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Across the Bowieverse: Brett Morgen’s ‘Moonage Daydream’
12.17.2022
02:33 pm
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This is a guest post by Spencer Kansa, author of Wormwood Star: The Magickal Life of Marjorie Cameron, Zoning and Out There: The Transcendent Life and Art of Burt Shonberg. Perfect gifts for the festive season!

In the welter of pre-publicity for Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream, Bowie fans were baited with the promise that the filmmaker had been granted enviable access to the Bowie archive, an Aladdin’s cave of five million audio-visual treasures which, for the hardcore devotees amongst us, sounded like a mouthwatering prospect. That was until Morgen subsequently claimed to have stumbled upon the “Holy Grail” of lost Bowie booty: an unseen travelogue of the ever-elegant Englishman sauntering around the streets of Bangkok and Singapore, filmed during the final Asian leg of his all-conquering Serious Moonlight Tour of 1983.

Problem was, as any fan would know, this was simply not true: Richochet, as the documentary is titled, has been in wide circulation amongst the Bowie faithful for decades. The BBC had already borrowed far too heavily from it for Five Years, the first in what became their own Bowie trilogy of documentaries, and, sadly, like far too much of the content in Morgen’s film, it already exists on YouTube.
 

 
Similarly, Morgen’s much-trumpeted inclusion of the ‘Jean Genie’/‘Love Me Do’ rock-out with Jeff Beck, during the encore of the final Ziggy Stardust show, has been in the possession of fans, in grainier bootlegged form, for decades, ever since it was first broadcast on ABC-TV in 1974 and, at a later date, by the Rai network on Italian television. So, even before viewing this eagerly anticipated movie, alarm bells were ringing in some quarters.

Aside from the color correction and sound restoration that has been done, Morgen’s film is essentially an editing job pieced together in a collage fashion from the embarrassment of riches placed at his disposal; but based on the results, it would’ve been a wise move if he’d consulted more widely with Bowie connoisseurs before launching and landing the project.

While there has been some unfair criticism for what the film is not – a traditional, chronologically-paced documentary replete with exposition and talking heads – many of the rave reviews for Moonage Daydream appear to have been penned by casual fans, whereas for those in the know, the reaction has been decidedly more muted. And the reasons are manifold. Firstly, the fast cutting that Morgen periodically employs is often unnecessary and distracting, especially when your focus is the most supra-charismatic and aesthetically pleasing subject ever to appear in front of a camera. (During the ‘90s ‘Hallo Spaceboy’ section, a shot of an Earthling-era Bowie confabbing backstage at the Phoenix Festival with the Prodigy’s Keith Flint, which I’m sure both sets of fans would like to have savoured, flashes by in the blink of an eye.)

While the interpolation of classic films – from Bowie favs like Metropolis and Un Chien Andalou to clips culled from Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle, B-movie sci-fi schlockers and even The Matrix – is an act of supererogation, and the abstract visuals that animate several of the musical interludes are equally superfluous. 

In its favour, the film offers some welcome behind-the-scenes antics and alternate camera angles from the Ziggy farewell concert at Hammersmith Odeon, including risqué upskirt shots of the Leper Messiah that clearly made the filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker blanch when he saw them as they never made it into his final cut. (Bear in mind, given the time it was filmed, Pennebaker even overdubs the words “well-hung” when Ziggy recites his resume.)

Bowie’s felt-tip pen storyboards for the proposed Diamond Dogs movie are neatly brought to life. There are some on and off-camera extras from his chin-wags with Russell Harty, and private glimpses of his mid-70s video-television art experiments that prompted John Lennon to nickname him “Video Dave.” Another gem is the previously unseen footage of Bowie live on stage in ‘Gouster’ mode, grooving while decked out in beret and fatigues and crooning a coke-hoarse rendition of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me’, taken from Philly Dogs shows, the seldom-seen soul revue that cannibalized the abandoned Diamond Dogs Tour to air cuts from his new but then-unreleased album, Young Americans.

