What Record Have I Owned The Longest? (or..... You Own How Many Versions of Star Wars?)

So.... What record I have owned the longest? Well that would be an easy answer and also the most obvious. This one.....

I had this bought for me by my parents when I was 7 years old and I've had it since 1979. A full two years after the film came out and  I remember falling in love with it immediately. John Williams score is so amazing and is so intertwined with the cultural imprint of the film. Very few scores can evoke so strongly the memories of how you felt watching a film like this one.

We had only a few records in our house and so this one was very special for a number of reasons. One: A Double LP! The only one we had in our family's collection. Two: It has a very beautiful gatefold cover.

 And three: It was fucking Star Wars.


 This record probably cemented my lifelong love of soundtracks. A love which has obviously carried on growing  as anyone who knows me (or reads this blog ) can attest.

If you're another collector you're probably going to ask me "Do you still have the poster?" and the answer sadly is no. Yes this Soundtrack came with a beautiful 6-panel fold out poster of artwork by John Berkey.

This poster is unique in that it has Two Millennium Falcons on it. One in the centre and one on the right edge of the poster It is cool to see this image which was obviously done at the concept stage of the film

So what happened to mine?

I gave it to my teacher. Mr Mack. I thought he was the coolest teacher ever and in a way he was. He taught us how to write in secret codes! He needs no more endorsement than that! I remember I bought the record in to show him  and I showed him the poster and he seemed really impressed with it. I just blurted out "You can have it if you like?" He said "Really?" he seemed really shocked by  my generosity and I think he had every intention of giving it back to me later.   He let me hang the poster on the wall of our classroom for the rest of the year and I just don't think I asked to get it back.

That was over 34 years ago and so what has happened since then? Well this.......

I've gotten a few more Star Wars records. A whole lot more. Now the weird thing is I never went out of my way to get so many but they've sort of just proliferated throughout my collection over the last 20 years. Every now and again I would see one cheap and have to pick it up. Besides  I just love the artwork on some of these.  Sometimes you see the artwork on an album and you think "Well fuck it,  for $5 that's gotta be worth something!!"  And that's obviously the case with  "Star Wars and Other Space Themes" by Geoff Love and His Orchestra.

I mean, that's not even Luke Skywalker! I think that's Han Solo! In Luke Skywalker's clothes!! WTF? I don't even thinks that's Princess Leah either, I think that's Priscilla  Presley?? There is a giddy sense of kitsch tackiness  that takes over when you see bootleg Star Wars stuff and this ones no different. I love it. Its weird how they got a majority of the other films referenced on the cover so write and yet Star Wars sooo wrong.

Geoff Love was  a bit of a musical chameleon, glorified session muso and a one man tribute act all rolled into one, He recorded over 30 albums with his band under the name of "Manuel and the Music of the Mountains" but is better known for a series of albums he did doing knock off "sound-a-like" versions of popular film themes.  His list of film theme albums encompass all genres and are known simply by titles such as "Geoff Love and His Orchestra Play Big Terror Movie Themes", "Geoff Love and His Orchestra Plays Big War Movie Themes"  or "Geoff Love Plays Big Bond Movie Themes" or the more exhaustingly titled "Geoff Love's Big Disco Sound Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Other Disco Galactic Themes"  But wait?  I hear you ask I've heard of disco sci fi stuff before!! And right you have which brings me to Meco!!

 

Thats right , a little beat up and with a luridly suggestive cover picture this is the album which spawned the Disco Star wars craze.  I assure the more longsighted of you that they are rather innocently dancing the hustle and not bumping uglies as it may appear at first glance. This may have to be one of the more suggestive pieces of Star Wars ephemera I've known  since C3PO's penis made its appearance on Bubble Gum cards in the 80s 

Want to know more about this crazy lost card from Star Wars in the 70s? Read here.

But back to Meco. If you've never heard it before  its a fantastic piece of disco cheesiness and the below clip just surfaced on the interwebs. I suggest you steal away 3 minutes of your life and watch this from beginning to end. This is the most incongruous and terrible montage of sequences set to Star Wars music ever!!. Its from a Dutch TV show called Toppop from 1977. Truly disastrous to behold........

