Jeff Gold

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Websites podcast. My
guest today is the King of Memorabilia, Jeff Gold. Jeff,
good to have you on the podcast. Good to be here, Bob. Okay,
So there's all this scuttle but about Elvis that the
value of his memorability is going down because his audience

(00:30):
is dying off. Is that true? To some extent yes,
and to some extent no. The A level stuff is
going for more than it's ever gone before. The mid
range stuff is kind of deteriorating. The low end of
the market is really deteriorating. So people want the best
stuff and they're willing to pay crazy prices for it.

(00:50):
So it's just like concert tickets, it's the cheaper ones
that are harder to sell. So you have a website,
record Mecca, tell us how you develop the website? Well, Uh,
as a teenager, I started buying uh rare Jimi Hendrix
records or Jimmy Hendrick records, and I started trying to
collect as many as I could find, and that entailed

(01:11):
going to swap meats and going to flea markets and
UH talking to anybody who might have anything, and along
my travels I started finding things that I recognized were
rare and buying them to sell them to pay for
my rare Jimi Hendricks Records. And uh. This turned into
a business for me as a kid. And so I

(01:32):
would go to England once a year, twice a year,
bring a suitcase full of rare American stuff, sell it
and trade it for rare English stuff, bring it back
and sell that in the Hollywood Swap Meet, which was
in the shadow of the Capitol Records Tower. And I
was making a lot of cash for a young person.
And I went to work for Rhino Records. That was

(01:53):
the first employee where I met you, and UH just
became an entrepreneurial guy. I uh and was doing this.
It was getting bigger and bigger. I opened up an office.
I started doing mail order. But when I graduated from college,
I thought, I really don't want to be going to
the Salvation Army in Oxnarden buying who forty five is

(02:13):
a fifty year old? So I got a business degree
from USC UH leveraged that into a job A and
M Records, but was continuing to collect things the whole time.
And when I left the record business after eighteen or
nineteen years at A and M and then Warner Brothers.
I was still collecting records. I had gotten very heavily

(02:35):
into the pre internet online world and then the Internet
online world, which sidebar. We started the first participation in
that at Warner Brothers, myself, at a few other people,
and so I just got a whole hog back into it.
And it was the early days of eBay and the
early days of web browsers, and uh, I never stopped. Okay,

(02:58):
So this point in time, let's go back to the beginning.
So you're from l A. How old were you when
you started to trade records sell records? Maybe fifteen? And
how old were you when you made your first trip
to the UK? Uh? Nineteen? Okay? So what was it

(03:20):
like growing up in the classic rock era in southern
California where a lot of this scene was happening. It
was fantastic. Um people sold bootlegs at swat meets. The
the record sat Meat that I talked about before, initially
started on Sunday mornings, and everybody was getting more and

(03:42):
more competitive and would get there at you know, I'll
get there at seven, I'll get there at six, I'll
get there at five, And eventually people including myself, started
getting there at ten o'clock at Saturday night and spending
the night in your car hanging out with your friends
so you could get the best position be there. When
people opened up at the earliest, stuff started selling earliest earlier.

(04:04):
I remember Al Wilson from Canned Heat, Uh would set
up there and had had a beat up old van
and would sell posters. It was a wild West and
it was fantastic. They were used record stores everywhere, which
I know you experienced and uh, uh you know, I'm
gonna write a blog post on what record collecting was

(04:25):
like in the pre internet days for those younger people. Uh,
you know. I collected Hendricks Records, that was my first priority,
and then David Bowie Records. There were no discographies. You
had to find somebody who knew somebody who had something
or had heard of a rare record, and tracked them
down and call him on the phone enough till they

(04:45):
find something they wanted so you could trade it from
them or prior out of their prior, out of their hands.
But it was very, very exciting. Okay. I read a
whole book written by some college professor about Al Wilson
supposedly he was even though Bob High, the big, large
guy who was lead singer of Cantet, and although al
Wilson sang the hits that Al Wilson was like a

(05:06):
real blues purist who knew everything about it was, you know,
driving force in that world. Is that something you're aware of?
You know? I know those guys were very serious record
collectors and music obsessives. And I actually bought a poster
collection of Larry Taylor, who was the bass player and
can't eat, and he had just incredible stuff that he

(05:28):
would pick up. You know, he was one of those guys.
I also bought a lot of stuff from the widow
of Sterling Morrison from the Velvet Underground, and occasionally you'd
find people like that who just wanted everything having to
do with their band and would uh as Sterling's wife
told me, you know, if they didn't have a poster
for him to take home, he'd rip it down off
the wall. And you know, most artists, as you know,

(05:51):
don't care about this stuff. I did some consulting for
Bill Wyman of the Stones, who's one of the probably
the pre eminent guy who saved absolutely everything, and uh,
I love talking to those guys, let's stay with Wyman
for a second. Because he he had everything, They did
a movie about him, and then all of a sudden
he decided to sell stuff. What was going on there?

(06:13):
You know? I have an NDA with Bill Winman, if
you can believe that, but not disclosure agreement, but suffice
to say, he had just an enormous amount of stuff,
has an enormous amount of stuff and sold some but
certainly far from all. And that movie, the Quiet One,
really shows the depths of his collecting. It's it's really

(06:34):
amazing if people haven't seen it well to the degree
you can talk about it. What kind of relationship did
you have with Bill Wyman relative to his collection? I
was consulting with him, and I spent a week at
his side going through stuff, which was probably the greatest
thrill in my fanboy record collector, music business life. He

(06:59):
remembers everything, he's kept a diary since he was ten. Uh,
just unbelievable. And what did he want from you? What
was he hiring you to do? You know, I really
can't talk about that, unfortunately. I just have to be
respectful to him. Okay, okay, so let's go back, Let's
leave memorabilia aside. So you grew up in l A.

(07:22):
How did you actually get into music. My parents had
a suitcase stereo and they bought herbal Bert and the
Tijuana Brass records, and I remember hearing the Lonely Bowl,
which was on his Lonely Bowl album and his first hit,
and just going nuts over. I just became obsessed with
that song to play it over and over and over

(07:42):
again as a six or seven year old, and uh,
it was amazing. Later going to work for her and
meeting salt Lake, the guy who had been in the
bar Mitzvah band with Urban written that song, and just
fawning over him, which I imagined didn't happen that often
for this guy who was probably eighty at the time. Uh.
And then my parents went to Palm Springs and they

(08:05):
brought me back as a gift the Beatles I want
to hold your hands single Creed Sullivan because they've read
about it in Time magazine and that was my first
record that I owned myself, and I went nuts and
just played that over and over and over. And when
they were on Ed Sullivan, I saw that and it
blew my mind. And I remember my some friend of

(08:26):
My parents had given me a Mr. Ed the Talking
Horse record and a couple of kiddie records, and I
made my mother take me to the record store they'd
come from in Beverly Hills so I could trade them
for rock records, and I got Beach Boys Party and
maybe the first Beatles album and uh, I just never
stopped the idea that I could own these things and

(08:47):
play them over and over and over again. That obsessed
me was fantastic. Okay, so you wrote a book about
Iggy and the Stooges, but you also said that you
went to the Whiskey to see the Raw Power were
in nineteen seventy three. So when did you start going
to concerts and what did you see? My father took

(09:08):
me to concerts by artists he like. There was a
Spanish group called Murray and Miranda who had uh Songs
of the African Velt was what it was called. And
I love that record, and we went and saw them.
I first started going to records to two shows on
my own, probably at fifteen, when I could hitchhike to

(09:30):
the Santa Monica Civic and I remember seeing Mountain and Zephyr,
and a little later when I was in high school
going to see Pink Floyd there who were traveling. We're
touring on Adam Hart mother and I saw free and
traffic reconstituted traffic. As soon as I got a car,

(09:54):
which maybe came when I was seventeen, I was unstoppable,
you know. I was at the Whiskey constantly where every
British prog band known to man played, and uh I
started working at Rhino I was probably seventeen, and people
would give us concert tickets, drop off concert tickets, So

(10:15):
I was I was a wild man. What's that story
of how did you get that? You know? At this
point in time, which is kind of funny for those
of us grew up in l A or at least
from age early twenties, you know, Rhino on Westwood Boulevard.
Ultimately there was a label. Harold Bronson, you know, got
started to come to Rhino Records while man Fisher. But
people don't understand what a big deal the record store was.

(10:39):
So Richard Fuss, who started it, started a department in
another store and then ultimately went to Westwood Boulevard. What
was Rhino Records like and how did you get the job? Okay?
So Richard who's still one of my best friends, had
a friend whose father had an army circle US electronics

(11:00):
store called Apollo Electronics on Broadway and Third in Santa Monica,
and that was the that was when the mall was
dead with J Jerry, And it wasn't even on the mall,
it was around the corner from them all. But and
so Richard convinced his friend's father to give him an
area that I'm gonna guess was like ten by fifteen

(11:23):
feet to sell US records. And a friend of mine
went in there and he was selling bootlegs. And this
was a big deal because I had to go to
the Rose bull Swat Meat to buy bootlegs. So someplace
that I could ride my bike too incredible. So I
started going in there and befriended Richard and he would
buy cutouts and used records and bootlegs, and we became friendly,

(11:48):
very friendly. And uh, sometime in probably late seventy two
or very early seventy three, said Hey, I'm gonna open
a record store. And I said something like and you're
gonna give me a job and he said, okay, and
there you got. So he uh, he had rented the
there was a guy on Westwood Boulevard who had a

(12:09):
Zenith appliance repair store. So if you had a Zenith
uh integrated stereo and it broke, you would go to
this guy. His name was Dave nine, and he had
very little business. And somehow Richard convinced him to lease
him the front half of the store and he would
keep the back half of the store to do his
electronics repair. And uh so I went down and with

(12:32):
a friend of mine, and we were helping Richard pound
together wooden bins for the records. And he had gone
to Aaron's Records and roseml swap in all these places
for about a year, saving up inventory to start this store.
And myself, his roommate, and a friend of his who
was a basus were the first three part time workers.

(12:54):
And they lasted maybe a month or two. And I
was not going to give this up. I was in
high school, I had a job a record store. I
had first pick of the records that got traded in. Uh.
It was as as you were alluding to the social
scene on the West Side for record collectors. There were
people who came four or five times a week waiting

(13:16):
to see what came out, what used records were new
in the bins what we had missed priced or missed,
and Richard very smartly salted the bins so he he
had a bunch of things like live Yardbirds album with
the John's Children album that back then we're records that
maybe now our hundred hundred to records, and he would

(13:37):
put him out for two fifty just so people would
start to talk about the great stuff in the bins.
And I made a lot of my friends at that
store were still my friends almost fifty years later. Uh.
Artists would come and visit us. Uh. You know, if
if Atlantic had the pretty Things on tour, there weren't
many record stores that cared about the pretty things. But

(14:00):
we would go nexts to meet the pretty things are
the trogs. Uh. You know, we do an in store.
We'd get a lot of people. We would have live
shows with our friends, the Angry Smoans or it was
just crazy all things to all people. Uh. Fun thing
and truly the most fun job I've ever had in

(14:21):
my life by life. Actually, what at what point did
you start to stock new records in addition to use
records pretty early on because people came in and wanted
new records, and then there were things like Saturday Night Fever,
which became these phenomenons that you couldn't not carry And

(14:42):
I remember, uh, that record was so big. You remember
a specific instance where you were this woman who was
probably in her thirties came in with a tennis racket
and a tennis skirt and a tennis shirt, fresh off
the courts, and she walked in the store, looked at
me and I said, Saturday and Night feverites right over there.

(15:03):
She said, how did you know? And it was so
evident this person was so outside the demographic of anybody
would come into our record store. Or you'd remember another
instance where it's a Sunday morning, somebody comes in and says,
Teff this album by the Roaches, Yeah, it's over there,
And about fifteen minutes later, somebody comes in and goes,
do you have this album on the Roaches? And you go,
they were on Saturday Night Live, right. How did you know?

(15:27):
You could really kind of gauge what was coming on,
what was going on in the world from that little
perch behind the counter. I've been to a lot of
record stores and they made movies now, high fidelity whatever,
but really that's not the way it was at most
record stores. Maybe there was a person behind the counter
or whatever, but you literally had to be anxious going

(15:48):
into Rhino Records because the staff would insult you on
what you bought, if you was as guilty if that
as anybody. Unfortunately, that's what I remember. So it was
less of all of what was anybody, uh policing that.
It was everyone's side. This was kind of the charm
of the store or what nobody was policing that because

(16:10):
what Richard did was higher experts in each category. You know,
Lee Kaplan ran the jazz and later Neil's Fine who
is famous as the guitar still Wilco and I was
doing the rock and the imports, and uh, it was
a store that had personality. You've got to admit that. Um,
that was just part of the stick. And I think,
you know, high fidelity was very much what Rhino was like, right.

