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Articles: The Greatest Record Finds Of All Time 2008


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On ‎21‎/‎03‎/‎2008 at 13:17, Ian Dewhirst said:

Following on from the Graham Warr thread, I figured that this is the time to start collating some of those UNBELIEVABLE U.S. Northern finds. Or unbelievable disappointments too.

 

From experience, it's quite often the unexpected ones which turn out to be killers!

 

So here's an example from me, just to kick things off....

 

In 1988 I was stuck in a pretty boring job in between my more exciting jobs when I got a phone call from my ex boss who used to own the Warehouse in Leeds. He'd recently moved out to Denver, Colorado and was thinking about opening a club out there, so he invited me over for 10 days and offered to send the plane tickets!

 

Which was perfect! Anything to get out of the MCPS in Streatham which was slowly killing me.....

 

Also, at the back of my mind, I figured that Denver is in the middle of nowhere so the chances of any Northern collectors actually CHOOSING to go to Denver or even Colorado was remote - they'd have to go roughly 1000 miles from anywhere else to the middle of cowboy country to look for Northern. Unlikely.....

 

So I got there, got settled in at my bosses pad and then began a week of trawling every store in Denver whilst looking at potential club premises.

 

And.......nothing!

 

A complete bust.

 

Crap.

 

I couldn't believe it. Quite often there'd be promising situations, i.e., plenty of the right labels from the right era and cheap. But somehow there were never the right artists or smaller labels and WAAAY too much Country & Western for my liking.....

 

It got to day 9 - the day before I was due to fly back and there was one store about 15 miles out of Denver which I hadn't tried yet. The only problem was that my ex-boss was busy that day and wouldn't be able to run me over there. I'd have to get there via about three buses which would be a pain in the ass.

 

Anyway, I set off. It took me almost 2 hours to get there but when I got there my heart started pounding! The shop looked FANTASTIC with 100ft long racks of 45's from floor to ceiling. So I got digging....

 

And nothing! Tons of the right labels, lots of the right artists but NO NORTHERN!!

 

The shop owner even let me in the back room to go through the unsorted stuff so I got covered in cobwebs, rat shit and dust going through hundred-count boxes of Luther Ingram, Staple Singers and Bar-Kays records but still NO NORTHERN!

 

After a couple of hours and covered in shit from head-to-toe, I called it a day and headed back to the bus stop for the trek back. And dammit, I just missed a bus and the next one was in an hour. So I had an hour to kill in the middle of Buttfuck, Denver with no records!

 

Great.

 

So I went into a burger bar and got a burger and coffee and went to sit at the window booth. As I was chomping my burger I was casually looking out of the window looking across a parking lot and, beyond that a dual carriageway, when in the distance, at the other side of the dual carriageway, I saw a sign which said "1940 Jukebox Co".

 

I wasn't that excited but I had a bit more time to kill and I like those early Wurlitzer jukeboxes anyway, so I thought I'd have a wander over there and have a look. Nothing better to do.....

 

So I crossed the dual carriageway and walked up to a huge building which had a shop front with a couple of Wurlitzer jukeboxes in the window. I looked at 'em for a while and then casually wandered into the shop.

 

As I went through the door into the shop, I noticed an alcove on the right-hand side which was roped-off but which was full of racks of records in what looked to be strict alphabetical order.

 

I still wasn't that excited - I thought they'd all be ex-jukebox records, 'oldies but goodies' or the dreaded Ferlin Husky or Merle Haggard stuff which Denver was filled with.

 

There was a long-haired bearded native Indian bloke at the counter, so I wandered up and said "Wow. Love these jukeboxes man. What do you play on 'em"?

 

He said: "I've got over a million records in there (pointing at the alcove), so we ain't gonna run out anytime soon son".

 

I said: "Wow. A million ay? Are they for sale"?

 

He said: "Yep. As a matter of fact it's your lucky day son. I'm having a sale, so anything you want is 25 cents each."

