announcing my new column “the avid record collector”

Estimated reading time is 2 minutes.

BE THE FIRST ON YOU BLOCK to read my new column, The Avid Record Collector! Sub-titled “From the Cut-Out Bin,” it can be found on the Sixties Music Secrets website! In each column, I will look at records that were mass-produced in the 1960s and subsequently deleted from record company catalogs.

Most of these records wound up in the bargain bins of five-and-dime stores. Then, in 1968, American record companies halted the production of albums in both mono and stereo formats. Thousands of mono records were deleted overnight, including many by top-selling artists. At the same time, the record companies also cut out thousands of stereo records that were no longer selling.

I call this “The Great Deletion.”

Want to read a monthly column about albums that wound up in the cut-out bins of American stores in the late ’60s and early ’70s?

The record companies dumped millions of albums onto the market! I bought hundreds of them for 99¢ before $1.99 became the standard price in the early ’70s. These records from The Great Deletion—mostly ’60s rock, soul, and pop albums—will be the focus of The Avid Record Collector.

As for my host, Sixties Music Secrets is an informative audio/visual blog with insight-filled conversations between knowledgeable, curious, and nostalgic readers regarding all things musical from the 1960s. My column will appear monthly.

 

The Avid Record Collector: front cover of GENE CLARK WITH THE GOSDIN BROTHERS album.
The first solo album from a Byrd was GENE CLARK WITH THE GOSDIN BROTHERS. It was a minor gem of an album that came and went so fast in early 1967 that many Byrds fans didn’t know of its existence. Then copies turned up as cut-outs around the country in 1968-1969. (This album will be reviewed in a future Avid Record Collector column.)

The Avid Record Collector

The first two columns provide background information about the column and about the scene for cut-out records in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The third will address the US-pressing of an album by a top UK artist that was common in cut-out bins while the fourth will look at the UK-pressing of an album by a top US artist that was a rarity in those same bins.

Unlike my publications on Medium which recycle articles published on my blogs, the columns in The Avid Record Collector will be all new material and will not appear on my blogs until the distant future!

If you want to read all my stuff plus other writers, you need to subscribe to Sixties Music Secrets. To subscribe, click here.

The first installment (“An Avid Record Collector’s Introduction”) has been published! To read it, click here.

 

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