                                      

 Needless to say it  was a huge hit. It went to number 1 on the US Billboard charts and clung there for two weeks. This is Meco's best known work although he didn't stop there.  . He made more albums and having discovered that maybe giving film scores a new disco remix might be the ticket to a steady pay check just kept coming and coming with the  disco-fever!

Meco_Encounters of Every Kind [Close Encounters of the Third Kind]

Meco Pop Goes to the Movies

Meco- Music from Star Trek and The Black Hole

Impressions of An American Werewolf in London

Meco Superman and Other Superhero themes

Meco-The Wizard of Oz

I guess when you realise your pony only has one trick, you're going to whip that nag til it shits money.

Meco did three other Star Wars records. Empire Strikes Back.

A Christmas Record!!

  

Which believe me is every bit  as tacky  as it sounds.

But his crowning achievement (and one I am particularly proud of owning) is this particular gem. His final Star Wars installment Ewok Celebration

Yes! You are looking at this correctly. That is as a picture of an Ewok paw holding a flute of champagne. This album from 1983 tries to round up Meco's Star Wars output with a final cash in on Return of the Jedi. The LP only has 3 Star Wars related tracks on it. One being a generic medley of Star Wars themes. Pretty much a montage of his other Star Wars disco-fied tracks. The other is a great cover of Lapti Nek the song played by Sy Snootles and the Max Rebo Band in Jabba's Palace in the film. Originally written by John Williams (natch) there is an incredibly awesome article on website Crawdaddy about the strange history behind the song.

                                       

But the best is yet to come. The best part of this album is the titular "Ewok Celebration". A full 5 minutes and 41 seconds of the song that closes ROTJ but with a particularly unique twist. In this clip below (the extended club mix version) at 3:50 there is a rap sung completely in Ewokese!! A redo of the scene where C3PO tells their story to the Ewok chldren, it is complete with sound effects and great name-dropping of all the main characters. It is a particularly fun type of weirdness.

                                        

Star Wars sells records and that is no more evident in the proliferation of Star Wars related stuff on vinyl. As mentioned before you can't go wrong with a good Star Wars Knock off and here is another one.

"The Empire Strikes Back and Other Space Movie Music"  Love the art on this one too.

So delightfully crap. Like a lot of those woeful tattoo portraits you see in Biker magazines where the tattoo looks more like a toxic mutation than the biker's mother or loved one ever did in the accompanying photo, this album has some Star Wars and Star Trek characters looking delightfully shit.

Spock and Kirk have a serious two headed, conjoined twin thing going on. Princess Leia looks like Posh Spice and Luke looks like an Asian kid with down syndrome. This would make an excellent redesign for Mt Rushmore. This would also make the crappest of all craptacular tattoos! I'm thinking across the lower back so that you end up with Kirk and Skywalker  bookending a totally geeked out tramp stamp. Maybe some elven script creating a filigree rising from the crack of your butt?

This record looks terrible but sounds half decent. Although it can't seem to make up it's mind whether its a disco version a la Meco or wether it is in fact a straight up tribute act to  Star Wars a la Geoff Love and I guess in that respect you get the best of both worlds as it tries to be both.

 Which brings me to the next monstrosity and possibly the worst of the bunch. "Music From Star Wars performed by the Electric Moog Orchestra"

 This is possibly the worst Star Wars record ever made which is saying something because all Star Wars albums in some way are trying to pay tribute to the original source material. This record is painfully wooden and  hilariously kitsch all at once and in a way comes off a bit like a piece of hilarious anti-art. The performance in true "Moog Styling" seems to have been sifted through someone's PC sound card circa Windows '95 and strip mined of any kind of warmth or humanity. In that  respect the cover art is genius in that I have never seen cover art so succinctly  depict the music inside more correctly. It is the music of Star Wars, devoid of all fanfare and flourish, played with mathematical precision and just in case you had your hopes up there is an imprint on the cover which reads "not the original soundtrack" with which  to drill the message home. To mix my geek-ology-isms;  "Its Star Wars Jim, but not as we know it"

Of course no Star Wars collection is complete without one storybook and I have taken it upon myself to own the middle one "The Empire Strikes Back"

I've seen the other two in my travels, even in the wild in Melbourne,  but budget constraints have always held me back. Someday I'll be in a position to buy em and have  all three.