 

And with that, he walked around the counter, down to the alcove, unhooked the rope to the entrance and ushered me in.

 

I took a deep breath. This actually looked promising. The alphabetizing of his stock was incredible with the 'A' section starting off with A, AA, AB, ABE, etc, etc. Far too intricate for just ex-juke-box titles. But it could still all be Country and Western though so I still wasn't getting too excited....

 

So, I thought what record have I never managed to find in all my previous trips to the U.S.? One I really like preferably.....? And it had always bugged me that I'd never managed to find a Stanley Mitchell "Get It Baby" one of my favourite records of all time.

 

So I went to the 'M' section, scrolled along - M..., MA..., ME..., MI...., MIT..., MITCH.........

 

And found 2 mint white promo copies of "Get It Baby" on Dynamo!

 

That was when my heart started pounding!

 

Everything was in there! All the major label stuff, lots of tiny indie labels, tons of New York, L.A., Detroit and Chicago goodies.

 

I ended up staying there until 12.00pm that night. The owner even locked me up in the shop so he could get some dinner. I bought 2,800 records for $700 and made close to £30,000 and massively increased my Northern collection at the time. It was easily the best hit I've ever had in my entire life. The 'Holy Grail' in fact.

 

But only around 10-11 hours to cover a million records? I had to go back to the UK the next day, so the only thing I could do was target things I could remember and adopt a kind of 'scattergun' approach which is absolutely the worst way to clear a warehouse.

 

And to this day, I wake up in a cold sweat every so often, dreaming of what I left behind at the 1940 Jukebox Company.

 

A few months after my visit, Dave Raistrick found the place and had a hell of a hit himself. But he couldn't understand why a lot of the obvious titles weren't there until he asked the guy whether anyone else from England had been there and the guy said. "Well there was this tall, dark-haired guy here a couple of months ago...........".

 

I caught up with Dave a year or two later at a record fair and he said "Denver, Colorado. Was that you"?

 

And I said "Yep"!

 

 

Got loads more but I thought I'd kick off with a monster. I know Tim, Johnny, Ady, Kev and most U.S. crate-diggers have their own great tales, so let's hear 'em. It doesn't have to be a successful story. I've had some monumental disappointments too. But it's always good to share the tales LOL.....

 

Ian D :thumbup:

fantastic ian 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 10 months later...

On 21/03/2008 at 19:27, Ian Dewhirst said:

 

 

Haha LOL. That was another great accident.

 

I was in east L.A. driving around looking for a Saturday morning 'swap-meet' (or flea market) and somehow I just couldn't find the place where the swap meet was meant to be. I was driving mile after mile along all these roads with heavy industrial complexes and factories as far as the eye could see but no sign of any swap meet.

 

As I was driving along one of these bleak, endless roads I noticed a hamburger stall coming up on the roadside with quite a few people milling around, so I slowed down, figuring I could ask someone where the swap meet might be. It was then that I noticed that there was a sort of household goods market right next to the hamburger van.

 

So I parked up, 'cos I fancied a coffee and there were a couple of coffee type stalls within the market. So I got a coffee and had a mooch around the market. It was all stepladders, dusters, cleaning fluids, tool kits, buckets, bowls and thousands of other household goods. I'd pretty much covered the whole market when I noticed a stall nearest the road which had a couple of boxes of 45's in amongst all the household shit....

 

I wandered over, set my coffee down and started flicking through the 45's. It really wasn't very promising - I expected lots of junk and some of the records looked beaten up.......but.......

 

Bingo!

 

I found "We Were Made For Each Other" - Terrible Tom on Maverick.......and then another one!

 

And then I found "You Don't Love Me Anymore" - Johnny Caswell on a pink Decca demo several records later. Things were looking up suddenly. After I'd gone through both boxes I'd found a few more so-so's - Candace Love, Fred Hughes and a couple of others, I asked the guy how much they were and he said, "Oh, just gimme 25 cents each man". So I gave him a couple of bucks and said, "Wow. I found a few things here. It's a shame you don't have any more."

