Review: The Vinyl Revival: A Film About Why the Tables are Turning Again

Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2020

Images from the Internet

The Vinyl Revival: A Film About Why the Tables are Turning Again

Directed by Pip Piper

Blue Hippo Media; Wienerworld; MVD Entertainment

43 minutes, 2019 / 2020

www.thevinylrevivalfilm.com/

www.bluehippomedia.com

www.wienerworld.com

www.mvdb2b.com

Seven years ago, British director Pip Piper released a documentary entitled Last Shop Standing (see review HERE). In it, he opined about the closing of Record Stores in favor of on-line shopping for digital music.

But, as I have stated before, including in the Last Shop Standing review, social philosopher Marshall McLuhan once posited that when a technology becomes obsolete, it comes back again as art (it’s one of my favorite “McLuhanisms”). The revival of the vinyl record is a perfect example of that idiom.

For a while, after the CD explosion in the late 1980s and into the 2000s, digital media overtook the physical LP, largely in part thanks to the greed of the record companies. CDs were much cheaper to produce, but the costs to the consumer were higher so the profit margin was chop-licking good. How did they get a way with it? They would include “bonus tracks” on their CDs that were not available on the 12’-ers, so fans would buy the digital form for the extra material. Then the record companies would say, “See, people want CDs,” and vinyl versions of releases began to disappear.

But the irony is that once music became digital, it was also easier to copy in almost pristine sound to the original. At least there was still the CD cover art and inserts, which were miniscule in relation to the 12-inch jacket. But even that was better than the elusive digital MP3, which was easily shared, stolen, or whatever you want to view it as, and was a standalone without art or liner notes. The appeal of these physical art “extras” had been underestimated by the companies that released the music, though collectors especially were aware.

Graham Jones

A good way to place this film into a context is to see it more as either a companion piece to the original, Last Shop Standing, or better still, considering it is half the length of the previous one, as an addendum, to bring it up to date. Many of the same people are involved, such as Piper and Graham Jones, who wrote the books on which this and the previous documentary is based.

Graham and Pip travel around Britain to independent record shops (no box stores), talking with the owners and workers in their environment. The last film was a bit on the depressing side, but this one has a totally fresh, new, and upbeat attitude which is smile-inducing to those of us (well, me, anyway) who have had a history of record collecting and have stood going through racks of used records until our legs were numb and fingers bruised from flipping.

An interesting point is made early on, and this is something I have pondered for quite a while, and that is the brilliance of Record Store Day. It’s a day where all record stores have gigantic sales at the same time, and people who are generally too busy in their real lives to journey out for their hobbies, will set aside the time and make a day with it (note that comic book stores, also having a revival, do the same thing). To a devotional collector, any day is Record Store Day, but for the casual fan, it’s a genuine celebratory holiday to save for, like Xmas (though the products are usually for oneself). In my heyday of collecting, going to stores like Sounds (St. Mark’s Place, NYC, managed by Binky Phillips), the House of Guitars (aka The HOG, in Rochester, NY, which included a talk with members of the Chesterfield Kings who worked there), and Newbury Comics (Boston), was a given, when the opportunity arose, or on weekends. The people who worked there were chums you talked to, discussing new sounds and old records. I remember no matter where I went, Greg Shaw and his Bomp! Records was always a topic that came up.

I mention this here because that is the vibe you get from the people interviewed by the film crew, that it’s not just the record, it’s the community, but one needs a watering hole, as it were, in the case the record shops. It is also a way for the new artists to get heard with in-store performances. We meet independent bands like the Orielles, a member of the Horrors, and a focus near the end by the trio Cassia, who explain how the relationship between the band, the independent stores, and the fans all work together in ways that go beyond big business record label promotions.

One of the side aspects of films like this, which is quite a favorite to me, is to keep hitting the pause button when they show a wall of records and posters, and see if there are any I recognize. I do this on a lot of documentaries, to see what records (or books) are on the shelf behind the person being interviewed, but it is especially thrilling (yes, I’m going with that word) when it comes to record shop walls. For example, it was fun seeing a sticker for Yo La Tengo, or the Ramones’ End of the Decade LP from 1987, among others.

Another nice aspect is that most of the interviews are in situ, meaning in a store or just outside of it. We get to hear from Nick Mason (Pink Floyd drummer), Philip Selway (Radiohead drummer, etc.), Adrian Utley (Portishead guitarist), and Joel Gion (The Brian Jonestown Massacre tambourinist), but also from Professor of Culture and Philosophy, Barry Taylor (one of his books is Sex, God, and Rock ‘n’ Roll: Catastrophes, Epiphanies, and Sacred Anarchies), and the great-named rock and roll cultural historian Dr. Jennifer Otter Bikerdike, author of Why Vinyl Matters: A Manifesto from Musicians and Fans, among others. Whether you question their tastes or not is irrelevant to what they are saying about the medium.

