Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Websites podcast. My
Speaker 1: guest today is the King of Memorabilia, Jeff Gold. Jeff,
Speaker 1: good to have you on the podcast. Good to be here, Bob. Okay,
Speaker 1: So there's all this scuttle but about Elvis that the
Speaker 1: value of his memorability is going down because his audience
Speaker 1: is dying off. Is that true? To some extent yes,
Speaker 1: and to some extent no. The A level stuff is
Speaker 1: going for more than it's ever gone before. The mid
Speaker 1: range stuff is kind of deteriorating. The low end of
Speaker 1: the market is really deteriorating. So people want the best
Speaker 1: stuff and they're willing to pay crazy prices for it.
Speaker 1: So it's just like concert tickets, it's the cheaper ones
Speaker 1: that are harder to sell. So you have a website,
Speaker 1: record Mecca, tell us how you develop the website? Well, Uh,
Speaker 1: as a teenager, I started buying uh rare Jimi Hendrix
Speaker 1: records or Jimmy Hendrick records, and I started trying to
Speaker 1: collect as many as I could find, and that entailed
Speaker 1: going to swap meats and going to flea markets and
Speaker 1: UH talking to anybody who might have anything, and along
Speaker 1: my travels I started finding things that I recognized were
Speaker 1: rare and buying them to sell them to pay for
Speaker 1: my rare Jimi Hendricks Records. And uh. This turned into
Speaker 1: a business for me as a kid. And so I
Speaker 1: would go to England once a year, twice a year,
Speaker 1: bring a suitcase full of rare American stuff, sell it
Speaker 1: and trade it for rare English stuff, bring it back
Speaker 1: and sell that in the Hollywood Swap Meet, which was
Speaker 1: in the shadow of the Capitol Records Tower. And I
Speaker 1: was making a lot of cash for a young person.
Speaker 1: And I went to work for Rhino Records. That was
Speaker 1: the first employee where I met you, and UH just
Speaker 1: became an entrepreneurial guy. I uh and was doing this.
Speaker 1: It was getting bigger and bigger. I opened up an office.
Speaker 1: I started doing mail order. But when I graduated from college,
Speaker 1: I thought, I really don't want to be going to
Speaker 1: the Salvation Army in Oxnarden buying who forty five is
Speaker 1: a fifty year old? So I got a business degree
Speaker 1: from USC UH leveraged that into a job A and
Speaker 1: M Records, but was continuing to collect things the whole time.
Speaker 1: And when I left the record business after eighteen or
Speaker 1: nineteen years at A and M and then Warner Brothers.
Speaker 1: I was still collecting records. I had gotten very heavily
Speaker 1: into the pre internet online world and then the Internet
Speaker 1: online world, which sidebar. We started the first participation in
Speaker 1: that at Warner Brothers, myself, at a few other people,
Speaker 1: and so I just got a whole hog back into it.
Speaker 1: And it was the early days of eBay and the
Speaker 1: early days of web browsers, and uh, I never stopped. Okay,
Speaker 1: So this point in time, let's go back to the beginning.
Speaker 1: So you're from l A. How old were you when
Speaker 1: you started to trade records sell records? Maybe fifteen? And
Speaker 1: how old were you when you made your first trip
Speaker 1: to the UK? Uh? Nineteen? Okay? So what was it
Speaker 1: like growing up in the classic rock era in southern
Speaker 1: California where a lot of this scene was happening. It
Speaker 1: was fantastic. Um people sold bootlegs at swat meets. The
Speaker 1: the record sat Meat that I talked about before, initially
Speaker 1: started on Sunday mornings, and everybody was getting more and
Speaker 1: more competitive and would get there at you know, I'll
Speaker 1: get there at seven, I'll get there at six, I'll
Speaker 1: get there at five, And eventually people including myself, started
Speaker 1: getting there at ten o'clock at Saturday night and spending
Speaker 1: the night in your car hanging out with your friends
Speaker 1: so you could get the best position be there. When
Speaker 1: people opened up at the earliest, stuff started selling earliest earlier.
Speaker 1: I remember Al Wilson from Canned Heat, Uh would set
Speaker 1: up there and had had a beat up old van
Speaker 1: and would sell posters. It was a wild West and
Speaker 1: it was fantastic. They were used record stores everywhere, which
Speaker 1: I know you experienced and uh, uh you know, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna write a blog post on what record collecting was
Speaker 1: like in the pre internet days for those younger people. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know. I collected Hendricks Records, that was my first priority,
Speaker 1: and then David Bowie Records. There were no discographies. You
Speaker 1: had to find somebody who knew somebody who had something
Speaker 1: or had heard of a rare record, and tracked them
Speaker 1: down and call him on the phone enough till they
Speaker 1: find something they wanted so you could trade it from
Speaker 1: them or prior out of their prior, out of their hands.
Speaker 1: But it was very, very exciting. Okay. I read a
Speaker 1: whole book written by some college professor about Al Wilson
Speaker 1: supposedly he was even though Bob High, the big, large
Speaker 1: guy who was lead singer of Cantet, and although al
Speaker 1: Wilson sang the hits that Al Wilson was like a
Speaker 1: real blues purist who knew everything about it was, you know,
Speaker 1: driving force in that world. Is that something you're aware of?
Speaker 1: You know? I know those guys were very serious record
Speaker 1: collectors and music obsessives. And I actually bought a poster
Speaker 1: collection of Larry Taylor, who was the bass player and
Speaker 1: can't eat, and he had just incredible stuff that he
Speaker 1: would pick up. You know, he was one of those guys.
Speaker 1: I also bought a lot of stuff from the widow
Speaker 1: of Sterling Morrison from the Velvet Underground, and occasionally you'd
Speaker 1: find people like that who just wanted everything having to
Speaker 1: do with their band and would uh as Sterling's wife
Speaker 1: told me, you know, if they didn't have a poster
Speaker 1: for him to take home, he'd rip it down off
Speaker 1: the wall. And you know, most artists, as you know,
Speaker 1: don't care about this stuff. I did some consulting for
Speaker 1: Bill Wyman of the Stones, who's one of the probably
Speaker 1: the pre eminent guy who saved absolutely everything, and uh,
Speaker 1: I love talking to those guys, let's stay with Wyman
Speaker 1: for a second. Because he he had everything, They did
Speaker 1: a movie about him, and then all of a sudden
Speaker 1: he decided to sell stuff. What was going on there?
Speaker 1: You know? I have an NDA with Bill Winman, if
Speaker 1: you can believe that, but not disclosure agreement, but suffice
Speaker 1: to say, he had just an enormous amount of stuff,
Speaker 1: has an enormous amount of stuff and sold some but
Speaker 1: certainly far from all. And that movie, the Quiet One,
Speaker 1: really shows the depths of his collecting. It's it's really
Speaker 1: amazing if people haven't seen it well to the degree
Speaker 1: you can talk about it. What kind of relationship did
Speaker 1: you have with Bill Wyman relative to his collection? I
Speaker 1: was consulting with him, and I spent a week at
Speaker 1: his side going through stuff, which was probably the greatest
Speaker 1: thrill in my fanboy record collector, music business life. He
Speaker 1: remembers everything, he's kept a diary since he was ten. Uh,
Speaker 1: just unbelievable. And what did he want from you? What
Speaker 1: was he hiring you to do? You know, I really
Speaker 1: can't talk about that, unfortunately. I just have to be
Speaker 1: respectful to him. Okay, okay, so let's go back, Let's
Speaker 1: leave memorabilia aside. So you grew up in l A.
Speaker 1: How did you actually get into music. My parents had
Speaker 1: a suitcase stereo and they bought herbal Bert and the
Speaker 1: Tijuana Brass records, and I remember hearing the Lonely Bowl,
Speaker 1: which was on his Lonely Bowl album and his first hit,
Speaker 1: and just going nuts over. I just became obsessed with
Speaker 1: that song to play it over and over and over
Speaker 1: again as a six or seven year old, and uh,
Speaker 1: it was amazing. Later going to work for her and
Speaker 1: meeting salt Lake, the guy who had been in the
Speaker 1: bar Mitzvah band with Urban written that song, and just
Speaker 1: fawning over him, which I imagined didn't happen that often
Speaker 1: for this guy who was probably eighty at the time. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then my parents went to Palm Springs and they
Speaker 1: brought me back as a gift the Beatles I want
Speaker 1: to hold your hands single Creed Sullivan because they've read
Speaker 1: about it in Time magazine and that was my first
Speaker 1: record that I owned myself, and I went nuts and
Speaker 1: just played that over and over and over. And when
Speaker 1: they were on Ed Sullivan, I saw that and it
Speaker 1: blew my mind. And I remember my some friend of
Speaker 1: My parents had given me a Mr. Ed the Talking
Speaker 1: Horse record and a couple of kiddie records, and I
Speaker 1: made my mother take me to the record store they'd
Speaker 1: come from in Beverly Hills so I could trade them
Speaker 1: for rock records, and I got Beach Boys Party and
Speaker 1: maybe the first Beatles album and uh, I just never
Speaker 1: stopped the idea that I could own these things and
Speaker 1: play them over and over and over again. That obsessed
Speaker 1: me was fantastic. Okay, so you wrote a book about
Speaker 1: Iggy and the Stooges, but you also said that you
Speaker 1: went to the Whiskey to see the Raw Power were
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three. So when did you start going
Speaker 1: to concerts and what did you see? My father took
Speaker 1: me to concerts by artists he like. There was a
Speaker 1: Spanish group called Murray and Miranda who had uh Songs
Speaker 1: of the African Velt was what it was called. And
Speaker 1: I love that record, and we went and saw them.
Speaker 1: I first started going to records to two shows on
Speaker 1: my own, probably at fifteen, when I could hitchhike to
Speaker 1: the Santa Monica Civic and I remember seeing Mountain and Zephyr,
Speaker 1: and a little later when I was in high school
Speaker 1: going to see Pink Floyd there who were traveling. We're
Speaker 1: touring on Adam Hart mother and I saw free and
Speaker 1: traffic reconstituted traffic. As soon as I got a car,
Speaker 1: which maybe came when I was seventeen, I was unstoppable,
Speaker 1: you know. I was at the Whiskey constantly where every
Speaker 1: British prog band known to man played, and uh I
Speaker 1: started working at Rhino I was probably seventeen, and people
Speaker 1: would give us concert tickets, drop off concert tickets, So
Speaker 1: I was I was a wild man. What's that story
Speaker 1: of how did you get that? You know? At this
Speaker 1: point in time, which is kind of funny for those
Speaker 1: of us grew up in l A or at least
Speaker 1: from age early twenties, you know, Rhino on Westwood Boulevard.
Speaker 1: Ultimately there was a label. Harold Bronson, you know, got
Speaker 1: started to come to Rhino Records while man Fisher. But
Speaker 1: people don't understand what a big deal the record store was.
Speaker 1: So Richard Fuss, who started it, started a department in
Speaker 1: another store and then ultimately went to Westwood Boulevard. What
Speaker 1: was Rhino Records like and how did you get the job? Okay?
Speaker 1: So Richard who's still one of my best friends, had
Speaker 1: a friend whose father had an army circle US electronics
Speaker 1: store called Apollo Electronics on Broadway and Third in Santa Monica,
Speaker 1: and that was the that was when the mall was
Speaker 1: dead with J Jerry, And it wasn't even on the mall,
Speaker 1: it was around the corner from them all. But and
Speaker 1: so Richard convinced his friend's father to give him an
Speaker 1: area that I'm gonna guess was like ten by fifteen
Speaker 1: feet to sell US records. And a friend of mine
Speaker 1: went in there and he was selling bootlegs. And this
Speaker 1: was a big deal because I had to go to
Speaker 1: the Rose bull Swat Meat to buy bootlegs. So someplace
Speaker 1: that I could ride my bike too incredible. So I
Speaker 1: started going in there and befriended Richard and he would
Speaker 1: buy cutouts and used records and bootlegs, and we became friendly,
Speaker 1: very friendly. And uh, sometime in probably late seventy two
Speaker 1: or very early seventy three, said Hey, I'm gonna open
Speaker 1: a record store. And I said something like and you're
Speaker 1: gonna give me a job and he said, okay, and
Speaker 1: there you got. So he uh, he had rented the
Speaker 1: there was a guy on Westwood Boulevard who had a
Speaker 1: Zenith appliance repair store. So if you had a Zenith
Speaker 1: uh integrated stereo and it broke, you would go to
Speaker 1: this guy. His name was Dave nine, and he had
Speaker 1: very little business. And somehow Richard convinced him to lease
Speaker 1: him the front half of the store and he would
Speaker 1: keep the back half of the store to do his
Speaker 1: electronics repair. And uh so I went down and with
Speaker 1: a friend of mine, and we were helping Richard pound
Speaker 1: together wooden bins for the records. And he had gone
Speaker 1: to Aaron's Records and roseml swap in all these places
Speaker 1: for about a year, saving up inventory to start this store.
Speaker 1: And myself, his roommate, and a friend of his who
Speaker 1: was a basus were the first three part time workers.
Speaker 1: And they lasted maybe a month or two. And I
Speaker 1: was not going to give this up. I was in
Speaker 1: high school, I had a job a record store. I
Speaker 1: had first pick of the records that got traded in. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was as as you were alluding to the social
Speaker 1: scene on the West Side for record collectors. There were
Speaker 1: people who came four or five times a week waiting
Speaker 1: to see what came out, what used records were new
Speaker 1: in the bins what we had missed priced or missed,
Speaker 1: and Richard very smartly salted the bins so he he
Speaker 1: had a bunch of things like live Yardbirds album with
Speaker 1: the John's Children album that back then we're records that
Speaker 1: maybe now our hundred hundred to records, and he would
Speaker 1: put him out for two fifty just so people would
Speaker 1: start to talk about the great stuff in the bins.
Speaker 1: And I made a lot of my friends at that
Speaker 1: store were still my friends almost fifty years later. Uh.
Speaker 1: Artists would come and visit us. Uh. You know, if
Speaker 1: if Atlantic had the pretty Things on tour, there weren't
Speaker 1: many record stores that cared about the pretty things. But
Speaker 1: we would go nexts to meet the pretty things are
Speaker 1: the trogs. Uh. You know, we do an in store.
Speaker 1: We'd get a lot of people. We would have live
Speaker 1: shows with our friends, the Angry Smoans or it was
Speaker 1: just crazy all things to all people. Uh. Fun thing
Speaker 1: and truly the most fun job I've ever had in
Speaker 1: my life by life. Actually, what at what point did
Speaker 1: you start to stock new records in addition to use
Speaker 1: records pretty early on because people came in and wanted
Speaker 1: new records, and then there were things like Saturday Night Fever,
Speaker 1: which became these phenomenons that you couldn't not carry And
Speaker 1: I remember, uh, that record was so big. You remember
Speaker 1: a specific instance where you were this woman who was
Speaker 1: probably in her thirties came in with a tennis racket
Speaker 1: and a tennis skirt and a tennis shirt, fresh off
Speaker 1: the courts, and she walked in the store, looked at
Speaker 1: me and I said, Saturday and Night feverites right over there.
Speaker 1: She said, how did you know? And it was so
Speaker 1: evident this person was so outside the demographic of anybody
Speaker 1: would come into our record store. Or you'd remember another
Speaker 1: instance where it's a Sunday morning, somebody comes in and says,
Speaker 1: Teff this album by the Roaches, Yeah, it's over there,
Speaker 1: And about fifteen minutes later, somebody comes in and goes,
Speaker 1: do you have this album on the Roaches? And you go,
Speaker 1: they were on Saturday Night Live, right. How did you know?
Speaker 1: You could really kind of gauge what was coming on,
Speaker 1: what was going on in the world from that little
Speaker 1: perch behind the counter. I've been to a lot of
Speaker 1: record stores and they made movies now, high fidelity whatever,
Speaker 1: but really that's not the way it was at most
Speaker 1: record stores. Maybe there was a person behind the counter
Speaker 1: or whatever, but you literally had to be anxious going
Speaker 1: into Rhino Records because the staff would insult you on
Speaker 1: what you bought, if you was as guilty if that
Speaker 1: as anybody. Unfortunately, that's what I remember. So it was
Speaker 1: less of all of what was anybody, uh policing that.
