The vinyl frontier: message in the medium

Few people own a vinyl record player. I don't. The culture of buying LPs, 7" and 12" singles is pretty much extinct in South Africa. Unless you're older than I am or a DJ, chances are you have no idea of what a 7" or 12" is. Don't get me wrong: I love new technology and wouuld never trade in my collection of CDs and MP3s for hoary old LPs and 8-track tapes. Yet it cannot be denied that there is something so damn... romantic about the crackle and pop of a stylus travelling in the groove, making music as if by magic. Old records were cool in other ways, too. They're huge, and therefore the space for album art is so much more. Gone are the days of the complicated psychedelia of The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and The Grateful Dead sleeve art and hello to the posed portraits of Gwen Stefani and Mary J. Blige as seen on the Top 40 rack at Musica. How else? Compact discs are just that - compact - and somehow require artists to brand them with their faces.

And so you can go on and on, comparing the pros and cons of vinyl vs. CDs. But there is one very special aspect of vinyl records that has been lost in the digital age. If you look at the runout groove of a record (especially if it was mastered at places like The Exchange in London or Frankford Wayne in New York) you might see a little secret message, engraved in the dead wax. Normally, this is where the person who does the mastering would have inscribed the catalogue number and other reference codes into the master disc with a stylus, but sometimes they add a personal touch (for a better understanding of how mastering a vinyl record works, read the Wikipedia article). What started as an industry inside joke soon grew into a cult phenomenon, and several websites are dedicated to cataloguing runout groove inscriptions. Even the artists themselves got in on the act and several bands requested that specific messages be inscribed on their records for their fans to discover.

Here are three of the many, many vinyl records out there with interesting things written in the runout groove. Have you discovered any?

Joy Division. Love Will Tear Us Apart. 7" single.
Factory Records FAC23 [1980]

Side A: Don't disillusion me
Side B: I've only got record shops left

This is obviously meant to be read as one message - has music become the only thing of value in the author's life? Is it an eerily prophetic message from vocalist Ian Curtis himself, who would commit suicide the month after its release?

Depeche Mode. Stripped. 12" single.

Mute Records 12Bong10 [1986]

Side A: Don't give me double messages, O.K?
Side B: More of a Kraftwerk kind of relationship

The older Depeche Mode singles are famous for crazy runout groove graffiti. The first message here is obviously a snub at another technician at the mastering plant, but does the second describe the influence of Kraftwerk's robotic electronica on the Mode's music?

Franz Ferdinand. Franz Ferdinand. LP.
Domino Records WIGLP136 [2004]

Side A: Because You're Lonely
Side B: Nobody Likes You

Didn't expect Franz Ferdinand in this list, did you? Their singles feature inscriptions too, and much speculation has arisen among fans as to what it all means. The band seems pretty tight-lipped about it, dropping subtle hints on their website from time to time. Curiouser and curiouser. It seems like the romance of vinyl is being kept alive, after all.

Aphid spit and theme park madness

For the past couple of days I have been injecting purified salivary proteins of aphids into wheat leaves. Yes, folks, that's right - I'm taking a diabetic needle and sticking it into the mid-vein of a wheat leaf in order to flood it with 50µl of aphid saliva. All in the name of science. At least I'm getting paid for it (as my thesis is currently under review and I'm no longer a 'student'). I'm incubating a chitinase assay as I'm typing this, hoping to see some sort of enzyme activity. Here's hoping! On another note, I'm accompanying my sister and her two children to Gold Reef City on Good Friday along with all the other billions of people trying to avoid the Rand Easter Show. I dislike crowds, but the little dears are pining for me to go and I'd so hate to disappoint. So its riding rollercoasters and eating candy floss 'till we puke on Friday for me. What are you doing to celebrate Easter?

Rare mint 12" promo blue vinyl ltd. g/fold sticker p/s

What is it that makes a record collectible? What compels us to seek out these objects, obsess about them, pay exorbitant prices for them, hoard them, display them, hide them, worship them, flaunt them and eventually resell them? I believe that there are a couple of things that make a record collectible. Rarity. Controversy. Beauty. Exclusivity. Novelty. But if you have to ask me what the one thing is that I believe inspires the desire to collect, then it must surely be this: provenance. Nothing beats owning that rare record with a great story. Here are four collectibles with great stories.


1. The Beatles. Yesterday and Today with butchers sleeve.
LP. Capitol Records ST2553 [1966]
Essentially an LP of songs previously only released on the UK versions of the Help! and Rubber Soul albums of 1965 and some tracks from their upcoming Revolver album of 1966, this American release initially featured sleeve art by photographer Robert Whitaker. The macabre photograph featured the Fab Four dressed in butcher's overcoats, draped with cuts of meat and dismembered plastic dolls. Capitol Records in the United States printed 750 000 copies of Yesterday and Today. Due to immediate public reaction, the record was recalled almost as soon as advance copies reached disc jockeys and store managers. In some areas, the record did indeed go on sale... for a whole day. Printing plant managers were requested by Capitol to destroy the record sleeves, and several were landfilled. However, to recoup costs, tens of thousands of recalled sleeves were cropped and had a compliant new cover pasted over the old one. First state records, without the new cover pasted onto them, are obviously the most valuable. Second state records, with an intact pasteover on the butcher image are also increasingly rare and valuable. Least valuable are third state records, where previous owners, curious to see the original condemned cover, have defaced their records by steaming or pealing off the pasteover. Twenty pristine, sealed, first state records were recently sold from the personal collection of Alan Livingston, ex-president of Capitol Records. These constitute some of the most valuable records on the planet, the purest crystallization of Beatlemania. Affluent collectors easily fork out $ 40 000 in order to get their hands on a Livingston Butcher.

