lps

My LP fascination has once again blossomed, as it is wont to do every so often. The arrival of my super-expensive Tom Waits ‘Orphans‘ boxed LP set with exclusive tracks (even though I own the music already), finding a box of prized LPs from high school in my closet today, and the discovery of Neutral Milk Hotel’s ‘Aeroplane Over the Sea‘ on affordable vinyl have all been contributing factors.

Unless you are studied expert, it’s nearly impossible to tell what you’re looking at in any given tag sale. I’m not sure how many amazing gems I’ve passed up over the years, but there are a few rules I follow : buy everything jazz, buy everything printed on non-black vinyl, and buy everything that genuinely looks neat. Who knows if I’ve flipped right on past an $8000 copy of The Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’? I’m more of a ‘Revolver’ kind of guy.

A recent set of eBay sales reveal a great, old jazz album that I wouldn’t have ever passed up, as it meets two of my criteria – Dexter Gordon’s Dexter Blows Hot and Cool from 1956, printed on red vinyl, which has recently been hovering around $3000 (a $2400 increase over a sale made just 5 years ago). This is his fifth album as a band leader.

Alternate copies on black vinyl, and reissues from Japan, also exist – so it’s not as if the music itself is exceptionally rare. It’s also available on CD and easily downloadable from legal sources. It’s simply the appeal of having a translucent, red jazz album.

In many instances, rare records are differentiated from common records by a few small printing differences on the jacket or the record’s label itself, and these variations are so minor that you really have no hope to find them without a lifetime of careful study. With many churches and libraries trying to clear out their donations of LPs for 25 cents each, you can literally purchase 100 LPs, and if you find three that are worth $10 each, you’ve already made a profit.

Soul records, things that you don’t recognize – at the very least, you’ll hear some music that you might dig.

I’ve mentioned it here once before, but my reputation in this town precedes me. I’m the guy you talk to before you throw your LPs in the trash, and no matter what they are, I’ll probably salivate over them. Sure, I might end up painting on them, but I’ll use them. The locals know that I’m a painter too, so it’s not unexpected.

So, it happened again today. I was handed a milk crate full of LPs by a local woman who comes into the library often, and she told me, “These are for you! If you don’t want them, the library can have them.” Her sons, both musicians, were no longer living at home and she was clearing out some space. I gladly accepted the lot, as our particular library has no consistent or reliable means for selling vinyl, nor do we really have the audience for it. I am essentially the whole audience.

I started to leaf through my treasures and I wasn’t too excited by the front of the box – Shaka Khan and The Thompson Twins aren’t really my idea of a pleasing sonic experience.

Now, there are countless albums that were designed for the turntable, so this is my attraction. I could listen to an MP3 of a song from the 1970s, or I could listen to it on the original LP and lend the experience some additional authenticity. I don’t debate the clarity, just the action.

As an aside, I also enjoy the fact that we still call it a ‘discography’ as our musical media becomes more and more distant from assuming the shape of discs.

I continued to hunt through the box, and I was not disappointed – some very clean Pink Floyd and Blue Oyster Cult indicated a fixation with prog rock – and then I came across nine Rush albums, from their very first 1974 self titled release through 1982’s Signals, and three live albums. While not a complete discography, I was just handed a collection. I love things that come pre-collected for me. And when I am handed a collection, I hunt down the value of what’s in my hands – not to re-sell it, but to see how carefully I need to preserve it.

All albums, generally speaking, are worth much more in their sealed forms than their opened forms, and many even have a respectable value if they retain their original plastic wrapping, despite being opened on one side.

Rush’s first album, simply titled ‘Rush‘ seems to have had at least three versions. The initial pressing of 3500 copies features a cream-colored label and a blue ‘Moon Records’ logo. The second pressing includes a red logo, as opposed to the later pink lettering, as well as a small logo for Moon Records which is missing from later pressings. The pressing of 5000 ‘red’ copies reach prices around $80, opened. Reprints of the ‘pink’ LP sell fairly consistently around the $10 mark. Mine, of course, is the latter.

I’ve also come across at least three versions of 1978’s Hemispheres. While the plain, black vinyl copy sells for only a few bucks, an alternate pressing on red vinyl sells for between $15 and $25. A picturedisc featuring the cover artwork sells for a similar price.

Most of these LPs have versions which were released exclusively in Japan, and while almost identical, they have an ‘obi’, or a little paper belt of sorts that wraps around the record sleeve to describe what it is in Japanese. These copies consistently surface for about $30 to $50 bucks. A Japanese picturedisc version of Fly By Night recently sold for $200, having met some kind of holy trifecta of rarity.

A comparable price was reached by a rare, sealed 2002 pressing of Vapor Trails. By 2002, LPs had already faded out of the mainstream, so vinyl pressings of things have become scarce by their very nature – but the best musicians out there still make vinyl releases. And I still collect them.