Speaker 1: It was everyone's side. This was kind of the charm
Speaker 1: of the store or what nobody was policing that because
Speaker 1: what Richard did was higher experts in each category. You know,
Speaker 1: Lee Kaplan ran the jazz and later Neil's Fine who
Speaker 1: is famous as the guitar still Wilco and I was
Speaker 1: doing the rock and the imports, and uh, it was
Speaker 1: a store that had personality. You've got to admit that. Um,
Speaker 1: that was just part of the stick. And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, high fidelity was very much what Rhino was like, right.
Speaker 1: The other thing, I remember we did great. I remember
Speaker 1: Van Halen playing opening for Nils Loft in the Santa
Speaker 1: Monica Civic and I was kind of laughing, like this
Speaker 1: was black O gar Kansaw. And then I went into
Speaker 1: Rhino and the guys by the kind of were reaving
Speaker 1: how great guitarist Eddie Van Halen was, and I said, well,
Speaker 1: maybe I have this row. Okay, So how did you
Speaker 1: get your job at A and M. So I went
Speaker 1: to USC and I got a business was a business major,
Speaker 1: and my plan was to get a job in the
Speaker 1: record business. And one of our customers, a guy named
Speaker 1: Lou Beach, came in and said, I know this guy
Speaker 1: at A and M, Jeff Areroff. You should call him.
Speaker 1: And I said, okay, okay, And I was interviewed for
Speaker 1: two or three jobs that I hadn't gotten and didn't
Speaker 1: really want, but was looking for any entry point, and uh,
Speaker 1: this guy kept bugging me to call his friend, Jeff Farroff,
Speaker 1: and finally I did, and Jeff Farroff, who's now probably
Speaker 1: my best friend, UM said okay, come on and you know,
Speaker 1: talk to me. And he was the vice president of
Speaker 1: creative Services at that point, so he wasn't responsible for
Speaker 1: all the album covers, videos, marketing, advertising, and we hit
Speaker 1: it off instantly, and he said, look, I'd like to
Speaker 1: hire you. I just fired a bunch of people. That
Speaker 1: was nineteen seventy nine and the record business had just
Speaker 1: expanded hugely on the back of Fleetwood, Mac Rumors and
Speaker 1: some of those records, and then contracted very dramatically. So
Speaker 1: Jeff said, I'd love to hire you. I can't hire you.
Speaker 1: I just fired a bunch of people. How would you
Speaker 1: like to work for me as a freelancer? And I
Speaker 1: said great. So he would give me projects to think
Speaker 1: about and I would come in once every couple of
Speaker 1: weeks and meet with him, and then every once in
Speaker 1: a while he'd say, send me an invoice for five dollars.
Speaker 1: And this was great. I was sort of what would
Speaker 1: the projects be. So Squeeze were signed to A and M,
Speaker 1: and he was trying to figure out something clever to
Speaker 1: do with Squeeze, and I go, why don't you make
Speaker 1: a five inch Squeeze record like Squeezed? And uh, I
Speaker 1: had this little six inch Jimmy Hendricks record from France
Speaker 1: and I brought it and showed it to me. Loved
Speaker 1: that idea. So they made a five inch Squeeze record
Speaker 1: for cool for Cats or one of those songs that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Um, Tim Curry's recording a new album,
Speaker 1: bring me some songs that might be interesting for him
Speaker 1: to cover, which was fantastic. I mean, I was getting
Speaker 1: paid what I thought was a fortune for this, and
Speaker 1: after about nine months he said, you know, I should
Speaker 1: get Guilfries and the president of him to hire you.
Speaker 1: That was the job I had. Jeff had and so
Speaker 1: he had Guilt take me out to lunch and uh
Speaker 1: this turned into probably six different meals with Gilt every
Speaker 1: three weeks or so. And one day he says to me,
Speaker 1: maybe we'll get you a desk in sales and I said, WHOA,
Speaker 1: does that mean you're hiring me? And he goes, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I was always gonna hire you. So I got hired
Speaker 1: as his assistant, which was the greatest job in the world. UM.
Speaker 1: Jeff had had it. A guy named Michael Leon who
Speaker 1: ran in him on the East Coast had it, and
Speaker 1: uh I had it. And then the gig was, after
Speaker 1: you had this job, you had to find your replacement.
Speaker 1: And I went and got Tom Corson who worked at
Speaker 1: I R. S and helped him get that job. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh I the job was basically doing everything he
Speaker 1: didn't have time for. So you'd read his mail, respond
Speaker 1: to the low hanging fruit stuff, bring things to his
Speaker 1: attention in the company that you thought he needed to
Speaker 1: know about. UM Travel with him. You know, he had
Speaker 1: a secretary, but you were the person sitting at his
Speaker 1: side helping him navigate his day to day responsibility to
Speaker 1: the workload was so great, and that too, was an
Speaker 1: incredible job. And he was probably the most important man
Speaker 1: in my life in terms of teaching me things and
Speaker 1: being able to emulate him and empowering me. You know,
Speaker 1: I did things like the Funny Enough, the the Maybe
Speaker 1: six months into the job, I got the tape of
Speaker 1: and Adams album You Want It You got advanced cassette
Speaker 1: I've never heard of. I listened to it and I
Speaker 1: went to Gil. I said another thing about this guy.
Speaker 1: He's signed by the Canadian Company, but this has one
Speaker 1: a O R classic after another as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1: Gil said, all right, fly him and his manager Dan,
Speaker 1: that's your project. So I flew Brian and Bruce Allen
Speaker 1: as manager down and they became my project. And so
Speaker 1: I could say to Gil they're trying to get the
Speaker 1: Kinks tour, and he'd get on the phone with whoever
Speaker 1: the agent was and try to make that happen. And
Speaker 1: I talked about him in the marketing meetings, and he
Speaker 1: was a nonentity there at one point, Charlie Miner, the
Speaker 1: late grade head of promotion, came down to my office,
Speaker 1: grabbed me by my shirt and lifted me up against
Speaker 1: the door and said, if you ever mentioned that guy's
Speaker 1: name again, I'm gonna kill you. And three years later
Speaker 1: and sold fifteen million albums something like. So Gil was
Speaker 1: very empowering and letting you decide what you wanted to do,
Speaker 1: and uh, supportive of going after So ultimately, air off
Speaker 1: leaves and you get that job. What's that like? So
Speaker 1: I worked for Gill as assistant. Then Adam started a
Speaker 1: film company which was very successful. It had Bertie, which
Speaker 1: won the Poem to Or at the can Film Festival,
Speaker 1: and we made the Breakfast Club. And at some point
Speaker 1: Guil came to me and said, do you want to
Speaker 1: work half time for the film company as the music guy?
Speaker 1: And I said sure, not because I had any interest
Speaker 1: in the movie business, but because everybody I knew had
Speaker 1: interested in the movie business. And what I hadn't figured
Speaker 1: on was this. Then I had to read a script
Speaker 1: every day, so I had to wake up at six
Speaker 1: rate a script till seven thirty, then go to work.
Speaker 1: And uh. I remember one series of meetings where somebody
Speaker 1: was coming in and saying, some the extend up, We're
Speaker 1: gonna do a remake of Alice in Wonderland. We've got
Speaker 1: Madonna attached, and I'm going on, that sounds stupid. And
Speaker 1: then to two meetings after that, somebody comes in and says,
Speaker 1: we're making a remake of something else. We've got Madonna attached,
Speaker 1: and I remember thinking, Wow, we're in the music business.
Speaker 1: We just exaggerate these guys lie um. And after about
Speaker 1: six months I went to Gil and said, I'm not
Speaker 1: into this. I want to work in the record business
Speaker 1: full time, no problem, And so Jeff Areff left and
Speaker 1: I was nominated and Gil came to me to run
Speaker 1: first the alternative marketing. We started an alternative marketing department.
Speaker 1: Actually I started it, and it was the first one
Speaker 1: in the music business to work on bands that weren't
Speaker 1: getting the full attention of Charlie and the higher ups
Speaker 1: in the company. So we worked on simple Minds at
Speaker 1: Suzanne Vega and O. M. D. And acts like that
Speaker 1: and had success, and then the idea was we'd get
Speaker 1: something going and then hand him off to the company
Speaker 1: at large. At some point, Bob Right, who's the head
Speaker 1: of marketing leaves and Gil comes to me and says,
Speaker 1: I want you to be the head of marketing too great,
Speaker 1: so I leave. UH. I leave his assistant job, and
Speaker 1: I become the head of marketing, which is where you
Speaker 1: and I really started to work together. And uh. At
Speaker 1: some point jeff Eroff leaves and I get nominated to
Speaker 1: be the head of creative services too. And neither of
Speaker 1: these jobs did I have any experience that they just
Speaker 1: threw you in and supported you, and uh, I did that.
Speaker 1: So I was in charge of advertising marketing all the
Speaker 1: merch stuff, album covers and videos, which was a big
Speaker 1: portfolio stuff and kind of very heavy stuff to learn
Speaker 1: while doing. But I had Gil was a very creative guy,
Speaker 1: and I could call on jeff Eroff and H somehow
Speaker 1: I figured it out. Okay, how do you. Ultimately we
Speaker 1: decide to DeCamp to Warner Brothers. I thought A M
Speaker 1: was going to be my entirety of my career. I
Speaker 1: was so close to guilt personally as well as professionally.
Speaker 1: And UH, I had had, through my friend Gary Boorman,
Speaker 1: had been approached by Warner Brothers, and I'd gone and
Speaker 1: had a meeting. But I decided, you know, I just
Speaker 1: don't want to leave Gil and this company where I
Speaker 1: know everybody, all my friends are And at some point UH,
Speaker 1: and periodically UH people from the press would call and
Speaker 1: say there are rumors and M is gonna get sold,
Speaker 1: and Guild would always say not gonna happen, and I'd
Speaker 1: go back and say, not gonna happen. And one day
Speaker 1: those rumors turned out to be true and Annam was
Speaker 1: sold by Herban Jerry to PolyGram. And it was clear
Speaker 1: that even though everybody was saying everything's gonna stay the same,
Speaker 1: no problem. I remember meeting with Alan Levy, who was
Speaker 1: the y hey of PolyGram in Europe, and he was
Speaker 1: really a dismissive, rude guy, and he was interrogating you.
Speaker 1: Was almost like the Gestapo. He'd say, tell me about this,
Speaker 1: and you start talking and he'd say, enough, tell me
Speaker 1: about this. And I just thought, this is not a
Speaker 1: good vibe. This guy is going to be the boss
Speaker 1: of our bosses. And at some point it becomes clear
Speaker 1: that the A M of Old is not going to
Speaker 1: be the A and M of new. And I start
Speaker 1: talking to Mouston and Lenny Warniker and Michael Lost and
Speaker 1: Warner brothers, and they're willing to make me a senior
Speaker 1: vice president and double my salary. And Warner Brothers and
Speaker 1: A and M are the two companies I ever wanted
Speaker 1: to work for, and MO was somebody I was always
Speaker 1: fascinated by, having signed hendricks On down. And so I
Speaker 1: made the tough decision that I was gonna leave my
Speaker 1: mentor and go to work for Warner Brothers. And the
Speaker 1: day I was going into quit, I had onto my
Speaker 1: shrink to prepare for this very difficult conversation, and we
Speaker 1: had an off the lot meeting and Tom Corson called
Speaker 1: me and said, Jerry just fired Gil. What I was
Speaker 1: gonna go quick today? Jerry just fired and called Gil.
Speaker 1: And I called Gil and I said, you're not gonna
Speaker 1: believe this, and Gil said, oh fantastic. You can walk
Speaker 1: into Jerry's office and it'll be I fired Gil. Now
Speaker 1: his number one, one of his number one guys is leaving.
Speaker 1: And I went in and quit to Jerry, who I had,
Speaker 1: you know, not a close relationship with. It was closer
Speaker 1: to her and Gil, and uh so the timing worked
Speaker 1: out beautifully. Okay, sidebar, you drove that Alfa Romeo Alphatta.
Speaker 1: I had a g TV six and I had a spider,
Speaker 1: but not an alphatta. I thought you had an al
Speaker 1: fet It must have been somebody else on the lot. Okay,
Speaker 1: you go to work, but I had to, So you're right.
Speaker 1: And how bad were they? Uh? The spider was really good.
Speaker 1: The GTV six required a bunch of work, but I
Speaker 1: enjoyed it. I like them. Okay, So was it culture
Speaker 1: shock going to Warner Brothers or do you fit right in?
Speaker 1: It was total culture shock, but not for the reason
Speaker 1: you might expect that A and M. Gil had his
Speaker 1: hands in absolutely everything, so I might hear from him
Speaker 1: five times a day. Uh, this is when I'm doing
Speaker 1: marketing and creative services. And then at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, all the senior vice presidents would go to
Speaker 1: his office and do a kind of a debrief for
Speaker 1: about an hour. When I went to work for MO,
Speaker 1: he was very decentralized. He hired people he thought I
Speaker 1: knew what they were doing and just let them know
Speaker 1: what let him go. And so I was so used
Speaker 1: to Hey, Gil, I'm gonna do this. How about that?
Speaker 1: I think we should do this. What are you doing
Speaker 1: about this? Jeff More didn't one enough. He just felt like,
Speaker 1: you know, there was a once a week meeting of
Speaker 1: vice presidents and senior vice presidents, and everybody would go
Speaker 1: around the table talking about what they were doing. And
Speaker 1: then there was a Thursday Senior Vice president's meeting that
Speaker 1: was called Korea because everybody said it just goes on forever,
Speaker 1: like the Korean War. And that was about four hours.
Speaker 1: And those are the opportunities where if you had a
Speaker 1: question for Mo, or Lenny or the head of Business
Speaker 1: Furs David Altchole, or wanted to let everybody know what
Speaker 1: you were doing, you did him in that for him,
Speaker 1: and otherwise you just did what you did and they
Speaker 1: didn't want to know about the everyday quotidian decisions that guilded.
Speaker 1: So it was culture shock in that way, but I
Speaker 1: adapted to it. And Mo was a genius, smartest guy
Speaker 1: ever met in the music business, and I knew exactly
Speaker 1: what he was doing. How did Mo evidence his genius?
Speaker 1: This is a real story. We're sitting in that Monday
Speaker 1: Vice President's meeting and Tom Raffino, the late head of International, says, oh,
Speaker 1: Rod Stewart's touring Germany. Uh, and it's gonna be a
Speaker 1: huge tour. They're gonna do a huge TV advertising campaign,
Speaker 1: and they're going to release the Greatest Hits in Germany only,
Speaker 1: and Mo turns to David Altchill Business appears and says,
Speaker 1: it seems to me, when we renegotiated Rod's contract about
Speaker 1: seven years ago, there was a provision for the Greatest
Speaker 1: Hits and I just want to make sure that this
Speaker 1: German Greatest Hits doesn't kill our ability to put out
Speaker 1: a worldwide Greatest Hits later. And you're thinking, how does
Speaker 1: this guy keep all this stuff in his mind? Just exceptional?
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, he's trying to sign the Red
Speaker 1: Hot Chili Peppers that he's taking him to Laker games
Speaker 1: and they're sitting on the court, and uh, he's pursuing
Speaker 1: them heavily, and they decide to go with the money
Speaker 1: and signed with CBS Colombia. And instead of being pissed,
Speaker 1: Moe calls each of them individually and congratulates them and
Speaker 1: tells them he's sorry we couldn't make a deal, but
Speaker 1: he wishes them all the best and was wonderful to
Speaker 1: get to know them, and he hopes he sees them
Speaker 1: in the future. And so as CBS starts negotiating the
Speaker 1: contract the way I heard it, they start backing out
Speaker 1: of some of the commitments they made, and well, yeah,
Speaker 1: we said that, but really it's got to be you know,
Speaker 1: four fourth album kind of thing, and the Chili Peppers
Speaker 1: start to say, you know, these guys promised us to
Speaker 1: the world and now they're starting to go back on it.
Speaker 1: Moe was the greatest guy in the world. Even losing us.