My favorite interviews, though, as I said, were with the store owners and workers; there isn’t much by people who are just fans without the credentials to explain their love when it isn’t their career. That why I wrote a blog back in 2008 called “Reflections of a Record Collector” (HERE). 

One of the almost subliminal messages this film seems to suggest is that the present record store consumer tends to be mostly in their fifties, or in their twenties, with a gap in-between from the later CD years of the 1990s and early 2000s. I would have liked to have heard some more information about that, and whether that’s real or in my head.

This documentary fills a void just like the record stores are doing, to help explain the psychology of the modern collector, what makes them different from the older ones like me, and to just revel in the joy that is vinyl.

And through this all, I thought of the most fanatical record collector I know, Mad Louis the Vinyl Junkie, in Buffalo, NY, who has never stopped collecting vinyl (and other media), and I dedicate this review to him.

DVD Review: “I Need That Record!”

Text and live photos © Robert Barry Francos/FFanzeen
Film images from the Internet

I Need That Record!: The Death (or Possibly Survival) of the Independent Record Store
Directed, produced and written by Brendan Toller
See of Sound, 2009
77 minutes, USD $14.95
Ineedthatrecord.com
Seeofsound.com
MVDvisual.com

We all know of an indie record store that has closed, such as Jennifer Flynn’s Home of the Hits in Buffalo, NY (nee Play It Again Sam’s) and Friday Night Dave Olka’s Record Mine, in Kenmore, NY. They were places to meet with friends, get a few lessons (be it historical or what was new on the shelves) from fellow collectors and/or lovers of music, or just to spend some time browsing and checking the racks on one’s own. The local stores are suffering and shuttering throughout the land, and this process is the focus of the documentary I Need That Record!, including places in Connecticut, Nashville, Minnesota, Dayton, and Chicago.

Let’s start with form. Using lots of interviews with store owners and workers, musicians, and various fans (mostly male, apparently), director Brendan Toller does quite well in taking the focus off of himself (unlike, say, Michael Moore) and places it squarely on the topic at hand (you only hear his voice as narrator and interviewer). He uses stock footage and animation that tends to be manipulated and animated in quite amusing fashions, as well as original art by Matt Newman; he uses these to presents a ton of facts and numbers, without any of it being preachy or distracting, and more importantly it is never boring. Also flowing throughout is a solid soundtrack, including the DVD title by The Tweeds, a few by the Black Keys (including in-store live footage), and the Kinks’ appropriate “I’m Not Like Everybody Else,” the latter clearly geared toward the mentality of the collector.

I took notes during the entire DVD and ended up with a few pages, which I won’t repeat here much, but just know that it’s mind-blowing to see just how manipulated the whole independent record store genre is by the major companies and big box corporations. As a collector states here, the big box stored fought to close the indie stores, and then were shuttered themselves by changes in technology. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The storyline is broken up into various sections. The first shows that with the indie stores closing, what is left are mall stores such as Wal-mart, who carry only top 50 releases. W-m sells 1 out of every 5 CDs sold (they also have a clutch hold on magazines, but I’m digressing again). This process was started by major label’s putting “bean counters,” as Legs McNeil says herein, in charge of the companies, answering to the stockholder’s need for profit, rather than a central company head, or even Board, who will nurture talent. Artist and Development was the first to go, and the performer now is expected to have a hit right off, rather than a steady climb to the top. That’s what happened at Sire, with bands like the Dead Boys and DMZ, or at Warner Bros. with Willie Alexander, even back in the ‘70s. Not selling fast enough? Good-bye. Enter homogenization.

The second section of the documentary deals with the corporate end, including what the record companies are willing to do to promote (or not); for example, Good Charlotte (an overrated band in the so-called mainstream punk vein, like Blink 182 or Green Day…yes, I’m going there) got 250 spins at a station for a payout of $17,000 by Sony. Clinton did a “Reagan” by passing the Telecommunications Act in 1996 (sometimes good guys do bad things), thereby removing the restrictions on the number of outlets owned by a single company. Before the Act, less than 65 radio stations were owned by major corporations, and today, Clear Channel alone owns 99.9% of the top 250 markets. That’s why you will hear crap like Limbaugh, but Air America went under. Lady Caca – I mean Gaga – produces “music” that is banal and thumping, and yet is played on every station, or even Good Charlotte types, rather music with any kind of balls like, say, DOA or Anti-Flag (never mind Monty Love or McRackins). No, Clear Channel stations play the same songs 73% of the time*. I’ve never listened to Justin Bieber (Beiber?) or Lady Caca, and yet I know their music just from walking though malls, emanating from storefronts, passing cars, newscasts, etc. It’s a drowning glut.