(16:33):
The other thing, I remember we did great. I remember
Van Halen playing opening for Nils Loft in the Santa
Monica Civic and I was kind of laughing, like this
was black O gar Kansaw. And then I went into
Rhino and the guys by the kind of were reaving
how great guitarist Eddie Van Halen was, and I said, well,
maybe I have this row. Okay, So how did you

(16:59):
get your job at A and M. So I went
to USC and I got a business was a business major,
and my plan was to get a job in the
record business. And one of our customers, a guy named
Lou Beach, came in and said, I know this guy
at A and M, Jeff Areroff. You should call him.
And I said, okay, okay, And I was interviewed for

(17:21):
two or three jobs that I hadn't gotten and didn't
really want, but was looking for any entry point, and uh,
this guy kept bugging me to call his friend, Jeff Farroff,
and finally I did, and Jeff Farroff, who's now probably
my best friend, UM said okay, come on and you know,
talk to me. And he was the vice president of

(17:44):
creative Services at that point, so he wasn't responsible for
all the album covers, videos, marketing, advertising, and we hit
it off instantly, and he said, look, I'd like to
hire you. I just fired a bunch of people. That
was nineteen seventy nine and the record business had just
expanded hugely on the back of Fleetwood, Mac Rumors and

(18:08):
some of those records, and then contracted very dramatically. So
Jeff said, I'd love to hire you. I can't hire you.
I just fired a bunch of people. How would you
like to work for me as a freelancer? And I
said great. So he would give me projects to think
about and I would come in once every couple of
weeks and meet with him, and then every once in
a while he'd say, send me an invoice for five dollars.

(18:31):
And this was great. I was sort of what would
the projects be. So Squeeze were signed to A and M,
and he was trying to figure out something clever to
do with Squeeze, and I go, why don't you make
a five inch Squeeze record like Squeezed? And uh, I
had this little six inch Jimmy Hendricks record from France

(18:51):
and I brought it and showed it to me. Loved
that idea. So they made a five inch Squeeze record
for cool for Cats or one of those songs that
kind of thing. Um, Tim Curry's recording a new album,
bring me some songs that might be interesting for him
to cover, which was fantastic. I mean, I was getting
paid what I thought was a fortune for this, and
after about nine months he said, you know, I should

(19:14):
get Guilfries and the president of him to hire you.
That was the job I had. Jeff had and so
he had Guilt take me out to lunch and uh
this turned into probably six different meals with Gilt every
three weeks or so. And one day he says to me,

(19:34):
maybe we'll get you a desk in sales and I said, WHOA,
does that mean you're hiring me? And he goes, oh, yeah,
I was always gonna hire you. So I got hired
as his assistant, which was the greatest job in the world. UM.
Jeff had had it. A guy named Michael Leon who
ran in him on the East Coast had it, and
uh I had it. And then the gig was, after

(19:57):
you had this job, you had to find your replacement.
And I went and got Tom Corson who worked at
I R. S and helped him get that job. Yeah,
and uh I the job was basically doing everything he
didn't have time for. So you'd read his mail, respond
to the low hanging fruit stuff, bring things to his

(20:19):
attention in the company that you thought he needed to
know about. UM Travel with him. You know, he had
a secretary, but you were the person sitting at his
side helping him navigate his day to day responsibility to
the workload was so great, and that too, was an

(20:40):
incredible job. And he was probably the most important man
in my life in terms of teaching me things and
being able to emulate him and empowering me. You know,
I did things like the Funny Enough, the the Maybe
six months into the job, I got the tape of
and Adams album You Want It You got advanced cassette

(21:04):
I've never heard of. I listened to it and I
went to Gil. I said another thing about this guy.
He's signed by the Canadian Company, but this has one
a O R classic after another as far as I'm concerned.
Gil said, all right, fly him and his manager Dan,
that's your project. So I flew Brian and Bruce Allen
as manager down and they became my project. And so

(21:25):
I could say to Gil they're trying to get the
Kinks tour, and he'd get on the phone with whoever
the agent was and try to make that happen. And
I talked about him in the marketing meetings, and he
was a nonentity there at one point, Charlie Miner, the
late grade head of promotion, came down to my office,
grabbed me by my shirt and lifted me up against

(21:47):
the door and said, if you ever mentioned that guy's
name again, I'm gonna kill you. And three years later
and sold fifteen million albums something like. So Gil was
very empowering and letting you decide what you wanted to do,
and uh, supportive of going after So ultimately, air off

(22:15):
leaves and you get that job. What's that like? So
I worked for Gill as assistant. Then Adam started a
film company which was very successful. It had Bertie, which
won the Poem to Or at the can Film Festival,
and we made the Breakfast Club. And at some point
Guil came to me and said, do you want to
work half time for the film company as the music guy?

(22:37):
And I said sure, not because I had any interest
in the movie business, but because everybody I knew had
interested in the movie business. And what I hadn't figured
on was this. Then I had to read a script
every day, so I had to wake up at six
rate a script till seven thirty, then go to work.
And uh. I remember one series of meetings where somebody

(22:58):
was coming in and saying, some the extend up, We're
gonna do a remake of Alice in Wonderland. We've got
Madonna attached, and I'm going on, that sounds stupid. And
then to two meetings after that, somebody comes in and says,
we're making a remake of something else. We've got Madonna attached,
and I remember thinking, Wow, we're in the music business.
We just exaggerate these guys lie um. And after about

(23:18):
six months I went to Gil and said, I'm not
into this. I want to work in the record business
full time, no problem, And so Jeff Areff left and
I was nominated and Gil came to me to run
first the alternative marketing. We started an alternative marketing department.
Actually I started it, and it was the first one
in the music business to work on bands that weren't

(23:41):
getting the full attention of Charlie and the higher ups
in the company. So we worked on simple Minds at
Suzanne Vega and O. M. D. And acts like that
and had success, and then the idea was we'd get
something going and then hand him off to the company
at large. At some point, Bob Right, who's the head
of marketing leaves and Gil comes to me and says,

(24:05):
I want you to be the head of marketing too great,
so I leave. UH. I leave his assistant job, and
I become the head of marketing, which is where you
and I really started to work together. And uh. At
some point jeff Eroff leaves and I get nominated to
be the head of creative services too. And neither of

(24:26):
these jobs did I have any experience that they just
threw you in and supported you, and uh, I did that.
So I was in charge of advertising marketing all the
merch stuff, album covers and videos, which was a big
portfolio stuff and kind of very heavy stuff to learn

(24:48):
while doing. But I had Gil was a very creative guy,
and I could call on jeff Eroff and H somehow
I figured it out. Okay, how do you. Ultimately we
decide to DeCamp to Warner Brothers. I thought A M
was going to be my entirety of my career. I

(25:08):
was so close to guilt personally as well as professionally.
And UH, I had had, through my friend Gary Boorman,
had been approached by Warner Brothers, and I'd gone and
had a meeting. But I decided, you know, I just
don't want to leave Gil and this company where I
know everybody, all my friends are And at some point UH,

(25:30):
and periodically UH people from the press would call and
say there are rumors and M is gonna get sold,
and Guild would always say not gonna happen, and I'd
go back and say, not gonna happen. And one day
those rumors turned out to be true and Annam was
sold by Herban Jerry to PolyGram. And it was clear
that even though everybody was saying everything's gonna stay the same,

(25:53):
no problem. I remember meeting with Alan Levy, who was
the y hey of PolyGram in Europe, and he was
really a dismissive, rude guy, and he was interrogating you.
Was almost like the Gestapo. He'd say, tell me about this,
and you start talking and he'd say, enough, tell me

(26:15):
about this. And I just thought, this is not a
good vibe. This guy is going to be the boss
of our bosses. And at some point it becomes clear
that the A M of Old is not going to
be the A and M of new. And I start
talking to Mouston and Lenny Warniker and Michael Lost and
Warner brothers, and they're willing to make me a senior

(26:37):
vice president and double my salary. And Warner Brothers and
A and M are the two companies I ever wanted
to work for, and MO was somebody I was always
fascinated by, having signed hendricks On down. And so I
made the tough decision that I was gonna leave my
mentor and go to work for Warner Brothers. And the

(26:58):
day I was going into quit, I had onto my
shrink to prepare for this very difficult conversation, and we
had an off the lot meeting and Tom Corson called
me and said, Jerry just fired Gil. What I was
gonna go quick today? Jerry just fired and called Gil.
And I called Gil and I said, you're not gonna
believe this, and Gil said, oh fantastic. You can walk

(27:18):
into Jerry's office and it'll be I fired Gil. Now
his number one, one of his number one guys is leaving.
And I went in and quit to Jerry, who I had,
you know, not a close relationship with. It was closer
to her and Gil, and uh so the timing worked
out beautifully. Okay, sidebar, you drove that Alfa Romeo Alphatta.

(27:46):
I had a g TV six and I had a spider,
but not an alphatta. I thought you had an al
fet It must have been somebody else on the lot. Okay,
you go to work, but I had to, So you're right.
And how bad were they? Uh? The spider was really good.
The GTV six required a bunch of work, but I

(28:08):
enjoyed it. I like them. Okay, So was it culture
shock going to Warner Brothers or do you fit right in?
It was total culture shock, but not for the reason
you might expect that A and M. Gil had his
hands in absolutely everything, so I might hear from him
five times a day. Uh, this is when I'm doing

(28:30):
marketing and creative services. And then at the end of
the day, all the senior vice presidents would go to
his office and do a kind of a debrief for
about an hour. When I went to work for MO,
he was very decentralized. He hired people he thought I
knew what they were doing and just let them know

(28:50):
what let him go. And so I was so used
to Hey, Gil, I'm gonna do this. How about that?
I think we should do this. What are you doing
about this? Jeff More didn't one enough. He just felt like,
you know, there was a once a week meeting of
vice presidents and senior vice presidents, and everybody would go
around the table talking about what they were doing. And

(29:13):
then there was a Thursday Senior Vice president's meeting that
was called Korea because everybody said it just goes on forever,
like the Korean War. And that was about four hours.
And those are the opportunities where if you had a
question for Mo, or Lenny or the head of Business
Furs David Altchole, or wanted to let everybody know what
you were doing, you did him in that for him,

(29:36):
and otherwise you just did what you did and they
didn't want to know about the everyday quotidian decisions that guilded.
So it was culture shock in that way, but I
adapted to it. And Mo was a genius, smartest guy
ever met in the music business, and I knew exactly
what he was doing. How did Mo evidence his genius?

(29:59):
This is a real story. We're sitting in that Monday
Vice President's meeting and Tom Raffino, the late head of International, says, oh,
Rod Stewart's touring Germany. Uh, and it's gonna be a
huge tour. They're gonna do a huge TV advertising campaign,

(30:19):
and they're going to release the Greatest Hits in Germany only,
and Mo turns to David Altchill Business appears and says,
it seems to me, when we renegotiated Rod's contract about
seven years ago, there was a provision for the Greatest
Hits and I just want to make sure that this
German Greatest Hits doesn't kill our ability to put out
a worldwide Greatest Hits later. And you're thinking, how does

(30:43):
this guy keep all this stuff in his mind? Just exceptional?
And uh, you know, he's trying to sign the Red
Hot Chili Peppers that he's taking him to Laker games
and they're sitting on the court, and uh, he's pursuing
them heavily, and they decide to go with the money
and signed with CBS Colombia. And instead of being pissed,

(31:05):
Moe calls each of them individually and congratulates them and
tells them he's sorry we couldn't make a deal, but
he wishes them all the best and was wonderful to
get to know them, and he hopes he sees them
in the future. And so as CBS starts negotiating the
contract the way I heard it, they start backing out

(31:25):
of some of the commitments they made, and well, yeah,
we said that, but really it's got to be you know,
four fourth album kind of thing, and the Chili Peppers
start to say, you know, these guys promised us to
the world and now they're starting to go back on it.
Moe was the greatest guy in the world. Even losing us.
He called each of us individually, fuck that. We'll go

(31:46):
to Word Brothers. Who is that. I don't think he
was being strategic either. I think that's who he was is.
But um, it ends up with the Chili Peppers coming
to Warner Brothers and enormous success because Mo was a
class act who could see the future and a very

(32:07):
strategic guy. Okay, Lenny was originally a producer he and
our Guy maybe a little bit before that, but made
his bones. Was a song plugger before that, right, but
he was working with Russ Russ, titleman, whatever, and then
they promote him to president. Does that happen during your
tenure or before before? Okay? So what was Lenny's everyday role?