Speaker 1: He called each of us individually, fuck that. We'll go
Speaker 1: to Word Brothers. Who is that. I don't think he
Speaker 1: was being strategic either. I think that's who he was is.
Speaker 1: But um, it ends up with the Chili Peppers coming
Speaker 1: to Warner Brothers and enormous success because Mo was a
Speaker 1: class act who could see the future and a very
Speaker 1: strategic guy. Okay, Lenny was originally a producer he and
Speaker 1: our Guy maybe a little bit before that, but made
Speaker 1: his bones. Was a song plugger before that, right, but
Speaker 1: he was working with Russ Russ, titleman, whatever, and then
Speaker 1: they promote him to president. Does that happen during your
Speaker 1: tenure or before before? Okay? So what was Lenny's everyday role?
Speaker 1: Lenny was the music guy. MO was the business guy.
Speaker 1: Lenny was the music guy. So artists would come in
Speaker 1: and talk to Lenny about their records he ran. He
Speaker 1: was the head of the A and R department. Um,
Speaker 1: he was a vibe is a vibe guy and also
Speaker 1: just unbelievably impressive at talking to artists, being able to
Speaker 1: say to an artist the album is great, but you
Speaker 1: need two more tracks and here's what they need to
Speaker 1: accomplish without pissing an artist off, which is a unique talent. Um.
Speaker 1: He would really get in the weeds with people making records.
Speaker 1: He's brilliant at that. Okay, So Deedles just say as
Speaker 1: we say in the business. There's a lot more product
Speaker 1: at Warner Brothers. So how did you manage dealing with
Speaker 1: such workload? I had a lot more people, and I
Speaker 1: worked really long hours. It was incredible workload at Warner Brothers.
Speaker 1: We released a ton of records. Um, a lot of
Speaker 1: people worked very long hours making sure that that happened.
Speaker 1: And you prioritize like anywhere else. So where long this
Speaker 1: timeline do you meet your wife and how do you
Speaker 1: meet her? I meet her at A and M Records.
Speaker 1: So I'm working for A and M. I've got at
Speaker 1: Boston and then New York. Uh, I have to go
Speaker 1: buy a suitcase. A call a friend of mine to
Speaker 1: see if he wants to go have lunch, and by
Speaker 1: a suitcase. We do. He mentions that his girlfriend, who
Speaker 1: I'm close friends with, as a friend, visiting from New York.
Speaker 1: We go over to their house. I meet Jody there
Speaker 1: and she has caught the bouquet at a wedding the
Speaker 1: night before. She'd come at her wedding and I really
Speaker 1: liked her, and she was in New York. So I
Speaker 1: flew to Boston that day, and for a couple of
Speaker 1: days I was kind of ruminating, Wow, I really liked her,
Speaker 1: Maybe she liked me. I'll call Steve. And I called
Speaker 1: Steve and he said, she really liked you. You You should
Speaker 1: call her. You're going to New York. So I call
Speaker 1: her to ask her out. Um left a message on
Speaker 1: her phone machine, never heard back. Get to New York.
Speaker 1: Called her. She says, yeah, she'll go out with me.
Speaker 1: We have dinner, hit it off, and that starts at all.
Speaker 1: And after the fact I find out that she had
Speaker 1: actually called me at the hotel in Boston, left a
Speaker 1: message she couldn't go out. She couldn't go out with me,
Speaker 1: but felt since I was being so persistent, she would,
Speaker 1: when in fact, I had never got the message. Somebody
Speaker 1: forgot to slide the slip under the door, as I
Speaker 1: used to do back then, and I would have never
Speaker 1: pursued her had she said no. So this whole family
Speaker 1: of mine and these two grown kids exists because some
Speaker 1: bellman at the Copley Plaza didn't slide a little note
Speaker 1: under my door. Do you know why she said no?
Speaker 1: The first time? She was breaking up with her boyfriend
Speaker 1: and felt weird about it now. But she comes from
Speaker 1: a lot of history in the music business. What was
Speaker 1: she doing then? And your father in law did he
Speaker 1: impact you at all? Yes? So Jody's father was Larry Utall,
Speaker 1: who owned Amy Mala and Bell Records, which were the precursors,
Speaker 1: as she pointed out of Ariston and Uh. I had
Speaker 1: never heard of him when I met her, but we
Speaker 1: soon got into conversation about that. She had worked for
Speaker 1: her father next label, Private Stock, and in her one
Speaker 1: in and R the thing that she ever did, found
Speaker 1: Blondie and brought it to her father and said we
Speaker 1: should sign these guys, which he did, and so uh,
Speaker 1: pretty soon in this conversation we realized I told her
Speaker 1: I was going to New York and one of the
Speaker 1: reasons was to meet How Wilder, a late grade record producer,
Speaker 1: and she said, I know how And so our first
Speaker 1: conversation was about this guy we knew mutually, and she
Speaker 1: had grown up in the music business and so could
Speaker 1: relate to that. And ironically, Um, my youngest daughter is
Speaker 1: engaged to a music business manager, which means that my
Speaker 1: daughter will have married somebody in the music business. My
Speaker 1: her mother, Jodie married me, a guy in the music business,
Speaker 1: and her grandmother married her father, Jody's father, a guy
Speaker 1: in the music business. And Jody's grandmother was a singer
Speaker 1: in the Zigfield Follies. So we're going to have four
Speaker 1: generations now, Okay, so Warner Brothers, you know, is going along.
Speaker 1: Let's just stop for one thing. I know most take
Speaker 1: on Prince. What was the take on Prince with him
Speaker 1: wanting to put out more product, the label saying no,
Speaker 1: him say painting slave on his face? What was it
Speaker 1: like inside the building? Well, I was in the middle
Speaker 1: of all that. Prince was the only genius, true genius
Speaker 1: I ever worked. Um and I had a have a
Speaker 1: funny story about our first meeting, but it's like five
Speaker 1: minutes long. Well that's that good telling. Okay. So, uh,
Speaker 1: Prince has had a couple of stiff records, and Moe
Speaker 1: and Lenny and Michael Auston, who's the head of A
Speaker 1: and R, meet with him and say, look, you've got
Speaker 1: to have some in our input. Your next record is
Speaker 1: not life or death, but very very important, and that
Speaker 1: becomes Diamonds and Pearls. And they're working very closely with him,
Speaker 1: and Mo and Lenny and Michael are keeping us up
Speaker 1: to data on all this, and uh, they're very convinced
Speaker 1: that they've got a Prince record with multiple hits. And
Speaker 1: I'm at the label maybe six months and they would
Speaker 1: circulate the artwork that somebody had submitted if we weren't
Speaker 1: doing it in the house for the album cover. And imagine,
Speaker 1: if you will. I opened this envelope and I've got
Speaker 1: the new Prince out and cover, and it's a type
Speaker 1: photo of his face from kind of his forehead down
Speaker 1: to his chin, and he's making kind of the peace
Speaker 1: sign with his fingers reversed, with his tongue sticking out
Speaker 1: of the middle. It's just a ridiculous photo. And so
Speaker 1: I go to Lenny's office and I said, I think
Speaker 1: this is you know, you guys have spent so much
Speaker 1: time on this record. This photograph that he wants on
Speaker 1: the album cover is laughable, It's ridiculous. And he said,
Speaker 1: go have a meeting with Prince. Okay. So Benny Medina
Speaker 1: is the head of black An R and the in
Speaker 1: his contact. So Benny sets up a meeting a couple
Speaker 1: of days later and Prince I come in and Benny
Speaker 1: has an office that looks like a cave with no windows,
Speaker 1: and the setup is he Benny sitting at his desk,
Speaker 1: and across from his desk perpendicular to it are two
Speaker 1: couches apart from each other, and Princes sitting on one
Speaker 1: and I'm sitting on the other one. And Prince looks
Speaker 1: as if he has come off stage or is about
Speaker 1: to bound on stage. He's wearing full hair, makeup, full
Speaker 1: stage clothes, which he always did I later found out.
Speaker 1: And Benny starts saying, um, well, Jeff's our new head
Speaker 1: of creative services, and he thinks your album cover maybe
Speaker 1: could be better, and then there's bam, bam bam on
Speaker 1: the door, and into the door walks Benny's lawyer, who's
Speaker 1: renegotiating Benny's contract at Warner brothers and says, I need
Speaker 1: to talk to you right away, and Benny proceeds to
Speaker 1: leave for the entirety of the meeting. So I'm sitting
Speaker 1: across from Prince Uh, who's a guy I have great
Speaker 1: admiration for, but by all accounts a difficult guy to
Speaker 1: deal with. And Uh, Benny has just told him I
Speaker 1: don't like his album cover, and he's this is a
Speaker 1: guy who knows how to use silence and intimidate people,
Speaker 1: and he's developed this to a fine art. So he
Speaker 1: looks at me and says, so, what do you think
Speaker 1: I should do? Do you think I should wear overalls
Speaker 1: like R E. M Or a band of the label
Speaker 1: who clearly did not wear overalls. But well, no, I
Speaker 1: was thinking, and you know it's just devolving, is do
Speaker 1: you think you wear good clothes? Maybe I should get
Speaker 1: you clothes like your send me your sizes. And he's
Speaker 1: wearing uh, fucia they look like ski pants, their skin
Speaker 1: tight pants with a loop around the bottom under his
Speaker 1: boots and a see through chartruss pinstriped shirt and uh,
Speaker 1: it's just kind of baiting me. And at some point
Speaker 1: he says, show me something you've done. I go okay.
Speaker 1: So I go up to my office and I pulled
Speaker 1: together all these CDs that I had art directed, and
Speaker 1: they were mostly from A and M because I hadn't
Speaker 1: been a worried Brothers that long. And he's bringing down
Speaker 1: maybe a foot high stack, and he's looking at them
Speaker 1: making dismissive comments. This is you know, I'm not saying
Speaker 1: this is ship, but that's essentially what he's saying. Why
Speaker 1: would I want to do this? Who would think this
Speaker 1: is a good idea? And he gets near to the
Speaker 1: bottom and he finds this holographic album of CD cover
Speaker 1: that I've done for Suzanne Vega for Days of Open Hand,
Speaker 1: that I actually she and I and Thomas and Len
Speaker 1: Pelt worked on it one great a Grammy for art direction.
Speaker 1: And after dismissing the first fifteen of these, he looks
Speaker 1: at this hologram and just kind of mesmerized and says,
Speaker 1: this is good. Why can't I get a hologram by
Speaker 1: some miracle I had met maybe a month before with
Speaker 1: a I working for a company. You you'd have these
Speaker 1: meetings who had a new technology to make holograms cheaply,
Speaker 1: And I said, well, maybe you can get a hologran
Speaker 1: what do you mean? And I explained to him and
Speaker 1: he said, all right, give me a hologram. And so
Speaker 1: that this hour and a half torture session ended up
Speaker 1: on a slightly positive note. So I called this guy
Speaker 1: from the hologram company and said, how would your company
Speaker 1: like to launch their new technology on the new album
Speaker 1: from Prince? What? And I explained to him and said,
Speaker 1: but you're gonna have to really make this economically viable
Speaker 1: for us. They did, and we ended up putting out
Speaker 1: diamonds and pearls with this holographic cover. And Prince actually
Speaker 1: sent me a thank you note, which is something that
Speaker 1: his assistant said she had never seen him do. That says,
Speaker 1: the more I look with an eye eyeball, the more
Speaker 1: I like with another eyeball, thank you for the cool cover, Prince.
Speaker 1: And it's on this little piece of station and it
Speaker 1: says from the desk of Prince. So after that, I
Speaker 1: was one of the few people at Warner Brothers that
Speaker 1: Prince talked to. And uh Mo and Lenny leave eventually,
Speaker 1: and so and Benny leaves and Michael Austen leaves, and
Speaker 1: so maybe it's me and one or two other people
Speaker 1: that Prince talks to and uh, well, actually I'm getting
Speaker 1: ahead of myself. So um, one day, Moe walks in
Speaker 1: and says, I had a meeting with Prince. He wants
Speaker 1: to be a vice president of this company. So I said, sure,
Speaker 1: you're a vice president. So Prince becomes a vice president
Speaker 1: of Warner Brothers and shows up to a couple of
Speaker 1: the career meetings, and one of them I remember because
Speaker 1: it was the day Magic Johnson announced he had it
Speaker 1: aids it was HIV positive, and uh, we had this
Speaker 1: giant projection TV and all of us were mesmerized. Those
Speaker 1: guys were big basketball fans and we're watching the live
Speaker 1: coverage of this with Prince, who for a very short
Speaker 1: period of time pretended to be an a our guy.
Speaker 1: But he was giving us so much product, and we
Speaker 1: had his label, Paisley Park. Why not? And uh then
Speaker 1: at another point Prince decides, you know, I want to
Speaker 1: get my master's back and goes to MO and they say, no,
Speaker 1: you can't get your master's back. We pay you millions
Speaker 1: of dollars every time you give us a record. If
Speaker 1: you were when you were negotiating nine months ago, maybe
Speaker 1: we could have discussed that, but no, so Prince decides
Speaker 1: he's going to change his name and then claim that
Speaker 1: Warner Brothers has signed Prince, but the symbol is a
Speaker 1: different artist who consigned to a different record label. And
Speaker 1: we're having fun with this because the name Prince has gone,
Speaker 1: so we do. He's a little come puter floppy disks
Speaker 1: with the symbol and send it out to the press
Speaker 1: so they can uh write articles about him and not
Speaker 1: use prints. And when when I needed to call him,
Speaker 1: I'd call his office and say, Hi, it's Jeff Gold
Speaker 1: from Warner Brothers. His Prince there, knowing that his uh
Speaker 1: people were from couldn't use the name. Or somebody would
Speaker 1: call from Paisley Park and say, Hi, my boss is
Speaker 1: on the phone. It's who who is that? You know?
Speaker 1: My boss? So obviously that doesn't fly. But eventually Moe
Speaker 1: and Lenny leave, and Michael leaves and Benny leaves, and
Speaker 1: I'm one of the few guys he talks to, and Uh,
Speaker 1: I remember having a conversation with him where he's complaining.
Speaker 1: It was just the two of us and he was
Speaker 1: complaining and I'm gonna paraphrase this, but it was, you know,
Speaker 1: everybody looks at these albums I put out as uh,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of being delivered from the mountain, these
Speaker 1: great statements. But I'm just recording all the time. And
Speaker 1: when I get enough songs that I think make an album,
Speaker 1: I put out an album. And I don't understand why
Speaker 1: I can't just do that whenever I want. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: when you renegotiated, you're getting to three million dollars whatever
Speaker 1: it is per album, and we've got to be able
Speaker 1: to recoup that money. And if you're giving us three
Speaker 1: albums a year and we're giving you nine million dollars,
Speaker 1: we can't possibly release the number of singles and market
Speaker 1: these things the way that we need to market them,
Speaker 1: uh to make our money back and be profitable. And
Speaker 1: he knew what I was saying. He was a very
Speaker 1: very smart guy, and I knew what he was saying.
Speaker 1: But it was kind of one of the few moments
Speaker 1: where he let down. His guarden was vulnerable. And I
Speaker 1: remember when he did the Gold Experience album. I think
Speaker 1: either that or the Come album. Maybe it was a
Speaker 1: Come album. We had a marketing meeting with Prince to
Speaker 1: discuss he was touring in the marketing of that album,
Speaker 1: and he sat to me because I was the only
Speaker 1: person in the meeting who had a relationship with and
Speaker 1: at some point, and this was the only time you
Speaker 1: really broke character. He whispered in my ear, make this big,
Speaker 1: I need the money. And you really never saw Prince
Speaker 1: break character. You know, he was literally every time I
Speaker 1: ever saw him, he could have gotten on stage and
Speaker 1: started performing. He was fully made up to the nines
Speaker 1: and uh dressed as exactly as if he was on stage. Well,
Speaker 1: in any event, you referenced, all of a sudden, there's
Speaker 1: all this turmoil in the music business. You know, Doug
Speaker 1: Morris gets power, he's kicked out. Bob Morgado's manipulating everything.
