According to my Instagram feed yesterday, Saturday August, 29, 2020, was the 13th annual “Record Store Day”. Originally scheduled for a date in April 2020, the “holiday” was first postponed until June 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, before being postponed again and split up among three separate dates: August 29, September 26 and October 24, 2020. These dates, along with the traditional “bonus” celebration every year on “Black Friday” (AKA “The Day After Thanksgiving When People Trample Each Other To Death At Walmart”) brings the total number of “Record Store Day” celebrations in 2020 to four. And I’m willing to bet that if the RSD Comptrollers see the kinda numbers they’re hopin’ for (the last drops of blood from those stimulus checks), they’ll figure out a way to justify doin’ the same thing every year movin’ forward, virus or no virus. “Hey, man, it’s just business! We’re just givin’ the people what they want!” Fair point, sir. And Yes, they’re “just records”. And Yes, RSD has produced quite a bit of revenue for once fledgling independent record stores. And Yes, it has produced at least some revenue for many artists, be they newer, older, dead, alive, greedy, stubborn, independent, dependent, relevant, obscure, tired, rich and poor. I can’t think of another holiday more based upon the ends justifying the means! “But, hey, what’s wrong with RSD’s ‘means’???” Well…
If you’ve read any previous entries here you might’ve detected my...distaste for a lot of labels who (speaking broadly) sorta take the fun out of “the game” by reissuing anything and everything that will sell even a few copies. The glut of reissues has been a huge part of the boom in new vinyl sales in the past decade that’s often referenced by optimistic labels and musicians who seem to be pretending that these sales are enough to return the industry to it’s pre-mp3 financial glory. Now, I don’t need to tell you that 20 years ago in 2000 when Limp Bizkit sold over 1 million physical copies of their album “Chocolate Starfish..” in less than 7 days the same labels and artists and managers were complaining about money and what their “art” was “worth” just as much as they are now. What we’ve been hearing since the advent of the iPod and digital files as consumers’ preferred music delivery methods is that musicians really make their money touring, playing live shows and licensing their merchandise for retail sale. Now, 6+ months in and thousands upon thousands of cancelled concerts and tours later, we’re still not 100% sure what lasting effects the COVID-19 pandemic has had or will have on the “music business”. It stands to reason that right now musicians who aren’t just straight up asking for money online from their fans to pay their bills are going to have to pivot to survive even more than they did when when the mp3 came along and repossessed their label president’s BMW. So, with the expanded RSD happening and artists’ further desperation to make a living we’re probably going to see the market flooded with even more vinyl no one wants (or knows they want yet).
Which brings me to my problem with Record Store Day: It has nothing to do with music and barely ever did. Generally, the most common criticisms of Record Store Day among “independent” labels are that 1.) The day and the marketing surrounding it have been hijacked by the major labels who have more money and resources to promote whatever garbage they’re injecting into the market (the 2016 release of a 180 gram 2xLP pressing of the “Forrest Gump” soundtrack (retail price: $45.99) comes to mind), 2.) as the vast number of RSD releases continues to grow every year the few vinyl pressing plants left become booked for months and months as they cater to higher profile clients with larger contracts, leaving small, independent labels who press smaller runs of their releases unable to release anything at all, and 3.) (and this is where my grumpy attitude comes in) the more desperate artists and labels are to make money from vinyl sales, the lower their standards are for what they’ll release and they end up flooding the market with garbage (and most of what the labels sell to stores for RSD is non-returnable, meaning, if it doesn’t sell, the store is stuck with it and might even end up selling it below cost just to get it out of their inventory). Already financially strapped stores are pressured into participating in RSD to stay relevant among consumers, they have to make difficult decisions on how to spend their money when ordering RSD releases knowing they can’t make every customer happy, and they have to take part in the same creepy “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” pseudo-mafia game with label reps to get ahold of high demand limited releases or risk losing that business to competitors and/or online vendors and resellers. It’s not a no-win situation but it is a barely-win situation for businesses already operating on the slimmest of margins. The abject desperation and greediness among record labels (big and small. I’m not going to pretend that “indie label” means the same thing in 2020 as it did in 1990) has led to most of them basically trying to cash in by flooding the market with a metric ton of vinyl that is surely beginning to press up against the walls of a dam supported by a particular class of young, middle class consumers who were somehow convinced that owning expensive new vinyl pressings of music they could listen to for free or very little money online buys them “authenticity” and is worth their allowances, as well as a much smaller market of vinyl enthusiasts of various ages who would be buying stuff regardless of the existence of Record Store Day. I myself fall into the latter category.
