After Monday's article on the most expensive record ever, I was left wondering what the second most valuable record might be and whether or not it has a similarly captivating story attached to it. Information on the Internet is conflicting and it's very difficult to assign a value to things that are not actually for sale. But, since money isn’t nearly as interesting as the stories that people attach value to, I will be talking about remarkable records regardless of their price.
The record next on my list of remarkable vinyl is such a candidate. It will not be for sale any time soon, when it was sold last in 1981, it went at an undisclosed price.
The story starts in 1956 in Liverpool with a couple of school kids that attended Quarry Bank High School. They decided to form a band they first named “The Blackjacks.” Before making any public appearances under that name and certainly before any recordings were made, the group decided to rename themselves the Quarrymen. One of the founding members was of course John Lennon. Lennon must have been somehow attached to his school, as even much later he would repeatedly be seen wearing the gold and blue school tie.
The kids got most of their initial musical training from John´s mother Julia Lennon who played the banjo and taught the kids to play simple tunes. They tuned their guitars to Banjo tuning (a G-Chord when strummed without fingering). I was unable to determine if this was done out of mom's preference or lack of better knowledge.
The band´s musical direction was a particular type of rock ‘n roll called skiffle which combined jazz, blues, folk, and roots influences often using home made instruments.
On the 12th of July 1958, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Colin Hanton (Drums) and John Duff Lowe (Piano) felt confident and had saved up enough to make their first recording. They entered Phillips' Sound Recording Services in Liverpool, a very small recording studio placed in a private home between a store for electrical goods and a kitchen. The owner Percy Phillips made a part time living offering actors room and board upstairs from the studio in return for recording their voices for promotional records and radio plays.
The initial sentiment between the owner of the “studio” and the lads must have been one of distrust. On one side Phillips demanded upfront payment for the recording. The Quarrymen on the other side were taken aback by how rudimentary the studio was with only one microphone in the middle of the room. The cost for the recording was 3 shillings and six pence from each of the five musicians. This today would be the equivalent of about 22 dollars between the five of them. McCartney, however, remembered the price to be at 5 pounds or $100 dollars in today’s money in a later interview.
What ensued must have been a stressful experience for the young men. The price of the recording did not include the service of transferring the music onto tape first. This would have roughly doubled the cost but would have allowed for the recording to be repeated if need be. Instead the recording was irrevocably cut into vinyl directly. So they had only one shot at getting it right. For the A side they chose a song they all knew well. “That´ll be the day” was a cover of a then recent rock and roll song written by Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison released a year earlier. The Quarrymen had rehearsed the song previously and made it through the recording reasonably well.
Interestingly enough, they came into the recording studio without a clear plan in mind as to what to cut onto the B-Side of the disk and some discussion ensued. Owner Phillips was not open to their request to rehearse at all saying that “at seventeen shillings and six pence you are not here all day.” McCartney recalls that it was all over in about 15 minutes.
With that the band recorded “In Spite of All the Danger” their first composition by members of the band (McCartney and Harrison). McCartney remembers the song as “himself trying to do Elvis” and there is a clear similarity to Elvis Presley’s “Tryin' to Get to You”. Neither the drummer Hanton nor the Guitarist Lowe had ever heard the song before.
The outcome of the session was a 78rpm mono record. Since the record was cut directly into vinyl the label advises to the use of a soft stylus. The five band members took possession of the record for one week at a time or lent it to friends until it was finally lost. The record was not rediscovered until 1981 when Lowe sold it to McCartney for an unknown amount.
McCartney acquired the publishing rights to the Buddy Holly catalogue in 1979 and had approximately 50 copies pressed as Christmas gifts for friends. In 1995 the two songs were released on the “Anthology I” album. The Quarrymen still exists today after a reunification in 1997 with three of the original members still standing strong.
Arved Deecke is founder of the Danish / Mexican Loudspeaker company KVART & BØLGE that makes quarter wave loudspeaker and sound systems at a price any one can afford. In his free time he blogs about everything, sound, music and audio.