Speaker 1: What was it like inside the building, and what was
Speaker 1: it like when Mo and Lenny decided to go. It
Speaker 1: was terrible. So Steve Ross, who ran Warners and then
Speaker 1: time Warner had gotten ill and died. And uh the
Speaker 1: head of the Warner Music Group was this guy, Bob Morgado,
Speaker 1: who MO did not get along with. So MO had
Speaker 1: a special side deal that while the heads of Electra
Speaker 1: and Atlantic had to report to Bob Morgado, MO did
Speaker 1: not have to. So Steve Ross dies and morgatoh cease
Speaker 1: his opportunity and convinces Jerry Levin, who takes over Time Warner,
Speaker 1: that he really needs Mo Austen to report to him
Speaker 1: and the Bob Morgado knew nothing about the music business
Speaker 1: and would give interviews after after the Grammy's when Madonna
Speaker 1: wins a bunch of Grammys, saying, well, I authorized her signing,
Speaker 1: you know, I authorized her resigning. So uh, when Morgato
Speaker 1: uh convinces Jerry Levin that it's in his best interest
Speaker 1: to have more report to him, most has forget it.
Speaker 1: I'm not resigning, I'm dune, and nobody can believe this,
Speaker 1: But Jerry Levin backs up Morgado and Mo leaves and
Speaker 1: for a while, uh, Lenny is going to take over,
Speaker 1: and we think, well, this is a tragedy, but at
Speaker 1: least Lenny is going to take over. Lenny eventually decides,
Speaker 1: now I'm gonna leave and start a record label with
Speaker 1: Mo DreamWorks. So then uh, Danny Goldberg comes in, who
Speaker 1: I knew from me and m And Danny actually promotes
Speaker 1: me and Howie Klein and Stephen Baker and Rich Fitzgerald
Speaker 1: in an effort to keep us and gives us big
Speaker 1: raises so he can project stability. But he's commuting from
Speaker 1: New York where he lives every week at to l
Speaker 1: A and Doug Morris Uh in a power play destabilizes
Speaker 1: UH Morgado and Morgado gets fired and Dug takes over
Speaker 1: and and this continues. So the music group has been
Speaker 1: run by Morgado for a longer of time, but MO
Speaker 1: has been independent. And then you've got Morgado seizing power,
Speaker 1: and then Doug seizing power from Regato, and then Michael
Speaker 1: Fuchs seizing power from UH Doug, and then UH Bob
Speaker 1: Daily and Terry Simmel from the picture company. This is
Speaker 1: in about two years. There are four different people running
Speaker 1: the music and the record company goes from Mo to
Speaker 1: Lenny to Danny to rust Thy Red, who then has
Speaker 1: heart failures so Phil Corduro was brought in. So you've
Speaker 1: got these companies at Moran this for twenty five years,
Speaker 1: and you've got five different people in the next two
Speaker 1: years running it. So it was very, very unstable. There
Speaker 1: was lots of speculation about what was going to happen,
Speaker 1: who was going to take over, what kind of changes
Speaker 1: there were, and they were very distracting from what we
Speaker 1: were trying to do, which is break acts and sell records.
Speaker 1: So how did you how did it ultimately end with
Speaker 1: you and Warner Brothers. Everybody's dream come true at this
Speaker 1: time was to get fired with time on your contract.
Speaker 1: This had happened to two of my closest friends, Hale
Speaker 1: Millgroom and Jeff Arrell, who got essentially paid to go
Speaker 1: home and do nothing. And the job was getting more
Speaker 1: and more stressful as I was getting I got eventually
Speaker 1: made the executive vice president and general manager of Warner
Speaker 1: so I was the number two guys. Steve Baker was
Speaker 1: the president. That happened with Danny and so my time
Speaker 1: went from being administrative creative reversed. So I was doing
Speaker 1: things like signing independent promotion bills and arguing with the
Speaker 1: CFO about why a secretary couldn't get a raise. And
Speaker 1: it was really not fun, but I was being paid well.
Speaker 1: So when the fifth person from the person who hired
Speaker 1: me took over, uh I UH was confronted by Phil
Speaker 1: Cornerrea who said, look, Russ, and I feel like maybe
Speaker 1: you'd be better in another job. What would you like
Speaker 1: to do instead? And this was you know, I had
Speaker 1: a contract that said I was the executive as president
Speaker 1: general manager or they were in breach and had to
Speaker 1: fire me. I had two years left on my deal,
Speaker 1: and so I said, fire me. I don't want another job,
Speaker 1: and that's what happened. I had become a Buddhist about
Speaker 1: three years before that. I realized every year I was
Speaker 1: working was probably two years off of my lifespan. But
Speaker 1: the money was good and I had a young family.
Speaker 1: And my contract auspiciously expired December thirty one. I thought,
Speaker 1: when that is over, I'm out of here and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna find something less stressful to do and mean while
Speaker 1: I'm gonna bank every penny I can. So what happened
Speaker 1: two years before me? I had these role models in
Speaker 1: Hale and Jeff, and I couldn't have been happier. Okay,
Speaker 1: So how did this ultimately segue into the memorabilia business? So,
Speaker 1: as I described, I started off collecting rare records and memorabilia,
Speaker 1: and I continued to do that during the record business years.
Speaker 1: And it was great because I could fly all over.
Speaker 1: Everything I bought was tax deductible. I was deep into
Speaker 1: the Internet, and so my deal with Warner Brothers said,
Speaker 1: as long as I didn't have another job, they had
Speaker 1: to pay me. Uh what my contract specified. So I thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to get another job, but I can
Speaker 1: be Entrepreneurroll what am I into? Rare records and memorabilia,
Speaker 1: the Internet, stereo equipment, and computers. All four things very
Speaker 1: simple too. Uh, cluster those together and start right back
Speaker 1: up where I had left when I was in the
Speaker 1: when I went to A and M and starting selling
Speaker 1: rare records and memorabilia, but at a much higher level
Speaker 1: because I was much better capitalized. And uh so I
Speaker 1: started a website. I started selling an eBay very early on,
Speaker 1: and uh, this is gonna be my retirement job. And
Speaker 1: it's become my kind of out of control retirement job
Speaker 1: that I'm constantly trying to not work more than I
Speaker 1: want to work, but I love. Okay. One has to
Speaker 1: ask how lucrative is this relative to working for the labels. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't make as much money as I did working
Speaker 1: with the record companies, but it's very lucrative. Okay. So
Speaker 1: when you first go online et cetera with eBay, what
Speaker 1: kind of stuff are you're selling? Rare records? Um, there's
Speaker 1: a big market for first pressing rare records, and the
Speaker 1: best analogy is um rare books. So you know somebody
Speaker 1: might pay an extreme amount of money for well, I'll
Speaker 1: give you an example. Um, The Beatles first album anywhere
Speaker 1: in the world is Please Please Me. In England for
Speaker 1: reasons that had nothing to do with the Beatles. It
Speaker 1: came out on Parlophone in a on a label that
Speaker 1: was black background with gold printing, and Parlophone decided to
Speaker 1: change their label design about two months in. They also,
Speaker 1: the first pressing of Please Please Me had erroneous copyright
Speaker 1: credits for a few songs crediting them to Dick James
Speaker 1: Music when they were actually Northern songs of the Beatles Company.
Speaker 1: So somebody will pay a huge premium for a gold
Speaker 1: Parlophone copy of Please Please Me that came out two
Speaker 1: months before a black and yellow copy, and they'll pay
Speaker 1: them even bigger premium if it has the first mistaken credits,
Speaker 1: And then they'll pay an exponential premium if it's a
Speaker 1: stereo copy, because nobody was buying stereo records and can
Speaker 1: addition is so important that let's say I had an
Speaker 1: absolutely perfect, brand new stereo copy of that record, I
Speaker 1: could probably get for it if I had a copy
Speaker 1: that was in very good condition that somebody had taken
Speaker 1: care of but had some scuffs and marks still played. Well,
Speaker 1: that might be ad. So I started selling really rare
Speaker 1: records in the best condition possible. That's what I started with.
Speaker 1: And then memorabilia as well, so concert posters, documents, signed things.
Speaker 1: I remember in the seventies passing up a version of
Speaker 1: Lumpy Gravy and then spending two years trying to find
Speaker 1: it again and having to buy an import because it
Speaker 1: was cut out from MGM whatever. Um uh So in
Speaker 1: any event, everyone knows in the memory of Bealia world
Speaker 1: in general that it used to be about like rock
Speaker 1: Guitaristromingham would go from pawn shop to pawn shop. This
Speaker 1: all went to the Internet, so everything became available. It
Speaker 1: was not so much about the hunt but about buying.
Speaker 1: Tell us the evolution once we're on the Internet of
Speaker 1: what is available and how you find it, etcetera. So
Speaker 1: I'll give you an example. M there's a when the
Speaker 1: Freewheel and Bob Dylan album, his second album, is released,
Speaker 1: in a story breaks that a few copies have been
Speaker 1: discovered that have four different songs. They aren't listed on
Speaker 1: the album cover. But uh, what had happened? Was he
Speaker 1: recorded the album the beginning with John Hammond and then
Speaker 1: with Tom Wilson, and then he written four more songs,
Speaker 1: including Blowing in the Wind, and they had the record
Speaker 1: all master designed, ready to go. But Tom Wilson thought
Speaker 1: these songs were so strong that he went in gutman.
Speaker 1: The studio recorded these four songs and they swapped them
Speaker 1: out at one pressing plan in California. Somebody didn't get
Speaker 1: the message and a few copies got pressed with the
Speaker 1: old stampers which had the four original songs. But I
Speaker 1: won't go to in the weeds with this, but the
Speaker 1: mono copies became instantly very very very very collectible, and
Speaker 1: the stereo copies nobody knew they existed to have surfaced
Speaker 1: since nineteen so um pre eBay, that was the kind
Speaker 1: of thing you heard about, but never ever saw a
Speaker 1: freewheel and Bob dealing with those four tracks. And I
Speaker 1: remember somebody knowing somebody in Santa Monica who had one,
Speaker 1: and I inveigled myself to go over to this guy's
Speaker 1: house and actually see it. And the only way you
Speaker 1: can tell is either playing it or looking at the
Speaker 1: stamper noters. That record was just impossibly rare, and I
Speaker 1: was looking for it for maybe seven or eight years,
Speaker 1: and I had a mail order catalog that I would
Speaker 1: send out to four collectors three or four times a year,
Speaker 1: and everybody would circulate there one list of times. I
Speaker 1: will pay a lot of money for this record if
Speaker 1: anybody has with And eventually, after I don't know, seven
Speaker 1: or eight years, somebody contacted me and I traded him
Speaker 1: maybe a thousand dollars worth of stuff for it. Just
Speaker 1: an impossible to find record. Now if you're looking at eBay,
Speaker 1: one a year will show up, so it's not it's
Speaker 1: still very rare, but it's not impossible. So records that
Speaker 1: were previously virtually unfindable find their way, as you said
Speaker 1: with the guitars, to eBay or to auction, and if
Speaker 1: you're willing to spend the money, you can find them.
Speaker 1: Records that were sort of rare are now generally pretty
Speaker 1: common because of Emay and discous people have a easily
Speaker 1: it's easy to find out what something's worth, to research it,
Speaker 1: and to put it up for sale on a forum
Speaker 1: where people are looking for Okay, you talk about free wheeling.
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan's girlfriend at the time, Susie Rutolo is on
Speaker 1: the cover of that. And if I got this straight,
Speaker 1: they ultimately sold her record collection and people bought the
Speaker 1: record she owned, and you know we're looking at one
Speaker 1: of them, right, So what is what is what is
Speaker 1: that worth? So Susie rode Along, who was his girlfriend
Speaker 1: in the early sixties, saved a lot of stuff and
Speaker 1: in probably the early two thousand's, decided she was going
Speaker 1: to sell some stuff and being a big consumer of
Speaker 1: Dylan stuff, and uh, I've worked for I appraised as
Speaker 1: archive with a colleague, I'm very much in the middle
Speaker 1: of that. So I got contacted and the two things
Speaker 1: I really wanted were two blues albums from sixty one
Speaker 1: that he had bought in London. There were English copies
Speaker 1: and on the back he had written above the liner
Speaker 1: notes things like written for and about Bob Dylan and
Speaker 1: read and absorbed by Bob Dylan. And I thought, I've
Speaker 1: got to have these, and I won them. I think
Speaker 1: I paid five or six thousand dollars apiece for them,
Speaker 1: which I've considered a huge bargain. And they're really interesting
Speaker 1: because this is Bob Dylan absorbing his influences, acknowledging that
Speaker 1: writing on the back of the album covers, and at
Speaker 1: the point where he's bought these records, He's been Bob
Speaker 1: Dylan for maybe a year a year and a half,
Speaker 1: so it's almost like he's trying on his new name.
Speaker 1: I've actually written an essay about this for a forthcoming book. Um,
Speaker 1: So I'm really One of my sub collections personal ones,
Speaker 1: is collecting records owned by artists who I who inspired me.
Speaker 1: So I've got about twenty five of Jimmie Hendricks's records,
Speaker 1: including his Dylan's greatest hits with some psychedelic doodling on
Speaker 1: the back. I've got some of Bill Wyman's records. I've
Speaker 1: got John Lennon's copy of A Hard Day's Night. I've
Speaker 1: got some Sterling Morrison's all that underground records. Um. You
Speaker 1: know it's pretty nerdy, but I love it. Okay, So
Speaker 1: Susie's album, let's assume she had an album from two
Speaker 1: with no doodle on it. It's just the same as
Speaker 1: if you boughted a retail store. Is that worth anything? Absolutely? Um,
Speaker 1: especially if it's a Dylan album. Um. And I was
Speaker 1: able to through the auction house contact her and say,
Speaker 1: you know, why was he writing on these records, and
Speaker 1: she said something to the extent of it would be
Speaker 1: as if someone was doodling on the side of a
Speaker 1: paperback book writing little notes to themselves. But yeah, people,
Speaker 1: there are people like me who are interested in records
Speaker 1: owned by musicians they like. Now, she's one generation away
Speaker 1: from that. But if it was something she had at
Speaker 1: the time and that Bob Dylan I would have listened
Speaker 1: to her played, that makes it intriguing. Okay, so at
Speaker 1: least to me. Yeah, right, so we know any of
Speaker 1: us who have sold or been to record stores that
Speaker 1: albums that everybody has Fleetwood, Mac, Rumors, Saturday Night Fever
Speaker 1: essentially worthless. Okay, what do people own that is actually
Speaker 1: worth something? That's not strictly true. The vinyl revival has
Speaker 1: gotten so out of control that people will pay premium
Speaker 1: prices for records that sold millions of copies. So if
Speaker 1: you had a sealed copy of Rumors that was the
Speaker 1: first pressing, probably go for three or four dred dollars.
Speaker 1: If you had a stone Mint first pressing, it's probably
Speaker 1: a hundred dollar record, which is inconceivable to be because
Speaker 1: it's one of the best selling records of all time. Um,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you the most recent story. Imaginal Nirvana's never
Speaker 1: Mind came out at a time where very few people
Speaker 1: were buying final records, so i've every day I wake
Speaker 1: up in one of the first things I do is
Speaker 1: look at the top forties selling records that's sold on
Speaker 1: eBay the day before. Just for those unsophisticated, that's an
Speaker 1: easy chart to find. Where's that chart grip swet dot com,
Speaker 1: g R I P s W E A T dot com.
Speaker 1: So you can see what's sold the day before on
Speaker 1: eBay in descending order of price. And never Mind has
Speaker 1: just been going up and up and up the last
Speaker 1: two or three years. And one sold for two thou
Speaker 1: dollars a couple of years ago, or a couple of
Speaker 1: months ago, a vinyl copy sold for two thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Yesterday a copy sold for thirty perfect condition. And you know,
Speaker 1: nobody's records are in perfect condition, and if if they're not,
Speaker 1: the suffer a lot less. So I wrote to a
Speaker 1: friend of mine, going, God, I just can't believe they're
Speaker 1: selling for this much. It's nuts, and he said, yeah,
Speaker 1: that record just keeps going up. So in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night last night, I woke up and went,
Speaker 1: you know, I might have a copy of that, And
Speaker 1: I wrote a note to myself, and I got up
Speaker 1: this morning and I went to my record collection, and
Speaker 1: sure enough, I have an absolutely perfect promo copy of
Speaker 1: never Mind. And that's not something I would keep for
Speaker 1: I'm happy to have a reissue of that. It's not
Speaker 1: a record that's, you know, generationally deep to me. So
Speaker 1: that's a perfect example of the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: a non record collector might have that's worth a lot
Speaker 1: of money. Okay, So you know you occasionally go to people.