 

The guy looked at me and said "You want more 45's"?

 

I said, "Yeah, that's what I'm looking for".

 

And the guy said, "Yo, come around here" and waved me round to the back of his stall where there was a huge rain-soaked tarpulin covering an area about 20' x 20'...

 

He then grabbed hold of one side of the tarpulin and threw it back to reveal......

 

about 20,000 45's!

 

He laughed and said "Help yourself. Good luck."

 

They were in a right state! Some of 'em were warped from the sun, others had been wet at some time and were water-damaged and most of the sleeves were falling apart or rotting.

 

But everything away from the edges of the tarpulin and in the middle of all this plastic was fine!

 

I found 50 x "Love Factory" - Eloise Laws on Music Merchant, 50 x "Memories" by the Segments Of Time on Sussex and at least a couple of hundred other goodies which were all in decent nick considering the circumstances.

 

I also found the rarest record ever on the Belgium scene at the time - "Heartless Lover" by the Dick Baker Combo on Kool Kat (the L.A. Kool Kat, not the Detroit one). I sold it a week later for £1500 (a huge amount of money in '76 - the guy flew in from Belgium to collect it personally).

 

So a shit day turned into a good one in the end.

 

Whilst I figured I'd pretty much cleared everything on that visit, a couple of years later I was back in L.A. and tried to find the place again but just couldn't remember where it was. But later that day I ended up in Redondo Beach and went into a furniture store/junk shop and found a whole bunch of great stuff from New York and Philly labels - the Superlatives, Del-Larks, Lou Courtney etc, etc. It turns out the guy had just re-located there from the East Coast!

 

All this was great, but I also remember Arthur Fenn having a fantastic hit several years later from a pressing plant I'd been to about 30 times - I think it was Monarch! He somehow got shown a back room that was packed with killers and came back loaded to the gills with Joe Hicks, Larry Atkins and bundles of other L.A. pressed goodies.

 

Ya win some, ya lose some.....

 

But what I'm doing here is trying to encourage Graham Warr and everyone else to share some tales with us. When he got to the U.S. it was Virgin territory for hunting Northern, so he had some great finds (see other thread). Also Kev Roberts hit in Baltimore was historic and the tales of Soussan's antics and Colony Records in New York are legendary...........

 

 

Ian D :thumbsup:

It was the Alco pressing plant Ian. Arthur and I made a killing on around 1,500 x 45s in 100 count boxes. Must have been around 1979.

 

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For sure finding £1000 rarities for 10 cents must be fantastic, but imagine finding the same record before it was famous...

The lucky blighters who achieved this in the early 70s were truly blessed. 

I remember speaking with Gwent Owens in LA in 2004, and she was actually selling some of her own records from her collection..

Not a Velgo label in site, but loads of Beatles and other brit pop stuff she loved.

If only she had saved her own stuff, she would have been a wealthy Lady.

Ed

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  • 2 weeks later...

When preparing to leave my favorite record store some years ago,I looked down and on the floor sat the one gem I had been searching for over twenty years[Neverending Impressions]in mint condition,I didn't know whether to laugh or cry with joy so I just swooped up this gem and smiled all the way home with what I call The Impressions best LP,and it's in my collection.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest woolie mark
2 hours ago, Steve Foran said:

Any further news on the book that was being written about record hunting? I think Andy Dyson was doing it. IF IT HAS BEEN MENTIONED BEFORE sorry I must have missed it. 

Cheers

Steve

I think Andy is helping Gilly to finish his book?

@Gilly

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  • 5 weeks later...
On 21/03/2008 at 13:17, Ian Dewhirst said:

Following on from the Graham Warr thread, I figured that this is the time to start collating some of those UNBELIEVABLE U.S. Northern finds. Or unbelievable disappointments too.