Excerpts from the hotly coveted Earls Court concert from 1978, originally filmed by the actor/director David Hemmings, that Bowie shelved for undisclosed reasons, include tantalising teases of ‘Warszawa’, ‘Sound and Vision’ and ‘Heroes’, although this abridged version of the latter lacks the mesmeric power of the one captured in its entirety by London Weekend Television on the second night of this Earls Court run for their Bowie special.

And there are eye-catching rushes from the suspenseful ‘Jump They Say’ music video, featuring the Duke at his most dashing, as well as arresting bonus scenes from the bewitching collaboration between Bowie and La La Human Steps siren, Louise Lecavalier, extricated from the ‘Fame ‘90’ promo and the scrim projections of the accompanying Sound and Vision Tour for which they were originally conceived.

But despite such enticements, Moonage Daydream is a frustrating watch at times, especially those moments when Morgen maddeningly muffs the money shot. The sublime segue from ‘Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud’ into ‘All the Young Dudes’ is one of the key moments of the entire Ziggy Stardust concert film, but instead of letting it play out to cast its spell, as the original footage does, Morgen cuts away to solar flares and ruins the effect.

When Bowie’s Lincoln Town Car arrives backstage for his concert at Earls Court, Morgen switches to fans filing into the arena, at precisely the wrong moment, so we don’t actually get to see the star of the show and his entourage emerge. (It’s hard to imagine that David Hemmings, who shot the actual footage, would have pulled away at that precise moment.)

While a montage, set to ‘Let’s Dance’, to showcase what a tasty little mover the Dame was, features his impressive tap dancing sequence from Absolute Beginners, but leaves out the crucial climax from the musical’s big production number (‘That’s Motivation’), where he out-Sinatra’s Sinatra and is winched into the air, Flying by Foy, to hand jive on top of a rotating globe. Morgen even excises the ending of the famous quote uttered by the bubbly moon-eyed fangirl outside the Diamond Dogs concert: “I’m just a space cadet – he’s the commander!”

I’m also surprised the filmmaker hasn’t received a litigious letter from the BBC, as he replays, in expanded form, pertinent Ziggy-era interviews about the rising importance of individualism and the rock star as false prophet that have already aired on their own Bowie documentaries. And he recycles two set pieces from their celebrated Cracked Actor doc. Firstly, by sampling the scene where a life mask is made of Bowie’s face, which Morgen marries to the very same song, ‘Quicksand’, albeit an alternative, non-album version. And although the ‘Cracked Actor’ live performance from the same programme is enhanced with some new footage, rather than cutting away, as the BBC does, to a waxwork of Elizabeth Taylor and other mannequins from the Golden Age of Hollywood, to help illustrate the theme of the song, Morgen merely superimposes stills from the famous photo session of Bowie with the movie queen instead.

And it’s not only major media corporations that Morgen’s recycled ideas from. The section dedicated to Bowie’s definitive film role, as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell To Earth, is scored with ‘Subterraneans’, an idea already realised, far more effectively, by Bowie superfan/film restorer, Nacho.
 

 
Furthermore, the insertion of Ziggy declaiming ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide’, inartfully juxtaposed with the Pepsi TV advert Bowie shot in exchange for their sponsorship of his highly ambitious but expensive to run Glass Spider Tour, that a couple of critics have taken as a rebuke to his, quite literal, ‘80s commercialism, doesn’t appear that mercenary at all if you already know that the money generated from it was used to pay for another stage – which took three days to assemble and pack down – so that Bowie could leapfrog shows and keep up a gruelling schedule.

The inclusion of late 60s deep cuts ‘Cygnet Committee’ and ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ (Bowie’s denunciation and celebration of hippiedom), which somewhat bookend the film, is another curious and unwelcome choice considering both are lower-tier tracks in his canon, and neither are indicative of the major themes that forged his legend during his Imperial Period that began when he left that decade for dead and relaunched himself into 70s rock superstardom.

And there are other strange anomalies. There’s a close-up of a widely seen schoolboy shot of the young master Jones, only his head has been transplanted from an even earlier school picture – for no reason whatsoever – so it makes him look like the younger brother of his classmates. And the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ promo, which was the life-changing moment for many second-generation Bowie fans, and remains one of his most magical moments, is marred by the oversaturation of colour that renders it a blur.