Speaker 1: Let's talk Ken Barnes. Ken Barnes, very well known rock
Speaker 1: writer from the classic rock era. He's got a huge collection.
Speaker 1: A few questions here, Hey he decides to sell. Are
Speaker 1: most of these people selling because they need the money?
Speaker 1: And be how do you find out about it? And
Speaker 1: sees to what degree is this the source of your inventor.
Speaker 1: I'd rather not talk about Ken, um, let's talk about
Speaker 1: it in a theoretical way. But that's why I bought
Speaker 1: his collection. I bought much of his collection. So there
Speaker 1: aren't that many people who will come over to your
Speaker 1: house and pay you tens of thousands of dollars or something,
Speaker 1: or a collection. A lot of the people who do
Speaker 1: what I do have stores, and their business model is
Speaker 1: by it as cheap as I can and then flip
Speaker 1: it as fast as I can because they've got overhead.
Speaker 1: My business models different. I want to buy the best
Speaker 1: things and only the best things, and I'll pay more
Speaker 1: than anybody to get them, and I'll put them on
Speaker 1: my website. And I don't care if something takes two
Speaker 1: or three years to sell if it's something really good.
Speaker 1: So I'll work with a couple of friends of mine
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles if somebody's got a huge collection and
Speaker 1: there are things that interest me, and I'll buy what
Speaker 1: I want and then they'll come in and buy what
Speaker 1: they want, and I get, you know, once a couple
Speaker 1: of times a week. I get those kind of calls.
Speaker 1: But generally people have used record store stock collections that
Speaker 1: aren't that interesting. But if it's an industry collection or
Speaker 1: somebody who worked in the media, oftentimes they do have
Speaker 1: interesting stuff. And I also very involved with the Rock
Speaker 1: and Roll Hall of Fame, and I will buy things
Speaker 1: that don't have financial value but have historical value, donate
Speaker 1: them things that I think need preserving. Okay, so the
Speaker 1: people who are selling these records? What is their main motivation?
Speaker 1: Money room, or they just don't want them anymore, all
Speaker 1: of the above. A lot of times somebody dies, somebody
Speaker 1: wants to raise money for a kid who's lost a job. Recently,
Speaker 1: I've paid for plastic surgery, I've bought new cars, I've
Speaker 1: paid for cancer medication. UM, you name it, Okay, so
Speaker 1: you come in. Let's assume to make the numbers around,
Speaker 1: somebody has a thousand records. Generally speaking, can you cherry
Speaker 1: pick or does someone want you to buy all a
Speaker 1: thousand for price and you deal with it? Uh? Generally,
Speaker 1: the way I explain it is, if you want me
Speaker 1: to buy everything, I'll buy it, but you'll make less
Speaker 1: than if I cherry pick it. And then I introduce
Speaker 1: you to somebody who will come over and and buy
Speaker 1: the rest from you. Because you're paying me, essentially to
Speaker 1: do the work that I don't need to do. It's
Speaker 1: a hassle for me to buy a thousand records keep
Speaker 1: a hundred of them at wholesale out nine hundred, So
Speaker 1: I'm gonna want something for my time. You're gonna get
Speaker 1: more money if I come over, pay you top dollar
Speaker 1: for that hundred and then introduce you to somebody who'll
Speaker 1: pay you top dollar for the other nine. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: talk about the ultimate a shrink wrapped record. How often
Speaker 1: do you find a shrink wrapped record? And how does
Speaker 1: that affect the price all the time. And here's here's
Speaker 1: my standard example. Yesterday and today in the Beetle by
Speaker 1: the Beatles was going to come out originally with a
Speaker 1: cover showing them with decapitated baby dolls covered in blood,
Speaker 1: capital printed them up, got very negative feedback from the media,
Speaker 1: and record store owners recalled or actually hadn't sent out
Speaker 1: the album in most cases, and pay did the trunk cover,
Speaker 1: an innocuous cover showing them standing around, uh, a trunk
Speaker 1: over the offending ones. So there, and they had sent
Speaker 1: out some of the original ones to reviewers, and they
Speaker 1: sent out a letter to them say, uh, mistake, sent
Speaker 1: it back to us, will send your replacement copy, which
Speaker 1: most of them didn't do. So you can find or
Speaker 1: what exists in the world are original copies that weren't
Speaker 1: pasted over, Copies that were pasted over that are called
Speaker 1: second state, and copies that are called third state. Where
Speaker 1: somebody industrious kid steamed off the old covered the new
Speaker 1: cover to reveal the old cutter cover. And these are
Speaker 1: worth a variety of prices depending on what the condition is.
Speaker 1: The most desirable one is a stereo, a sealed stereo,
Speaker 1: not pasted over copy. Uh. The guy who was the
Speaker 1: president of Capital at the time, Allen Livingston, kept a
Speaker 1: number of these, and those are the ultimate ones because
Speaker 1: I've got a letter from him saying I'm the president
Speaker 1: of Capital. I kept these from the top. So let's
Speaker 1: say one of those might be worth a hundred thousand dollars. Uh.
Speaker 1: If I took my fingernail and opened the shrink rap
Speaker 1: at the mouth, didn't pull the record out, that's gonna
Speaker 1: mean it's worth six. For the privilege of or the
Speaker 1: difference of sealed and unsealed, even though nothing else has changed,
Speaker 1: might reduce the price by if you took the record
Speaker 1: out and played it, the corners were bent up a
Speaker 1: little bit just through normal handling, that might be worth Uh.
Speaker 1: If the seams started to split, that might be worth fifteen.
Speaker 1: Now that's the extreme example, but that shows you how
Speaker 1: obsessed people are by condition and what an extreme premium
Speaker 1: people pay for rare records they're sealed. Let's uh, stay
Speaker 1: with the butcher cover. For a minute, Let's assume someone
Speaker 1: steamed off the cover and the album is not in
Speaker 1: good condition. What is that worth If they did a
Speaker 1: so so job, as most kids did, a couple hundred bucks,
Speaker 1: if they did a fantastic job where it was done
Speaker 1: professionally and there are people literally who do this professionally
Speaker 1: undred Okay, those of us who were record store savvy.
Speaker 1: You went into the Tower Sunset, you went in the
Speaker 1: back room. They had a shrink wrap machine. They sure
Speaker 1: did so. And Charlie Shaw, the manager of Tower at
Speaker 1: that time, had a motto, there's no such thing as
Speaker 1: as a defective record. So they were just reshrink everything.
Speaker 1: So the question becomes fraud. To what degree is being
Speaker 1: sold as shrink opped is really not shrink wrapped? And
Speaker 1: how can you tell? That? Is an extremely savvy question, Bob.
Speaker 1: There are a huge percentage of what's sold as sealed
Speaker 1: isn't is reshrink reshrunk. There's a huge amount on eBay
Speaker 1: of people selling NonStop sixties records that are supposed to
Speaker 1: be factory sealed, which aren't. I kind of find the
Speaker 1: whole phenomenon of sealed records ridiculous because, as you and
Speaker 1: I know there are defective records, and if I'm going
Speaker 1: to pay a thousand knowledge for record, I want to
Speaker 1: see what the record looks like. Um, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of fraud. And the way you tell the difference is
Speaker 1: somebody like me stares at it for a very long time. Well,
Speaker 1: I know, somebody's what a ship ton of records? You
Speaker 1: could tell back then? What was reshrunk? You know? I haven't.
Speaker 1: You can't tell you right? And but have you very
Speaker 1: sophisticated though? That's my I figured? So have you been beaten? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been beating a couple of times, um, but not many.
Speaker 1: And another quirk about my business model is, and I
Speaker 1: don't know anybody else who does this, I guarantee everything
Speaker 1: I sell to be authentic forever, in writing, if people
Speaker 1: ask and for hiring things in writing anyway, And this
Speaker 1: has two purposes. One it ensures the buyers they're getting
Speaker 1: something that is authentic. And to it prevents me from
Speaker 1: buying and reselling anything that I'm not absolutely positive about.
Speaker 1: If I see something and I'm nine percent sure it's good,
Speaker 1: I'm passing because I don't want that coming back to
Speaker 1: haunt me. Okay, So have you ever sold something that
Speaker 1: turned out not to be authentic. It's happened a few times.
Speaker 1: I almost did. Actually this week i'll show it to
Speaker 1: you this This is audio only, so described for the
Speaker 1: audience side it okay, this is a nine concert program
Speaker 1: for Felonious Monks first Australian tour and as you Bob
Speaker 1: can see, it's signed at the top by the Felonious Monk.
Speaker 1: So I bought this from a guy in Australia who
Speaker 1: told me that his friend now deceased, had gotten it signed.
Speaker 1: And I looked at the signal I bought it got
Speaker 1: it looked absolutely genuine, signed in fountain pen and uh.
Speaker 1: I sold it to a good customer. Mind I hadn't
Speaker 1: sent it out, and the next day somebody sent me
Speaker 1: an email saying, hey, that Felonious Monks signed thing you signed?
Speaker 1: Do you have that because somebody's got one listed on
Speaker 1: eBay And he sent me a link and I looked
Speaker 1: at it. It looked almost exactly the same, but there
Speaker 1: were a few creases in different places. So I wrote
Speaker 1: to the seller and said, do you actually have that?
Speaker 1: It was a guy in Australia. Is it possible that
Speaker 1: I bought that copy and you just didn't take it down. No,
Speaker 1: I've got the right in front of me, and I said,
Speaker 1: got the autograph has to be printed. And I looked
Speaker 1: at it through a very high power loop and it
Speaker 1: still looks like an original autograph. Um. And I did
Speaker 1: a lot of research and I couldn't find any other
Speaker 1: copies of it online. This guy sent me some high
Speaker 1: resolution pictures of the one he had, and even though
Speaker 1: I was almost certain it wasn't printed, it clearly has
Speaker 1: to be printed because there's another one that's identical in
Speaker 1: every way. So I contacted my customer and said, bad news.
Speaker 1: I'm refunding your money. I didn't send it out yet.
Speaker 1: It's fake. I can't think of the last time that happened.
Speaker 1: If ever. Um, yeah, just happened a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 1: So I do, I do, But you know, the good
Speaker 1: news is I guarantee everything. So okay. So how much
Speaker 1: inventory do you have and where do you keep it? Uh?
Speaker 1: I have a fair amount of inventory, but a lot
Speaker 1: of it is very valuable pieces of paper and records
Speaker 1: which don't take up a lot of space, and unframed posters.
Speaker 1: So I have some flat files and I have a
Speaker 1: big safe and I have a safe deposit box, and
Speaker 1: I'm forever trying to sell fewer more expensive things, um
Speaker 1: and happily that what I deal in generally doesn't take
Speaker 1: up very much space. Okay, So how many vinyl records
Speaker 1: do you own today in my personal collection? You're looking
Speaker 1: at it a two thousand? Okay, how many of those
Speaker 1: records you're never gonna sell? Well, I'm gonna die someday, shockingly,
Speaker 1: and so you know my fantasy is to sell it
Speaker 1: all right before that happens. I don't know if that
Speaker 1: will happen. But those two thousand records are my collection,
Speaker 1: So I'm I'm very disinclined to part with any of them.
Speaker 1: There are hard earned, a lot of them might spend
Speaker 1: a lot of time looking for a lot of them
Speaker 1: have stories behind them, are souvenirs from travel or owned
Speaker 1: by friends of mine who are no longer here, or
Speaker 1: owned by artists I admire. So that's my record collection.
Speaker 1: And if one was knowledgeable like yourself, how many of
Speaker 1: those are rare and how many just have sentimental value?
Speaker 1: M m it's probably m hmm. There are records in
Speaker 1: there I would be extremely hard pressed to ever replace.
Speaker 1: There are records in there that are irreplaceable or the
Speaker 1: only known copy. There are records in there that are
Speaker 1: really common. Having found that Nirvana record today, I'm motivated
Speaker 1: to go look through and I wonder if there's anything
Speaker 1: else that doesn't mean that much, to mean it's worth
Speaker 1: a lot of money. But but generally those are things
Speaker 1: that I have a deep connection to and I listened to,
Speaker 1: you know, probably five or six albums a day. Okay,
Speaker 1: So how good a system do you have? What do
Speaker 1: you have I have? I lived in a house with
Speaker 1: just my wife. She never turns on the stereo, and
Speaker 1: I have four stereos with turntables, and I have a
Speaker 1: three floor house. Uh. My best stereo is I was
Speaker 1: born in nineteen fifty six and I thought it would
Speaker 1: be fun to put together he stayed of the art
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty six system, and for that I have some
Speaker 1: nineteen circa nineteen fifty six JB L speakers that have
Speaker 1: been rebuilt that are about three ft tall. I have
Speaker 1: a Macto, Macintosh Mono to bamps, Macintosh uh Tuner pre amp,
Speaker 1: and a um Thorn's turntables. So that's all circa nine
Speaker 1: and that's my best stereo. I think, uh, I have
Speaker 1: some other McIntosh integrated amps. I have Linn Access turntable.
Speaker 1: I have a real good turntable. Yeah, lesser stuff, but
Speaker 1: it's great to have stereos all over the house. What
Speaker 1: do you think of the vinyl revival. It's mystifying to me.
Speaker 1: It's fantastic. I think it's fantastic. My first book was
Speaker 1: on classic vinyl records. Um, it's great to see kids
Speaker 1: excited about vinyl records. It's great to see all these records,
Speaker 1: store day releases coming out, lots of things you thought
Speaker 1: you'd never hear or never be able to get on vinyl.
Speaker 1: It's shocking to me when I look at the forty
Speaker 1: biggest selling records from the day before on eBay and
Speaker 1: seeing over and over and over Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift
Speaker 1: record store day records or reissues of not that uncommon
Speaker 1: records selling for five six hundred dollars. H People doing
Speaker 1: bespoke jazz reissues itself for five d to a thousand
Speaker 1: dollars when you could buy for that kind of money
Speaker 1: a truly rare record. But generally, I think it's very
Speaker 1: exciting that kids are getting turned onto music and and
Speaker 1: not just kids and records. We grew up in an
Speaker 1: era where the records were cut analog on tape, ultimately
Speaker 1: analog format, and you wanted to get the best ster
Speaker 1: you can afford. Whereas kids frequently have a very poor
Speaker 1: stereo and they're buying something that was cut digitally that's
Speaker 1: ultimately pressed on vinyl. What do you think about all that?
Speaker 1: I think the whole thing is weird. When the Beatles did.
Speaker 1: When the first Beatles vinyl remasters came at five or
Speaker 1: seven years ago, I bought some of them, and they
Speaker 1: were doing all this us about how George Martin's son
Speaker 1: and state of the art UH remastering and allowed them
Speaker 1: to tease new information on the tapes, and you could
Speaker 1: hear the Beatles fingers on the strings, the string noise
Speaker 1: and stuff, and they've been remixed from the original masters.
Speaker 1: And I listened to them and I hated them because
Speaker 1: they didn't sound like the records that are imprinted in
Speaker 1: my mind that I love. And I have a friend
Speaker 1: who has a very high end audio store at the
Speaker 1: time had a hundred thousand dollar turntable and I went
Speaker 1: a bead some of my English first pressing Beatle records
Speaker 1: against those, and I just thought the new ones sounded terrible.
Speaker 1: They were like science projects. Yeah, there's more information, but
Speaker 1: it's not what the Beatles signed off on in when
Speaker 1: they were sitting in the room with George Martin. So
Speaker 1: generally that stuff doesn't interest me. M I buy lots
Speaker 1: of reissues and I like find hearing new music artists
Speaker 1: I like. But the remastering, you know, I mean, the
Speaker 1: remastering never stops. As you know, you know, there are
Speaker 1: records have been remastered, you know, pet sounds four or five,
Speaker 1: six times, and uh, it just feels very science project.
