“You are never going to discover Captain Beefheart or the 13th Floor Elevators or the Velvet Underground in your local supermarket, ever.” – Richard Hawley, Musician
‘Last Shop Standing’ is a documentary film to be released on September 10th this year and was inspired by the book of the same name by Graham Jones.
The film takes you behind the counter to discover why nearly 2000 record shops have already disappeared across the UK.
The film charts the rapid rise of record shops in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s, the influence of the chart, the underhand deals, the demise of vinyl and rise of the CD as well as new technologies.
Where did it all go wrong? Why were three shops a week closing? Will we be left with no record shops with the continuing rise of downloading?
The film will feature over 20 record shop owners and music industry leaders as well as musicians including Paul Weller, Johnny Marr, Norman Cook, Billy Bragg, Nerina Pallot, Richard Hawley and Clint Boon as they all tell us how the shops became and still are a part of their own musical education, a place to cherish and discover new bands and new music.
The final clips are an unedited interviews with Richard Hawley and with Johnny Marr. The latter filmed at KingBee Records, in Manchester, a proper record store where I have spend many a happy hour buying (and occasionally selling) 45s, LPs, CDs and cassettes!
The film will be in cinemas and arts venues throughout the UK from September through to December 2012.
Filmed by the BBC in November, 1969 – (I remember it the first time around!) this documentary follows four days of a UK tour by Gene Vincent to promote a new album released here on John Peel’s Dandelion label as well as a single from the album – ‘Be Bop A Lula ’69’. Peel had been long time Gene Vincent fan and the album, which was produced by ex-Byrd Skip Battin, failed to sell.
The film watches Gene struggle to get promoters and TV producers to pay him. Gene was broke – but even so he arrives at a London hotel in a white Rolls Royce!
Gene had been a massive star only ten years before, but now much of that had gone and the film takes you into a very British world of small dance halls on the Isle of Wight, cheap hotels – where he has to tell the woman on the desk that he will be sharing with his roadie, and a rehearsal room in the basement of a pub in Croydon – where the walls are lined with old mattresses! Less than eighteen months later Vincent died – because an ulcer burst in his stomach.
Joe Bussard has been dubbed the ‘King Of Record Collectors’ – with good reason. Now aged 75, Joe has perhaps the greatest collection of vintage blues, country,  gospel and early jazz records ever assembled. Over a period of 50 years, Joe has built a world-class collection of 78 rpm records – over 25,000 discs in all. The walls of his basement are lined with records, in identical, unlabelled cardboard sleeves. Reputedly Joe does not have a filing system  – he has them all memorised!
A resident of Frederick, Maryland Joe’s record collecting exploits are legendary. Junking records across Appalachia, the mountain regions of West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina. Knocking on doors (in the record collecting fraternity it is known as ‘canvassing’) attending auctions and house clearances to snaffle up records, long forgotten or stored in basements and cupboards – no longer listened to, but not yet discarded. Joe also traded records with fellow collectors – one story goes that he sold records to members of Canned Heat, at the height of their fame. Bob Hite and other band members were long-time blues record collectors, and spent mega-bucks buying up ‘duplicates’ of records Joe had already collected – so much so that Joe was able to buy a swimming pool.
In 2006, Dust To Digital release the dvd ‘Desperate Man Blues’ which tells the Joe Bussard story, whilst in the same year Old Hat Records issued a CD ‘Down In The Basement’ – a compilation of some of the most desriable records on the planet. See the clip below from the introduction to ‘Desperate Man Blues’ broadcast by the BBC in 2009.
In 1999, the Washington Post carried an in-depth article on Joe’s record hunting exploits, telling the story of finding a whole bunch of mint Black Patti 78’s – at the ramshackle home of an old guy he met on the way to a record hunting trip to an out of town flea market. See: ‘Desperate Man Blues- Record collector Joe Bussard parties like it’s 1929’.
Joe’s other main claim to fame is that from 1957 through to 1970, he ran Fonotone Records, the last 78 RPM record label in the USA. Fonotone actually issued custom made 78s sent out via mail order to a small but dedicated band of collectors. Many of the artists are fine bluegrass and string band players and among them were the first recordings of finger-picking guitarist John Fahey.
The UK music magazine ‘The Wire’, recently used its website to carry a forty-four minute long interview with Joe Bussard (along with Fonotone recordings) in a featured called ‘Listen to Joe Bussard: An Oral History of Fonotone Records’. It is certainly worth a listen.
Joe is still broadcasting rare country music records on Radio WREK – ‘Country Music Classics’ – each week which Dust To Digital convert to a podcast, which you can subscribe to via iTunes.
If you want to know what record collecting is all about check out the ‘Desperate Man Blues’ dvd!
