This year marks the 15th anniversary of Record Store Day, a joint promotion between record labels and independent record stores around the world, started to drive business to the stores at a time when many were either closing or struggling. To say it succeeded is putting it mildly, it became an unofficial national holiday for vinyl enthusiasts, at least until the pandemic changed the retail landscape. RSD was an integral part of the vinyl resurgence, without a doubt, but the less beneficial side of the coin was its contribution to the rise of collector “flipping,” which has played as big a role in the steady rise of new and used record prices as facility and material shortages. Flipping, collectors buying up multiple copies of RSD limited releases to sell them for inflated prices on secondary markets like eBay, is as prevalent as concert ticket scalping was back in the day. Music lovers and record profiteers carry on with RSD these days with an uneasy truce between them.
I realize RSD won’t be relevant to a lot of readers of this post, but for those of us with a turntable and love of the LP format the release of a new RSD list is like the Sears Christmas catalog showing up in the mail when we were kids, something to pore over and make wish lists. After giving it a thorough going over, I thought I’d take a few minutes and use some of the titles on the just-released 2022 list to demonstrate the kinds of things RSD does well, and a few examples where I feel like it misses the mark.
• Taylor Swift, “the lakes” – Every year, RSD has a celebrity “ambassador,” a face to be used for promotion and a voice to encourage music fans to support their local record stores. This year it’s Taylor, but her contribution to the proceedings feels a little weak. It’s simply a 7” single of a song from her 2020 folklore album. Kinda cool, I guess, for the obsessed and the completist, but nowhere near the feat Foo Fighters pulled off last year with their fun, and eminently buzzworthy, Dee Gees record. Maybe she’s really busy.
• Black Pumas, Collector’s Edition 7” Box Set – Repackaging the same music fans have already purchased at least once before is a staple of RSD. There’s nothing here that wasn’t on their first and only album, but with this box you get to get up and flip records over a lot more often.
• Asia, XXX – The scourge of the RSD picture disc. I know the legion of fans of the prog-rock lite band would welcome a high-quality reissue of their fine 2012 comeback album, the one where they got the original band back together for the first time since 1985. That they decided to offer that reissue as a picture disc means no fan concerned about sound quality need bother. Picture discs generally sound crappy. These are for hanging on the wall or hoarding for eBay only, and an indication that RSD actively encourages the flippers sometimes.
• Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Live Seeds – One of the biggest customer traffic drivers in the early days of RSD was record labels releasing vinyl versions of popular albums that had been CD-only releases back in the 90s. That’s definitely still going on, and the process still faces the same problem – the time disparity between what a CD can hold and what a vinyl LP can hold. It’s often not a smooth transition. A full length 80-minute CD fits pretty comfortably on four sides of vinyl, so no problem. A 60-minute CD, which was far more common back in the day, only fills up three sides. So, the question has been what to do with the last side of a 2LP reissue? One of the most common solutions has been to not add any extra music and etch a pretty design onto the blank vinyl side, which is exactly what’s happening with this one. Do you pay less because there’s a side of music missing? Hahaha, that’s cute.
• Stevie Nicks, Bella Donna (2LP Deluxe) – Studio outtakes used to be the purview of diehard fans who bought bootlegs in order to hear all of the false starts, blown cues, and cringe-worthy early lyrics that had to happen before a beloved album took its final shape. For RSD’s purposes, outtakes and B-sides are now used to add an additional slab of vinyl to entice buyers to purchase a favorite album yet again, at a higher price, this time in a “deluxe” format. Trust me, as a former avid bootleg collector I can tell you those rejected studio efforts rarely sound “deluxe.” My cash grab alarm is sounding loudly for this one.
• Rick Astley, Whenever You Need Someone (35th Anniversary) – The problems with record pressing capacity have been well documented over the last couple of years. There aren’t enough pressing facilities to meet the demand for new LPs these days, most pressing plants closed down when vinyl fell out of favor in the 1990s. Titles are being delayed or canceled on a seemingly daily basis and smaller bands without major record label clout behind them are being pushed aside for the big guns like Adele. So why reissue this one? Anybody that really needs to add a vinyl copy of “Never Gonne Give You Up” to their collection can go on Discogs and choose from the more than 100 copies currently for sale. Copies in excellent-to-mint condition sell for as little as five bucks. Why waste pressing plant time and raw materials on a record collectors and music lovers clearly don’t care about?