(32:32):
Lenny was the music guy. MO was the business guy.
Lenny was the music guy. So artists would come in
and talk to Lenny about their records he ran. He
was the head of the A and R department. Um,
he was a vibe is a vibe guy and also

(32:53):
just unbelievably impressive at talking to artists, being able to
say to an artist the album is great, but you
need two more tracks and here's what they need to
accomplish without pissing an artist off, which is a unique talent. Um.
He would really get in the weeds with people making records.

(33:15):
He's brilliant at that. Okay, So Deedles just say as
we say in the business. There's a lot more product
at Warner Brothers. So how did you manage dealing with
such workload? I had a lot more people, and I
worked really long hours. It was incredible workload at Warner Brothers.
We released a ton of records. Um, a lot of

(33:37):
people worked very long hours making sure that that happened.
And you prioritize like anywhere else. So where long this
timeline do you meet your wife and how do you
meet her? I meet her at A and M Records.

(33:57):
So I'm working for A and M. I've got at
Boston and then New York. Uh, I have to go
buy a suitcase. A call a friend of mine to
see if he wants to go have lunch, and by
a suitcase. We do. He mentions that his girlfriend, who
I'm close friends with, as a friend, visiting from New York.
We go over to their house. I meet Jody there

(34:18):
and she has caught the bouquet at a wedding the
night before. She'd come at her wedding and I really
liked her, and she was in New York. So I
flew to Boston that day, and for a couple of
days I was kind of ruminating, Wow, I really liked her,
Maybe she liked me. I'll call Steve. And I called
Steve and he said, she really liked you. You You should
call her. You're going to New York. So I call
her to ask her out. Um left a message on

(34:41):
her phone machine, never heard back. Get to New York.
Called her. She says, yeah, she'll go out with me.
We have dinner, hit it off, and that starts at all.
And after the fact I find out that she had
actually called me at the hotel in Boston, left a
message she couldn't go out. She couldn't go out with me,
but felt since I was being so persistent, she would,

(35:04):
when in fact, I had never got the message. Somebody
forgot to slide the slip under the door, as I
used to do back then, and I would have never
pursued her had she said no. So this whole family
of mine and these two grown kids exists because some
bellman at the Copley Plaza didn't slide a little note
under my door. Do you know why she said no?

(35:25):
The first time? She was breaking up with her boyfriend
and felt weird about it now. But she comes from
a lot of history in the music business. What was
she doing then? And your father in law did he
impact you at all? Yes? So Jody's father was Larry Utall,
who owned Amy Mala and Bell Records, which were the precursors,

(35:49):
as she pointed out of Ariston and Uh. I had
never heard of him when I met her, but we
soon got into conversation about that. She had worked for
her father next label, Private Stock, and in her one
in and R the thing that she ever did, found
Blondie and brought it to her father and said we

(36:09):
should sign these guys, which he did, and so uh,
pretty soon in this conversation we realized I told her
I was going to New York and one of the
reasons was to meet How Wilder, a late grade record producer,
and she said, I know how And so our first
conversation was about this guy we knew mutually, and she
had grown up in the music business and so could

(36:31):
relate to that. And ironically, Um, my youngest daughter is
engaged to a music business manager, which means that my
daughter will have married somebody in the music business. My
her mother, Jodie married me, a guy in the music business,
and her grandmother married her father, Jody's father, a guy

(36:52):
in the music business. And Jody's grandmother was a singer
in the Zigfield Follies. So we're going to have four
generations now, Okay, so Warner Brothers, you know, is going along.
Let's just stop for one thing. I know most take
on Prince. What was the take on Prince with him
wanting to put out more product, the label saying no,

(37:15):
him say painting slave on his face? What was it
like inside the building? Well, I was in the middle
of all that. Prince was the only genius, true genius
I ever worked. Um and I had a have a
funny story about our first meeting, but it's like five
minutes long. Well that's that good telling. Okay. So, uh,

(37:40):
Prince has had a couple of stiff records, and Moe
and Lenny and Michael Auston, who's the head of A
and R, meet with him and say, look, you've got
to have some in our input. Your next record is
not life or death, but very very important, and that
becomes Diamonds and Pearls. And they're working very closely with him,
and Mo and Lenny and Michael are keeping us up

(38:02):
to data on all this, and uh, they're very convinced
that they've got a Prince record with multiple hits. And
I'm at the label maybe six months and they would
circulate the artwork that somebody had submitted if we weren't
doing it in the house for the album cover. And imagine,
if you will. I opened this envelope and I've got

(38:25):
the new Prince out and cover, and it's a type
photo of his face from kind of his forehead down
to his chin, and he's making kind of the peace
sign with his fingers reversed, with his tongue sticking out
of the middle. It's just a ridiculous photo. And so
I go to Lenny's office and I said, I think
this is you know, you guys have spent so much

(38:46):
time on this record. This photograph that he wants on
the album cover is laughable, It's ridiculous. And he said,
go have a meeting with Prince. Okay. So Benny Medina
is the head of black An R and the in
his contact. So Benny sets up a meeting a couple
of days later and Prince I come in and Benny

(39:08):
has an office that looks like a cave with no windows,
and the setup is he Benny sitting at his desk,
and across from his desk perpendicular to it are two
couches apart from each other, and Princes sitting on one
and I'm sitting on the other one. And Prince looks
as if he has come off stage or is about
to bound on stage. He's wearing full hair, makeup, full

(39:30):
stage clothes, which he always did I later found out.
And Benny starts saying, um, well, Jeff's our new head
of creative services, and he thinks your album cover maybe
could be better, and then there's bam, bam bam on
the door, and into the door walks Benny's lawyer, who's
renegotiating Benny's contract at Warner brothers and says, I need

(39:54):
to talk to you right away, and Benny proceeds to
leave for the entirety of the meeting. So I'm sitting
across from Prince Uh, who's a guy I have great
admiration for, but by all accounts a difficult guy to
deal with. And Uh, Benny has just told him I
don't like his album cover, and he's this is a

(40:14):
guy who knows how to use silence and intimidate people,
and he's developed this to a fine art. So he
looks at me and says, so, what do you think
I should do? Do you think I should wear overalls
like R E. M Or a band of the label
who clearly did not wear overalls. But well, no, I
was thinking, and you know it's just devolving, is do

(40:37):
you think you wear good clothes? Maybe I should get
you clothes like your send me your sizes. And he's
wearing uh, fucia they look like ski pants, their skin
tight pants with a loop around the bottom under his
boots and a see through chartruss pinstriped shirt and uh,

(40:58):
it's just kind of baiting me. And at some point
he says, show me something you've done. I go okay.
So I go up to my office and I pulled
together all these CDs that I had art directed, and
they were mostly from A and M because I hadn't
been a worried Brothers that long. And he's bringing down
maybe a foot high stack, and he's looking at them

(41:20):
making dismissive comments. This is you know, I'm not saying
this is ship, but that's essentially what he's saying. Why
would I want to do this? Who would think this
is a good idea? And he gets near to the
bottom and he finds this holographic album of CD cover
that I've done for Suzanne Vega for Days of Open Hand,
that I actually she and I and Thomas and Len

(41:42):
Pelt worked on it one great a Grammy for art direction.
And after dismissing the first fifteen of these, he looks
at this hologram and just kind of mesmerized and says,
this is good. Why can't I get a hologram by
some miracle I had met maybe a month before with
a I working for a company. You you'd have these

(42:02):
meetings who had a new technology to make holograms cheaply,
And I said, well, maybe you can get a hologran
what do you mean? And I explained to him and
he said, all right, give me a hologram. And so
that this hour and a half torture session ended up
on a slightly positive note. So I called this guy

(42:24):
from the hologram company and said, how would your company
like to launch their new technology on the new album
from Prince? What? And I explained to him and said,
but you're gonna have to really make this economically viable
for us. They did, and we ended up putting out
diamonds and pearls with this holographic cover. And Prince actually

(42:44):
sent me a thank you note, which is something that
his assistant said she had never seen him do. That says,
the more I look with an eye eyeball, the more
I like with another eyeball, thank you for the cool cover, Prince.
And it's on this little piece of station and it
says from the desk of Prince. So after that, I

(43:09):
was one of the few people at Warner Brothers that
Prince talked to. And uh Mo and Lenny leave eventually,
and so and Benny leaves and Michael Austen leaves, and
so maybe it's me and one or two other people
that Prince talks to and uh, well, actually I'm getting
ahead of myself. So um, one day, Moe walks in

(43:34):
and says, I had a meeting with Prince. He wants
to be a vice president of this company. So I said, sure,
you're a vice president. So Prince becomes a vice president
of Warner Brothers and shows up to a couple of
the career meetings, and one of them I remember because
it was the day Magic Johnson announced he had it
aids it was HIV positive, and uh, we had this

(43:58):
giant projection TV and all of us were mesmerized. Those
guys were big basketball fans and we're watching the live
coverage of this with Prince, who for a very short
period of time pretended to be an a our guy.
But he was giving us so much product, and we
had his label, Paisley Park. Why not? And uh then

(44:21):
at another point Prince decides, you know, I want to
get my master's back and goes to MO and they say, no,
you can't get your master's back. We pay you millions
of dollars every time you give us a record. If
you were when you were negotiating nine months ago, maybe
we could have discussed that, but no, so Prince decides

(44:42):
he's going to change his name and then claim that
Warner Brothers has signed Prince, but the symbol is a
different artist who consigned to a different record label. And
we're having fun with this because the name Prince has gone,
so we do. He's a little come puter floppy disks
with the symbol and send it out to the press

(45:03):
so they can uh write articles about him and not
use prints. And when when I needed to call him,
I'd call his office and say, Hi, it's Jeff Gold
from Warner Brothers. His Prince there, knowing that his uh
people were from couldn't use the name. Or somebody would
call from Paisley Park and say, Hi, my boss is
on the phone. It's who who is that? You know?

(45:25):
My boss? So obviously that doesn't fly. But eventually Moe
and Lenny leave, and Michael leaves and Benny leaves, and
I'm one of the few guys he talks to, and Uh,
I remember having a conversation with him where he's complaining.
It was just the two of us and he was

(45:45):
complaining and I'm gonna paraphrase this, but it was, you know,
everybody looks at these albums I put out as uh,
you know, kind of being delivered from the mountain, these
great statements. But I'm just recording all the time. And
when I get enough songs that I think make an album,
I put out an album. And I don't understand why

(46:06):
I can't just do that whenever I want. And I said, well,
when you renegotiated, you're getting to three million dollars whatever
it is per album, and we've got to be able
to recoup that money. And if you're giving us three
albums a year and we're giving you nine million dollars,
we can't possibly release the number of singles and market

(46:27):
these things the way that we need to market them,
uh to make our money back and be profitable. And
he knew what I was saying. He was a very
very smart guy, and I knew what he was saying.
But it was kind of one of the few moments
where he let down. His guarden was vulnerable. And I
remember when he did the Gold Experience album. I think

(46:50):
either that or the Come album. Maybe it was a
Come album. We had a marketing meeting with Prince to
discuss he was touring in the marketing of that album,
and he sat to me because I was the only
person in the meeting who had a relationship with and
at some point, and this was the only time you
really broke character. He whispered in my ear, make this big,

(47:11):
I need the money. And you really never saw Prince
break character. You know, he was literally every time I
ever saw him, he could have gotten on stage and
started performing. He was fully made up to the nines
and uh dressed as exactly as if he was on stage. Well,

(47:39):
in any event, you referenced, all of a sudden, there's
all this turmoil in the music business. You know, Doug
Morris gets power, he's kicked out. Bob Morgado's manipulating everything.
What was it like inside the building, and what was
it like when Mo and Lenny decided to go. It
was terrible. So Steve Ross, who ran Warners and then

(48:02):
time Warner had gotten ill and died. And uh the
head of the Warner Music Group was this guy, Bob Morgado,
who MO did not get along with. So MO had
a special side deal that while the heads of Electra
and Atlantic had to report to Bob Morgado, MO did
not have to. So Steve Ross dies and morgatoh cease

(48:27):
his opportunity and convinces Jerry Levin, who takes over Time Warner,
that he really needs Mo Austen to report to him
and the Bob Morgado knew nothing about the music business
and would give interviews after after the Grammy's when Madonna
wins a bunch of Grammys, saying, well, I authorized her signing,
you know, I authorized her resigning. So uh, when Morgato