Speaker 1: We'll certainly remix. You know. I've been on record and
Speaker 1: certainly been involved with people on this is just crazy. Okay.
Speaker 1: You've been heavily involved with Dylan's music, both in the
Speaker 1: museum that opened in Oklahoma and finding unreleased stuff. Tell
Speaker 1: us about that. He was one of my favorite artists
Speaker 1: as a kid. It still is. I heard a show
Speaker 1: on YouTube from five days ago in Seattle where he
Speaker 1: was just sounding unbelievably good. It's just remarkable. This guy
Speaker 1: at eighty one years old is making great music and
Speaker 1: is still great, still on the road and sounding fantastic. Uh,
Speaker 1: he's not sounding like he did in Night sixty four.
Speaker 1: But sav Um, I loved Dylan records. I bought all
Speaker 1: the Dylan bootlegs I could find. As a kid, I
Speaker 1: collected rare Dylan records. I wanted that freewheel and so bad.
Speaker 1: I was willing to pay crazy money for it. Um
Speaker 1: I became friendly with a guy named Jason Emmons who
Speaker 1: was the curatorial director at the Experience Music Project in Seattle.
Speaker 1: He put together a museum show called Bob Dylan's American
Speaker 1: Journey that traveled around the United States. That was the
Speaker 1: only authorized ever Dylan exhibit. It was at the Scutball
Speaker 1: here in Los Angeles. It was incredible. I was consultant
Speaker 1: to it, and I was probably the major, one of
Speaker 1: the major lenders to it. And through that I met
Speaker 1: Jeff Rosen, who manages Bob and at some point many
Speaker 1: years later, he called me up and asked me if
Speaker 1: I would uh uh. He had a project he was
Speaker 1: interested in talking to me about, but I had to
Speaker 1: sign a nondisclosure agreement first. Sure I did. He told
Speaker 1: me about Bob Dylan's archive and that it was being
Speaker 1: had been sold to the George Kaiser family. Foundation in
Speaker 1: Tulsa and they were going to open a museum and
Speaker 1: he needed somebody to appraise it. And he felt like
Speaker 1: I probably knew as much about that as anybody and
Speaker 1: could I do? And this threw me for a total loop.
Speaker 1: But it was a dream come true project and I
Speaker 1: told him I could certainly value this stuff, but when
Speaker 1: I saw what it constituted, I said, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not somebody who can write you hundreds of page long
Speaker 1: appraisal and then defended to the I R s if
Speaker 1: if that happens, But I know somebody who can. Laura Woolli,
Speaker 1: who's the top entertainment praiser in the world, isn't a
Speaker 1: good friend of mine. So I brought her on board
Speaker 1: and for about six months we appraised this massive archive.
Speaker 1: There were six thousand handwritten things, ranging from a note
Speaker 1: on the back of a business card to the notebooks
Speaker 1: that he wrote blood on the Tracks in, or the
Speaker 1: original manuscript to Subterranean Homesick Blues. And we were holding
Speaker 1: these things in our hands, and you know, it was
Speaker 1: just breath digging, literally breath digging for me. And uh
Speaker 1: I have done helped them with other projects. I bought
Speaker 1: the collection of Ralph J. Gleeson, who was the first
Speaker 1: rock printic in America and in he had died, but
Speaker 1: he was one of those guys to say literally everything.
Speaker 1: And in his archives in his basement, I found a
Speaker 1: bunch of Bob Dylan tapes that had come from Dylan
Speaker 1: who he was friendly with him other people, and um,
Speaker 1: I had a lot of them were poorly labeled. So
Speaker 1: I rented a recording studio and went and listened to stuff.
Speaker 1: And there was one that just said Dylan Brandeis on
Speaker 1: the side in pencil, and I googled and I couldn't
Speaker 1: find anything about that. He played Brandeis University, but that
Speaker 1: was it. And it turned out to be a professionally
Speaker 1: recorded stereo recording of Bob Dylan at Brandeis University about
Speaker 1: a month before Freewheeland came out, perfect quality. And my
Speaker 1: jaw dropped when I was listening to this in the studio,
Speaker 1: And you know, my find tapes like this, and I
Speaker 1: always my first stop is always to go to the artist.
Speaker 1: And so I called Jeff rosen up and I told
Speaker 1: him and h I made a deal with him and
Speaker 1: myself in the Gleason family for them to buy that
Speaker 1: tape and it got released as Bob Dylan at Brandeis
Speaker 1: University in nine and it was just shocking to me
Speaker 1: that I could be the fanboy Jeff Uh buying these
Speaker 1: bootlegs all of a sudden is responsible for Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: album being released. And I found other tapes that have
Speaker 1: been released and that I've sold the artists. But that
Speaker 1: was the peak for me. Okay. You also, you know
Speaker 1: Rhino Records label and Rhino have been sold years past.
Speaker 1: You also implore them to release some of the stuff
Speaker 1: you find. What's that experience been like? Mixed? Um, the
Speaker 1: late great Gary Stewart who worked to Rhino with me,
Speaker 1: was a wonderful guy. Um was the head of A
Speaker 1: and RT Rhino and when he was it was easy. Uh.
Speaker 1: When he left, I remember, for instance, I had bought
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff from Danny Fields and in these
Speaker 1: again I had to read a studio to find out
Speaker 1: what was on these boxes and things. I found the
Speaker 1: a copymaster tape of the first Stooges album with John
Speaker 1: Kale's mixes that had never been released. They've been remixed
Speaker 1: um by Jack Holsman and Idie And so I went
Speaker 1: to Rhino and had a meeting saying, look, this is incredible.
Speaker 1: You can release this as a double album with the
Speaker 1: mixes everybody knows and these John Kale mixes which are
Speaker 1: legendary but nobody's ever heard. And one of the guys
Speaker 1: at Rhino, who I had known for a very long time, said, well,
Speaker 1: why should we buy those from you? We can go
Speaker 1: remix these ourselves, and I was like, you don't get it.
Speaker 1: This is American history at a high level. Uh, you
Speaker 1: gotta put this out, And they bought the tape from me,
Speaker 1: and sparingly would put out a couple of tracks at
Speaker 1: a time and eventually released the whole thing. So sometimes
Speaker 1: it's really I mean, I had Charlie Parker out takes
Speaker 1: and I called Verve and said, you know, I've got
Speaker 1: these false starts and Charlie Parker with strings out takes, Well,
Speaker 1: jazz doesn't sell, and it's like, look, I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about Johnny Hodge's outtakes. It's Charlie Parker. And eventually they
Speaker 1: bought them. But sometimes it's the myth of sism. This
Speaker 1: you're rolling a boulder up a hill, and sometimes people
Speaker 1: like Jeff Frozen get it instantly. It's like, yes, we've
Speaker 1: got to buy it from you know, you talk about
Speaker 1: Gary Stewart, anybody who was at his house, it was
Speaker 1: you know, it was an unending stream of vinyl records.
Speaker 1: I think about my records and I say I'll buy
Speaker 1: and my girlfriend or my sister just throw it out.
Speaker 1: So my dness, oh, believe me it is. I say,
Speaker 1: you have no idea how valuable these he put it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So what happened to Gary Stewart's records, Well, what happened
Speaker 1: to Gary Stewart's records is Gary Stewart, who was ultimately
Speaker 1: the head of an art Rhino and then the uh
Speaker 1: ran iTunes at the beginning for Apple, was a frequent
Speaker 1: customer of Rhino Records who I befriended, and he I
Speaker 1: kept trying to hire him to come to work to
Speaker 1: the store because he spent so much time there. He
Speaker 1: was working at McDonald's. It was a management trainee, and
Speaker 1: I felt like that was a greater career path than
Speaker 1: working in record store. And though he would till the
Speaker 1: end of his life deny that that these two things
Speaker 1: were connected. The McDonald's got held up twice, and the
Speaker 1: second time he was locked in a meat locker with
Speaker 1: a bunch of employees and eventually decided, Okay, I'll come
Speaker 1: to work for Rhino and excelled and became at Richard
Speaker 1: and Harold's feet, the guy who put together all those
Speaker 1: incredible reissues that Rhino became famous for. And we remained
Speaker 1: close friends till the end of his life, which was
Speaker 1: about three years ago. So when Gary died, I had
Speaker 1: been in close contact with him, and I had been
Speaker 1: in close contact with his UH cousin, who inherited his estate,
Speaker 1: and I said, look, if you need any help figuring
Speaker 1: out what to do with any of his possessions, I'll
Speaker 1: be happy to help. Yes, I do. She lives in Chicago,
Speaker 1: So I went over there and UH went through his
Speaker 1: collection and I my idea was we should take all
Speaker 1: of the Rhino reissues, which they were colossal number hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds and hundreds, and donate them to the Rock
Speaker 1: and Roll Hall of Fame because they really document the
Speaker 1: birth of the reissued culture in America, in the world, really,
Speaker 1: and they were very excited about that. His cousin approved,
Speaker 1: so all of his a copy of everything he ever did,
Speaker 1: is at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Then
Speaker 1: I had an idea that we should save some of
Speaker 1: the records that he was obsessed with and give them
Speaker 1: to his friends, so artists like Elvas Costello, for instance,
Speaker 1: or Sparks. I bought those records from the estate and
Speaker 1: made up a little car arts saying this record was
Speaker 1: owned by Gary Stewart, and I distributed them to about
Speaker 1: seventy five of his friends so people could just have
Speaker 1: a reminder of Gary. And then the rest were sold
Speaker 1: to a friend of Gary's. In mind, Bob say, who
Speaker 1: has a record store. Now, it's a very tragic story,
Speaker 1: and you seem to have been closest to Gary at
Speaker 1: the end. Was this anomalous his death or is this
Speaker 1: evidence of our era? Because I certainly know a lot
Speaker 1: of people who had very big jobs in the music business,
Speaker 1: but when the time came with a the game of
Speaker 1: musical chairs, there was no longer receipt for them have
Speaker 1: hit very hard times. So is he evidence of that really?
Speaker 1: Or you know, he was a unique guy and none
Speaker 1: of those laws apply. You know, Gary took his own life.
Speaker 1: He had been suffering from mental illness. He would depression.
Speaker 1: He was working on it head on, working with therapists.
Speaker 1: He didn't tell a lot of people about it, but
Speaker 1: I knew about it, um, and I think ultimately he
Speaker 1: just couldn't um see the forest for the treaty. It's
Speaker 1: one of the great tragedies of my lifetime. UM. I
Speaker 1: think Gary had very strong feelings about what he wanted
Speaker 1: to do and what he didn't want to do, and
Speaker 1: he was the antithesis. I mean, I was someone who
Speaker 1: was happy to work for a record company and market
Speaker 1: and package things, even though a lot of them weren't
Speaker 1: to my personal taste. I could find, you know, I
Speaker 1: didn't go home and listen to Van Halen Records, but
Speaker 1: I could appreciate what van Halen worked. Um. Gary didn't
Speaker 1: want to work on things that he wasn't personally too.
Speaker 1: And I think that that is not the trajectory that
Speaker 1: people are looking for. We're running record companies, you know,
Speaker 1: it's become much and much more of a being counting mentality.
Speaker 1: Forgive the expression and uh, you know, the Netflix culture
Speaker 1: is the most extreme example of it. And I don't
Speaker 1: think Gary had a place in that world. And I
Speaker 1: think that world repulsed Gary. You didn't want to have
Speaker 1: a place in the world. Just going back over your
Speaker 1: decades in the business, what can you tell us about
Speaker 1: the people who ultimately got squeezed out? How they I mean,
Speaker 1: first they all went to work in the video business.
Speaker 1: Then they all went to work in real estate, and
Speaker 1: video business tied. Real estate is really competitive. I certainly
Speaker 1: know a lot of people who have hard been on
Speaker 1: hard times. What your experience been with people? It's the same, um,
Speaker 1: it's you know, we lived this charmed life where we
Speaker 1: had expense accounts and traveled all around the world and
Speaker 1: hung out with bands, and you know, my experience was
Speaker 1: what I figured everybody in the music business had to
Speaker 1: be just as crazy about music as I was, And
Speaker 1: when I got to in m I found out that
Speaker 1: was absolutely not the case. There were a lot of
Speaker 1: people like Jeff Arroff and Steve Baker were obsessed with music,
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of people who just ended
Speaker 1: up in the music business because they were good salespeople
Speaker 1: or marketing people or advertising people who didn't live and
Speaker 1: breathe this stuff the way you and I do. UM.
Speaker 1: So I feel lucky that I could transition straight in.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm still entirely consumed by music all day long,
Speaker 1: doing you know, writing books about music and consulting for artists, selling,
Speaker 1: buying and selling this stuff, researching this stuff. Um, some
Speaker 1: of the people who weren't as obsessed with it as
Speaker 1: you say, found other careers. Some of them have been
Speaker 1: very successful. Some of them are working very hard h
Speaker 1: to reinvent themselves. And you know, I think this golden
Speaker 1: age that we lived through, we were very fortunate to
Speaker 1: live through. But the business, as you know better than anybody,
Speaker 1: has changed dramatically. Okay, speaking of which, you wrote a
Speaker 1: book about the jazz clubs of the forties and fifties,
Speaker 1: and of the books you've written, that is the most
Speaker 1: riveting because it is a window into a world that
Speaker 1: I don't only happened before I was born, that I
Speaker 1: really wasn't aware of, and I certainly know Q and
Speaker 1: a lot of big jazz ers, etcetera. My question, I
Speaker 1: always viewed the rock era as the Renaissance. Okay, there
Speaker 1: was only one Renaissance. They painted and sculpted after that,
Speaker 1: but there was one Renaissance. And then I'm reading your
Speaker 1: book and I'm saying, well, maybe you know sounds change.
Speaker 1: What is your perspective of the continuum and where we
Speaker 1: are today? I don't know, but I subscribe to the mhm.
Speaker 1: Different kinds of music had different periods of time where
Speaker 1: there was a renaissance. I find myself fairly uncompelled by
Speaker 1: most of the music happening today, but I don't dive
Speaker 1: that deep into it, and I think that's generational. UM.
Speaker 1: I think the jazz clubs and the jazz are I
Speaker 1: wrote about was absolutely a cultural renaissance and a societal
Speaker 1: renaissance at a time where, um, as I discovered talking
Speaker 1: to Quincy and Sunny Rawlins, racism started the first breakdown
Speaker 1: in America. I don't know what's coming next. I think
Speaker 1: it's kind of a fool's game to try and predict this. Um.
Speaker 1: I would have never thought that at eighty Bob Dylan
Speaker 1: would make be making great provocative records. I'm really into
Speaker 1: a British folksinger named Shirley Collins who is also in
Speaker 1: her early eighties and released an album last year that
Speaker 1: was probably my favorite record along with the Dylan album
Speaker 1: of the year to eight year old. I mean, who
Speaker 1: would have saw that coming? Um? You never know where
Speaker 1: the next great thing is coming from. I think anybody
Speaker 1: who thinks they've got this all figured out may for
Speaker 1: a short period of time, but the next great thing
Speaker 1: can be around the corner. Swim generally pretty optimistic. Guy
Speaker 1: about that? Okay, from the internet era, which will say
Speaker 1: post two thousand, in the hip hop era, which really
Speaker 1: started in the eighties but gained significant traction in the nineties,
Speaker 1: is any of that stuff worth something? And are you
Speaker 1: involved in Internet? I'll answer your second question first. I'm
Speaker 1: not involved in it. Generally. I find if I stick
Speaker 1: to my lane, I do really well, and if I
Speaker 1: start trying to go deep into something I don't have
Speaker 1: a personal affinity for, like hip hop, it can be
Speaker 1: a fraud situation. There are lots of hip hop records
Speaker 1: worth a lot of money. There's a label called Doubt
Speaker 1: d a u pe in England who releases limited edition
Speaker 1: hip hop records that almost instantly sell out and go
Speaker 1: for five thousand dollars um. A lot of early hip
Speaker 1: hop stuff, a lot of sample stuff, goes for a
Speaker 1: lot of money. A lot of punk records from the
Speaker 1: nineties goes go for a lot of money. UM. A
Speaker 1: lot of these limited edition record store day records or
Speaker 1: uh you know, an artist like Taylor Swift will put
Speaker 1: out a record where a certain retailer will get a
Speaker 1: certain vinyl color and they'll make a thousand of them
Speaker 1: go for a lot of money. So yeah, there's there's
Speaker 1: a lot of current and recent records that are very collectable. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: I remember in the nineties you bid in an auction
Speaker 1: you've got a role in the steam room at Seinfeld,
Speaker 1: and you gave me a script from that episode that
Speaker 1: you pulled off the table. My, so I know that
Speaker 1: it always hasn't been records. So how far afield wire
Speaker 1: you go, and you certainly do posters and other music
Speaker 1: related stuff, how do you find that stuff? Assess that stuff?