The real reason I think RSD and the glut of reissues “takes the fun” out of record collecting is because it takes all of the effort and context out of record collecting. The instant gratification of not only learning about a record from 20-30 years ago, but being able to look the record up on your phone’s internet browser, listen to the record and even purchase a brand new pressing of that record, all in less than 1 minute with zero effort aside from owning a credit card and having a PayPal account, absolutely diminishes the experience of having to put in time and effort to learn about the record, hunt down a copy and in the process interact with other collectors and share information. Am I romanticizing this process? Absolutely. Yes. I realize I sound like an “old man yells out cloud” old-timer here but I really do think the process of slowly and humbly learning about music and art and taking time and effort to discover information and (forgive me) cultural artifacts like records is infinitely more interesting and character-building of a process than using Google and Discogs to fill a bunch of shelves with records mostly for the opportunity to post photos on social media as evidence of good taste or knowledge. As if being able to point to a crisp, new limited pressing of a punk record is somehow proof of understanding the history and context of the record and why it is or isn’t important, obscure, well-known, hated, loved, ignored, forgotten, etc. Undoubtedly, there was a dusty-lunged generation of collectors before mine who witnessed 21 year-old lads like myself typing “KBD” into eBay in 1997 and thinking, “Goddamn these kids! They don’t know SHIT! In my day..” and they’d be right, but I still gotta say: buying a Bloodstains or Back From the Grave or Pebbles compilation LP in 1997 and then figuring out where to even look for one of the bands on them took of a hell of a lot more effort, interaction with other collectors and learning experiences than logging onto Discogs and hitting “”Add To Cart” on a $15 Avengers reissue 7″ after hearing someone as dumb as you play it off Spotify on a podcast. If all you learn about the history of whatever records you collect is based on “rarity” or “number pressed” it seems to me like you’d be a pretty boring person to talk about records with and I would be very suspect of your taste, let alone knowledge. The creation of represses of rare records as desirable, collectible artifacts themselves has dulled the taste of a lot of younger collectors who not only value the object itself more than the art within, but equate their owning the object with their own identity. If it’s new to them, it must be new to everyone else! And if it’s new to everyone else, and they owned it first, they must be an expert on it! Save your breath, kid, you’re embarrassing yourself.
So this “Andromeda Strain” LP. I dunno, I’m not an expert on film scores, nor am I an expert on the history of electronic music. Does it sound like your “favorite” Morton Subotnick LP that, while still a thrift store/dollar bin staple in 2020, got reissued in 2018 on no less than FOUR colors of vinyl AND cassette? Sure. If that’s what it takes for you to be interested in it. I mean, I could tell you that I personally first learned about “Andromeda Strain” as a boot CD-R on Creel Pone in the early 90’s, and that it was notable as the first all-electronic soundtrack for a major motion picture released on vinyl, and that the composer of the soundtrack, Gil Mellé, was actually a celebrated jazz saxophonist who appeared on recordings with Zoot Sims, Max Roach and Kenny Dorham, and that he was the man who introduced Rudy Van Gelder to Blue Note founder Alfred Lion in 1952, and that Mellé was also a visual artist who designed album covers for Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. I could tell you that Mellé’s “Tome VI” LP on Verve from 1968 is probably one of the easiest to find and most affordable records featuring early experimentations in improvisational jazz combined with studio electronics, and a great starting point for lot of more obscure releases that followed. I would probably also mention that while Creel Pone was technically a bootleg label and all of its releases are unfortunately banned from sale on Discogs, the discography remains a great resource as a virtual encyclopedia of electronic music from around the world with albums like “Andromeda Strain” being the least obscure. But I don’t need to say any of this stuff because you can just Google it and there it is for you to decide whether or not it’s worth the effort to read. So, to convince you that this “Andromeda Strain” soundtrack is worth tracking down I will defer to the Record Store Day website feature of a reissue of the LP which describes it thusly:
“One of most sought-after and expensive soundtracks, with one of the most elaborate packages in history. Features silver foil hexagon cover that folds open, with a hexagon shaped record. This is the first all-electronic soundtracks released in US, and has never been reissued here. The packaging recreates the original, and the original master tapes were used. “
Now doesn’t that sound like a great record?