We expected so much more. Where’s the Ziggy rehearsal footage filmed at Haddon Hall? The recovered but still under-wraps performance of ‘Starman’ on Lift Off With Ayshea? The long-rumoured existence of Bowie’s full performance in The Elephant Man play? The Good Morning America interview with Rona Barrett? The unexpurgated footage of the Duke’s hero’s welcome at Victoria Train Station? The never-released concert footage of Bowie headlining the final night of the US Festival, in 1983, in front of an estimated 300,000 peoploids. Or Bowie being stalked and attacked by his alter-egos, in sinister puppet form, from the mothballed ‘The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell’ promo?

Inexplicably, the final chapter of the film, sees Morgen rerunning previously shown clips of Bowie riding the Escheresque escalators in the Singapore shopping plaza, and miming a flower blooming from an earlier seen outtake from ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’ promo, for no apparent purpose. In fact, it seems like a shoddy oversight. And you can’t shake the nagging suspicion that, by now, Morgen has been so overwhelmed by his project that he’s resorted to just throwing stuff at the screen, and only makes you lament the other unseen material that could and should’ve been used in its place.

In this regard, Moonage Daydream has been rivalled for the Bowie highlight of the year by this recently shared pro-shot footage of a Serious Moonlight concert held at the Sydney Showground, which has lain unseen for nearly forty years.
 

 
Despite my misgivings, the film has struck big with cinema audiences, raking in millions at the regular box office and from special IMAX screenings, as well as via streaming services, where not only votaries but those uninitiated or new to the Bowieverse await. For the cognoscenti, the Earls Court concert footage is worth the price of admittance alone, although your appetite may be whetted, it won’t be satiated until the Bowie estate finally releases the full show. And how much longer are they going to wait? First-generation Bowie fans are now in their dotage, and us second-generation fans are getting up there in years, too. If the estate doesn’t start sharing some of the untapped jewels in the archive soon, many will no longer be around to see and appreciate them. And yet, the estate seems far more concerned with squeezing every last shekel from the fanbase – from licensing his name on Barbie dolls, NFTs, Stylophones and pop-up stores – to care.

Moonage Daydream is screening in select cinemas, and on streaming services, and is available to buy on DVD and Blu-ray.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.17.2022
02:33 pm
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Discussion
‘Generations’: Exclusive interview with legendary photographer Scot Sothern
05.11.2022
08:52 am
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scotsothern_weirdo
‘Wierdo.’
 
Scot Sothern grew up in a photographic studio. His old man photographed weddings and portraits. He told him: When you take a portrait of the bride you gotta see her with the same love the groom has for her. It was a lesson Sothern never forgot.

Sothern worked around the studio. He started in the dark room then ended up taking wedding photos. He was expected to take over the family business. Sothern wanted to be a writer or maybe an artist like Andy Warhol.

It was the late 1960s. A time of revolutions. Sexual, social and political.  Sothern quit home in Springfield, Missouri and headed for Southern California looking for teenage dreams of sex ‘n’ drugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll. He wasn’t making it as an artist. He wasn’t making it as a writer. Instead of giving up Sothern thought “fuck it, I’ll do whatever I want.” He started taking photographs. Kids making out at the skating rink. Working guys drinking at a bar. White working class people on the periphery. But no one was interested.

In the 1980s, Sothern documented the junkies, winos, and hookers. He followed his “hard-on.” He photographed his subjects with the same love a groom felt for his bride. He shot with a flashbulb or used sunlight. Nothing else. He showed his father his work. He liked the composition, the lighting, the power. The subject matter not so much. His brother thought he was “degenerate”. Sothern’s work said as much about his life as it did about the women and men he was photographing. He wrote the down their conversations. A short story of their lives. Still no one took an interest.
 
scotsothern_lowlife
From ‘Low Life.’
 
1990: Sothern has motor bike accident. He stops taking photographs. He starts writing. But no one’s interested. He returned to photographing the people most politicians want to forget. The poor, homeless, and fucked-up.

It took 40-years for Sothern to get established. 40-years of rejection slips, and sorry this ain’t our kinda shit letters. In 2010, John Matkowsky at the drkrm Gallery in LA put on Sothern’s first solo show Lowlife. At the age of 60, Sothern had arrived.