 

From experience, it's quite often the unexpected ones which turn out to be killers!

 

So here's an example from me, just to kick things off....

 

In 1988 I was stuck in a pretty boring job in between my more exciting jobs when I got a phone call from my ex boss who used to own the Warehouse in Leeds. He'd recently moved out to Denver, Colorado and was thinking about opening a club out there, so he invited me over for 10 days and offered to send the plane tickets!

 

Which was perfect! Anything to get out of the MCPS in Streatham which was slowly killing me.....

 

Also, at the back of my mind, I figured that Denver is in the middle of nowhere so the chances of any Northern collectors actually CHOOSING to go to Denver or even Colorado was remote - they'd have to go roughly 1000 miles from anywhere else to the middle of cowboy country to look for Northern. Unlikely.....

 

So I got there, got settled in at my bosses pad and then began a week of trawling every store in Denver whilst looking at potential club premises.

 

And.......nothing!

 

A complete bust.

 

Crap.

 

I couldn't believe it. Quite often there'd be promising situations, i.e., plenty of the right labels from the right era and cheap. But somehow there were never the right artists or smaller labels and WAAAY too much Country & Western for my liking.....

 

It got to day 9 - the day before I was due to fly back and there was one store about 15 miles out of Denver which I hadn't tried yet. The only problem was that my ex-boss was busy that day and wouldn't be able to run me over there. I'd have to get there via about three buses which would be a pain in the ass.

 

Anyway, I set off. It took me almost 2 hours to get there but when I got there my heart started pounding! The shop looked FANTASTIC with 100ft long racks of 45's from floor to ceiling. So I got digging....

 

And nothing! Tons of the right labels, lots of the right artists but NO NORTHERN!!

 

The shop owner even let me in the back room to go through the unsorted stuff so I got covered in cobwebs, rat shit and dust going through hundred-count boxes of Luther Ingram, Staple Singers and Bar-Kays records but still NO NORTHERN!

 

After a couple of hours and covered in shit from head-to-toe, I called it a day and headed back to the bus stop for the trek back. And dammit, I just missed a bus and the next one was in an hour. So I had an hour to kill in the middle of Buttfuck, Denver with no records!

 

Great.

 

So I went into a burger bar and got a burger and coffee and went to sit at the window booth. As I was chomping my burger I was casually looking out of the window looking across a parking lot and, beyond that a dual carriageway, when in the distance, at the other side of the dual carriageway, I saw a sign which said "1940 Jukebox Co".

 

I wasn't that excited but I had a bit more time to kill and I like those early Wurlitzer jukeboxes anyway, so I thought I'd have a wander over there and have a look. Nothing better to do.....

 

So I crossed the dual carriageway and walked up to a huge building which had a shop front with a couple of Wurlitzer jukeboxes in the window. I looked at 'em for a while and then casually wandered into the shop.

 

As I went through the door into the shop, I noticed an alcove on the right-hand side which was roped-off but which was full of racks of records in what looked to be strict alphabetical order.

 

I still wasn't that excited - I thought they'd all be ex-jukebox records, 'oldies but goodies' or the dreaded Ferlin Husky or Merle Haggard stuff which Denver was filled with.

 

There was a long-haired bearded native Indian bloke at the counter, so I wandered up and said "Wow. Love these jukeboxes man. What do you play on 'em"?

 

He said: "I've got over a million records in there (pointing at the alcove), so we ain't gonna run out anytime soon son".

 

I said: "Wow. A million ay? Are they for sale"?

 

He said: "Yep. As a matter of fact it's your lucky day son. I'm having a sale, so anything you want is 25 cents each."

 

And with that, he walked around the counter, down to the alcove, unhooked the rope to the entrance and ushered me in.

 

I took a deep breath. This actually looked promising. The alphabetizing of his stock was incredible with the 'A' section starting off with A, AA, AB, ABE, etc, etc. Far too intricate for just ex-juke-box titles. But it could still all be Country and Western though so I still wasn't getting too excited....