Speaker 1: I mean a record, there's there's one free wheel and
Speaker 1: there various iterations, but there's an endless supply of posters
Speaker 1: and signatures and all kinds of stuff. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of the signatures are fake, a huge percentage. Like if
Speaker 1: you go on I think there are something like twelve
Speaker 1: authentic American Beatles albums that have been signed service twelve,
Speaker 1: Yet if you go on email you'll find numerous ones. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's an extremely fraught areas. So what I bring to
Speaker 1: it is nearly fifty years of actually more than fifty
Speaker 1: years of looking at this stuff and expertise and the
Speaker 1: ability to research it um and discern whether something is genuine,
Speaker 1: and you begin to develop an internal algorithm for Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's rarer than it looks. I'll buy it and spend
Speaker 1: some time sitting with it and letting it marinate my
Speaker 1: mind and researching it and seeing what I can find
Speaker 1: out and contextualizing it. And that's the thing I enjoy
Speaker 1: it the most about what I do, um, you know,
Speaker 1: finding I bought one of John Coltrane's saxophones at an
Speaker 1: auction sold by his family, and I was able to
Speaker 1: find records he played it on live records. I was
Speaker 1: able to find photographs of him using it. I was
Speaker 1: able to find posters from the Japanese tour where he
Speaker 1: played it. I bought on eBay a Japanese magazine that
Speaker 1: the guy who had been the band boy Uh in
Speaker 1: the seventies discovered pictures he had taken of the tour,
Speaker 1: and this Japanese magazine had thirty pictures, and I was
Speaker 1: able to find three or four with the saxophone or
Speaker 1: the saxophone case on a rack in a train with
Speaker 1: Coltrane sitting next to it. I love that detective work
Speaker 1: aspect of it, and I think That's where I can
Speaker 1: add value to things as well. I love the research.
Speaker 1: I love figuring out if things are authentic or not authentic.
Speaker 1: I love figuring out is this pressing actually what somebody
Speaker 1: selling as it as or have they mischaracterized it? Uh.
Speaker 1: Once a year I find something on eBay. Now, I
Speaker 1: may spend two hours a day on email or an
Speaker 1: hour a day on email. Once a year I'll find
Speaker 1: something really incredible. But you've got to put in a
Speaker 1: lot of hours to get that, to get to that point.
Speaker 1: I bought the guitar that Bob Dylan played at the
Speaker 1: Clinton inauguration on eBay, which had been offered with a
Speaker 1: five thousand or six thousand dollars buy it now, and
Speaker 1: nobody bought it, and uh, I was able to buy it,
Speaker 1: research it, get letters from Gibson proving it was real,
Speaker 1: do a match of the tortoiseshell headstock with one of
Speaker 1: the foremost rare guitar experts in the world. And I
Speaker 1: just love the treasure hunting aspect of it, the research aspect. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you you bought the sacophone, you bought the guitar,
Speaker 1: you went on an adventure which all of us music
Speaker 1: nerds know is cool. But in the back of your mind,
Speaker 1: are you wild being an asset to sell an adding
Speaker 1: value to that asset? Sometimes yes, Sometimes it's something I
Speaker 1: want for myself. I sold the Coltrane saxophone twice, actually
Speaker 1: sold it once, bought it back from the guy, kept
Speaker 1: it about ten years, and just recently sold it again. Um.
Speaker 1: The Dylan guitar, I've had for ten years or so.
Speaker 1: I've loaded it to various museum exhibitions. Uh. At some
Speaker 1: point I'll sell it um, but I like having it. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I'm buying something just to sell, like that felonious
Speaker 1: Monk program or you know, all day I'm buying stuff.
Speaker 1: We're selling stuff, okay, but things like posters, programs, other
Speaker 1: merch How do you find that? How invested are you
Speaker 1: in that? And what's that like relative to vinyl? Some
Speaker 1: of those things go for crazy money. There's some stuff
Speaker 1: I collect myself, which you can see on the walls
Speaker 1: of my UM office here. Some of the stuff I'm
Speaker 1: buying just to sell. Some of the stuff I'm buying
Speaker 1: to keep. Some of the stuff I'm buying to think about. Uh.
Speaker 1: It runs the gamut um. But people are there. There
Speaker 1: are crazy collectors for posters. There are crazy collectors for autographs.
Speaker 1: There are crazy collectors for uh handbills. Um. I have
Speaker 1: a wammy bar that popped off of Jimmy Hendricks's guitar
Speaker 1: framed on the wall and went straight into the lap
Speaker 1: of a guy who was sitting in the pit photographing
Speaker 1: Hendricks for Rolling Stone. Um. It really, it's just all
Speaker 1: over the place, and sometimes I think I want something,
Speaker 1: but somebody comes along. I really like placing things in
Speaker 1: the right collections, and sometimes somebody who's got an incredible
Speaker 1: collection will just be desperate to buy something for me,
Speaker 1: and I think, you know, I've got it. I've had
Speaker 1: it for ten years. I love it, but time to
Speaker 1: let that move on. I'm very conscious of the fact
Speaker 1: that I'm not gonna at some point this stuff will
Speaker 1: leave me either dead or alive. So it's good when
Speaker 1: you can make somebody happy. So these worlds are always small,
Speaker 1: like the music business itself. How many of I mean
Speaker 1: you maybe at the pinnacle, but how many of you
Speaker 1: are there out there who are making a full time
Speaker 1: business or spending a lot of time buying and selling
Speaker 1: music memorabilia. There are a lot of people doing that,
Speaker 1: but I think there aren't a lot of people doing
Speaker 1: it at my level. Who can just you know, somebody's
Speaker 1: got this has happened to me a year ago. Somebody's
Speaker 1: got a Jim Morrison handwritten manuscript of Strange Days. I'll
Speaker 1: buy that, and I will pay you a lot of
Speaker 1: money for that, and I will sit on that and
Speaker 1: let it marinate and wait till the right person comes along,
Speaker 1: and not feel expert to flip it. There aren't a
Speaker 1: lot of people doing it at my level. I don't
Speaker 1: want to. I didn't mean that. I'm just trying to
Speaker 1: get a landscape. Are the buyers? Do you ultimately know
Speaker 1: all the buyers are? Really the buyers are all over
Speaker 1: the world, their individuals. They might buy once and forget
Speaker 1: or as I say, you know, well let's stay there.
Speaker 1: Are they the same hungry people? No, there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who are repeat customers who I deal with,
Speaker 1: and who I get something and pick up the phone
Speaker 1: or send an email saying I just got this. I
Speaker 1: thought you might be interested. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who might buy two things you hear from me,
Speaker 1: but I know who they are, and there are fifty
Speaker 1: of its people I've never dealt with before buying something,
Speaker 1: and you establish a price, certainly on the stuff. Okay,
Speaker 1: how much is buy it as it is on eBay?
Speaker 1: How much is auction and how much when someone's interested
Speaker 1: is they're haggling. Almost always I set a price for
Speaker 1: something and just wait for the right person come along.
Speaker 1: I'm a patient guys. I've said, if somebody wants to
Speaker 1: make me an offer and makes a compelling case, and
Speaker 1: it's in the ballpark and I've had the thing for
Speaker 1: a long time and I'm not attached to it, I'll
Speaker 1: consider it. But a lot of these things, you know,
Speaker 1: when you get to the memorabilia, you're never going to
Speaker 1: see another one. And I like having a website and
Speaker 1: eBay listings with stuff people can't find everywhere else. So
Speaker 1: I'm not generally a motivated seller. And you know, typically
Speaker 1: what happens is you put up something really big and
Speaker 1: you might get a i'll pay you fifty right now.
Speaker 1: And as a friend of mine said, that's what the
Speaker 1: delete button has made for those people don't even get
Speaker 1: a response. Um uh, if it's god. I'm a huge
Speaker 1: stores collector and this is the one thing I'm missing
Speaker 1: and I can't afford it, but I could pay you
Speaker 1: off over a year. Sure, no problem. You want to
Speaker 1: help people out and you talk a couple of times
Speaker 1: about buying stuff back. How often does that happen and
Speaker 1: what is the person's motivation? Doesn't happen very often. In
Speaker 1: the case of the Coltrane saxophone, someone was starting a
Speaker 1: new business and wanted some capital and it was a
Speaker 1: big number. In a couple of weeks ago, I bought
Speaker 1: three great things back from a regular customer line who
Speaker 1: had was actually writing Ruby an email. It was very
Speaker 1: apologetic that he wanted was inquiring about selling this stuff back,
Speaker 1: as if I would be somehow offended, and I wasn't
Speaker 1: in any way. I was excited about buying these three
Speaker 1: things back. And he wanted to buy UH a very
Speaker 1: rare photograph UH of baseball players in the Negro leagues.
Speaker 1: And so you know, people have differing collecting priorities, and
Speaker 1: he was trying to fund fund the purchase of something
Speaker 1: else that I was thrilled to get the stuff back.
Speaker 1: And how do you establish a price for getting it back,
Speaker 1: just as you would establish a price for buying something.
Speaker 1: But in this case, because the guy was a good customer, mind,
Speaker 1: I paid him more than I ordinarily would, but enough
Speaker 1: that I could make money enough to make it worth
Speaker 1: my wife, so less than he boughted from you. Yes,
Speaker 1: you know, you begin to develop an internal algorithm for
Speaker 1: this pricing. Okay, so tell us about writing books and
Speaker 1: that part of your business. I've done three hundred and
Speaker 1: one Essential Rock Records, which is basically classic vinyl porn
Speaker 1: with I interviewed some recording artists that I admire about
Speaker 1: records that were life changing to them. The second one
Speaker 1: was a History of the Stooges that is centered around
Speaker 1: a my collection of students memorabilia and that of a
Speaker 1: friend of mine, and uh series of interviews I did
Speaker 1: with Iggy Pop talking about the Stooges. And the third
Speaker 1: one was the Jazz Club Book. Each of them have
Speaker 1: different origin stories. I never had any aspiration to do
Speaker 1: a book whatsoever. Uh, but I have a friend who
Speaker 1: hasn't art book story, Lee Kaplan, who worked at Rano
Speaker 1: with me, and one day he showed me this book
Speaker 1: of rare photography books called the Book of a hundred
Speaker 1: and one Books. And this person had assembled these and
Speaker 1: possibly rare photography books and written an essay about each
Speaker 1: book and had a photograph of the cover and then
Speaker 1: a couple of spreads from the book, and I went, Wow,
Speaker 1: that would be great to do for records. And I
Speaker 1: kind of thought about it, but I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't have a burning passion to do this. And
Speaker 1: a friend of mine, Brian raps Are caught in a
Speaker 1: customer who had written a punk rock flyer book called
Speaker 1: Fucked Up and photocopied. It was one of these pet
Speaker 1: rock sensations. This book just went crazy. It's in something
Speaker 1: like its twentieth printing and has sold nearly a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand copies about punk flyers. And he was in my
Speaker 1: house one day looking through some new flyers and told
Speaker 1: me that his book had been such a success the
Speaker 1: publisher had given him an imprint and if I had
Speaker 1: any book ideas, he wanted to hear them. And I said, well,
Speaker 1: I've been carrying this one around to do a book
Speaker 1: of a hundred and one classic vinyl records, a rip
Speaker 1: off of this book of a hundred one photography books.
Speaker 1: And told him what it was and what I added
Speaker 1: to it was the interviews with artists. He goes, I'll
Speaker 1: get your book deal, and he did, and so we
Speaker 1: did it together, and uh interviewed Graham Nash, Iggy, and
Speaker 1: Suzanne Vega, some other artists I had worked with Johnny
Speaker 1: Maher people. I knew it had these lush photo spreads
Speaker 1: of the earliest pressing for the artists country of origin,
Speaker 1: totally nerdy, and some of those are septionally rare records.
Speaker 1: And then I did a spread on my collection of
Speaker 1: Jimmie Hendricks's records, a few other things like that band
Speaker 1: album covers spread. It was very successful. It's in its
Speaker 1: fourth printing now, and it was a lot of work,
Speaker 1: but it was fun and people really enjoyed it, and
Speaker 1: uh so I was happy to do it, and I thought,
Speaker 1: I'm never doing another book again, and it was too
Speaker 1: much work. Glad I did it. And I had this
Speaker 1: collection of stooges memorabiliy, a very large collection, and another
Speaker 1: friend of mine had an equally large collection of stuff
Speaker 1: that nobody had ever seen. He kept bugging me to
Speaker 1: do a book, and I kept saying, no, not interested.
Speaker 1: And one day I kind of had this idea where
Speaker 1: I worked with Iggy at A and M and we
Speaker 1: become very friendly, and I knew he was this great
Speaker 1: rack on tour and I thought, I know what to do.
Speaker 1: We'll pick a hundred things from our Stooges memorabilia that
Speaker 1: nobody's ever seen, and we'll go interview Iggy and just
Speaker 1: record what he has to say about each thing, and
Speaker 1: that will be the book. And uh, my friend said great,
Speaker 1: and uh so I got in contact with Iggy, who
Speaker 1: had really liked my hunder one Rock Records book and
Speaker 1: really liked what I said about the Stooges, included two
Speaker 1: Stooges albums, and we worked out a deal with him
Speaker 1: to do it. And the idea was we would go
Speaker 1: to my aunt or Miami and where he lives, and
Speaker 1: for eight hours show him these pictures and record his recollections.
Speaker 1: And my I thought, you know, maybe to have five
Speaker 1: minutes to say about each thing, and then we'd fill
Speaker 1: in what the things he didn't remember with a little
Speaker 1: bit of captions, and that would be It would be simple.
Speaker 1: So I prepared this page document of questions to ask
Speaker 1: him about based on these images. And the idea was
Speaker 1: we were going to surprise. I said, you know, he
Speaker 1: wouldn't see these things before it, and a couple of
Speaker 1: days before he said, you know, i'd really like to
Speaker 1: see these things, okay, So I fixed him to him
Speaker 1: and he sent me an email saying, this is fantastic.
Speaker 1: I'm really excited about this. I've never seen almost any
Speaker 1: of these things before. Great. So my friend Johan, who
Speaker 1: I was doing this with, and I who had the
Speaker 1: other collection, I went down to Miami and we sat
Speaker 1: in this little again has two houses. One is his workhouse,
Speaker 1: and that's where we went. And sat in this little
Speaker 1: thatched roofed hut by a creek in the backyard of
Speaker 1: his place, and uh, you know, we got through the
Speaker 1: pleasant trees and I showed him the first thing, and
Speaker 1: he just started talking. And I'm looking at my watch
Speaker 1: and it's fifteen minutes and I've got eight hours to
Speaker 1: talk to him, and I'm doing the math, going this
Speaker 1: is never gonna work. So I interrupted him and I said, listen,
Speaker 1: we gotta keep these answers pretty short or else I'm
Speaker 1: going to be more than eight hours. Uh no, I
Speaker 1: don't want that. And he and we're very reflective about
Speaker 1: the stooges. Ron Ashton, who was the guitar player, had died.
Speaker 1: Scott Ashton was in poor health, and I think he'd
Speaker 1: been thinking a lot about them, and I was a
Speaker 1: comfortable person to talk to because he knew me from
Speaker 1: the record company experience in my previous book. And I
Speaker 1: think he figured, you know, if I'm ever going to
Speaker 1: talk about this period in depth, which he never had,
Speaker 1: this is the situation where I'm going to do it.
Speaker 1: But the thing I hadn't planned on was this unbelievable memory.