Over the past decade, Sothern has exhibited across the USA and in Europe. He has published several books and launched a parallel career as a writer. This month, These Days will exhibit two major Sothern exhibitions under the title Generations: Sothern’s earliest personal photographs, Family Tree 1975-1980, and his most recent body of work, Identity both of which “explore time, change, and the multi-directional evolution of America.”
 
scotsothern_generations
 
Tell me about your new exhibition ‘Generations’?

Scot Sothern: Well, Generations consists of two different bodies of works. The Family Tree photos were shot nearly fifty years ago and I think the original impetus was all about making my photography something more than portraits and snapshots. I was still in my twenties and mostly running wild, with little respect for the societal norms. I decided the best way to rationalize my lifestyle was to call myself an artist.

The other half of Generations, Identity, comes from looking for something new and wearing my politics on my sleeve. America has changed to a very different place since the Family Tree series, a lot the good of the Baby Boomer generation has decayed or was merely a delusion in the first place. A lot of things got fixed but in general America is fucked-up. I’m inspired by anger and I find I am inspired by younger generations of people who are reclaiming the identities that had been previously been kept in the closets.
 
scotsothernfonz
‘The Fonz.’
 
More from Scot Sothern after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.11.2022
08:52 am
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Discussion
Extreme Record Collecting part II: There’s only one way to find Better Records
08.25.2021
08:21 pm
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When I recently wrote about being an analog vinyl snob, I made mention several times in that essay of Tom Port, the proprietor of Better Records. Port claims that the copies he sells of classic albums sound better—much better—than others. He calls them “Hot Stampers” and he sells them to a well-heeled audiophile audience who can afford to spend $500 on, say, the perfect copy of Aqualung. But when I wrote of the Hot Stamper notion, I was not writing from firsthand experience, but because Port’s offerings at Better Records was conceptually an easy thing for the reader to grok. Once the concept of doing a shootout between dozens of copies of the same album to find the best sounding one is understood, the rest of what I was banging on about came into sharper focus.

After he read Extreme Record Collecting: Confessions of an Analog Vinyl Snob, which was crossposted at Robert Brook’s The Broken Record blog, Tom got in touch through Robert and offered to send me a Hot Stamper of Steely Dan’s Aja that had a scratch rendering it unsaleable so that I could see just how much better his Hot Stampers were compared to an average, run of the mill copy of Aja.

Aja was a particularly fortuitous selection, not just because it’s considered by many to be the best sounding album of all time, but because I once had the good fortune to take a tour of the legendary Village Recorder studios in Los Angeles which culminated in getting to listen to the first side of Aja made from a dub of the master tape in the studio it was mixed in, on the very same speakers! Imagine that, right? I still have a strong sense memory of it and with an experience like that under my belt, there was probably no better test of the Hot Stamper concept that he could have sent me.

The record arrived two days later, packaged far better than anything that I have ever been sent by a Discogs dealer. I was excited to get it, I must say. I really wanted to hear an “official” Hot Stamper. This was going to be fun.

So I got super baked and put the record on. The outer groove was dead quiet and clearly it had been properly cleaned. (Pay attention to that subject below, it’s very, very important.) In the second or two before the music started, I wondered how much confirmation bias might be present when someone has spent $500 on a single record album. I imagined that they probably would be more inclined to agree that they possessed one of the world’s very best copies of album X for the simple reason that… it cost a lot more? Of course I hadn’t paid a small fortune for this album, and so I wasn’t quite invested in that way, but I still really wanted for it to sound good. I didn’t want to be disappointed.

When the music began, well, these sorts of thought immediately flew out the window. This record was clearly superior to any Aja on vinyl or CD that I have ever heard BY FAR and I realize that to many of you reading this what I am about to write next might seem pretty daft, but about a minute or two in, the thought occurred to me that this Aja Hot Stamper actually sounded better to me than the dub made from the master tape that I heard at Village Recorders. Yeah it sounded that fucking good, it really did. And if you know how painstakingly edited together that album was, you wouldn’t necessarily expect it to soundstage like a motherfucker either, but it sounded like the Dan were in the room playing live right in front of me. I was truly blown away. Rest assured that if I had paid $299 for this album, it would have been money well spent (although my wife might not see it the same way!)