(48:52):
uh convinces Jerry Levin that it's in his best interest
to have more report to him, most has forget it.
I'm not resigning, I'm dune, and nobody can believe this,
But Jerry Levin backs up Morgado and Mo leaves and
for a while, uh, Lenny is going to take over,
and we think, well, this is a tragedy, but at
least Lenny is going to take over. Lenny eventually decides,

(49:16):
now I'm gonna leave and start a record label with
Mo DreamWorks. So then uh, Danny Goldberg comes in, who
I knew from me and m And Danny actually promotes
me and Howie Klein and Stephen Baker and Rich Fitzgerald
in an effort to keep us and gives us big
raises so he can project stability. But he's commuting from

(49:40):
New York where he lives every week at to l
A and Doug Morris Uh in a power play destabilizes
UH Morgado and Morgado gets fired and Dug takes over
and and this continues. So the music group has been
run by Morgado for a longer of time, but MO

(50:00):
has been independent. And then you've got Morgado seizing power,
and then Doug seizing power from Regato, and then Michael
Fuchs seizing power from UH Doug, and then UH Bob
Daily and Terry Simmel from the picture company. This is
in about two years. There are four different people running
the music and the record company goes from Mo to

(50:25):
Lenny to Danny to rust Thy Red, who then has
heart failures so Phil Corduro was brought in. So you've
got these companies at Moran this for twenty five years,
and you've got five different people in the next two
years running it. So it was very, very unstable. There
was lots of speculation about what was going to happen,
who was going to take over, what kind of changes

(50:46):
there were, and they were very distracting from what we
were trying to do, which is break acts and sell records.
So how did you how did it ultimately end with
you and Warner Brothers. Everybody's dream come true at this
time was to get fired with time on your contract.
This had happened to two of my closest friends, Hale
Millgroom and Jeff Arrell, who got essentially paid to go

(51:07):
home and do nothing. And the job was getting more
and more stressful as I was getting I got eventually
made the executive vice president and general manager of Warner
so I was the number two guys. Steve Baker was
the president. That happened with Danny and so my time
went from being administrative creative reversed. So I was doing

(51:35):
things like signing independent promotion bills and arguing with the
CFO about why a secretary couldn't get a raise. And
it was really not fun, but I was being paid well.
So when the fifth person from the person who hired
me took over, uh I UH was confronted by Phil

(51:59):
Cornerrea who said, look, Russ, and I feel like maybe
you'd be better in another job. What would you like
to do instead? And this was you know, I had
a contract that said I was the executive as president
general manager or they were in breach and had to
fire me. I had two years left on my deal,
and so I said, fire me. I don't want another job,
and that's what happened. I had become a Buddhist about

(52:19):
three years before that. I realized every year I was
working was probably two years off of my lifespan. But
the money was good and I had a young family.
And my contract auspiciously expired December thirty one. I thought,
when that is over, I'm out of here and I'm
gonna find something less stressful to do and mean while

(52:40):
I'm gonna bank every penny I can. So what happened
two years before me? I had these role models in
Hale and Jeff, and I couldn't have been happier. Okay,
So how did this ultimately segue into the memorabilia business? So,
as I described, I started off collecting rare records and memorabilia,
and I continued to do that during the record business years.

(53:05):
And it was great because I could fly all over.
Everything I bought was tax deductible. I was deep into
the Internet, and so my deal with Warner Brothers said,
as long as I didn't have another job, they had
to pay me. Uh what my contract specified. So I thought, Okay,
I'm not going to get another job, but I can
be Entrepreneurroll what am I into? Rare records and memorabilia,

(53:27):
the Internet, stereo equipment, and computers. All four things very
simple too. Uh, cluster those together and start right back
up where I had left when I was in the
when I went to A and M and starting selling
rare records and memorabilia, but at a much higher level

(53:47):
because I was much better capitalized. And uh so I
started a website. I started selling an eBay very early on,
and uh, this is gonna be my retirement job. And
it's become my kind of out of control retirement job
that I'm constantly trying to not work more than I

(54:08):
want to work, but I love. Okay. One has to
ask how lucrative is this relative to working for the labels. Well,
I don't make as much money as I did working
with the record companies, but it's very lucrative. Okay. So
when you first go online et cetera with eBay, what

(54:29):
kind of stuff are you're selling? Rare records? Um, there's
a big market for first pressing rare records, and the
best analogy is um rare books. So you know somebody
might pay an extreme amount of money for well, I'll

(54:49):
give you an example. Um, The Beatles first album anywhere
in the world is Please Please Me. In England for
reasons that had nothing to do with the Beatles. It
came out on Parlophone in a on a label that
was black background with gold printing, and Parlophone decided to

(55:09):
change their label design about two months in. They also,
the first pressing of Please Please Me had erroneous copyright
credits for a few songs crediting them to Dick James
Music when they were actually Northern songs of the Beatles Company.

(55:32):
So somebody will pay a huge premium for a gold
Parlophone copy of Please Please Me that came out two
months before a black and yellow copy, and they'll pay
them even bigger premium if it has the first mistaken credits,
And then they'll pay an exponential premium if it's a

(55:53):
stereo copy, because nobody was buying stereo records and can
addition is so important that let's say I had an
absolutely perfect, brand new stereo copy of that record, I
could probably get for it if I had a copy

(56:15):
that was in very good condition that somebody had taken
care of but had some scuffs and marks still played. Well,
that might be ad. So I started selling really rare
records in the best condition possible. That's what I started with.
And then memorabilia as well, so concert posters, documents, signed things.

(56:41):
I remember in the seventies passing up a version of
Lumpy Gravy and then spending two years trying to find
it again and having to buy an import because it
was cut out from MGM whatever. Um uh So in
any event, everyone knows in the memory of Bealia world
in general that it used to be about like rock

(57:04):
Guitaristromingham would go from pawn shop to pawn shop. This
all went to the Internet, so everything became available. It
was not so much about the hunt but about buying.
Tell us the evolution once we're on the Internet of
what is available and how you find it, etcetera. So
I'll give you an example. M there's a when the

(57:29):
Freewheel and Bob Dylan album, his second album, is released,
in a story breaks that a few copies have been
discovered that have four different songs. They aren't listed on
the album cover. But uh, what had happened? Was he
recorded the album the beginning with John Hammond and then

(57:50):
with Tom Wilson, and then he written four more songs,
including Blowing in the Wind, and they had the record
all master designed, ready to go. But Tom Wilson thought
these songs were so strong that he went in gutman.
The studio recorded these four songs and they swapped them
out at one pressing plan in California. Somebody didn't get

(58:11):
the message and a few copies got pressed with the
old stampers which had the four original songs. But I
won't go to in the weeds with this, but the
mono copies became instantly very very very very collectible, and
the stereo copies nobody knew they existed to have surfaced

(58:33):
since nineteen so um pre eBay, that was the kind
of thing you heard about, but never ever saw a
freewheel and Bob dealing with those four tracks. And I
remember somebody knowing somebody in Santa Monica who had one,
and I inveigled myself to go over to this guy's

(58:53):
house and actually see it. And the only way you
can tell is either playing it or looking at the
stamper noters. That record was just impossibly rare, and I
was looking for it for maybe seven or eight years,
and I had a mail order catalog that I would
send out to four collectors three or four times a year,
and everybody would circulate there one list of times. I

(59:15):
will pay a lot of money for this record if
anybody has with And eventually, after I don't know, seven
or eight years, somebody contacted me and I traded him
maybe a thousand dollars worth of stuff for it. Just
an impossible to find record. Now if you're looking at eBay,
one a year will show up, so it's not it's

(59:37):
still very rare, but it's not impossible. So records that
were previously virtually unfindable find their way, as you said
with the guitars, to eBay or to auction, and if
you're willing to spend the money, you can find them.
Records that were sort of rare are now generally pretty

(01:00:00):
common because of Emay and discous people have a easily
it's easy to find out what something's worth, to research it,
and to put it up for sale on a forum
where people are looking for Okay, you talk about free wheeling.
Bob Dylan's girlfriend at the time, Susie Rutolo is on

(01:00:20):
the cover of that. And if I got this straight,
they ultimately sold her record collection and people bought the
record she owned, and you know we're looking at one
of them, right, So what is what is what is
that worth? So Susie rode Along, who was his girlfriend
in the early sixties, saved a lot of stuff and

(01:00:43):
in probably the early two thousand's, decided she was going
to sell some stuff and being a big consumer of
Dylan stuff, and uh, I've worked for I appraised as
archive with a colleague, I'm very much in the middle
of that. So I got contacted and the two things

(01:01:05):
I really wanted were two blues albums from sixty one
that he had bought in London. There were English copies
and on the back he had written above the liner
notes things like written for and about Bob Dylan and
read and absorbed by Bob Dylan. And I thought, I've

(01:01:28):
got to have these, and I won them. I think
I paid five or six thousand dollars apiece for them,
which I've considered a huge bargain. And they're really interesting
because this is Bob Dylan absorbing his influences, acknowledging that
writing on the back of the album covers, and at
the point where he's bought these records, He's been Bob

(01:01:50):
Dylan for maybe a year a year and a half,
so it's almost like he's trying on his new name.
I've actually written an essay about this for a forthcoming book. Um,
So I'm really One of my sub collections personal ones,
is collecting records owned by artists who I who inspired me.

(01:02:11):
So I've got about twenty five of Jimmie Hendricks's records,
including his Dylan's greatest hits with some psychedelic doodling on
the back. I've got some of Bill Wyman's records. I've
got John Lennon's copy of A Hard Day's Night. I've
got some Sterling Morrison's all that underground records. Um. You
know it's pretty nerdy, but I love it. Okay, So

(01:02:31):
Susie's album, let's assume she had an album from two
with no doodle on it. It's just the same as
if you boughted a retail store. Is that worth anything? Absolutely? Um,
especially if it's a Dylan album. Um. And I was
able to through the auction house contact her and say,

(01:02:52):
you know, why was he writing on these records, and
she said something to the extent of it would be
as if someone was doodling on the side of a
paperback book writing little notes to themselves. But yeah, people,
there are people like me who are interested in records
owned by musicians they like. Now, she's one generation away
from that. But if it was something she had at

(01:03:14):
the time and that Bob Dylan I would have listened
to her played, that makes it intriguing. Okay, so at
least to me. Yeah, right, so we know any of
us who have sold or been to record stores that
albums that everybody has Fleetwood, Mac, Rumors, Saturday Night Fever
essentially worthless. Okay, what do people own that is actually

(01:03:39):
worth something? That's not strictly true. The vinyl revival has
gotten so out of control that people will pay premium
prices for records that sold millions of copies. So if
you had a sealed copy of Rumors that was the
first pressing, probably go for three or four dred dollars.

(01:04:02):
If you had a stone Mint first pressing, it's probably
a hundred dollar record, which is inconceivable to be because
it's one of the best selling records of all time. Um,
I'll tell you the most recent story. Imaginal Nirvana's never
Mind came out at a time where very few people
were buying final records, so i've every day I wake

(01:04:27):
up in one of the first things I do is
look at the top forties selling records that's sold on
eBay the day before. Just for those unsophisticated, that's an
easy chart to find. Where's that chart grip swet dot com,
g R I P s W E A T dot com.
So you can see what's sold the day before on
eBay in descending order of price. And never Mind has

(01:04:52):
just been going up and up and up the last
two or three years. And one sold for two thou
dollars a couple of years ago, or a couple of
months ago, a vinyl copy sold for two thousand dollars.
Yesterday a copy sold for thirty perfect condition. And you know,
nobody's records are in perfect condition, and if if they're not,

(01:05:14):
the suffer a lot less. So I wrote to a
friend of mine, going, God, I just can't believe they're
selling for this much. It's nuts, and he said, yeah,
that record just keeps going up. So in the middle
of the night last night, I woke up and went,
you know, I might have a copy of that, And
I wrote a note to myself, and I got up
this morning and I went to my record collection, and

(01:05:34):
sure enough, I have an absolutely perfect promo copy of
never Mind. And that's not something I would keep for
I'm happy to have a reissue of that. It's not
a record that's, you know, generationally deep to me. So
that's a perfect example of the kind of thing that
a non record collector might have that's worth a lot

(01:05:56):
of money. Okay, So you know you occasionally go to people.
Let's talk Ken Barnes. Ken Barnes, very well known rock
writer from the classic rock era. He's got a huge collection.