The next section contends with the blow to independent music dealt by the launch of MTV in the 1980s. Mike Watt, once of the Minutemen, comments widely on this topic in this film. While he sounds a bit disorientated in his manner, what he is saying is quite smart and is worth paying attention. The selectivity of MTV had a strong effect on what was released; if it couldn’t be played on MTV, it wasn’t supported, i.e., if the band didn’t make a video or it was not accepted on the station, it was not promoted.

Wal-mart leads off the next part. They undermine the indie stores by undercutting them. Music and videos are viewed as loss leader by the chain, to get people into the stores, so if they lose money on the music, they more than make up for it by selling the music player. As Rob Miller, of the indie Bloodshot Records label says here quite well, they are more interested in moving product than defining culture. In some markets, indie stores buy their CDs from big box stores to sell in their own shops, because they can get a better deal from them than with the actual major record companies.

Marketing is another section, describing (in part), how CD prices have been rising, making sheer profit for the labels (it is incredibly less expensive to make CDs over vinyl, but the cost to purchase is so much more). Also explained here is how the computer and MP3s are having a major impact on the larger labels, who sued companies like mp3.com and Napster into freebie non-existence. Despite that, most historic music is ignored by the bigger labels, as 80% of the market sales are through CDs, and yet more than 50% of recorded music is never put on CD.

Here, the opinion of those interviewed varies. For example, Glenn Branca states he likes the value and selection online and buys most of his music that way, but Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth, calls online buying lonely and boring in comparison to record stores. Lenny Kaye eloquently states that he likes the ease of downloading, but misses the “moment in time” connection of what he is buying. Leg McNeil, in his own “I gotta be different and difficult” manner, states he buys online because he is not interested in “community.”

It is here the “possible survival” part comes in, with major labels not being able to cope (yet) with indie releases being so viral, so presently the only place to get them is on-line or at an indie store. With modern technology, anyone can record themselves and sell it. For example, Anthony Kapfer of Brooklyn has been promoting releases by his own bands, such as Kung Fu Grip, quite well without the help of a label; you’re likely to find his CDs online or at indie stores, because big box chains are not going to deal with his sales level, but that won’t stop him or like-minded musicians like him.

Between these DIY artists and a resurgence in vinyl, which will not be found in big box stores, there will be a need for the chance of an indie store revival. Meanwhile, I have found many of the “community” of collectors meeting haphazardly over boxes of vinyl or CDs at garage sales and flea markets (implied in this film). Collectors will find a way, and hopefully, so will the indie stores. As more and more chains fold, such as Tower and Virgin, this may open a vacuum of need for a way to find those hard to locate bands.

I have only touched a tip of what is expressed in I Need That Record!, a well made release that should serve as a wake-up call to the way music is distributed, and the tributaries surrounding that output.

The extras are quite interesting, consisting of over two hours of longer interview pieces by people who comment throughout the film, such as DIY do-or-die Ian MacKaye (whose comments about listening to the radio are priceless), Mike Watt, Thurston Moore (who comes across as a sweet guy who you would be likely to meet at a record shop talking over tunes), an annoyingly abrasive Leg McNeil, Lenny Kaye (who I feel said the most heartfelt comments), and an appropriately abrasive chain-smoking Glenn Branca (who helped start the No Wave movement in the late ‘70s).

Fortunately, there are still many great indie stores out there hanging on, such as House of Guitars in Irondiquoit, NY, Rockit Scientist and Bleecker Bob’s in Greenwich Village, Turn it Up! In Northampton, MA, and Vinyl Diner, Vinyl Exchange, and Tramps in Saskatoon.

For me, this documentary made me think of some die-hard record collectors I’ve known in my life, such as (in no particular order) Bernie Kugel, Mad Louie the Vinyl Junkie, Friday Night Dave, the Doctor of Madness, Joe Viglione, Mike McDowell, Kenne Highland, Tom Bingham, Jeff Tamarkin, Greg Prevost, Cary Baker, Gary Pig Gold, Bruce Farley Mowat, Joe Bonomo, Richie Unterberger, Miriam Linna and Billy Miller, and so many others. We’re out there, and we will find each other one way or another.

* In the early ‘80s, I got into an argument with talk show host / record company exec Jonathan “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” King about what he considered successful radio, which consisted of just this very commonality and replaying of records over and over. I’m sorry to say it looks like the was ahead of his time, and he won.