• Blue Velvet, Big Night, and The Royal Tenenbaums Soundtracks – RSD successfully exposed the previously untapped popularity of film soundtrack albums and every release list includes several. They sell out quickly and become prime flipping fodder. This year we get three particularly great ones, all of which I’d like to add to my collection.
• The Cranberries, Remembering Dolores and The Everly Brothers, Hey Doll Baby – The RSD release as memorial, another interesting sub-genre. Dolores O’Riordan was the Cranberries’ lead singer and songwriter who accidentally drowned in 2018. Her estate and former bandmates curated a 2LP set of greatest hits and unreleased tracks to celebrate what would have been her 50th birthday. Tom Petty was an outspoken fan of the Everlys, so his daughter collaborated with the brother’s widows to curate a new collection of their hits and lesser-known songs in the hopes of introducing a younger audience to their seminal work. I expect both of these to be very popular and in short supply.
Art Pepper, Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section and Charles Mingus, The Lost Album from Ronnie Scott's – The folks behind RSD realized pretty early on that jazz collectors were at least as fanatical as rock and pop fans, if not more so. Every list has increased the number of well-chosen titles available. Some, like the Art Pepper, are beautiful remasters of classic recordings from the jazz canon. Others, like the Mingus, are newly unearthed material, often live recordings, of a jazz legend in his or her prime. RSD jazz releases tend to have beautiful covers, stellar sound quality, and a high sticker price. And they all sell out, every time, with copies ending up on eBay or Discogs at even more inflated prices soon after. The flippers love ‘em.
• Miles Davis, What It Is: Montreal 7/7/83 – Once again in the jazz realm, RSD always has some Miles to offer. He usually didn’t tour with the same batch of musicians he recorded his most recent album with, so unless there was a live album released fans didn’t get to hear every incarnation of his music and missed significant chunks of his musical journey. So live recordings of Miles’ various lineups have become an exceedingly popular RSD staple. This one is of particular interest to me because it’s one of the very rare recordings of the band that had Darryl Jones in it, several years before he replaced Bill Wyman as the Rolling Stones’ bassist.
• Bill Evans, Inner Spirit: The 1979 Concert at The Teatro General San Martín, Buenos Aires and Morning Glory: The 1973 Concert at The Teatro Gran Rex, Buenos Aires – On the other side of the jazz coin, Bill Evans reissues can stop anytime now. Let’s pay attention to another worthy candidate for a while. Without question, the single most redundantly reissued jazz musician of them all. It’s not an exaggeration to say there are 6 to 10 Evans reissues of old material every year, RSD and non-RSD. He’s a damn brilliant musician, a legend even, but his work is all small trio or solo piano, and how much of it can any one person need to own? Maybe he’s like the Grateful Dead to his fans and you just have to “get it.” I don’t I’m afraid.
• Rory Gallagher, Live in San Diego ’74 – The “run a good idea into the ground” part of RSD. A few unearthed Rory live shows did well in the early years of RSD, so now every list includes another show from another city. I love Rory, his electric blues rock guitar work hits me harder than Clapton’s ever did. But he rarely varied his setlist over his too-short career, I doubt I could tell these live albums apart blindfolded. The last one from 2021 sat in my local stores’ bins for several months after RSD, so maybe this RSD fixture will be coming to an end soon.
• Flash and the Dynamics, The New York Sound – Another brilliant use for RSD, the reclamation of a long-lost musical microgenre. There was a brief moment in mid-60s NYC clubs when Latin-inspired dance music called “boogaloo” reigned supreme. Song lyrics had a socially conscious tone to them, sung in English and/or Spanish. The music itself was a heady mash-up of rock, funk and psychedelia. Most of the genre’s popular bands never got a recording contract or made an album. Flash and the Dynamics made one, and I definitely want to hear it.