(01:06:17):
A few questions here, Hey he decides to sell. Are
most of these people selling because they need the money?
And be how do you find out about it? And
sees to what degree is this the source of your inventor.
I'd rather not talk about Ken, um, let's talk about

(01:06:37):
it in a theoretical way. But that's why I bought
his collection. I bought much of his collection. So there
aren't that many people who will come over to your
house and pay you tens of thousands of dollars or something,
or a collection. A lot of the people who do
what I do have stores, and their business model is
by it as cheap as I can and then flip

(01:06:59):
it as fast as I can because they've got overhead.
My business models different. I want to buy the best
things and only the best things, and I'll pay more
than anybody to get them, and I'll put them on
my website. And I don't care if something takes two
or three years to sell if it's something really good.
So I'll work with a couple of friends of mine

(01:07:20):
in Los Angeles if somebody's got a huge collection and
there are things that interest me, and I'll buy what
I want and then they'll come in and buy what
they want, and I get, you know, once a couple
of times a week. I get those kind of calls.
But generally people have used record store stock collections that

(01:07:41):
aren't that interesting. But if it's an industry collection or
somebody who worked in the media, oftentimes they do have
interesting stuff. And I also very involved with the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame, and I will buy things
that don't have financial value but have historical value, donate
them things that I think need preserving. Okay, so the

(01:08:05):
people who are selling these records? What is their main motivation?
Money room, or they just don't want them anymore, all
of the above. A lot of times somebody dies, somebody
wants to raise money for a kid who's lost a job. Recently,
I've paid for plastic surgery, I've bought new cars, I've
paid for cancer medication. UM, you name it, Okay, so

(01:08:30):
you come in. Let's assume to make the numbers around,
somebody has a thousand records. Generally speaking, can you cherry
pick or does someone want you to buy all a
thousand for price and you deal with it? Uh? Generally,
the way I explain it is, if you want me
to buy everything, I'll buy it, but you'll make less

(01:08:51):
than if I cherry pick it. And then I introduce
you to somebody who will come over and and buy
the rest from you. Because you're paying me, essentially to
do the work that I don't need to do. It's
a hassle for me to buy a thousand records keep
a hundred of them at wholesale out nine hundred, So
I'm gonna want something for my time. You're gonna get

(01:09:13):
more money if I come over, pay you top dollar
for that hundred and then introduce you to somebody who'll
pay you top dollar for the other nine. Okay, let's
talk about the ultimate a shrink wrapped record. How often
do you find a shrink wrapped record? And how does
that affect the price all the time. And here's here's

(01:09:34):
my standard example. Yesterday and today in the Beetle by
the Beatles was going to come out originally with a
cover showing them with decapitated baby dolls covered in blood,
capital printed them up, got very negative feedback from the media,
and record store owners recalled or actually hadn't sent out

(01:09:57):
the album in most cases, and pay did the trunk cover,
an innocuous cover showing them standing around, uh, a trunk
over the offending ones. So there, and they had sent
out some of the original ones to reviewers, and they
sent out a letter to them say, uh, mistake, sent

(01:10:19):
it back to us, will send your replacement copy, which
most of them didn't do. So you can find or
what exists in the world are original copies that weren't
pasted over, Copies that were pasted over that are called
second state, and copies that are called third state. Where
somebody industrious kid steamed off the old covered the new

(01:10:42):
cover to reveal the old cutter cover. And these are
worth a variety of prices depending on what the condition is.
The most desirable one is a stereo, a sealed stereo,
not pasted over copy. Uh. The guy who was the

(01:11:02):
president of Capital at the time, Allen Livingston, kept a
number of these, and those are the ultimate ones because
I've got a letter from him saying I'm the president
of Capital. I kept these from the top. So let's
say one of those might be worth a hundred thousand dollars. Uh.
If I took my fingernail and opened the shrink rap

(01:11:24):
at the mouth, didn't pull the record out, that's gonna
mean it's worth six. For the privilege of or the
difference of sealed and unsealed, even though nothing else has changed,
might reduce the price by if you took the record
out and played it, the corners were bent up a
little bit just through normal handling, that might be worth Uh.

(01:11:51):
If the seams started to split, that might be worth fifteen.
Now that's the extreme example, but that shows you how
obsessed people are by condition and what an extreme premium
people pay for rare records they're sealed. Let's uh, stay
with the butcher cover. For a minute, Let's assume someone

(01:12:12):
steamed off the cover and the album is not in
good condition. What is that worth If they did a
so so job, as most kids did, a couple hundred bucks,
if they did a fantastic job where it was done
professionally and there are people literally who do this professionally

(01:12:32):
undred Okay, those of us who were record store savvy.
You went into the Tower Sunset, you went in the
back room. They had a shrink wrap machine. They sure
did so. And Charlie Shaw, the manager of Tower at
that time, had a motto, there's no such thing as
as a defective record. So they were just reshrink everything.

(01:12:55):
So the question becomes fraud. To what degree is being
sold as shrink opped is really not shrink wrapped? And
how can you tell? That? Is an extremely savvy question, Bob.
There are a huge percentage of what's sold as sealed
isn't is reshrink reshrunk. There's a huge amount on eBay

(01:13:15):
of people selling NonStop sixties records that are supposed to
be factory sealed, which aren't. I kind of find the
whole phenomenon of sealed records ridiculous because, as you and
I know there are defective records, and if I'm going
to pay a thousand knowledge for record, I want to
see what the record looks like. Um, there's a lot

(01:13:35):
of fraud. And the way you tell the difference is
somebody like me stares at it for a very long time. Well,
I know, somebody's what a ship ton of records? You
could tell back then? What was reshrunk? You know? I haven't.
You can't tell you right? And but have you very
sophisticated though? That's my I figured? So have you been beaten? Yeah,

(01:13:58):
I've been beating a couple of times, um, but not many.
And another quirk about my business model is, and I
don't know anybody else who does this, I guarantee everything
I sell to be authentic forever, in writing, if people
ask and for hiring things in writing anyway, And this
has two purposes. One it ensures the buyers they're getting

(01:14:21):
something that is authentic. And to it prevents me from
buying and reselling anything that I'm not absolutely positive about.
If I see something and I'm nine percent sure it's good,
I'm passing because I don't want that coming back to
haunt me. Okay, So have you ever sold something that
turned out not to be authentic. It's happened a few times.

(01:14:46):
I almost did. Actually this week i'll show it to
you this This is audio only, so described for the
audience side it okay, this is a nine concert program

(01:15:06):
for Felonious Monks first Australian tour and as you Bob
can see, it's signed at the top by the Felonious Monk.
So I bought this from a guy in Australia who
told me that his friend now deceased, had gotten it signed.
And I looked at the signal I bought it got
it looked absolutely genuine, signed in fountain pen and uh.

(01:15:30):
I sold it to a good customer. Mind I hadn't
sent it out, and the next day somebody sent me
an email saying, hey, that Felonious Monks signed thing you signed?
Do you have that because somebody's got one listed on
eBay And he sent me a link and I looked
at it. It looked almost exactly the same, but there
were a few creases in different places. So I wrote

(01:15:51):
to the seller and said, do you actually have that?
It was a guy in Australia. Is it possible that
I bought that copy and you just didn't take it down. No,
I've got the right in front of me, and I said,
got the autograph has to be printed. And I looked
at it through a very high power loop and it
still looks like an original autograph. Um. And I did

(01:16:13):
a lot of research and I couldn't find any other
copies of it online. This guy sent me some high
resolution pictures of the one he had, and even though
I was almost certain it wasn't printed, it clearly has
to be printed because there's another one that's identical in
every way. So I contacted my customer and said, bad news.

(01:16:35):
I'm refunding your money. I didn't send it out yet.
It's fake. I can't think of the last time that happened.
If ever. Um, yeah, just happened a couple of weeks ago.
So I do, I do, But you know, the good
news is I guarantee everything. So okay. So how much
inventory do you have and where do you keep it? Uh?

(01:16:59):
I have a fair amount of inventory, but a lot
of it is very valuable pieces of paper and records
which don't take up a lot of space, and unframed posters.
So I have some flat files and I have a
big safe and I have a safe deposit box, and
I'm forever trying to sell fewer more expensive things, um

(01:17:24):
and happily that what I deal in generally doesn't take
up very much space. Okay, So how many vinyl records
do you own today in my personal collection? You're looking
at it a two thousand? Okay, how many of those
records you're never gonna sell? Well, I'm gonna die someday, shockingly,

(01:17:47):
and so you know my fantasy is to sell it
all right before that happens. I don't know if that
will happen. But those two thousand records are my collection,
So I'm I'm very disinclined to part with any of them.
There are hard earned, a lot of them might spend
a lot of time looking for a lot of them
have stories behind them, are souvenirs from travel or owned

(01:18:08):
by friends of mine who are no longer here, or
owned by artists I admire. So that's my record collection.
And if one was knowledgeable like yourself, how many of
those are rare and how many just have sentimental value?
M m it's probably m hmm. There are records in

(01:18:32):
there I would be extremely hard pressed to ever replace.
There are records in there that are irreplaceable or the
only known copy. There are records in there that are
really common. Having found that Nirvana record today, I'm motivated
to go look through and I wonder if there's anything
else that doesn't mean that much, to mean it's worth

(01:18:56):
a lot of money. But but generally those are things
that I have a deep connection to and I listened to,
you know, probably five or six albums a day. Okay,
So how good a system do you have? What do
you have I have? I lived in a house with
just my wife. She never turns on the stereo, and

(01:19:18):
I have four stereos with turntables, and I have a
three floor house. Uh. My best stereo is I was
born in nineteen fifty six and I thought it would
be fun to put together he stayed of the art
nineteen fifty six system, and for that I have some
nineteen circa nineteen fifty six JB L speakers that have

(01:19:40):
been rebuilt that are about three ft tall. I have
a Macto, Macintosh Mono to bamps, Macintosh uh Tuner pre amp,
and a um Thorn's turntables. So that's all circa nine

(01:20:02):
and that's my best stereo. I think, uh, I have
some other McIntosh integrated amps. I have Linn Access turntable.
I have a real good turntable. Yeah, lesser stuff, but
it's great to have stereos all over the house. What
do you think of the vinyl revival. It's mystifying to me.

(01:20:26):
It's fantastic. I think it's fantastic. My first book was
on classic vinyl records. Um, it's great to see kids
excited about vinyl records. It's great to see all these records,
store day releases coming out, lots of things you thought
you'd never hear or never be able to get on vinyl.
It's shocking to me when I look at the forty

(01:20:48):
biggest selling records from the day before on eBay and
seeing over and over and over Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift
record store day records or reissues of not that uncommon
records selling for five six hundred dollars. H People doing

(01:21:09):
bespoke jazz reissues itself for five d to a thousand
dollars when you could buy for that kind of money
a truly rare record. But generally, I think it's very
exciting that kids are getting turned onto music and and
not just kids and records. We grew up in an
era where the records were cut analog on tape, ultimately

(01:21:30):
analog format, and you wanted to get the best ster
you can afford. Whereas kids frequently have a very poor
stereo and they're buying something that was cut digitally that's
ultimately pressed on vinyl. What do you think about all that?
I think the whole thing is weird. When the Beatles did.
When the first Beatles vinyl remasters came at five or

(01:21:55):
seven years ago, I bought some of them, and they
were doing all this us about how George Martin's son
and state of the art UH remastering and allowed them
to tease new information on the tapes, and you could
hear the Beatles fingers on the strings, the string noise
and stuff, and they've been remixed from the original masters.

(01:22:17):
And I listened to them and I hated them because
they didn't sound like the records that are imprinted in
my mind that I love. And I have a friend
who has a very high end audio store at the
time had a hundred thousand dollar turntable and I went
a bead some of my English first pressing Beatle records
against those, and I just thought the new ones sounded terrible.

(01:22:40):
They were like science projects. Yeah, there's more information, but
it's not what the Beatles signed off on in when
they were sitting in the room with George Martin. So
generally that stuff doesn't interest me. M I buy lots
of reissues and I like find hearing new music artists

(01:23:00):
I like. But the remastering, you know, I mean, the
remastering never stops. As you know, you know, there are
records have been remastered, you know, pet sounds four or five,
six times, and uh, it just feels very science project.
We'll certainly remix. You know. I've been on record and
certainly been involved with people on this is just crazy. Okay.