Refections on Being a Record Collector

All photos from the Internet

“Hello, my name is Robert, and I am a record collector.”

Is the term “record collector” usable these days? Maybe “music collector”? Perhaps “physical music collector”?

My very first record was one of those yellow plastic kid ones, with a song about Noah that I can still recall part of the chorus (“It rained for 40 days and nights/It poured and poured and poured…”), though I can’t seem to remember what was on the flip side (Moses?). It was played on a portable electric all-in-one player that was a 1-foot square cube (when the lid was down), and played 4 speeds (78, 45, 33-1/3, 16!). My mom used it to listen to her 78 RPMs, including Vaughn Monroe’s “Stout Hearted Men”, Nelson Eddy’s, “Song of the Mounties” (but not Jeanette McDonald, oddly enough), a truly cool version of “The Volga Boatmen’s Song,” and Al Jolsen doing the “Hatikva.” And yes, I still have most of them.

My father only knew Big Band Swing, like the Shaw brothers, but my mom was a bit more contemporary, loving Nat King Cole and especially Johnny Mathis. Both parents were pretty clueless, however, about rock and roll. My dad hated it, and my mom wasn’t against it, she was just never interested.

I’m not sure how my dad made his choices in what to give me and my older brother, but he seemed to rely on soundtracks and greatest hits. He brought us Mary Poppins and West Side Story, as well as collections of hits by The Beach Boys, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and the Four Seasons. He also got us Beatles ’65. And, yes, I still have them all.

Sometime in the mid-1960s, one of my mom’s cousins decided she didn’t want her record collection any more (all 15 or so), and she gave them to my mom, who gave them to me. It was a weird grouping, from Jackie Mason’s I'm the Greatest Comedian in the World, Only Nobody Knows it Yet!, Gretchen Wyler’s Wild Wyler Wildest, the Broadway soundtracks to Funny Girl and Carol Channing’s Show Girl, and even one of a military brass band! And yes, I still have almost all of them.

When my brother was old enough, he started bringing home some Simon & Garfunkel, The Who and CSNY. Somehow, they got incorporated into my collection. While I don’t remember the first LP I purchased by myself, I do recall the first singles, a 3-for-$1 sealed-in-plastic set of The Blues Image’s “Ride Captain Ride,” Ray Stevens’ “Mr. Businessman,” and Manfred Mann’s “Quinn the Eskimo.” And yes, I still have them.

Around 1970, my cousin moved out of his parent’s house, and unknown to him then, my aunt gave me his 45 collection, which consisted of two 45s boxes (the cardboard ones with the plastic handles and metal latch that never latched). She must have had some prescient knowledge that I would be interested. A large chunk of it was doo-wop era, like The Crests’ “Trouble in Paradise,” Randy & the Rainbow’s “Denise,” Bobby Lewis’ “Tossin’ and Turnin’,” and Frankie Avalon's "Why." It was a music history lesson, and I loved it. And yes, I still have them all.

By the early ‘70s, I probably had about 75 albums and about 100 singles. Then I met my first influencial record collector in high school, Bernie Kugel. The first time I hung out at his house, I saw his shelves of vinyl. I fully admit that at the time I met him, I was still pretty clueless, but then again, compared to Bernie’s extensive musical knowledge, I always would be (in relation). He played all this music I had never heard before, like Slade, Move, Roxy Music, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, and rare Dylan. I liked some of the stuff he played, others I didn’t. Yet, I still didn’t get the collecting bug.

Bernie and I headed into Manhattan pretty often, usually in Greenwich Village, but occasionally uptown. One time we were rifling through the bins at Colony Records, which is connected to the Brill Building, on Broadway and 49th Street. As I languidly flipped through one of the discount bins, Bernie looked at the other. He walked over to me excitedly, holding an LP. He said, quite bluntly, “Buy this!” It was $1.97, and I had never heard of it. Bernie briefly gave me a history of International Artist Records from Texas (who also put out the 13th Floor Elevators). He convinced me into buying the Red Crayola With the Familiar Ugly’s The Parable of Arable Land. There were two copies in the bins; he took the Mono one, so I took the Stereo. It was pretty wild, and yes I still have it. I thought I had gotten off pretty easy, actually, because I remember being in shock around that time at Bernie having paid $15 for a Flamin’ Groovies EP.