• Grateful Dead, Wembley Empire Pool, London, England 4/8/72– Another mainstay of RSD, the appearance of a previously unreleased complete Dead show on many slabs of vinyl, this time five. They tend to be very limited in number and high-priced. I rarely have to make the decision about spending the big bucks or not, because I almost never see them on RSD, people spend pre-dawn hours waiting in line to snap them up. To offer an example of what happens next, the only one I found and bought a few years ago for about sixty bucks is now selling used on eBay for more than $300. It’s a crazy world of vinyl we’re living in these days.
• Jackson 5, ABC – I’m of the opinion that it was RSD that fueled the Monkees vinyl revival, and long overdue reassessment of their music, of the last few years. Maybe they’re picking another worthy target this year. The brother’s records were pretty great pop-soul albums, long before Michael embarked on one of the weirdest and most tragic superstardom journeys known to man.
• Jetstar Records, The Soul Sides and The Rock Sides – Another great reason for RSD to exist, shining a well-deserved spotlight on influential, yet obscure, regional record labels. Jetstar started near Dallas in the early 60s and, to my knowledge, never released a full album, only 45rpm singles. The closest thing to a hit they ever had was Dale Hawkins’ “Susie Q,” mostly because Creedence knocked a cover version of it out of the park on their first album. Two separate LPs of their singles, the backbone of the early rock and roll and soul eras, saved from being lost to history.
• Esther Marrow, Sister Woman – A sad truth of the U.S. recording industry was the treatment of African American artists as second-class citizens when it came to the distribution and promotion of their records up until the 1970s. Countless absolutely stunning albums were relegated to the back of the bus and never got the public recognition they deserved. To their great benefit, the folks behind RSD have taken great pains to rescue some of them and right that wrong. Sister Woman, from 1972, is as mind-blowing a soul and R&B record as most of Aretha’s classic albums and deserves to be heard far and wide.
• Rockabye Baby!: Lullaby Renditions of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On – RSD has never underestimated the public’s desire for novelty records. I doubt I will ever go out of my way to give this one a listen, but I’m confident many people will and this will sell out. I have to say, the cartoon rendering of the original album cover featuring a very Pooh-like bear is almost worth the price of admission.
• Rolling Stones, More Hot Rocks (Big Hits & Fazed Cookies) [50th Anniversary] – The Stones roll on with their ongoing series of RSD reissues. Last year’s Hot Rocks was a huge hit, so this year we get the much harder to find (and much quirkier) second volume. I’ve tried for years to find a decent used copy of the original release in the wild, with zero success, so I’ll be happily adding this one to my collection. UPDATE: I've learned since posted this that the More Hot Rocks reissue is due to be pressed on glow-in-the-dark vinyl, the only type of vinyl record that sounds worse than a picture disc. Pass.
• Patti Smith, Curated by Record Store Day and World Party, Curated by Record Store Day - A newish idea, which I think originated with a very fine John Prine compilation I picked up a couple of RSDs ago. An artist is chosen, sent out to RSD-participating indie record stores and a greatest hits track list is voted on by the stores’ staffs. The Prine collection is a great listen, although limited to songs from his own Oh Boy record label. The Patti and World Party versions cover their whole catalogs, and the track lists look marvelous. If I see them, they’re coming home with me. The Patti Smith record should be easy enough to get my hands on, but the World Party record is about as limited in numbers as RSD releases get. RSD is nothing without its usual dose of frustration and disappointment.
• Various Artists – Another indispensable part of RSD, curated song collections that cover the aforementioned obscure record labels and movie soundtracks, country-of-origin collections that wouldn’t have seen the light of day otherwise, and just plain off-the-wall stuff. Some intriguing ones, as usual, on this year’s list, including a collection of female led reggae and ska singles from Jamaica’s legendary, but male-dominated Studio 1, a compilation of independently-released U.K. punk singles from 1977 – 78 and, maybe the most tempting, 2 LPs of American TV theme songs from the 50s through the 90s. What a nostalgia trip that would be, amiright?
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