Posted on 08/08/2014 3:29:14 PM PDT by a fool in paradise
Paul Mawhinney, a former music-store owner in Pittsburgh, spent more than 40 years amassing a collection of some three million LPs and 45s, many of them bargain-bin rejects that had been thoroughly forgotten. The world’s indifference, he believed, made even the most neglected records precious: music that hadn’t been transferred to digital files would vanish forever unless someone bought his collection and preserved it.
Mawhinney spent about two decades trying to find someone who agreed. He struck a deal for $28.5 million in the late 1990s with the Internet retailer CDNow, he says, but the sale of his collection fell through when the dot-com bubble started to quiver. He contacted the Library of Congress, but negotiations fizzled. In 2008 he auctioned the collection on eBay for $3,002,150, but the winning bidder turned out to be an unsuspecting Irishman who said his account had been hacked.
Then last year, a friend of Mawhinney’s pointed him toward a classified ad in the back of Billboard magazine...
...That fall, eight empty semitrailers, each 53 feet long, arrived outside Mawhinney’s warehouse in Pittsburgh. The convoy left, heavy with vinyl. Mawhinney never met the buyer.
“I don’t know a thing about him — nothing,” Mawhinney told me. “I just know all the records were shipped to Brazil.”
Just weeks before, Murray Gershenz, one of the most celebrated collectors on the West Coast and owner of the Music Man Murray record store in Los Angeles, died at 91. For years, he, too, had been shopping his collection around, hoping it might end up in a museum or a public library... But in his final months, Gershenz agreed to sell his entire collection to an anonymous buyer. “A man came in with money, enough money,”...
Those records, too, were shipped to Brazil...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
He may have millions but I have six brazillion records in my collection!
lol
A whole Brazilian!
I work for a radio station and have spent quite some time transferring rare vinyl records to hard drive. Many were Top 40 hits and cannot be found on CD or online for download anywhere.
There are even different pressings of The Rolling Stones' Hot Rocks LP with an alternate take of one song used for the first press.
It's as if the only version of Star Wars you could see was the one were "Gredo shot first".
Even the Beatles catalog was remixed to make it "louder" like contemporary albums.
The upcoming mono VINYL release is going to use the original mono mixes (which were the ones the Beatles themselves labored over in the studio for weeks, they weren't around when the stereo mix of Sgt. Pepper was created afterwards in 2 weeks).
Reminiscent of the Twilight Zone's "Time Enough at Last"
It drives me nuts that greatest hits albums never sound as good as the original release.
Everybody Needs Somebody to Love by The Rolling Stones is a good example of this. The cut on the album is nothing like the single released to radio.
Been wondering what to do with my collection of 1950s 45s.
As it would be the perfect time now because i read somewhere that movie distributors are sending out all digital movies to the theaters now and there is a huge conversion to digital movies now (foolish people).
Of course some of it you should just let go
Several years ago, a private collector bought about half of SCETV Radio’s record collection. There were several thousand overall. He took about half. Others helped themselves afterwards. The bulk of the rest went in the trash.
A year or two later, hundreds of videotapes of all formats were purged and thrown in dumpsters. I snagged a quad to keep and a bunch of 1 inch tape flanges.
I was wondering how long it would take for the “worst album covers of all time” posts to start appearing.
I used to work for a delivery company that delivered boxes and and boxes of “Cut-outs” to the local radio stations.
Sometimes the boxes would break open and I would find albums in the back of my van.
Are they all by Brazil 66?
Then he loses his hearing.
Funny. We used to get both “cut-outs” and special radio station DJ cuts, then when CDS came out, the record companies drilled holes in the CD covers.
So, you got five “cut-outs” of a new release and I got one.
Plus you got all the first release posters for a lot of great bands.
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