I asked Tom Port some questions via email.

What is a Hot Stamper? Please define the term and how this concept first occurred to you. Can I presume that it was a slow process and that it dawned on you gradually?

Tom Port: The easiest and shortest version of the answer would be something like “Hot Stampers are pressings that sound dramatically better than the average pressing of a given album.”

My good friend Robert Pincus coined the term more than thirty years ago. We were both fans of the second Blood, Sweat and Tears album, a record that normally does not sound very good, and when he would find a great sounding copy of an album like B,S &T, he would sell it to me as a Hot Stamper so that I could hear a favorite album sound its best. Even back then we knew there were a lot of different stampers for that record—it sold millions of copies and was Number One for 15 weeks in 1969—but there was one set of stampers we had discovered that seemed to be head and shoulders better than all the others. Side one was 1AA and side two was IAJ. Nothing we played could beat a copy of the record with those stampers.

After we’d found more and more 1AA/ IAJ copies—I have a picture on the blog of more than 40 all laid out on the floor—it became obvious that some copies with the right stampers sounded better than other copies with those stampers. We realized that a Hot Stamper not only had to have the right numbers in the dead wax, but it had to have been pressed properly on good vinyl. All of which meant that you actually had to play each copy of the record in order to know how good it sounded. There were no shortcuts. There were no rules of thumb. Every copy was unique and there was no way around that painfully inconvenient fact.
 

 
For the next thirty years we were constantly innovating in order to improve our record testing. We went through hundreds of refinements, coming up with better equipment, better tweaks and room treatments, better cleaning technologies and fluids, better testing protocols, better anything and everything that would bring out the best sound in our records. Our one goal was to make the critical evaluation of multiple copies of the same album as accurate as possible. Whatever system our customer might use to play our record—tubes or transistors, big speakers or small, screens or dynamic drivers—our pressing would be so much better in every way that no matter the system, the Hot Stamper he bought from us would have sound that was dramatically superior to anything he had ever heard.

It was indeed a slow process, and a frustrating one. Lots of technological advancements were needed in order to make our Hot Stamper shootouts repeatable, practical and scalable, and those advancements took decades to come about. When I got started in audio in the ‘70s, there were no stand-alone phono stages, or modern cabling and power cords, or vibration controlling platforms for turntables and equipment. No tonearms with extremely delicate adjustments. No modern record cleaning machines and fluids. Not much in the way of innovative room treatments. A lot of things had to change in order for us to reproduce records at the level we needed to, and we pursued every one of them as far as money and time allowed.

Our first official Hot Stamper offering came along in 2004. We had a killer British pressing of Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat which we had awarded our highest grade, the equivalent of A+. Having done the shootout, I wrote up the review myself. At the end I said, “Five hundred dollars is a lot for one record, but having played it head to head against a dozen others, I can tell you that this copy is superior to every copy I have ever heard. It’s absolutely worth every penny of the five hundred bucks we are charging for it. If no one wants to pay that, fine, no problem, I will put the record in my own collection and thrill to its amazing sound for the rest of my life.”

As you can imagine, it sold immediately. That told us that the demand was there. To provide the supply, we eventually ended up needing about eight of us working in concert. It takes a crew of people to find a big batch of vintage LPs of the same title, clean them, do the Hot Stamper shootout, then check the playing surfaces on each side from start to finish, and finally describe the sound of each individual record on the website to the best of our ability.

We like to tell our customers exactly how to go about finding their own Hot Stampers, how to clean them, how to do shootouts with scientific rigor, but honestly, if you do it right it’s just a crazy amount of work. However, since it’s the only proven way to find the best sounding records in the world, to us we think it’s worth it.
 

 
Obviously the concept is controversial—to say the least—among record collectors. I’ve noticed an attitude on the Steve Hoffman Forum and elsewhere towards the hot stamper notion where someone almost takes offense, as if it suggests their records are somehow inferior. Any kind of audiophilia brings out the folks who say “I can’t hear it”—never a winning argument to begin with—and accusations of snobbery and snake oil. Was there a lot of pushback when you first started?