2. Madonna. Sex.
Book. Warner Books 0-446-51732-1 [1992]
Obviously not a record, but rather a visual acompaniment to Madonna's album Erotica. This is one of the most sought-after items spawned by the music industry. Lavishly designed by Baron & Baron, it featured the work of many photographers, most notably Steven Meisel. Inside its mylar wrapper and metal covers nestled an opulent collection of collages, full colour photographs, monochrome prints and stylized snippets of text (ostensibly written by Madonna's persona Mistress Dita) and depicting the erotic adventures of Madonna and such friends as Naomi Campbell, Isabella Rossellini and Vanilla Ice. Although the volume seems quite tame today, it was hugely controversial upon release, with several stores refusing to carry it. The hype worked, though: the first print run of 1.5 million copies completely sold out worldwide in just three days. This makes Madonna the author of the single most successful coffee table book ever published. Included with the book was a CD in packaging styled to look like a condom wrapper, containing an alternate version of the song Erotica, called Erotic. Bound into the back of the book was a photonovella comic book, Dita in "The Chelsea Girl" consisting of photographs taken by Steven Meisel at the Hotel Chelsea in New York. Sealed first editions of Sex easily reach $ 200 with online resellers today.

3. U2. Achtung Baby 'Users Kit'.
Promo. Island Records U28 [1991]
A lot of the collectibles from today's musicians take the form of advance items sent out to radio stations and music magazines to promote records before their release. These can range from a simple CD-R containing a radio edit of a new single, to extravagant goodie bags produced in the hope of enticing airplay or a favourable review. The marketing machine behind Irish rockers U2 is quite adept at pimping the band in this way. Some of the most deliciously desirable promos were made for the 1991 album Achtung Baby. One of these took the form of a khaki coloured kit bag, curiously labeled as the U2 Achtung Baby (Ahk-toong Bay-bi) 'Users Kit'. This PVC lined nylon bag rolled out to reveal the Achtung Baby album on CD and cassette, a U2-branded poster showing a Trabant on one side and a map of Berlin on the other, an Achtung Baby/Trabant keyring, a dayglo pink and green pocket torch, a screwdriver and a spanner. How you're supposed to use all these items to further your Achtung Baby experience is unclear, and probably best left to the imagination. Apparently only 200 copies of it were made for lucky-lucky record industry people, and a copy in mint condition will fetch well over £ 500.

4. Tori Amos. Y Kant Tori Read.
CD. Atlantic Records 81845-2 [1988]
Very possibly one of the most-often bootlegged recordings out there, the title of this eponymous album by Ms. Amos and her ephemeral band Y Kant Tori Read was inspired by her being expelled from Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland for refusing to read sheet music. Atlantic Records fully abandoned promoting the album only two months after its release. The record, released three years before her 'official' debut Little Earthquakes, sold so poorly that most vinyl versions out there take the form of clipped promotional copies that sold for 99 cents. Apparently it truly is atrocious and doesn't remotely sound like anything Tori has recorded since (i.e. think 80's rock chick - the cover says it all). Tori Amos has distanced herself from it, requesting that no material from it ever be re-released, although some of the songs creep into her live performances now and then. The CD version of this bomb is one of the most sought-after of Tori collectibles: unopened CDs in the original American longbox have sold in excess of $ 1000 at the height of her career.

Note: the author does not own any of the items mentioned in this post, nor does the author have any intention to purchase any of the items in this post. The author thanks all the online second-hand record retailers for the pilfering of images without consent, especially Esprit International Ltd.

Calves of steel

I have a fear of lifts. Not of elevators per sé, of course, but of the kind that tends to get stuck. The lifts in the building where my lab is situated are very scary. A couple of years ago, some springbokkies and chickens in the walk-in freezer upstairs at Animal Science defrosted over the Easter weekend. The resulting fetid soup leaked out of the freezer, across the hallway, and down the service elevator shaft, contaminating each floor on the way down. Apparently, the bacteria-basted chickens had swollen to the size of turkeys by the time somebody noticed something was awry. The mess has since long been cleaned up by a crew in space suits with sanitizing spray that smelled oddly pink, and yet the memory of the stench still prevents me from using the service elevator in the east wing.

The only other lifts in the building are situated in the west wing, and are very old. I suspect that they might well be the first ones Otis ever installed in South Africa. They must have worked superbly in the 1970's, but have become... erm, interesting with age. Often, when you're bent over your centrifuge tubes at your bench, faint cries of help from someone trapped in the lift will break your concentration. Sometimes the LED's indicate that you are on floor 3 when you are on floor 6, sometimes that you are on floor 15. The building has 11 floors. Sometimes the lift doesn't respond to any buttons you press. Sometimes the elevator doors open, and there is no lift. That's right: just a gaping black chasm to welcome you to sudden death, with cables and ratchets moving in the dark. Or the doors will open and the lift won't be level with the floor and you have to step down into it, like a little mobile crawlspace. I once called the lift to go down to ground level: when the doors opened it was there all right, but it just kept moving up, past my floor. Suddenly the doors slammed shut with enough force to sever any limb that would have been in their path. That's dodgy. So much for a safety precaution. So now I climb the eight flights of stairs to my floor several times a day. Not because I believe it to be a great workout. Because I have claustrophobia.