Of course, there are always a few auditory odds and ends out there in the world of vinyl, including promos, radio station releases and fan club specials, but this is the main crux of it. Keep an eye out for picturediscs and red logos and you’ll have something of monetary value. For nw, I’ll enjoy my musical value.

With tag sale season finally coming around again, I’m once again reaping the benefits handed to me by dead grandmas, kids going off to college and the recently destitute. It’s a marginally parasitic pursuit if you do it right, and it’ll leave your hands feeling grimy and questioning your own moral compass.

Well, not always – but that’s how I felt picking through a pile of garbage in a movable storage container on Westbrook Drive last weekend. It was pretty clear that someone had just raided an estate and threw everything that they could find into the giant crate – record players, lamps, suitcases, clothing, photo albums and the like. And when I say ‘threw’, I mean it in the most literal sense of the word. Prying one layer of junk from the next in order to see the hidden treasures was a necessity that many casual tag sale attendees declined to participate in. The back of the trailer was completely inaccessible. Me, I’m a junk lover and future home-renter. I’m remorseless.

I exited the crate with three LPs in my hands, and was pleased to snag them all for a buck (since one was a double LP set). Most of the offerings were the obligatory Herb Alpert stuff and classical junk that you can find pretty much anywhere, but I managed to find a few things that I’d never seen before. Seriously – from my own experiences at tag sales, I could very scientifically conclude that there were exactly 50 records ever made, with ten trillion copies of each record, and fifty percent of the mess was Herb Alpert. And if your family didn’t own the full collection, they’d find you and force it upon you. It’s always great to see something that you haven’t seen at the last ten houses.

The most curious item was ‘Armand Schaubroeck Steals Live at the Holiday Inn’, an LP from 1978 that looked incredibly, authentically punk rock and featured an image of a crazed-looking man on the cover. I really had no idea about the significance of the album, except for the liner notes indicating that he was an ex-con, and a few pictures indicating that he really loved holding a knife close to his face.

Further investigation revealed two interesting things. First, Schaubroeck’s albums don’t seem to have had any kind of official CD release and rarely sell for less than a healthy $25, with prices occasionally shooting up into the hundreds of dollars – usually for his ‘Shakin” LP, also released in 1978. There’s a surprising lack of clear information about Schaubroeck on the internet, but he quit music shortly after these albums to pursue music sales instead. The copy I found was open and the sleeve was worn, but the records themselves were musically pristine, free of any scratches or dust. My 25-cent purchase could probably net me $45 on a really good day, based on some quick price research.

The second interesting thing about Armand Schaubroeck is that he went on to own one of the most successful record stores in the US – the House of Guitars in Rochester, NY. Click through to the shop’s website to see a collector and audiophile’s paradise. Schaubroeck expanded upon his original shop by purchasing neighboring buildings and connecting them through an intricate series of hallways and tunnels, making the House of Guitars something of a curious, exciting labyrinth to walk through, with walls and ceilings lined by hundreds of musicians’ signatures and photographs. It’s certainly not the model of a clean, organized establishment, but it’s just as punk rock as the owner, and between selling instruments and albums, and opening at midnight on Mondays to give their shoppers first crack at new releases, it seems like an awesome place to visit. I’m already imagining the road trip.

The album itself? Not completely my thing. I don’t think I get it – as I usually don’t get into albums that require a whole side to finish a song – but that’s okay. It’s neat to experience an artist who’s regarded as something of a pioneer of independent recording and a paragon of music shop ownership – and clearly, something of a collector himself.

Way back whenever, I blogged here about the value that a healthy typography collection can hold for a designer, and how that collection can be culled from anything and everything that incorporates text. I am ever-vigilant.

So, when I was recently called upon to refine a t-shirt design for a band belonging to a friend of mine, I headed straight out to the odds-and-ends record collection out in the garage. These are the records that I just kinda inherited, or bought in large crates because they were far cheaper that way, or planned on doing ‘creative’ things with without really being concerned about the loss of the music therein. They can be mined for sounds, raw materials, cover designs or wherever inspiration leads without any real sense of loss.

I went out with a few loose guidelines in hand. Something Mod-ish, kinda retro-nerdy. Stereofidelic, but maybe a little more original or less common. Would look good in a circle.

I found nothing really relevant, but I did find some prime examples of typography that I can modify for my own personal use at some later date, and a few painful mis-steps also.

A personal favorite comes from the cover of ‘Under The Influence Of… Love Unlimited‘. It’s a purely musical font, evoking notes on a staff. Something about this font, or some variation on it, would be appropriate on any album that took itself seriously… or maybe too seriously.

