for those who never gave up their turntables
IT WAS JUST ANOTHER DAY on Medium when I found the article, “Embarrassing Songs By Major Artists.” Written by Alex Markham for The Riff, its tagline was “Even the biggest music superstars had moments when taste deserted them.” He could have written “every music superstar” and substituted “intelligence” for “taste” and I would have agreed! [Continue reading]
I HAVE BEEN BUYING RECORDS for sixty years and collecting them for about the same length of time. As far back as I can remember, I have referred to LPs and EPs and prerecorded tapes as ‘albums.’ Since the Digital Revolution of the ’80s, I have referred to tapes, EPs, LPs, and CDs as albums
During this time, I called a seven-inch, 45 rpm record with one track per side a ‘single’ while calling a seven-inch, 45 rpm record with two or three tracks per side an ‘EP.’ [Continue reading]
SHRINK-WRAPPING ALBUMS did not become standard practice for the American record industry until 1963-1964. Prior to that, EP albums and LP albums were shipped to wholesalers and retailers without any protection! Then Robert B. Cohen, a rack jobber in New Jersey, started wrapping records in protective plastic sleeves, making him the “Godfather of Shrinkwrapped Albums.” [Continue reading]
I HAD TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION: “Who was the first rock band to sell a million albums?” It was on Quora and immediately seized my attention. Why? Because not only had I never thought about it, but I had never heard a record-collecting friend or a professional music writer address it. [Continue reading]
ARTHUR CRUDUP CAME AND WENT, placing five sides from three singles on Billboard’s national R&B chart in 1945-1946. Then the big hits stopped, although RCA Victor kept releasing his records for several years to apparently dwindling returns. His fifteen minutes of fame were over until eight years later when Elvis Presley released his first record. [Continue reading]
HERE’S ANOTHER QUESTION ABOUT VINYL on Quora that distracted me from various writing projects! The question is, “What vinyl album cover empty is worth more than a mint vinyl album without the cover?” Or, as I have worded it in this article’s title: Are there albums with covers that are worth more than the records? [Continue reading]
THE AVID RECORD COLLECTOR is a column that I recently started contributing to the Sixties Music Secrets blog. The intention of the column was to address LPs released in the ’60s and subsequently deleted. Then they found their way into cut-out bins of retail record stores around the country and then, years later, found their way onto collector’s want-lists. [Continue reading]
THERE ARE A HANDFUL OF RECORDS from the ’70s that are so common among British collectors that they receive little attention from them. But they are all rather rare records outside of the UK—so rare, that most non-UK collectors have only seen them as images on the internet! [Continue reading]
I MOVED TO CALIFORNIA from Pennsylvania in June 1978. I naively believed I would find some semblance of “the sixties” hidden away in San Francisco. But in only a few years, most of it had been blotted out. There were still a lot of hand-painted Victorian houses and a few hip coffee shops and bookstores.