records

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.

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.

So, my theory goes like this :

If I could accidentally collect about 40 Christmas records over the past few years, I must have actively passed up at least a thousand. Perhaps they were duplicates, perhaps they were all fairly generic in their variety or instrumentation, but I’ve always just flipped right past them. Now, I’m the kind of collector that becomes inspired by anything that presents itself in quantity, so I don’t know why they never crossed my mind as ‘collectible’. Thanks again go to FaLaLaLaLa for showing me otherwise. I still think that my repulsion away from Christmas music is a gut reaction to my grandma’s insistence on playing what she calls ‘Japanese jazz’ during many holiday events. You know the music that they played on the Weather Channel in the early 90s? It’s like living inside of that. And praying for some kind of supertornado to just come on by and relieve you from your misery.

Given the amount of holiday music that’s been produced, a very small percentage of it actually finds radio play every year, be it on an FM station or piped into a mall. This means that there are thousands of Christmas songs that are just going unnoticed, forgotten, and ultimately unappreciated. And that idea is what inspires me to discover and collect. By the time I die, I’m going to compile the ultimate Christmas playlist. It will not be encyclopedic, but it’ll undoubtedly be a thousand times more interesting than what we traditionally hear. And it’ll absolutely involve some Twisted Sister. Did you know that Dee Snider wrote a Christmas song that was later recorded by an unwitting Celine Dion?

So, I’ve gotten a good start on my Ultimate Christmas Mix – and given the assortment of records I’ve found in the garage, I’ve also started on The Worst Christmas Mix Ever That Makes Babies Cry.

My personal favorite, for the cover alone, is ‘Home For Christmas : A Joyous Evening of Yuletide Songs‘, released in 1964. The joyousness is doubtful, as it appears that this record hasn’t seen a needle more than once, whereas my copy of Led Zeppelin’s ‘IV’ is scratched to heck and back, denoting the true measure of joy derived from any album. The cover depicts a family joylessly singing along to the piano playing of a bespectacled girl, whose pigtail strangely and rigidly extends out from her head. They stand in a line, mouths agape, clearly gathered together for some kind of highly invasive tonsil inspection form the Ghost of Christmas Whatever. The only one even kinda smiling is ol’ Grandma, and she’s only smiling because the baby is about to goose the dog. The gentleman in blue wears a ‘P’ on his chest, which surely stands for ‘Pretty Awesome Guy’. Merry Christmas.

Of note is ‘Good King Wenceslas‘, which has the ‘father’ character belting it out in a crazy, unnatural baritone as if it were some kind of Klingon battle hymn – causing me to giggle uncontrollably, especially at the verse ‘BRING ME FLESH AND BRING ME WINE!’ A finer Klingon there never was!

A close second is Engelbert Humperdinck’s ‘Christmas Tyme‘. He doesn’t have to spell thyngs ryght, he’s the Humperdinck! He can spell it wrong fyve different tymes on the record sleeve, but are you gonna argue with that surly lothario on the cover? I didn’t think so. It’s a cover that begs the question, ‘Is this the best photo you could get?’ The answer is ‘yes, Mr. Humperdinck had a very busy schedule of swoonifying women that day.’

The most interesting record of the bunch is ‘A Music Box Christmas‘. which is a recording of a collection of 19th century music boxes, all from the collection of Rita Ford – so within this collection of Christmas records of mine, one of the records themselves is a document of a collection. The liner notes (which are always exhaustive, bombastic, and a fun read in themselves) details the general history of music boxes, the authors of the songs contained therein, and talks about the photograph record rendering the interchangeable discs of a music box obsolete, a theme that’s still repeating itself 30 years later as we constantly change musical formats.

And finally, the only full-length Christmas record I ever intentionally bought, ‘Hi-Fi Organ and Chimes and Christmastime‘, purchased solely on the virtue of the word ‘hi-fi’. That, and for ten cents.

If you have a favorite holiday album of any era, comment down below, and check out the collection I’ve amassed so far – and enjoy some holiday tunes!

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from ‘Hi-Fi Organ and Chimes’ LP
Rudolph by Engelbert Humperdinck
Rudolph by The Boston Pops
Rudolph by Gene Autry
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