Lastly I wanted to share with you something truly special in the Star Wars universe. Its not in the picture above because i wanted it to be unique and I didn't want to spoil the surprise. Some of you might already have heard of this but to those who haven't this is a great little gem. Its this one....

 

The band is Big Daddy. They are on the Rhino Records label and they do hit songs of the 70s and 80s in 1950s rock-a-billy style. Including you guessed it (side one track 4)  Star Wars!

Here it is all its Surf Guitar style!! Gotta love that Theremin as well.

So there you have it. A brief adventure in finding records from both the dark side and light side of the force.

Hope you've enjoyed it. Til next time. May the Force Be With You.

Luke Pencilneck

Happy Birthday Robert Crumb! 70 Yesterday!

It was Robert Crumbs birthday yesterday. (August 30th)  He turned 70. To celebrate I'm gonna post a clip about a colab he did with American Splendor's Harvey Pekar about collecting old Jazz records.

Recent Aquisitions AKA Hobart I Love You

Dinosaur Jr-BUG SST Records 1988

It's been a long weird month at Pencilneck Headquarters but the record collecting hasn't stopped. It still moves forward at  a crackling pace finding rare things and cool finds and the odd healthy dose of WTF??

Lately I've spurned eBay and  I 've been hitting the streets and spending  a bit of time getting to know my local record stores. I left my house the other Saturday and went into Hobart City and decided to hit the crates and see what i could find. 

First port of call was Tommy Gun Records. Hobart's Primo New Vinyl/CD/ Second Hand Vinyl store. They also sell the everpresent black band-logo hoodies so prevalent with the kids these days. As well as a few rock books thrown in the mix. It's a great little store.

They sell plastic record sleeves. The only place close enough that I know of where i can get them instead of the internet. So I made the mistake of "just-popping-in-to-grab-some-sleeves" where I made the perhaps  unwise decision to just  "have-a-look-while-I'm-here"

I walked out with the above gem;  Dinosaur Jr's 1988 album Bug. 4 years before grunge hit big and  8 months before Nirvana's first effort "Bleach" this album is just fucking beautiful and is in my opinion an historical  touchstone for the direction music was taking  around this time. Four other bands were on everyones lips around this time; Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Swervedriver and  Slowdive who were epitomizing the shoegaze band scene emerging from the UK and this album, although coming from a different place of the heart entirely, it  is sometimes lumped in with them for it's wall of fuzzed out psych guitar sound. But as the shoegaze scene would evolve and be eclipsed by Britpop, D Jr would soon break from the pack and establish themselves in their own right.  At the hard edge of what the kids were calling College Rock back in the day this album really put the band and its frontman J Mascis on the map. The real hit from this album was of course Freak Scene, the true meaning of which will elude everyone til the ends of time but to me the song will always be about accepting and overcoming the pain of unrequited love or a relationship that has all it needs but never really takes off.  Being "friendzoned" has never sounded more upbeat.

Next up I went to Soldas Sound Centre, where i found a great amount of stuff for really cheap.

 Lisa Sumner of Just Cool Records put me onto this album. The Soundtrack to the 1982 movie Star Struck. Weirdly enough you see this album allll the time in Soundtrack and Second Hand bins all throughout Australia. I was 10 when it came out. It's a cute film but with  a lot of homegrown things from this era it has a lot of cultural cringe. If you've got three minutes and forty seconds you can live without, give this a go.

See what I mean? Even to this day the Aussie accent sticks out in cinema like dogs balls!!  The actors voices  in the recent Voltron-a-like film "Pacific Rim" is no different.
Next up this little beauty.......

This is definitely one of those "Just for the Cover Alone"  type purchases. I have a few Halloween-y/ Horror-y type  LPs (story book kiddy type one's as opposed to soundtracks) and this one has been on my radar for ages. To actually listen to it though is a bit of a disappointment. Its really more into the Stereo Dynamics and less on the Scaring Hell Out  of Your Neighbors. It comprises of 7 tracks  and most of those are classical pieces or string arrangements. Not even a mention of Blood, Terror or Gore anywhere in track on  here. Put it into the great cover pile though.

Next up.....