It was after I started going to CBGB’s, Max’s Kansas City, etc., that I really started to get interested in music. I liked the bands, and I wanted to learn more about where they stylisticly came from. There were so many albums that became sought out a couple of years later that one could find in the dollar bin in the mid-70s, like the Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls, and the Modern Lovers. But what really got me started is when the bands I was watching starting coming out with music. At the time, it was pretty easy to just buy them as they came out, if one knew the stores to hit, and we did. From Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel (Parts I & II)”, to Talking Heads’ “Love --> Building On Fire” to the Heartbreakers’ “Live at Max’s,” to Richard Hell’s seminal “Blank Generation,” to even bands we hadn't seen, like the very first EMI single of “Anarchy in the U.K.” by the Sex Pistols, we just bought them one by one as they were released, and then two by two, and so on. And I kept them all.

What pushed me over the edge into serious collecting started in July of 1977: I published the first issue of my fanzine, FFanzeen, which ran until 1988. The records started pouring in to be reviewed, including most releases from SST, Alternative Tentacles, Frontier, BYO, Placebo, and many other important independent labels. Even when I didn’t like a particular record, I respected the work and financial payout of the indies, so I refused to get rid of them; I kept them all. Of course, my collection was expanding enormously, getting around 50 or more records a month, on top of those I was buying.

Meanwhile, I was still hitting up record stores, garage sales, and Sallie Ann-type places to see what was available. I was also into the obscure and odd. One time in New York, I went to a thrift shop and found this really cool EP (that’s a 7” that played at 33-1/3). It was a doctor explaining about diseases of the heart. He would interject between the sounds of heartbeats to explain what was physically wrong with it in medical terms. I thought this was so cool; I brought it up to Bernie’s house in Buffalo, where he attended college. After I played it, he reached into his own collection and brought out just about the same record, except it was the sounds of the lungs. Seems it was part of a series. In the other direction, I was entertaining (i.e., playing records for) a younger friend (who would later go on to have his own extensive and expensive collection…sorry Walter). He said, “Have you ever heard of this band called Love? I hear their records are hard to find.” I casually reached behind me and pulled out four of them. “You mean these?” I thought his head was going to explode.

Still, even as my collection grew and grew and grew, it was still dwarfed by Bernie and some of the people he would introduce me to, such as Greg Prevost of the Chesterfield Kings, and Mad Louie the Vinyl Junkie. Those were record collectors on a scope I couldn’t even fathom. Still are.

Through these associations, I learned not only about collecting, but also about collectors. In a grossly general way, collectors usually fold into two categories: there are the completionists (hunters) and the serendipitious (gatherers).

The completionists are those who have a gap in their collection, and will go to extraordinary lengths to fill that hole, sometimes paying exorbitant amounts for a record. These tend to be people who are into things that are hopelessly obscure, which takes a large knowledge of music to know when something is rare-first-printing level or just a reissue. Sometimes completionists can be a bit elitist, only wanting to deal with others who know nearly as much as they do (though they tend to respect those who know more), but fortunately most of the completionist collectors I know are happy to share. I remember a few times standing in the House of Guitars in Irondequoit/Rochester with Bernie, Greg and Louie talking, and I didn’t really understand much, but I listened and learned. It was like being in a really cool school.

Then there are the serendipitious, like myself, who feel like they score a coup when they find something exciting and hopefully rare, but look in general, not going out of the way searching for that particular item. Such a case was finding a doo-wop single on its original, local label in southern Florida in some obscure store for 5 cents, rather than the national one released later. While the completionists would search in magazines like Record Collector , the Rock Marketplace or Goldmine, one thing they both have in common in the love of the process of hunting in garage sales and thrift shops. But the former will be willing to pay the extra fee to get to a collector’s market early to grab up the goodies, where the serendipitious are happy to hunt and find in a more casual manner.

I will leave this topic for now with a true story: During the late 1980s, I was hanging out in Kenmore, New York (essentially a suburb of Buffalo, though I doubt they see themselves as such) at a used record shop on Main Street owned a friend, Friday Night Dave Olka. Dave and the kids who hung out in his store (who would later form Green Jello) smoked tobacco like fiends, so I had to get out of there after a while and get some air. I decided to walk around the block.

Around the corner, I saw a sign for a garage sale, so I stopped in. There I found a nearly mint condition first edition of the Stones’ Their Satanic Majesty’s Request, with the 3D cover. I bought it for a dollar, and brought it back to Dave. I saw that Dave had been selling a pretty beat-up copy for nearly $30. I walked back into the store and said, “Hey Dave, look what I bought around the corner for a buck!” I thought he was going to laugh, but instead he turned bright red, and threw me out of the store. Later that evening, he called me and apologized, saying he wasn’t really mad at me, he was projecting at the person who sold it to me. He said, “I have a used record store right around the corner. Why didn’t she just sell it to ME?” Well, I would say now, it was just serendipitious. And yes, I still have it.