(01:23:23):
You've been heavily involved with Dylan's music, both in the
museum that opened in Oklahoma and finding unreleased stuff. Tell
us about that. He was one of my favorite artists
as a kid. It still is. I heard a show
on YouTube from five days ago in Seattle where he

(01:23:48):
was just sounding unbelievably good. It's just remarkable. This guy
at eighty one years old is making great music and
is still great, still on the road and sounding fantastic. Uh,
he's not sounding like he did in Night sixty four.
But sav Um, I loved Dylan records. I bought all
the Dylan bootlegs I could find. As a kid, I

(01:24:09):
collected rare Dylan records. I wanted that freewheel and so bad.
I was willing to pay crazy money for it. Um
I became friendly with a guy named Jason Emmons who
was the curatorial director at the Experience Music Project in Seattle.
He put together a museum show called Bob Dylan's American

(01:24:30):
Journey that traveled around the United States. That was the
only authorized ever Dylan exhibit. It was at the Scutball
here in Los Angeles. It was incredible. I was consultant
to it, and I was probably the major, one of
the major lenders to it. And through that I met
Jeff Rosen, who manages Bob and at some point many

(01:24:55):
years later, he called me up and asked me if
I would uh uh. He had a project he was
interested in talking to me about, but I had to
sign a nondisclosure agreement first. Sure I did. He told
me about Bob Dylan's archive and that it was being

(01:25:18):
had been sold to the George Kaiser family. Foundation in
Tulsa and they were going to open a museum and
he needed somebody to appraise it. And he felt like
I probably knew as much about that as anybody and
could I do? And this threw me for a total loop.
But it was a dream come true project and I

(01:25:40):
told him I could certainly value this stuff, but when
I saw what it constituted, I said, you know, I'm
not somebody who can write you hundreds of page long
appraisal and then defended to the I R s if
if that happens, But I know somebody who can. Laura Woolli,
who's the top entertainment praiser in the world, isn't a

(01:26:01):
good friend of mine. So I brought her on board
and for about six months we appraised this massive archive.
There were six thousand handwritten things, ranging from a note
on the back of a business card to the notebooks
that he wrote blood on the Tracks in, or the

(01:26:22):
original manuscript to Subterranean Homesick Blues. And we were holding
these things in our hands, and you know, it was
just breath digging, literally breath digging for me. And uh
I have done helped them with other projects. I bought
the collection of Ralph J. Gleeson, who was the first

(01:26:44):
rock printic in America and in he had died, but
he was one of those guys to say literally everything.
And in his archives in his basement, I found a
bunch of Bob Dylan tapes that had come from Dylan
who he was friendly with him other people, and um,
I had a lot of them were poorly labeled. So

(01:27:05):
I rented a recording studio and went and listened to stuff.
And there was one that just said Dylan Brandeis on
the side in pencil, and I googled and I couldn't
find anything about that. He played Brandeis University, but that
was it. And it turned out to be a professionally

(01:27:25):
recorded stereo recording of Bob Dylan at Brandeis University about
a month before Freewheeland came out, perfect quality. And my
jaw dropped when I was listening to this in the studio,
And you know, my find tapes like this, and I
always my first stop is always to go to the artist.
And so I called Jeff rosen up and I told
him and h I made a deal with him and

(01:27:48):
myself in the Gleason family for them to buy that
tape and it got released as Bob Dylan at Brandeis
University in nine and it was just shocking to me
that I could be the fanboy Jeff Uh buying these
bootlegs all of a sudden is responsible for Bob Dylan
album being released. And I found other tapes that have

(01:28:09):
been released and that I've sold the artists. But that
was the peak for me. Okay. You also, you know
Rhino Records label and Rhino have been sold years past.
You also implore them to release some of the stuff
you find. What's that experience been like? Mixed? Um, the

(01:28:35):
late great Gary Stewart who worked to Rhino with me,
was a wonderful guy. Um was the head of A
and RT Rhino and when he was it was easy. Uh.
When he left, I remember, for instance, I had bought
a bunch of stuff from Danny Fields and in these
again I had to read a studio to find out

(01:28:57):
what was on these boxes and things. I found the
a copymaster tape of the first Stooges album with John
Kale's mixes that had never been released. They've been remixed
um by Jack Holsman and Idie And so I went
to Rhino and had a meeting saying, look, this is incredible.

(01:29:19):
You can release this as a double album with the
mixes everybody knows and these John Kale mixes which are
legendary but nobody's ever heard. And one of the guys
at Rhino, who I had known for a very long time, said, well,
why should we buy those from you? We can go
remix these ourselves, and I was like, you don't get it.
This is American history at a high level. Uh, you

(01:29:42):
gotta put this out, And they bought the tape from me,
and sparingly would put out a couple of tracks at
a time and eventually released the whole thing. So sometimes
it's really I mean, I had Charlie Parker out takes
and I called Verve and said, you know, I've got
these false starts and Charlie Parker with strings out takes, Well,
jazz doesn't sell, and it's like, look, I'm not talking

(01:30:05):
about Johnny Hodge's outtakes. It's Charlie Parker. And eventually they
bought them. But sometimes it's the myth of sism. This
you're rolling a boulder up a hill, and sometimes people
like Jeff Frozen get it instantly. It's like, yes, we've
got to buy it from you know, you talk about
Gary Stewart, anybody who was at his house, it was
you know, it was an unending stream of vinyl records.

(01:30:26):
I think about my records and I say I'll buy
and my girlfriend or my sister just throw it out.
So my dness, oh, believe me it is. I say,
you have no idea how valuable these he put it. Okay,
So what happened to Gary Stewart's records, Well, what happened

(01:30:47):
to Gary Stewart's records is Gary Stewart, who was ultimately
the head of an art Rhino and then the uh
ran iTunes at the beginning for Apple, was a frequent
customer of Rhino Records who I befriended, and he I
kept trying to hire him to come to work to
the store because he spent so much time there. He

(01:31:09):
was working at McDonald's. It was a management trainee, and
I felt like that was a greater career path than
working in record store. And though he would till the
end of his life deny that that these two things
were connected. The McDonald's got held up twice, and the
second time he was locked in a meat locker with
a bunch of employees and eventually decided, Okay, I'll come

(01:31:32):
to work for Rhino and excelled and became at Richard
and Harold's feet, the guy who put together all those
incredible reissues that Rhino became famous for. And we remained
close friends till the end of his life, which was
about three years ago. So when Gary died, I had

(01:31:53):
been in close contact with him, and I had been
in close contact with his UH cousin, who inherited his estate,
and I said, look, if you need any help figuring
out what to do with any of his possessions, I'll
be happy to help. Yes, I do. She lives in Chicago,
So I went over there and UH went through his

(01:32:13):
collection and I my idea was we should take all
of the Rhino reissues, which they were colossal number hundreds
and hundreds and hundreds, and donate them to the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame because they really document the
birth of the reissued culture in America, in the world, really,
and they were very excited about that. His cousin approved,

(01:32:36):
so all of his a copy of everything he ever did,
is at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Then
I had an idea that we should save some of
the records that he was obsessed with and give them
to his friends, so artists like Elvas Costello, for instance,
or Sparks. I bought those records from the estate and

(01:32:59):
made up a little car arts saying this record was
owned by Gary Stewart, and I distributed them to about
seventy five of his friends so people could just have
a reminder of Gary. And then the rest were sold
to a friend of Gary's. In mind, Bob say, who
has a record store. Now, it's a very tragic story,

(01:33:20):
and you seem to have been closest to Gary at
the end. Was this anomalous his death or is this
evidence of our era? Because I certainly know a lot
of people who had very big jobs in the music business,
but when the time came with a the game of
musical chairs, there was no longer receipt for them have

(01:33:41):
hit very hard times. So is he evidence of that really?
Or you know, he was a unique guy and none
of those laws apply. You know, Gary took his own life.
He had been suffering from mental illness. He would depression.
He was working on it head on, working with therapists.

(01:34:05):
He didn't tell a lot of people about it, but
I knew about it, um, and I think ultimately he
just couldn't um see the forest for the treaty. It's
one of the great tragedies of my lifetime. UM. I
think Gary had very strong feelings about what he wanted

(01:34:31):
to do and what he didn't want to do, and
he was the antithesis. I mean, I was someone who
was happy to work for a record company and market
and package things, even though a lot of them weren't
to my personal taste. I could find, you know, I

(01:34:51):
didn't go home and listen to Van Halen Records, but
I could appreciate what van Halen worked. Um. Gary didn't
want to work on things that he wasn't personally too.
And I think that that is not the trajectory that
people are looking for. We're running record companies, you know,

(01:35:11):
it's become much and much more of a being counting mentality.
Forgive the expression and uh, you know, the Netflix culture
is the most extreme example of it. And I don't
think Gary had a place in that world. And I
think that world repulsed Gary. You didn't want to have

(01:35:31):
a place in the world. Just going back over your
decades in the business, what can you tell us about
the people who ultimately got squeezed out? How they I mean,
first they all went to work in the video business.
Then they all went to work in real estate, and
video business tied. Real estate is really competitive. I certainly

(01:35:53):
know a lot of people who have hard been on
hard times. What your experience been with people? It's the same, um,
it's you know, we lived this charmed life where we
had expense accounts and traveled all around the world and
hung out with bands, and you know, my experience was

(01:36:17):
what I figured everybody in the music business had to
be just as crazy about music as I was, And
when I got to in m I found out that
was absolutely not the case. There were a lot of
people like Jeff Arroff and Steve Baker were obsessed with music,
But there are a lot of people who just ended
up in the music business because they were good salespeople
or marketing people or advertising people who didn't live and

(01:36:38):
breathe this stuff the way you and I do. UM.
So I feel lucky that I could transition straight in.
You know, I'm still entirely consumed by music all day long,
doing you know, writing books about music and consulting for artists, selling,
buying and selling this stuff, researching this stuff. Um, some

(01:37:01):
of the people who weren't as obsessed with it as
you say, found other careers. Some of them have been
very successful. Some of them are working very hard h
to reinvent themselves. And you know, I think this golden
age that we lived through, we were very fortunate to
live through. But the business, as you know better than anybody,

(01:37:25):
has changed dramatically. Okay, speaking of which, you wrote a
book about the jazz clubs of the forties and fifties,
and of the books you've written, that is the most
riveting because it is a window into a world that
I don't only happened before I was born, that I
really wasn't aware of, and I certainly know Q and

(01:37:46):
a lot of big jazz ers, etcetera. My question, I
always viewed the rock era as the Renaissance. Okay, there
was only one Renaissance. They painted and sculpted after that,
but there was one Renaissance. And then I'm reading your
book and I'm saying, well, maybe you know sounds change.
What is your perspective of the continuum and where we

(01:38:07):
are today? I don't know, but I subscribe to the mhm.
Different kinds of music had different periods of time where

(01:38:28):
there was a renaissance. I find myself fairly uncompelled by
most of the music happening today, but I don't dive
that deep into it, and I think that's generational. UM.
I think the jazz clubs and the jazz are I
wrote about was absolutely a cultural renaissance and a societal

(01:38:49):
renaissance at a time where, um, as I discovered talking
to Quincy and Sunny Rawlins, racism started the first breakdown
in America. I don't know what's coming next. I think
it's kind of a fool's game to try and predict this. Um.