More than a ffffeeEEEllllLLiiIInnnNNggg! Totally in love with that song. I've had a soft spot for lots of MOR classic rock lately so when I saw this up for $3 I leapt at the chance. Now all I need is Night Ranger's "Sister Christian" and Journey's "Don't Stop Dreaming"  and I'll have a complete set. Or i could just buy the "Rock of Ages Soundtrack"

This is a pretty obscure choice for me. Normally I despise the Eagles (that might sound weird after that last pick) but nothing has said "boring-commericial-radio-friendly-dinosaur-rock-and-roll-bullshit"  than The Eagles, or so I thought until I discovered that they wrote this track,

That's right! The theme from "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" . Its original title was Journey of the Sorcerer from the album  "One of These Nights" its an amazing piece of near psych-folk- rock and just for self indulgence sake here is the full track

Next up is a total gem. A real WIN when it comes to finding a great steal. The band is Tyrnaround and its a four track EP called "Colour Your Mind"

It was recorded in 1986 in Melbourne. Tyrnaround were a part of the Neo Psychedelic scene. Fuzzed out guitar, swirling vocal harmonies in a minor key, mix the Beatles and the Grateful Dead with a healthy smidge of the Electric Prunes and stir.

This record was played a lot on my friend Sean's radio show which I mentioned before so my 

16  year old self let out a gasp when I saw it on the racks.

These types of records form a very important part of history, not just for Australian music but for the psychedelic music scene in  general. Tyrnaround have been sited as being at the forefront  of the neo-psychedelic scene and their music and in particular the titular track from this EP has been covered  by other psych bands the world over. This record is highly sort after and regularly sells on ebay for upwards of fifty bucks. . Today's price? Twelve Dollars!!

But thats not all. The following week I went to the Glenorchy Showgrounds Market. I got up early and headed out. Well, early for a Sunday about 10am. I looked in a few stalls that had record crates and  found a few "wins". Two Cheech and Chong albums. A Doors Album. A few new 80s singles which I've always wanted. So far, so ordinary until I came across this!!

Soundtrack to the Metal Horror Movie "Trick or Treat" , just sitting there on top of some old James Last albums. So unbelievably stoked to find this record. Its a real treat, all tunes provided by the band FASTWAY, The film is a great 80s Slasher classic the story of devil worshiping satanic shock rocker Sammi Curr who dies in a mysterious hotel fire but when young fan Eddie Weinbauer starts to play Sammi's records backwards (can you see where this might be going?) Sammi starts talking to Eddie from beyond the grave. Like any good horror movie the trailer says it all, and yes that is "Skippy from Family Ties" and Doug Savant from Melrose Place, this also has two great cameos from Gene Simmons (as a Radio DJ) and Ozzy Osbourne (as a TV Preacher extolling the evils of Heavy Metal)

It's a hoot  of a film with some great gory sequences and some great satirizing of the "Heavy Metal Hysteria" which gripped Christianity in the 80s

\

But yeh there are some of the things  which Hobart has unearthed in my crate-digging adventures. While I continue to live here I'm sure there is more to come.

Thanks for reading again folks until next time

Luke Pencilneck

One Sided Records; an Ode to the Humble Radio Spot.

Before the internet, before youtube, before DVD and Blu Ray's hell even before VHS, movies had it tough. I know that sounds like a weird thing to say but hear me out. If you were a movie released  in the 60s or 70s or even the  80s you either lived or died by word of mouth. Sure you had TV and you had Posters and Newspapers but movies  back then didn't have megamillion dollar marketing campaigns, no viral videos, no Redband trailers, no teaser campaigns. And if you were a horror movie forget about it. You played at a handful of theatres then the drive in and that was that. Hopefully the kids weren't making out too much or too high to remember if you were any good or not. Hopefully they told their friends.

Yet even though the budgets are bigger,  the way movies are marketed hasn't changed. Studios have always gone for the Bait and Switch / Smash and Grab marketing model they've always used. They saturate the market with hype until nobody can resist  but slap down their cash and see what the hype is about. Then the movie doesn't live up to the hype and so the audience is disappointed. Rinse and repeat. Back in the day they  just used different tools to achieve it.