The Commodores aren’t quite as demure and flowery. Their name is in an elaborate, bold, huge font that literally overshadows the entire cover – the exact opposite approach that Led Zeppelin took with their fourth, ostensibly untitled and uncredited album (which coincidentally made much use of symbols and typefaces). The Commodores are a little Roger Dean, and make a very bold statement about themselves with this kind of typeface.

Quicksilver Messenger Service has a touch of Roger Dean in ‘em also, but something about the slightly twitsy, fantasy typeface doesn’t match up with the old west scene on the cover. Still, I didn’t think it would fit on my friend’s garage band t-shirt.

‘Rhinoceros’ just uses a neat typeface all around – easy to read, very unique, and a little quirky.

And then there’s The Irish Rovers‘ ‘The Unicorn’. A fine song, of course (and written by my favorite, Shel Silverstein), but while the handwritten, semi-psychedelia of the cover might have some nostalgic value, it’s tremendously ugly. Weirdly black-edged letters, uneven widths, and completely incongruous with the kind of music that the band plays.

But then we have ‘Herb Alpert’s Ninth’, which seems to have stolen the appropriate font from The Irish Rovers and refuses to give it back. It’s a common Irish-y font, but does it really match up with poppy, toned-down versions of ‘Carmen’ and ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’?

Ultimately, my garage hunting was fruitless and I’ll spend the weekend tinkering in Adobe Illustrator to make things feel just right for The Cheap Speakers, but it’s definitely awesome to have a whole goldmine of inspiration at my fingertips – even if half of it is perfect examples of things to never, ever, ever do.

Over the past year, I’ve bonded a little with a patron at the library, where I spend too much time telling people not to lick the computer keyboards. I guess there’s three points that this patron and I ultimately connect on; we’ve both been art teachers, we both have LP collections, and we both agree that I’m a handsome devil. With this knowledge, she occasionally pays visits to drop off stacks of records for me. While many aren’t in the genres that I’m currently exploring (as many are opera or musical theatre), there are always a few strange gems mixed in. During her last visit, she left a smart little stack of folk albums – Joan Baez, the notable Allan Sherman folk-parody album ‘My Son, The Folk Singer’, and a whole collection of albums by The New Christy Minstrels and The Back Porch Majority, whom I’d never heard of before.

I was attracted despite my ignorance, and I had the distinct feeling that THIS genre of music, and these ‘large folk ensembles’, were exactly what the excellent mockumentary ‘A Mighty Wind‘ was parodying. I explored deeper, because anything worth a good loving mock is worth learning more about, especially if it was alarmingly antiseptic and delightful as the album covers implied. These guys were gonna MAKE me delighted, whether I liked it or not – and the masochist in me was going to like it either way.

I consulted an older generation than myself, and the mere mention of ‘The New Christy Minstrels’ brought a few looks of disdain and fear. Indeed, their practice of forcing joy upon all who encountered them had left a few scars, carved into the skin of their victims like little smiles. ‘The Back Porch Majority’ wasn’t nearly as recognizable, and even the omniscient internet doesn’t offer up too much on their popularity – if it ever existed.

Both groups were organized (and sometimes performed in) by a man named Randy Sparks, and if The New Christy Minstrels were center stage, The Back Porch Majority were the opening act – something of a rehearsal space before moving on to The Minstrels, and many group members did transfer from one group to another. While the two groups were seen as competitors of one another, it seems that they traded members as sports teams might.

A number of things attracted me to the albums, beyond the ripe-for-parody musical genre. First off was the Jack Davis album cover on the Minstrels’ ‘Advance to the Rear’ album, thanks to Derek – but even MORE interesting to me was the progression of The Majority’s album covers.

The first 4 in the stack, and the first 4 sequentially released, are images of smiling, happy, waving youngsters, clearly excited about life and haircuts and soda pop and drive-ins and poofy dresses. Album number five, ‘The Willy Nilly Wonder of Illusion‘ takes a sudden psychedelic turn, as a single male member of the band gets all grabby with three women at once, one of whom is making devil horns behind his head. Their bodies stretch strangely off of the album and into unknown spaces, though we can safely assume that they end up in a acid den somewhere. I mean, c’mon – the guy’s top button isn’t even buttoned! What kind of ne’er-do-wells have The Majority turned into? These are no longer ‘Riverboat Days’, and we’re suddenly covering Paul Simon songs about suicide.

I love it.

I wasn’t around to watch the music of the 1960s slowly devour a straight-laced society, and I never experienced the infectious plague of rock ‘n’ roll that destroyed our youth culture. By the time I came along, DEVO had already done their weird pseudo-sexual damage, and by the time I was conscious of it, Nirvana had already ripped holes in my jeans. From what I can tell, 1967’s ‘Willy Nilly’ was their last album, though given their rate of moral decay, one can only assume that their next musical output would be all about sacrificing goats and hailing their dark underlord. Play it backwards and the messages might even be offensive.