There has always been a lot of pushback and the pushback continues to this day, easily found on any audiophile forum you care to name. The psychology behind it is pretty well documented by now. I have read a dozen books about the cognitive biases that feed into confirming that whatever you want to believe is actually true, and written scores of commentaries connecting these ideas to a better way to pursue audio.

All of our work is entirely evidence based. Pressings that sound better than other pressings do not need to be explained. They simply do sound better, and rarely does it take a pair of golden ears to hear the difference.

But it does take a good stereo, and I talk about this issue a great deal as well. Even as recently as the early 2000s, I could easily name dozens of Heavy Vinyl pressings that I very much liked the sound of. Embarrassing as they are, I made a point to keep the old catalogs from those days. They are full of positive reviews for the Heavy Vinyl titles I was recommending at the time. They are undeniable proof of what I really believed back then. Of how mistaken I was. And I had already been in audio for twenty five years by then! After this last twenty years of working on my system and the hundreds of changes it has gone through, I would be very surprised if I could sit through one out of ten of those records now. Their shortcomings have become much too obvious to be ignored.

But… for the first time in a very long time, I actually played two outstanding Heavy Vinyl pressings just this year—the Led Zeppelin II from 2014 and the Chris Bellman cutting of Brothers in Arms, also from 2014. They went head to head against my best White Hot Stamper Shootout Winning pressings. Unlike almost all the other Heavy Vinyl records I have played over the last five to ten years, especially everything Half-Speed Mastered, both of these records sounded, gulp!, very much like good originals. in the case of Zep II, the uptake of my review would be that you simply cannot buy any version of this record outside of a Robert Ludwig original that will be able to hold a candle to the new recut. Yes, it’s that good. Brothers in Arms you can beat, but you have to work at it, and unless it is a favorite album of yours, why would you bother? The new one is probably good enough.

Even more surprising to most anyone reading this interview is the fact that I am happy to be proven wrong about Jimmy Page’s remastering project. I actually have a section on the blog for records we got wrong, with 80 entries to date. Who else points out to the world the records he was wrong about? No record dealer or record reviewer I am familiar with. But being wrong today simply means that I’ve learned something I hadn’t known before, and learning about records is what I’ve been doing for more than fifty years. And for the last 34 of those I’ve done it for a living, five days a week with plenty of weekends thrown in for good measure.

I hated what Page did to the sound of the first album in the Zep series, but I love the sound of the second album. Which just goes to show that records should not be judged by any process other than playing them. We endlessly talk about that subject on the blog. It’s a long-dead horse we just can’t seem to stop beating. Here is a sample:

We talk a lot on our site about the need for basing your audio—whether it be equipment, records, tweaks, cleaning methods or anything else associated with the hobby—on evidence.

In other words, don’t believe what you read, believe what you hear. Don’t take anything on faith, test it with your own two ears and record the data.

The only way to understand this Hot Stamper thing is to hear it for yourself, and that means having multiple copies of your favorite albums, cleaning them all up and shooting them all out on a good stereo. Nobody, but nobody, who takes the time to perform this little exercise can fail to hear exactly what we are talking about when we say no two records sound the same.

Or you can join the other 99% of the audiophiles in the world. They’re the ones who don’t know anything about pressing variations on records. Some very large percentage of that group also doesn’t want to know about any such pressing variations and will happily supply you with all sorts of specious reasoning as to why such variations can’t really amount to much—this without ever doing a single shootout!.

Such is the world of audiophiles. Some audiophiles believe in anything—you know the kind—and some audiophiles believe in nothing, not even what their own two ears are telling them.

But shooting out multiple pressings of records is work, more often than not hard and frustrating work. You can’t do that kind of work and type on a keyboard at the same time. It’s not about sitting at a computer and opining. It’s about sitting in a listening chair and gathering evidence that either confirms or disconfirms the opinions you held. If you haven’t done the work, you shouldn’t have much to say about the subject until after you have done the work. You can’t really talk about the results of an experiment you haven’t run, can you?

 

 
Where do you source your records from?

Local stores, eBay and Discogs are our main sources for records.