One of those tools was the Radio Spot. A glorious little piece of movie magic which if you look hard enough  you can still find hiding in  the crates if you know where to look. (By crates I mean the internet and the place to look  is eBay)

The Radio Spot was a 45 or sometimes a 12" record (and sometimes a reel to reel tape)  given to radio station DJs which often had movie trailers on  them. Some were ads for Coca Cola, or General Motors. Some were even of Frank Zappa and the Beach Boys encouraging people to vote but most were designed to get your movie out there. Comprising of 3 tracks (or spots) one usually lasting for 60 seconds and then another two of 30 seconds they were little audio trailers  played between songs or after news segments to promote films of the day.

And get this, most of them were one sided! One sided! How cool is that? Also these records were never kept for very long. The movie finished and the radio spot was likely thrown in the bin. This of course makes them very rare and highly sort after collectibles. As always the older the movie or the more bankable the franchise the prices for these items can and do go through the roof.

Case in point.....

That's a very expensive 3 minutes and 34 seconds.

Another great things  about them (especially when it comes to the Horror/Exploitation genre) is they were so over the top. Like I mentioned before about Hollywood's "Buy-My-Snake-Oil" tactics when it comes to film marketing, horror films were the prime example. You had to draw people in. Your target market had to feel as if they couldn't miss out on it before  they left the cinema to tell their friends to  give it a miss. If your picture promised  "Boobs, Blood or  Beasts" (or in most cases all three) you exploited peoples curiosity just as much as the supposed "dignity" of the  actors or actresses on screen. In that way it is suffice to say the Exploitation genre has always been a  two way street. But here's what I mean. This is a Radio Spot for Ted V Mikels' schlock disasterpiece  "The Astro-Zombies". Listen and tell me if it isn't trying to reach into your psych, grab hold of your id and just strangle it....

Watch it and you die a thousand deaths! Brilliant! or this one for American International's Frogs!

Or this one which I think is definitely a cut above the others because it doesn't try too hard. It knows its going to  scare the crap out of you but what more would you expect from this classic gem?

Brilliant right? IN fact the other one is so good we might as well go for a twofer.........

Thanks to the internet they have mostly been recorded and put up on youtube and other file sharing sites. When I DJ'd the closing party of "The Stranger With My Face"  Horror Film Festival here in Hobart, I interspersed the selected soundtracks  with lots of cool radio spots. I have a very cocktail lounge/listening club vibe to my DJing (film scores don't lend themselves to "Wave Your Hands In the Air"  type antics) so they fit the atmospherics perfectly.

I just love these things to death, And I love how they all have to have the Ratings Certificate at the end. This one's a classic! Tons of reverb the classic line "Violently Raw Brutally Frank it had to be made that way!!" and the message at the end "The R Rating will be strictly enforced"

These are just tremendous gems, and if I were able to afford the exhorbitant prices on eBay I would snap them up all the time. They're just  fabulous pieces of ephemera and an art form which sadly has gone the way of the Dodo.  Outmoded and made extinct by the steady march of media technology. Anyway I hope you enjoyed my little history lesson/ excursion. If you see any around your local record shop I'll pay you top dollar for them. Within reason.

Luke Pencilneck

When Cool is Still Just Cool Enough (An Interview wth Etsy seller Just Cool Records)

Collecting is cool and in the age of the internet it's even cooler. For one it puts you in touch with other collectors. People you otherwise would've never been able to meet years ago you can now say hi to with the click of  a mouse. Also it can put you in touch with other people who might have records you want, or want records you have. Or maybe both and you just want to groove on the records you share.

Lisa  Sumner is a rare example because she is all three. She's into Soundtracks, Metal and Punk/Post Punk and 80s gear and under the moniker of Just Cool Records she also a seller. She runs her own shop on Etsy (JustCoolRecords - natch!) and boy does she sell some good stuff.

Very cool right? Beat Street, The Story of Return of the  Jedi, Pac-Man Fever, Conan, Tolkien reading Lord of the Rings and it doesn't stop there. She even sells cool record cases and even rare cassettes!!! Remember those??

Wind on Lead Pencil Optional

She also has recently listed some amazing  Sci Fi & Horror holy grails which she has been selling  on commision for a close friend whose fallen on hard times. I'm not sure what those hard times entail  but  by the look of these items they were not easy to just cough up. You can also tell she wants to make sure they go to good homes just as much as he does.

So naturally I thought she was the perfect pick for our next interview here at Pencil Neck Record Geek
so I got on the inter-blower and sent her some questions and here are her awesome answers.

Enjoy,.....

How old are you and where are you located?