Speaker 1: So I'm in the second and third thing and we're
Speaker 1: at forty five minutes, and I stopped him and I said, listen,
Speaker 1: I think I'm gonna change plans. I think we're gonna
Speaker 1: just do an oral history of the Stooges and and
Speaker 1: show you this stuff and and work around that at
Speaker 1: some point I may may need to do fill in interviews.
Speaker 1: And he was like fine, I mean, he was having
Speaker 1: a ball. So we talked for eight or nine hours,
Speaker 1: and uh, it was I've never I've talked to a
Speaker 1: lot of artists. I've never met anybody with the recall
Speaker 1: he which when you factor in the fact that the
Speaker 1: guy abused himself as much as anybody, is almost unfathomable. Um.
Speaker 1: So you'd show him something and he'd say, all right,
Speaker 1: here's what I remember and give you whatever. He'd remember
Speaker 1: that was maybe fifty or sixty percent at the time,
Speaker 1: and then another twenty percent at the time. He'd say,
Speaker 1: you can almost see the gears turning in his head.
Speaker 1: And he'd say, all right, I don't remember much, but
Speaker 1: and he'd tell you and then maybe ten or fifteen
Speaker 1: percent a time he'd got no idea, don't remember anything.
Speaker 1: So you knew he wasn't bullshitting. You knew he was
Speaker 1: telling you the truth. And UH, I got home and
Speaker 1: just but this is unbelievable. And there were a few
Speaker 1: filling kind of things I did, and we had this
Speaker 1: abundance of visuals and that became the book. And that's
Speaker 1: actually uh. That was published by third man Jack White's
Speaker 1: company and Ben Blackwell, who was one of the guys
Speaker 1: who runs it as a Stooges fanatic, and so that
Speaker 1: was great. And in August they will really a paperback
Speaker 1: version of that with a bunch of additional content. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and Henry Rawlins and I, who was a Stooges
Speaker 1: super fan, interview each other about why the Stooges are
Speaker 1: so important. UM, and then I thought, Okay, I'm really done.
Speaker 1: I am never doing this again. It is just too
Speaker 1: much work for me. And then I went. I was
Speaker 1: introduced to a guy who had a huge collection of
Speaker 1: jazz memorabilia who was in San Diego, and the memorabilia
Speaker 1: was in his safe deposit box. So h two or
Speaker 1: three times I would go down to this guy's house.
Speaker 1: We would drive to the Bank of America in San Diego.
Speaker 1: We would go into one of those little rooms that
Speaker 1: you can go into take your safe deposit box, and
Speaker 1: he would bring out a cart with this series of
Speaker 1: safe deposit boxes. And he had just bought stuff for
Speaker 1: thirty or forty years and dropped him in the boxes
Speaker 1: as he was buying. So it was in no The
Speaker 1: organization was as he bought stuff. So I'm going through
Speaker 1: these boxes, like here's a Charlie Parker autograph, I want that.
Speaker 1: Here's a couple of Dave Brubek tickets. I don't care
Speaker 1: about those. Oh look, here's a photo from Birdland with
Speaker 1: Count Basie and some fans. I want that. And I started.
Speaker 1: So these jazz clubs in the forties and fifties had
Speaker 1: in house photographers who would take a picture of you
Speaker 1: and your girlfriend or your day or your party at
Speaker 1: your table. They'd go in the back room and develop
Speaker 1: it and at the end of the evening you could
Speaker 1: buy it for a buck in a little custom portfolio
Speaker 1: that had Birdland artwork. And these things were just fantastic.
Speaker 1: I've never seen one of them before. And uh so,
Speaker 1: as I'm going through this stuff, I've got twenty thirty,
Speaker 1: forty fifty of these things, all from different jazz clubs
Speaker 1: around America, I'm thinking, I'm in his business for forty
Speaker 1: years at the time. For five years, I've never seen
Speaker 1: a single one of these. These have to be impossibly rare,
Speaker 1: and they're really evocative of these clubs. So um, I
Speaker 1: end up buying nearly two hundred from him, along with
Speaker 1: a bunch of other stuff. And while I'm going the
Speaker 1: first day, as I'm looking at these things, going he
Speaker 1: should be in a book somewhere and they're just too good.
Speaker 1: So I um piled these things up on a bookcase
Speaker 1: and just was staring at them, and I engaged in
Speaker 1: this staring contest with them that we want to be
Speaker 1: a book. No, I said, I'd never do another book.
Speaker 1: People need to see these And as I started googling,
Speaker 1: I realized there are no books of these things, and
Speaker 1: occasionally online you can find one or two of them,
Speaker 1: but there are no collections of them. And it's really
Speaker 1: black history. You see black people white people. It's the
Speaker 1: birth of selfie culture. You see Louis Armstrong posing with
Speaker 1: a bunch of white fans or Count Basie Um, and
Speaker 1: I just eventually they wore me down, and I decided
Speaker 1: these things needed to be seen. So I thought, Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, I know a fair amount of my jazz,
Speaker 1: but I'm certainly no expert on jazz clubs. What do
Speaker 1: I do? So I read forty books. I interviewed Quincy
Speaker 1: Jones and Sonny Rawlins about what it was like to
Speaker 1: play in these clubs at the time. And I kind
Speaker 1: of casually said to Quincy, what was the racial situation?
Speaker 1: It was fantastic, everybody got along. This was where black
Speaker 1: people and white people could hang out together. Was the
Speaker 1: first place that happened. Uh, that's shocking. I've never read
Speaker 1: anything about that. Uh. And he said to me, you know,
Speaker 1: racism would have been over in the fifties if people
Speaker 1: had paid attention to the jazz guys. So I'm talking
Speaker 1: to Sonny Rollins. It's just it's unfathomble to me that
Speaker 1: he could interview these people, you know, I used Quincy.
Speaker 1: I used my mo leverage to interview Quincy, and then
Speaker 1: I used the fact that I had interviewed Quincy to
Speaker 1: get to Sonny Rawlins. It was wonderful, and I said, so,
Speaker 1: Sonny Quincy told me, you know, thing about the racism,
Speaker 1: and it was like he'd been waiting for seventy years
Speaker 1: for somebody to ask him this question. It's absolutely true.
Speaker 1: You know, nobody paid attention to who you, what color
Speaker 1: you were, the musicians, the people. Uh. In the audiences,
Speaker 1: everybody got along. Now you might go outside and it
Speaker 1: wasn't the same way, but in these clubs, and so
Speaker 1: that became a kind of through line in this book.
Speaker 1: And the next interview, I thought, Okay, I want to
Speaker 1: talk to somebody who was in the audience. And you know,
Speaker 1: to be at a jazz club at the end of
Speaker 1: the forties, you're ninety years old, and Sunny Rollins and
Speaker 1: Quincy were both sneaking in. So I found Dan Morgan Stern,
Speaker 1: who is the pre eminent jazz historian in the world,
Speaker 1: who's now about nine two, and he came to America
Speaker 1: as a refugee from Nazi Germany, was obsessed with jazz,
Speaker 1: started uh going to these clubs when he was seventeen,
Speaker 1: sneaking in and because he was European, uh, he was
Speaker 1: a very close observer to it, and the musicians were
Speaker 1: very interesting and talking to um as he was interested
Speaker 1: in talking to musicians, and he ends up being the
Speaker 1: editor of Downbeat, has written all these many books, and
Speaker 1: runs the Ructor's Jazz Institute for forty years. So I
Speaker 1: could talk to Sonny and Quincy about what it was
Speaker 1: like on stage and Dan what it was like to
Speaker 1: be in the audience, and it was just amazing. And
Speaker 1: then I spoke to Jason Moran, who's a younger pianist
Speaker 1: and composers, the head of the Kennedy Center Jazz program
Speaker 1: and Arthur Genius Grant winner and is obsessed with jazz
Speaker 1: history and he had never seen a single one of
Speaker 1: these and they just blew his mind. So I got
Speaker 1: his perspective. And then I spoke to a woman named
Speaker 1: Robin Given was a cultural critic, Pulitzer Prizeman and culture
Speaker 1: critic for the Washington Post, but has great at deconstructing photographs.
Speaker 1: So I keep saying to my wife, I am never
Speaker 1: doing this again. And the asterix is unless I can
Speaker 1: find somebody to do pass the work a lot of
Speaker 1: the lifting, because it's just a lot of work. But
Speaker 1: you know they're all successful, and that's in its second
Speaker 1: printing as well. And the last thing I'll say is
Speaker 1: I feel like with the Students Book and the Jazz Book,
Speaker 1: they're important in the sense that I got Eggy to
Speaker 1: talk about the history of the band who invented punk
Speaker 1: rock in more depth than anybody ever has, and I
Speaker 1: doubt he will ever do it again. So I feel
Speaker 1: like I documented something that wouldn't have been documented had
Speaker 1: I not done it. And the same with the Jazz book.
Speaker 1: I mean to find somebody who was there at the
Speaker 1: time in ten years is going to be impossible just
Speaker 1: because of the age demographics of it. So I feel
Speaker 1: like I got that story down and documented this scene
Speaker 1: and the racial situation before it became too late. Now
Speaker 1: these are all very well done, expensive coffee table books.
Speaker 1: Are these just labors of love or is this a business?
Speaker 1: It is a total labor of Look when my first
Speaker 1: book came out hunder One Essential Rock Rats, I said
Speaker 1: to my wife, I've now mastered making five dollars an Now,
Speaker 1: because it had four printings, I've revised that I've now
Speaker 1: mastered making twenty dollars an now, but no, this is
Speaker 1: a labor of love and getting it down while I
Speaker 1: can be gotten down. Now, what is it typical day like? Finally,
Speaker 1: and is it like being in the music business? We're
Speaker 1: essentially two seven or you set limits on it. So
Speaker 1: give us what is going on every day in the
Speaker 1: life of Jeff Gold. I try to set limits. It's
Speaker 1: nearly impossible. Um. I wake up and come downstairs. I
Speaker 1: make my wife coffee and I make me tea. I
Speaker 1: get on my iPad. I look at the top selling
Speaker 1: records on he made the day before, just as kind
Speaker 1: of a wake up. I've got three websites with memorabilia
Speaker 1: that I look at every day, and once every six
Speaker 1: months i'd buy something for them. I look at Expecting Rain,
Speaker 1: which is an incredible aggregator of Bob Dylan links from
Speaker 1: the day before and general music links from the day before.
Speaker 1: I look at the New York Times, the h l
Speaker 1: A Times, and uh, maybe a couple of other news sites.
Speaker 1: I wake up, I have breakfast, I come upstairs. I
Speaker 1: started answering email. Generally it will be hey, I've got this,
Speaker 1: I want to sell because people find something they think
Speaker 1: might be rare, google it, and I show up high
Speaker 1: in the results. One out of twenty turns out to
Speaker 1: be interesting, and I end up buying one out of thirty. Maybe. Um,
Speaker 1: I've sold a couple of things. I emailed a person
Speaker 1: letting them them know we're shipping once a week these days. Uh,
Speaker 1: but that I've received payment and it will go out. Um.
Speaker 1: My assistant comes one day a week. I pulled the
Speaker 1: orders for her. She boxes and chip stuff. She takes
Speaker 1: photographs and template stuff on my wid website eBay. I
Speaker 1: might write those things up, do a lot of deep
Speaker 1: research into a project or two I have going on.
Speaker 1: I might get a call about an archive. Uh. Six
Speaker 1: or seven o'clock, my wife is tearing me away from
Speaker 1: the computer, going it's time for dinner. It's time for dinner.
Speaker 1: I meditate a couple of times a day, try to
Speaker 1: go out to lunch once a day, just to force
Speaker 1: myself to leave my computer, because left to my own devices,
Speaker 1: I can spend way too much time on this stuff.
Speaker 1: And I'll read them a rock book, or watch a
Speaker 1: music documentary, or read the paper or sometimes occasionally a
Speaker 1: non rock book, go to bed and what is your
Speaker 1: holy grail one of the one or two things you're
Speaker 1: looking to get, whether available, runavailable. Happily. I don't have
Speaker 1: any holy grails, but I have some holy grails that
Speaker 1: I own. Okay, what are those? I have one of
Speaker 1: Dylan's handwritten manuscripts Do I Want You, which is my favorite,
Speaker 1: one of my favorite Dylan songs that I have one
Speaker 1: for absolutely Sweet Marie. And I have uh the manuscript
Speaker 1: for this Wheels on Fire. So those are holy grails
Speaker 1: for me. I have, as I said, about twenty five
Speaker 1: of Hendrix's records. Those two Dylan records or holy grails
Speaker 1: for me? Uh? Got a great Coltrane poster from the
Speaker 1: sixties on my wall. I've got a signed Beatles program
Speaker 1: from the first US tour. I've got a times error
Speaker 1: changing first pressing signed to me. Uh. Do you use
Speaker 1: stuff that Dylan? Yeah? Do you have a relationship with Dylan? No?
Speaker 1: I met him one time. Oddly enough. There's a place
Speaker 1: called the Brentwood Country martin about a mile from my Yeah, ready, chick.
Speaker 1: I've been going there since I was four, over sixty years.
Speaker 1: I probably when I was a kid would go there
Speaker 1: four times a week, and in nine seventy seven. I'm
Speaker 1: there eating my Ready chick and I glanced up and
Speaker 1: there's Bob Dylan wearing a Ready leather jacket with stringy
Speaker 1: hair and three kids and they go into the toy store,
Speaker 1: which is my childhood toy store, and I am in shock,
Speaker 1: and so I think, do I have time to go
Speaker 1: home and get an album? No? So I go to
Speaker 1: my car and I get a pad of paper and
Speaker 1: a pen, and I wait about half an hour and
Speaker 1: Dylan comes out with kids and he's holding a child's
Speaker 1: twirling baton with a little ribbon around it that he
Speaker 1: must have bought his a So his kids were going
Speaker 1: to a birthday party or something. And I summoned up
Speaker 1: my courage and I said, excuse me, Bob, I hate
Speaker 1: to bother your autograph. And he looks at me and
Speaker 1: holds up this baton with his right hand and goes,
Speaker 1: I can't sign yeah, And I go, well, I'm really
Speaker 1: sorry to bother you, but your music has meant so
Speaker 1: much to me through the years. Uh, you know, thanks
Speaker 1: for everything, you know, and he says, what's your favorite song?
Speaker 1: And why I go like a rolling stone because it
Speaker 1: kind of marks the Yeah, the journey from acoustic to
Speaker 1: electric and Tom Wilson's production. I just acquitted myself very
Speaker 1: quickly and showed him I do what I was talking about.
Speaker 1: I said, you're going to Japan, aren't you. For the
Speaker 1: first time, he goes, how do you know that? Well,
Speaker 1: I work in a record store and we get Billboard
Speaker 1: magazine and I saw an article about it. And he
Speaker 1: sat and chatted with me for about I don't know
Speaker 1: five minutes, and his kids are running around, and eventually
Speaker 1: he looks at them and goes, I gotta go, and
Speaker 1: I hold out this piece of paper in this pen
Speaker 1: and he lifts up his hand with the baton again
Speaker 1: as if say, sorry, my my hands are full, and
Speaker 1: he walks away, which today is such an amazing story
Speaker 1: because I got my five minutes with Dylan. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: sign an autograph for me, but I've got, you know,
Speaker 1: lyric manuscripts and appraised as archives and all this stuff,
Speaker 1: So an autograph is the least thing I need. So
Speaker 1: if someone wants to check your stuff out, whether just
Speaker 1: for their own interest or to buy stuff, how do
Speaker 1: they find your stuff? On Twitter and Instagram? I am
Speaker 1: at record Mecca. I don't look at it. My assistant
Speaker 1: does uh. The way to get through to me is
Speaker 1: through the website Record Meca r e c O R
Speaker 1: D M e c c A dot com and I
Speaker 1: write about issues of interest to collectors, very nerdball stuff
Speaker 1: at Record Mecca dot com slash blog. Okay, Jeff, good
Speaker 1: to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time.
Speaker 1: This is something people are aware of now we've gone
Speaker 1: to the absolute source. Thanks again for doing this my pleasure, Bob.
Speaker 1: Until next time, This is Bob left Sex