. It’s signature Brian Auger, and a technique he uses live to this day.