“I find that there are certain points in our humanity where as a society we took something that was perfect in every way and ruined it in the name of convenience. We make things easier or smaller but in some sense lose the essence. I think LPs are the slow food movement of the music industry. They are bigger, more difficult to maintain, take longer and cost more to produce but they just taste (or in this case sound) so much better. Our grandparents had it right in a lot of ways and this is no exception.
When I was in high school I would go to Recycled Sounds in Kansas City almost every day. I would collect anything that Dischord, Sub Pop, Lookout! or SST would put out. There was a really cool regional label based out of Omaha called Caulfield that released some pretty major 7″s by Germbox and Mineral. I had a pretty good grunge collection for a while but traded in the whole lot when Nirvana blew up (angry 16 year old that I was). A few years later I got to work at that store and got into an expensive habit of tracking down all the Pixies import singles. I think we could either get paid in cash or a dollar more an hour in trade. Guess which I usually chose?
The Get Up Kids – Regents Court
I always had the desire but never the funds to release my own records. I really kind of idolized Dischord. Eventually I saved up enough start up capital and released a split 7″ between my band at the time (Secular Theme) and one of my local favorites Boys Life. There is something really satisfying about releasing your own records. You get so excited when the test pressing comes from the plant. We released the first Get Up Kids 7″ ourselves hand stamping and assembling all the sleeves. Everyone was doing demo tapes at the time but that seemed so amateurish. You had to put so much more thought and time and money into pressing a 7″. Oh, and on a side note Boulevard (out of KC) Brewery’s 6 pack boxes are the perfect size for 7″ storage.
The Get Up Kids – Shatter Your Lungs
We’ve always been fans of releasing our albums on vinyl. Our album “On A Wire” which came out on both 180 gram black and picture disc. I love it when you offer your friend the vinyl purist the picture disc but the scorn it for the superior audio of the black. The “Simple Science” EP that we released last year came out on four different colored 12″s as well as couple of different colored 10″s. I still remember how excited we were when we got asked to be part of the Sub Pop singles club. That 7″ had 100 on clear but Rob’s dog Bonham ate a box of them. We did a limited split 7″ with Braid that was part of a collection of 7″s that were all splits and were hand assembled to look like envelopes complete with postage stamps.
We did 500 of those for our first tour of Europe with Braid that had an old map on the cover. The kids in the Czech Republic kindly pointed out that they were no longer Czechoslovakia which was kind of embarrassing. We’ve done some cool splits over the years with Coalesce, The Anniversary and Rocket From The Crypt all on lots of different colors.
It’s interesting to me when people talk about a vinyl resurgence. We’ve always collected records and never really stopped releasing them. I’m glad that more people are catching on that smaller isn’t necessarily better. As a wise man once said, “You can’t roll a joint on an MP3.” —Matthew Pryor
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