 

So, I thought what record have I never managed to find in all my previous trips to the U.S.? One I really like preferably.....? And it had always bugged me that I'd never managed to find a Stanley Mitchell "Get It Baby" one of my favourite records of all time.

 

So I went to the 'M' section, scrolled along - M..., MA..., ME..., MI...., MIT..., MITCH.........

 

And found 2 mint white promo copies of "Get It Baby" on Dynamo!

 

That was when my heart started pounding!

 

Everything was in there! All the major label stuff, lots of tiny indie labels, tons of New York, L.A., Detroit and Chicago goodies.

 

I ended up staying there until 12.00pm that night. The owner even locked me up in the shop so he could get some dinner. I bought 2,800 records for $700 and made close to £30,000 and massively increased my Northern collection at the time. It was easily the best hit I've ever had in my entire life. The 'Holy Grail' in fact.

 

But only around 10-11 hours to cover a million records? I had to go back to the UK the next day, so the only thing I could do was target things I could remember and adopt a kind of 'scattergun' approach which is absolutely the worst way to clear a warehouse.

 

And to this day, I wake up in a cold sweat every so often, dreaming of what I left behind at the 1940 Jukebox Company.

 

A few months after my visit, Dave Raistrick found the place and had a hell of a hit himself. But he couldn't understand why a lot of the obvious titles weren't there until he asked the guy whether anyone else from England had been there and the guy said. "Well there was this tall, dark-haired guy here a couple of months ago...........".

 

I caught up with Dave a year or two later at a record fair and he said "Denver, Colorado. Was that you"?

 

And I said "Yep"!

 

 

Got loads more but I thought I'd kick off with a monster. I know Tim, Johnny, Ady, Kev and most U.S. crate-diggers have their own great tales, so let's hear 'em. It doesn't have to be a successful story. I've had some monumental disappointments too. But it's always good to share the tales LOL.....

 

Ian D :thumbup:

Hi Ian I really enjoyed that reading Abart how it started. Sounded like you were having a The badest and unluckiest day's ever but.if you keep a clear head don't let it get to you it comes Up Trump's IAN Your A Top Man IAN. And you got rewarded with the fruits of The vynil with perciveering mate I'll take my Hat of to ya all The best Ian mate TEK CARE. DAVE WAKEFIELD

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On 27/03/2008 at 09:39, Guest said:

The greatest finds are the ones where you've spent all day looking through 45s and found virtually nothing, then in the very last handful! Bam! A great record.. smile.gif you can't beat that feeling.

I made the fatal mistake in starting to read this thread from the beginning....bang went all my other plans and stuff that I had to do. Read the first couple o' pages slowly but managed to lure myself away. Phew!

Probably sometime mid 1990's whilst driving up the coast north of Miami I stumbled upon a small one room record store in the middle of nowhere. On entering the shop I spied a couple of very large cardboard boxes of 45's under a table on the floor.

And whilst I didn't spend all day there (being the obsessive I am) I'm sure I spent the best part of an afternoon on mi knees wading through all the records from top to bottom.

My memory reckons I didn't find a single thing - but in virtually my last couple o' handfuls - a lovely Revilot white demo appeared in front of my eyes. Wow Darrell Banks "Open the door to your heart" thank you very much. I paid for it and left the shop.

I reckon that the only reason that record was still there was because previous people had missed it or had found it but then misplaced it. Oh well.

Derek

I still have the said record.

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  • 3 months later...

done this a few times, once in a 'one street' town in NWS in Australia.  Crap place but unbelievably had a record shop on two levels, spent the whole day, really pissed my wife off who wanted to continue our journey to Queensland... and I got a single mint WD of Garland Green - Just a case of Loving you...   not an expensive record, but in its original sleeve and a lovely example... I toiled for that bit of plastic, sweat and tears baby!!

 

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