Isn’t ordering them from Discogs cheating?

It’s not cheating, it is in fact one of the best ways we know of to get exactly the pressing we are interested in. It’s difficult because many records are listed incorrectly, and most are graded too generously, and usually only visually. But finding a Pink Floyd import with the right stampers is not going to happen locally. That can only be done over the web.The mistake sellers make about us is that they think we buy the record from them and if it doesn’t have the Hot Stamper sound we’re looking for, we return it. That has never happened. Most records do not go into shootouts until many months after we buy them, sometimes years. The only thing we check is that the surfaces are passable and there is no groove distortion. Other than that, we won’t know how good the record sounds until it gets cleaned and played in a shootout. Many of our top dollar titles only get put into shootouts once every one or two years. Any Mingus record would work that way. How many years does it take to find four or five nice copies of Ah Um? Three to five years would be my guess. And we cannot afford to hurry up the process by spending more time looking for clean original pressings. They just don’t come up for sale all that often.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.25.2021
08:21 pm
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Discussion
Luke Haines: Psychedelic wrestlers & Xmas tree decorated with portraits of every member of The Fall
07.09.2021
12:01 pm
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Pic via @Bob_Fischer
 
Uncanny Island, the very first solo art exhibition by musician and author Luke Haines is on at the Eston Arts Centre through the end of the month. Should you find yourself in North Yorkshire, you should drop by and check it out.

The exhibit features Haines’ psychedelic visions of British wrestlers from the 1970s and early 80s (echoing his 2011 concept album 9 ½ Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ‘80s) and a Christmas tree festooned with ornaments bearing the likeness of everyone who was ever in the Fall. (The band had 66 members during Mark E. Smith’s five decade run, in case you were wondering.)

Luke Haines’ latest album is Setting The Dogs on The Post Punk Postman.

I asked the artist a few questions via email.

Is this your first solo art exhibit?

Luke Haines: Yep. First solo exhibition. I’m pleased it’s in the north—away from curators and the dull art people.

Tell me about the Fall Xmas tree?

I’d painted a MES bauble for a friend’s Xmas present. The obvious next stage was to paint every member of the Fall, but I had no reason to embark on such a futile endeavour. Then the artist Neil McNally asked me if I wanted to have an exhibition. It was then that I realized it was time for the Fall Xmas tree.

I know that you’ve described your work as outsider art in the past, but with the Lou Reeds, the Hawkwind paintings, the Maoist Monkees—and of course the psychedelic wrestlers which refer to your own album—it seems more like you’re doing something more akin to “rock snob art”? How do you see it?

My stuff is more like sitcom art. I tend to do the same thing: put popular or unpopular culture figures in absurd situations. Like putting Hawkwind in a balloon carrying esoteric knowledge (The North Sea Scrolls) back to their squat in Ladbroke Grove. If Hawkwind actually did this the world would be improved immeasurably. In the show there are a couple of paintings depicting wrestlers having diabolical fever dreams about It’s A Royal Knockout. I’d like to do a whole art show about It’s A Royal Knockout. Maybe a straightforward reenactment.

How often are you asked to comment on the art of Ronnie Wood, Ringo Starr or Paul Stanley?

I think that worrying about pop stars inflicting their art on an ungrateful world will be the least of our problem post covid. There will a tsunami of ‘lockdown art washing up. It will all be terrible.
 

Mark E Smith Xmas tree bauble
 

The Fall Xmas Tree in situ.
 

Fall Xmas Tree (detail)
 

Liver Sausage (Mark “Rollerball” Rocco)
 

Brian Glover
 

Dickie Davies
 

 
Eston Arts Centre, 176 -178 High Street, Eston, Middlesbrough, TS6 9JA.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.09.2021
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‘Tax Scam Records’: Artist Discovers Albums of His Songs Were Released by Shadowy Companies in 1977
11.27.2020
09:45 am
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Richard Goldman in loft above Hollywood Blvd
 
In April 2017, we told you the incredible story of the talented singer/songwriter Richard Goldman and the LPs of his material that were put out without his knowledge. Both records were released as part of tax shelter deals in 1977. The albums are testaments to his knack for writing and performing clever, catchy songs, but in addition to not being asked if his works could be used on those records, Richard received no financial compensation. Forty-plus years later, these injustices are finally being righted with Numero Group’s issuing of Sweethearts Deluxe, the first authorized collection of Richard’s recordings that were included on tax shelter albums.
 