Well I’m gonna have to go with the adage that it’s not polite to ask a lady her age, but suffice it to say I’m older than you. ; )

I am located in the Pacific Northwest, in Washington State.

How long have you been running your etsy shop?

My shop will have its 4th anniversary in October. My, how time flies...

Where do you get your records from?

Anywhere, and everywhere I can. Garage sales, estate sales, local record shops, online, trades with friends and strangers...

You sell some amazing stuff. How do you decide what to keep and what to sell?

Haha! Well, thank you so much for saying so. Sometimes it is indeed difficult to decide whether to keep or sell particular records because my inventory is dangerously close to my personal collection. That being said, I have a hard time keeping records that are extremely rare/desirable/expensive, because invariably I’m behind on the bills, and I love having as many cool records as I can in my shop.

How big is your collection and do you collect from any specific genre (i.e. soundtracks) or do you collect other kinds?

Surprisingly, my collection is not as large as one would think, roughly only 600 records. My collection is very specific, and I don’t like anything extraneous clouding it up. Aside from soundtracks, I collect most any Halloween and/or Horror related records, old school Punk/Post Punk, New Wave, Pop and Rock. Cool children’s records, 1960’s French Pop, torch singers, 1950’s & 1960’s crooners and rock-n-roll. A little disco, buttrock, hard rock and heavy metal. Basically nothing past 1990, with only a few exceptions (White Stripes and a few others).

Here’s a shot of most of my collection. The records facing front represent the records/genres in each cubby behind it. 

 

   

How long have you been collecting?

Well that’s a two-part answer. I of course grew up in a time where it was pretty much records and cassettes only, so I started buying my own records at a fairly young age. Then, as it does, life got in the way of my collecting, and after many moves and the rise of the almighty CD, I stopped collecting for about 20 years. But I picked it up again roughly 5 years ago, and will never again let life get in the way of my passion for vinyl.

Do you collect for love or money or both?

Definitely both. The more record hunting I do, the more hooked I get. And there’s nothing like the feeling of finding a rare record for someone who has been searching for it for 20 years.

What's your most favourite record?

Oh good lord, I couldn’t possibly answer with just one...so I’ll give you my top three in Soundtracks: (in no particular order)

1. Return of the Living Dead Soundtrack
 

 

2. Texas Chainsaw Massacre II Soundtrack 

3. StarStruck Soundtrack (Australian film 1983)

Although my recently acquired Maniac Soundtrack (2013) is fast becoming a favorite, I can’t stop playing it!

 

What's the most valuable record you own?

Ooh that’s an easy one, The Monster Club Soundtrack. Ridiculously rare and worth a few hundred dollars. Priceless to me, it’ll go to my grave.

What's your holy grail? What record(s) have you been looking everywhere for but still elude you?

Hmm...that’s tough because I have recently gotten the two most desirable records that I have been wanting for a long, long time; The Cramps Big Beat From Badsville and the Nosferatu soundtrack--the German pressing with this particular cover.

What was the first record you bought?   Do you still have it?

Haha! It was Adam and the Ants Antmusic EP from 1979. And yes, I’m pleased to say it was one of the very few records that survived my many moves and poor decisions.

What draws you to collecting Soundtracks? Was there one clear record/film/soundtrack  that started you off?

I have always been an avid movie fan, from the time I was a small child. But music has always been my first love so I suppose it was just a natural progression to get into soundtracks. But what got me into selling them and more specifically specializing in them was the Legend soundtrack (Tangerine Dream version 1985). It was the perfect niche market for me to get into because of my love and knowledge of movies, and an excellent building block for my growing business.

I started selling media 10 years ago and by total accident I found that there were many soundtracks (on CD) that were out of print and worth a ton of money. That also fueled my desire to expand my knowledge of soundtracks and discover which were desirable and highly collectible. Now, I always pay attention to a film’s soundtrack, especially if there is a vinyl release of it.

So there you go friends or fans. Another cool chat with someone at the very hub of the vinyl revival. Make sure you check out the Just Cool Records Blog and Etsy Store and she has just let it out that you can grab her great stuff at Discogs as well. Drop by, check out her wax, hop onto her blog and maybe if you're keen help her help out her friend and buy some great Horror LPs.

Til Next time peeps 

Luke Pencilneck