(01:39:10):
I would have never thought that at eighty Bob Dylan
would make be making great provocative records. I'm really into
a British folksinger named Shirley Collins who is also in
her early eighties and released an album last year that
was probably my favorite record along with the Dylan album
of the year to eight year old. I mean, who
would have saw that coming? Um? You never know where

(01:39:33):
the next great thing is coming from. I think anybody
who thinks they've got this all figured out may for
a short period of time, but the next great thing
can be around the corner. Swim generally pretty optimistic. Guy
about that? Okay, from the internet era, which will say

(01:39:53):
post two thousand, in the hip hop era, which really
started in the eighties but gained significant traction in the nineties,
is any of that stuff worth something? And are you
involved in Internet? I'll answer your second question first. I'm
not involved in it. Generally. I find if I stick
to my lane, I do really well, and if I

(01:40:15):
start trying to go deep into something I don't have
a personal affinity for, like hip hop, it can be
a fraud situation. There are lots of hip hop records
worth a lot of money. There's a label called Doubt
d a u pe in England who releases limited edition

(01:40:36):
hip hop records that almost instantly sell out and go
for five thousand dollars um. A lot of early hip
hop stuff, a lot of sample stuff, goes for a
lot of money. A lot of punk records from the
nineties goes go for a lot of money. UM. A

(01:40:57):
lot of these limited edition record store day records or
uh you know, an artist like Taylor Swift will put
out a record where a certain retailer will get a
certain vinyl color and they'll make a thousand of them
go for a lot of money. So yeah, there's there's
a lot of current and recent records that are very collectable. Okay, Now,

(01:41:17):
I remember in the nineties you bid in an auction
you've got a role in the steam room at Seinfeld,
and you gave me a script from that episode that
you pulled off the table. My, so I know that
it always hasn't been records. So how far afield wire
you go, and you certainly do posters and other music

(01:41:38):
related stuff, how do you find that stuff? Assess that stuff?
I mean a record, there's there's one free wheel and
there various iterations, but there's an endless supply of posters
and signatures and all kinds of stuff. There's a lot
of the signatures are fake, a huge percentage. Like if
you go on I think there are something like twelve

(01:42:00):
authentic American Beatles albums that have been signed service twelve,
Yet if you go on email you'll find numerous ones. Uh,
it's an extremely fraught areas. So what I bring to
it is nearly fifty years of actually more than fifty

(01:42:20):
years of looking at this stuff and expertise and the
ability to research it um and discern whether something is genuine,
and you begin to develop an internal algorithm for Yeah,
that's rarer than it looks. I'll buy it and spend

(01:42:40):
some time sitting with it and letting it marinate my
mind and researching it and seeing what I can find
out and contextualizing it. And that's the thing I enjoy
it the most about what I do, um, you know,
finding I bought one of John Coltrane's saxophones at an
auction sold by his family, and I was able to

(01:43:02):
find records he played it on live records. I was
able to find photographs of him using it. I was
able to find posters from the Japanese tour where he
played it. I bought on eBay a Japanese magazine that
the guy who had been the band boy Uh in

(01:43:22):
the seventies discovered pictures he had taken of the tour,
and this Japanese magazine had thirty pictures, and I was
able to find three or four with the saxophone or
the saxophone case on a rack in a train with
Coltrane sitting next to it. I love that detective work

(01:43:42):
aspect of it, and I think That's where I can
add value to things as well. I love the research.
I love figuring out if things are authentic or not authentic.
I love figuring out is this pressing actually what somebody
selling as it as or have they mischaracterized it? Uh.
Once a year I find something on eBay. Now, I

(01:44:04):
may spend two hours a day on email or an
hour a day on email. Once a year I'll find
something really incredible. But you've got to put in a
lot of hours to get that, to get to that point.
I bought the guitar that Bob Dylan played at the
Clinton inauguration on eBay, which had been offered with a

(01:44:29):
five thousand or six thousand dollars buy it now, and
nobody bought it, and uh, I was able to buy it,
research it, get letters from Gibson proving it was real,
do a match of the tortoiseshell headstock with one of
the foremost rare guitar experts in the world. And I
just love the treasure hunting aspect of it, the research aspect. Okay,

(01:44:51):
so you you bought the sacophone, you bought the guitar,
you went on an adventure which all of us music
nerds know is cool. But in the back of your mind,
are you wild being an asset to sell an adding
value to that asset? Sometimes yes, Sometimes it's something I
want for myself. I sold the Coltrane saxophone twice, actually
sold it once, bought it back from the guy, kept

(01:45:14):
it about ten years, and just recently sold it again. Um.
The Dylan guitar, I've had for ten years or so.
I've loaded it to various museum exhibitions. Uh. At some
point I'll sell it um, but I like having it. Uh.
Sometimes I'm buying something just to sell, like that felonious

(01:45:35):
Monk program or you know, all day I'm buying stuff.
We're selling stuff, okay, but things like posters, programs, other
merch How do you find that? How invested are you
in that? And what's that like relative to vinyl? Some
of those things go for crazy money. There's some stuff

(01:45:55):
I collect myself, which you can see on the walls
of my UM office here. Some of the stuff I'm
buying just to sell. Some of the stuff I'm buying
to keep. Some of the stuff I'm buying to think about. Uh.
It runs the gamut um. But people are there. There

(01:46:17):
are crazy collectors for posters. There are crazy collectors for autographs.
There are crazy collectors for uh handbills. Um. I have
a wammy bar that popped off of Jimmy Hendricks's guitar
framed on the wall and went straight into the lap

(01:46:38):
of a guy who was sitting in the pit photographing
Hendricks for Rolling Stone. Um. It really, it's just all
over the place, and sometimes I think I want something,
but somebody comes along. I really like placing things in
the right collections, and sometimes somebody who's got an incredible

(01:47:00):
collection will just be desperate to buy something for me,
and I think, you know, I've got it. I've had
it for ten years. I love it, but time to
let that move on. I'm very conscious of the fact
that I'm not gonna at some point this stuff will
leave me either dead or alive. So it's good when
you can make somebody happy. So these worlds are always small,
like the music business itself. How many of I mean

(01:47:21):
you maybe at the pinnacle, but how many of you
are there out there who are making a full time
business or spending a lot of time buying and selling
music memorabilia. There are a lot of people doing that,
but I think there aren't a lot of people doing
it at my level. Who can just you know, somebody's
got this has happened to me a year ago. Somebody's

(01:47:43):
got a Jim Morrison handwritten manuscript of Strange Days. I'll
buy that, and I will pay you a lot of
money for that, and I will sit on that and
let it marinate and wait till the right person comes along,
and not feel expert to flip it. There aren't a
lot of people doing it at my level. I don't

(01:48:04):
want to. I didn't mean that. I'm just trying to
get a landscape. Are the buyers? Do you ultimately know
all the buyers are? Really the buyers are all over
the world, their individuals. They might buy once and forget
or as I say, you know, well let's stay there.
Are they the same hungry people? No, there's there's a
lot of people who are repeat customers who I deal with,

(01:48:25):
and who I get something and pick up the phone
or send an email saying I just got this. I
thought you might be interested. There are a lot of
people who might buy two things you hear from me,
but I know who they are, and there are fifty
of its people I've never dealt with before buying something,
and you establish a price, certainly on the stuff. Okay,

(01:48:49):
how much is buy it as it is on eBay?
How much is auction and how much when someone's interested
is they're haggling. Almost always I set a price for
something and just wait for the right person come along.
I'm a patient guys. I've said, if somebody wants to
make me an offer and makes a compelling case, and

(01:49:12):
it's in the ballpark and I've had the thing for
a long time and I'm not attached to it, I'll
consider it. But a lot of these things, you know,
when you get to the memorabilia, you're never going to
see another one. And I like having a website and
eBay listings with stuff people can't find everywhere else. So

(01:49:37):
I'm not generally a motivated seller. And you know, typically
what happens is you put up something really big and
you might get a i'll pay you fifty right now.
And as a friend of mine said, that's what the
delete button has made for those people don't even get
a response. Um uh, if it's god. I'm a huge

(01:50:01):
stores collector and this is the one thing I'm missing
and I can't afford it, but I could pay you
off over a year. Sure, no problem. You want to
help people out and you talk a couple of times
about buying stuff back. How often does that happen and
what is the person's motivation? Doesn't happen very often. In

(01:50:24):
the case of the Coltrane saxophone, someone was starting a
new business and wanted some capital and it was a
big number. In a couple of weeks ago, I bought
three great things back from a regular customer line who
had was actually writing Ruby an email. It was very
apologetic that he wanted was inquiring about selling this stuff back,

(01:50:44):
as if I would be somehow offended, and I wasn't
in any way. I was excited about buying these three
things back. And he wanted to buy UH a very
rare photograph UH of baseball players in the Negro leagues.
And so you know, people have differing collecting priorities, and

(01:51:05):
he was trying to fund fund the purchase of something
else that I was thrilled to get the stuff back.
And how do you establish a price for getting it back,
just as you would establish a price for buying something.
But in this case, because the guy was a good customer, mind,
I paid him more than I ordinarily would, but enough
that I could make money enough to make it worth

(01:51:27):
my wife, so less than he boughted from you. Yes,
you know, you begin to develop an internal algorithm for
this pricing. Okay, so tell us about writing books and
that part of your business. I've done three hundred and
one Essential Rock Records, which is basically classic vinyl porn
with I interviewed some recording artists that I admire about

(01:51:52):
records that were life changing to them. The second one
was a History of the Stooges that is centered around
a my collection of students memorabilia and that of a
friend of mine, and uh series of interviews I did
with Iggy Pop talking about the Stooges. And the third
one was the Jazz Club Book. Each of them have

(01:52:13):
different origin stories. I never had any aspiration to do
a book whatsoever. Uh, but I have a friend who
hasn't art book story, Lee Kaplan, who worked at Rano
with me, and one day he showed me this book
of rare photography books called the Book of a hundred
and one Books. And this person had assembled these and
possibly rare photography books and written an essay about each

(01:52:36):
book and had a photograph of the cover and then
a couple of spreads from the book, and I went, Wow,
that would be great to do for records. And I
kind of thought about it, but I thought, you know,
I don't have a burning passion to do this. And
a friend of mine, Brian raps Are caught in a
customer who had written a punk rock flyer book called

(01:52:57):
Fucked Up and photocopied. It was one of these pet
rock sensations. This book just went crazy. It's in something
like its twentieth printing and has sold nearly a hundred
thousand copies about punk flyers. And he was in my
house one day looking through some new flyers and told
me that his book had been such a success the
publisher had given him an imprint and if I had

(01:53:19):
any book ideas, he wanted to hear them. And I said, well,
I've been carrying this one around to do a book
of a hundred and one classic vinyl records, a rip
off of this book of a hundred one photography books.
And told him what it was and what I added
to it was the interviews with artists. He goes, I'll
get your book deal, and he did, and so we

(01:53:41):
did it together, and uh interviewed Graham Nash, Iggy, and
Suzanne Vega, some other artists I had worked with Johnny
Maher people. I knew it had these lush photo spreads
of the earliest pressing for the artists country of origin,
totally nerdy, and some of those are septionally rare records.

(01:54:01):
And then I did a spread on my collection of
Jimmie Hendricks's records, a few other things like that band
album covers spread. It was very successful. It's in its
fourth printing now, and it was a lot of work,
but it was fun and people really enjoyed it, and
uh so I was happy to do it, and I thought,

(01:54:21):
I'm never doing another book again, and it was too
much work. Glad I did it. And I had this
collection of stooges memorabiliy, a very large collection, and another
friend of mine had an equally large collection of stuff
that nobody had ever seen. He kept bugging me to
do a book, and I kept saying, no, not interested.
And one day I kind of had this idea where

(01:54:44):
I worked with Iggy at A and M and we
become very friendly, and I knew he was this great
rack on tour and I thought, I know what to do.
We'll pick a hundred things from our Stooges memorabilia that
nobody's ever seen, and we'll go interview Iggy and just
record what he has to say about each thing, and
that will be the book. And uh, my friend said great,

(01:55:07):
and uh so I got in contact with Iggy, who
had really liked my hunder one Rock Records book and
really liked what I said about the Stooges, included two
Stooges albums, and we worked out a deal with him
to do it. And the idea was we would go
to my aunt or Miami and where he lives, and

(01:55:30):
for eight hours show him these pictures and record his recollections.
And my I thought, you know, maybe to have five
minutes to say about each thing, and then we'd fill
in what the things he didn't remember with a little
bit of captions, and that would be It would be simple.
So I prepared this page document of questions to ask

(01:55:54):
him about based on these images. And the idea was
we were going to surprise. I said, you know, he
wouldn't see these things before it, and a couple of
days before he said, you know, i'd really like to
see these things, okay, So I fixed him to him
and he sent me an email saying, this is fantastic.
I'm really excited about this. I've never seen almost any
of these things before. Great. So my friend Johan, who

(01:56:18):
I was doing this with, and I who had the
other collection, I went down to Miami and we sat
in this little again has two houses. One is his workhouse,
and that's where we went. And sat in this little
thatched roofed hut by a creek in the backyard of
his place, and uh, you know, we got through the
pleasant trees and I showed him the first thing, and

(01:56:41):
he just started talking. And I'm looking at my watch
and it's fifteen minutes and I've got eight hours to
talk to him, and I'm doing the math, going this
is never gonna work. So I interrupted him and I said, listen,
we gotta keep these answers pretty short or else I'm
going to be more than eight hours. Uh no, I
don't want that. And he and we're very reflective about

(01:57:01):
the stooges. Ron Ashton, who was the guitar player, had died.
Scott Ashton was in poor health, and I think he'd
been thinking a lot about them, and I was a
comfortable person to talk to because he knew me from
the record company experience in my previous book. And I
think he figured, you know, if I'm ever going to
talk about this period in depth, which he never had,

(01:57:22):
this is the situation where I'm going to do it.
But the thing I hadn't planned on was this unbelievable memory.
So I'm in the second and third thing and we're
at forty five minutes, and I stopped him and I said, listen,
I think I'm gonna change plans. I think we're gonna
just do an oral history of the Stooges and and
show you this stuff and and work around that at

(01:57:43):
some point I may may need to do fill in interviews.
And he was like fine, I mean, he was having
a ball. So we talked for eight or nine hours,
and uh, it was I've never I've talked to a
lot of artists. I've never met anybody with the recall
he which when you factor in the fact that the
guy abused himself as much as anybody, is almost unfathomable. Um.