Sweethearts Deluxe cover
 
To celebrate the release, which is out today, we’re reposting part one of our 2017 article on Richard Goldman and the shady world of “tax scam records.”

*****

“Tax scam records” is a term that was coined by collectors to identify albums that are believed to have been manufactured for the sole purpose of—get this—losing money. From around 1976 until 1984, a number of record labels were established as tax shelters, with investors putting their money into albums. A financier would invest, say, $20,000 in an LP, and if it tanked, the backer could claim a loss on their taxes, based on the assessed value of the master recording. Technically, the practice was legal, but to maximize the write-off, the appraisal was often grossly inflated—as high as seven figures.

The I.R.S would come to question the legitimacy of some of these labels, and accuse those promoting shelters that focused on tax benefits—rather than the music being bankrolled—of perpetuating fraud.

Anything was seemingly fair game for a tax shelter album, including LPs previously issued as private press records, demo tapes by aspiring artists, and studio outtakes by name acts. Some labels were so brazen, they released albums using material by groups as big as Led Zeppelin and the Beatles.
 
Happy Michaelmas
Album of Beatles Christmas messages, 1981

Another issue that caught the attention of the I.R.S., was how little to no money was put into marketing these releases. Over time, collectors came to realize that relatively few copies of individual tax shelter albums had made it into stores. It’s believed that most of the LPs went directly to a warehouse or were simply destroyed. Many of these records are so scarce that only a handful of copies are known to exist.

Sometimes the artists knew about the release and were compensated, but more often than not, they had no idea. The singer-songwriter Richard Goldman is an artist in which the latter applies. Though getting ripped off isn’t unusual in the music business, his story is a fantastic one—even in the strange universe of “tax scam records.”

In late 1970, with dreams of making it in the music business, a 20-year-old Richard Goldman moved from his hometown of New Rochelle, New York to Los Angeles. “I wanted to be Jimmy Webb,” Richard told me recently (other inspirations include witty songsmith, Harry Nilsson; alt-country pioneer, Gram Parsons; and pop titans, the Beatles). His goal was to be a behind the scenes figure, thinking he would have a longer career as songwriter, rather than as a performer, as they tended to have shorter lifespans. But he wasn’t averse to playing his songs in public.
 
Keenly Susceptible
 
Richard became a fixture of the weekly open mic night at the Troubadour, then the hottest venue for singer-songwriters. After one such a set at the club, he was approached by an impressed member of the audience, Sam Weatherly, who became Richard’s manager and producer. Weatherly paid for demo sessions, which enabled Richard to record studio-quality versions of the songs he had been writing. For a session that took place at Sunset Sound, Weatherly brought in a musician by the name of George Clinton to play piano on a few tracks. Yep, the George Clinton.
 
Richard Goldman in studio
 
Weatherly, who was older, “wasn’t just my manager,” Richard says today. “He was like a parent.” Richard would head over to Weatherly’s house often to have dinner, watch football, or play the board game Risk. Weatherly and his wife were like Richard’s west coast family.

In 1975, Richard recorded at the famed Sound City Studios. He’d actually recorded there a couple of years prior, and was invited back by one of the owners, Joe Gottfried. The engineer for the sessions, Fred Ampel, had taken on the managerial role in Richard’s career. By this time, Weatherly and Richard had drifted apart, though the circumstances are now unclear. Richard was thrilled to be recording again at Sunset Sound. “You knew you were in a very cool place.” Fleetwood Mac were right across the hall, and Lindsay Buckingham caught a playback of one of Richard’s songs, “Sinatra’s Car.” Buckingham expressed his admiration for the tune, noting that the bridge sounded Beatlesesque. He even lent a hand, overdubbing a bit of bass for a particularly tricky section of the track. “It was a thrill to watch,” remembers Richard. “He was ripped on pot but absolutely flawless on bass.”
 
Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Bart Bealmear
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11.27.2020
09:45 am
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