(01:58:07):
So you'd show him something and he'd say, all right,
here's what I remember and give you whatever. He'd remember
that was maybe fifty or sixty percent at the time,
and then another twenty percent at the time. He'd say,
you can almost see the gears turning in his head.
And he'd say, all right, I don't remember much, but
and he'd tell you and then maybe ten or fifteen

(01:58:30):
percent a time he'd got no idea, don't remember anything.
So you knew he wasn't bullshitting. You knew he was
telling you the truth. And UH, I got home and
just but this is unbelievable. And there were a few
filling kind of things I did, and we had this
abundance of visuals and that became the book. And that's
actually uh. That was published by third man Jack White's

(01:58:52):
company and Ben Blackwell, who was one of the guys
who runs it as a Stooges fanatic, and so that
was great. And in August they will really a paperback
version of that with a bunch of additional content. Uh.
And and Henry Rawlins and I, who was a Stooges
super fan, interview each other about why the Stooges are
so important. UM, and then I thought, Okay, I'm really done.

(01:59:16):
I am never doing this again. It is just too
much work for me. And then I went. I was
introduced to a guy who had a huge collection of
jazz memorabilia who was in San Diego, and the memorabilia
was in his safe deposit box. So h two or

(01:59:38):
three times I would go down to this guy's house.
We would drive to the Bank of America in San Diego.
We would go into one of those little rooms that
you can go into take your safe deposit box, and
he would bring out a cart with this series of
safe deposit boxes. And he had just bought stuff for
thirty or forty years and dropped him in the boxes

(02:00:00):
as he was buying. So it was in no The
organization was as he bought stuff. So I'm going through
these boxes, like here's a Charlie Parker autograph, I want that.
Here's a couple of Dave Brubek tickets. I don't care
about those. Oh look, here's a photo from Birdland with
Count Basie and some fans. I want that. And I started.

(02:00:21):
So these jazz clubs in the forties and fifties had
in house photographers who would take a picture of you
and your girlfriend or your day or your party at
your table. They'd go in the back room and develop
it and at the end of the evening you could
buy it for a buck in a little custom portfolio
that had Birdland artwork. And these things were just fantastic.

(02:00:42):
I've never seen one of them before. And uh so,
as I'm going through this stuff, I've got twenty thirty,
forty fifty of these things, all from different jazz clubs
around America, I'm thinking, I'm in his business for forty
years at the time. For five years, I've never seen
a single one of these. These have to be impossibly rare,
and they're really evocative of these clubs. So um, I

(02:01:08):
end up buying nearly two hundred from him, along with
a bunch of other stuff. And while I'm going the
first day, as I'm looking at these things, going he
should be in a book somewhere and they're just too good.
So I um piled these things up on a bookcase
and just was staring at them, and I engaged in
this staring contest with them that we want to be

(02:01:30):
a book. No, I said, I'd never do another book.
People need to see these And as I started googling,
I realized there are no books of these things, and
occasionally online you can find one or two of them,
but there are no collections of them. And it's really
black history. You see black people white people. It's the
birth of selfie culture. You see Louis Armstrong posing with

(02:01:51):
a bunch of white fans or Count Basie Um, and
I just eventually they wore me down, and I decided
these things needed to be seen. So I thought, Okay,
you know, I know a fair amount of my jazz,
but I'm certainly no expert on jazz clubs. What do
I do? So I read forty books. I interviewed Quincy

(02:02:13):
Jones and Sonny Rawlins about what it was like to
play in these clubs at the time. And I kind
of casually said to Quincy, what was the racial situation?
It was fantastic, everybody got along. This was where black
people and white people could hang out together. Was the
first place that happened. Uh, that's shocking. I've never read

(02:02:34):
anything about that. Uh. And he said to me, you know,
racism would have been over in the fifties if people
had paid attention to the jazz guys. So I'm talking
to Sonny Rollins. It's just it's unfathomble to me that
he could interview these people, you know, I used Quincy.
I used my mo leverage to interview Quincy, and then

(02:02:55):
I used the fact that I had interviewed Quincy to
get to Sonny Rawlins. It was wonderful, and I said, so,
Sonny Quincy told me, you know, thing about the racism,
and it was like he'd been waiting for seventy years
for somebody to ask him this question. It's absolutely true.
You know, nobody paid attention to who you, what color
you were, the musicians, the people. Uh. In the audiences,

(02:03:16):
everybody got along. Now you might go outside and it
wasn't the same way, but in these clubs, and so
that became a kind of through line in this book.
And the next interview, I thought, Okay, I want to
talk to somebody who was in the audience. And you know,
to be at a jazz club at the end of
the forties, you're ninety years old, and Sunny Rollins and
Quincy were both sneaking in. So I found Dan Morgan Stern,

(02:03:38):
who is the pre eminent jazz historian in the world,
who's now about nine two, and he came to America
as a refugee from Nazi Germany, was obsessed with jazz,
started uh going to these clubs when he was seventeen,
sneaking in and because he was European, uh, he was
a very close observer to it, and the musicians were

(02:03:59):
very interesting and talking to um as he was interested
in talking to musicians, and he ends up being the
editor of Downbeat, has written all these many books, and
runs the Ructor's Jazz Institute for forty years. So I
could talk to Sonny and Quincy about what it was
like on stage and Dan what it was like to
be in the audience, and it was just amazing. And
then I spoke to Jason Moran, who's a younger pianist

(02:04:23):
and composers, the head of the Kennedy Center Jazz program
and Arthur Genius Grant winner and is obsessed with jazz
history and he had never seen a single one of
these and they just blew his mind. So I got
his perspective. And then I spoke to a woman named
Robin Given was a cultural critic, Pulitzer Prizeman and culture
critic for the Washington Post, but has great at deconstructing photographs.

(02:04:48):
So I keep saying to my wife, I am never
doing this again. And the asterix is unless I can
find somebody to do pass the work a lot of
the lifting, because it's just a lot of work. But
you know they're all successful, and that's in its second
printing as well. And the last thing I'll say is
I feel like with the Students Book and the Jazz Book,

(02:05:10):
they're important in the sense that I got Eggy to
talk about the history of the band who invented punk
rock in more depth than anybody ever has, and I
doubt he will ever do it again. So I feel
like I documented something that wouldn't have been documented had
I not done it. And the same with the Jazz book.

(02:05:30):
I mean to find somebody who was there at the
time in ten years is going to be impossible just
because of the age demographics of it. So I feel
like I got that story down and documented this scene
and the racial situation before it became too late. Now

(02:05:52):
these are all very well done, expensive coffee table books.
Are these just labors of love or is this a business?
It is a total labor of Look when my first
book came out hunder One Essential Rock Rats, I said
to my wife, I've now mastered making five dollars an Now,
because it had four printings, I've revised that I've now

(02:06:12):
mastered making twenty dollars an now, but no, this is
a labor of love and getting it down while I
can be gotten down. Now, what is it typical day like? Finally,
and is it like being in the music business? We're
essentially two seven or you set limits on it. So

(02:06:32):
give us what is going on every day in the
life of Jeff Gold. I try to set limits. It's
nearly impossible. Um. I wake up and come downstairs. I
make my wife coffee and I make me tea. I
get on my iPad. I look at the top selling
records on he made the day before, just as kind
of a wake up. I've got three websites with memorabilia

(02:06:54):
that I look at every day, and once every six
months i'd buy something for them. I look at Expecting Rain,
which is an incredible aggregator of Bob Dylan links from
the day before and general music links from the day before.
I look at the New York Times, the h l

(02:07:16):
A Times, and uh, maybe a couple of other news sites.
I wake up, I have breakfast, I come upstairs. I
started answering email. Generally it will be hey, I've got this,
I want to sell because people find something they think
might be rare, google it, and I show up high
in the results. One out of twenty turns out to

(02:07:37):
be interesting, and I end up buying one out of thirty. Maybe. Um,
I've sold a couple of things. I emailed a person
letting them them know we're shipping once a week these days. Uh,
but that I've received payment and it will go out. Um.
My assistant comes one day a week. I pulled the
orders for her. She boxes and chip stuff. She takes

(02:07:59):
photographs and template stuff on my wid website eBay. I
might write those things up, do a lot of deep
research into a project or two I have going on.
I might get a call about an archive. Uh. Six
or seven o'clock, my wife is tearing me away from
the computer, going it's time for dinner. It's time for dinner.

(02:08:21):
I meditate a couple of times a day, try to
go out to lunch once a day, just to force
myself to leave my computer, because left to my own devices,
I can spend way too much time on this stuff.
And I'll read them a rock book, or watch a
music documentary, or read the paper or sometimes occasionally a

(02:08:41):
non rock book, go to bed and what is your
holy grail one of the one or two things you're
looking to get, whether available, runavailable. Happily. I don't have
any holy grails, but I have some holy grails that
I own. Okay, what are those? I have one of
Dylan's handwritten manuscripts Do I Want You, which is my favorite,

(02:09:05):
one of my favorite Dylan songs that I have one
for absolutely Sweet Marie. And I have uh the manuscript
for this Wheels on Fire. So those are holy grails
for me. I have, as I said, about twenty five
of Hendrix's records. Those two Dylan records or holy grails
for me? Uh? Got a great Coltrane poster from the

(02:09:29):
sixties on my wall. I've got a signed Beatles program
from the first US tour. I've got a times error
changing first pressing signed to me. Uh. Do you use
stuff that Dylan? Yeah? Do you have a relationship with Dylan? No?

(02:09:51):
I met him one time. Oddly enough. There's a place
called the Brentwood Country martin about a mile from my Yeah, ready, chick.
I've been going there since I was four, over sixty years.
I probably when I was a kid would go there
four times a week, and in nine seventy seven. I'm

(02:10:13):
there eating my Ready chick and I glanced up and
there's Bob Dylan wearing a Ready leather jacket with stringy
hair and three kids and they go into the toy store,
which is my childhood toy store, and I am in shock,
and so I think, do I have time to go
home and get an album? No? So I go to

(02:10:34):
my car and I get a pad of paper and
a pen, and I wait about half an hour and
Dylan comes out with kids and he's holding a child's
twirling baton with a little ribbon around it that he
must have bought his a So his kids were going
to a birthday party or something. And I summoned up
my courage and I said, excuse me, Bob, I hate
to bother your autograph. And he looks at me and

(02:10:57):
holds up this baton with his right hand and goes,
I can't sign yeah, And I go, well, I'm really
sorry to bother you, but your music has meant so
much to me through the years. Uh, you know, thanks
for everything, you know, and he says, what's your favorite song?
And why I go like a rolling stone because it

(02:11:18):
kind of marks the Yeah, the journey from acoustic to
electric and Tom Wilson's production. I just acquitted myself very
quickly and showed him I do what I was talking about.
I said, you're going to Japan, aren't you. For the
first time, he goes, how do you know that? Well,
I work in a record store and we get Billboard
magazine and I saw an article about it. And he
sat and chatted with me for about I don't know

(02:11:39):
five minutes, and his kids are running around, and eventually
he looks at them and goes, I gotta go, and
I hold out this piece of paper in this pen
and he lifts up his hand with the baton again
as if say, sorry, my my hands are full, and
he walks away, which today is such an amazing story
because I got my five minutes with Dylan. You wouldn't

(02:12:01):
sign an autograph for me, but I've got, you know,
lyric manuscripts and appraised as archives and all this stuff,
So an autograph is the least thing I need. So
if someone wants to check your stuff out, whether just
for their own interest or to buy stuff, how do
they find your stuff? On Twitter and Instagram? I am

(02:12:21):
at record Mecca. I don't look at it. My assistant
does uh. The way to get through to me is
through the website Record Meca r e c O R
D M e c c A dot com and I
write about issues of interest to collectors, very nerdball stuff
at Record Mecca dot com slash blog. Okay, Jeff, good

(02:12:43):
to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time.
This is something people are aware of now we've gone
to the absolute source. Thanks again for doing this my pleasure, Bob.
Until next time, This is Bob left Sex

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