The Magnificent Goldberg

Little John Robin Hood Maid Marion

Joel Dorn really loves mainstream black entertainment music and understands it very well. If he's given too much of a budget, I think he has a strong tendency to overproduce. But with a small band of competent musicians/singers, he can be as great a producer as Bob Porter or Francis Woolf. I wish Atlantic had signed Art Prysock during the Dorn years. MG

It is possible that there may have been many extra sleeves hanging around somewhere. Or would they have used them up at some point through the years? Gokudo got them all! MG

(Isn't it "Thomas the Tank Engine!?) Little Richard Little Walter Johnny Lytle

Thanks for putting this up Jim, though I've only just seen it. Just up my street. Dare say I'll find one sooner or later. MG

Mary Martin Martin Carthy Senator Joe McCarthy

I was just listening to some New Orleans jazz and thought of this thread. Louis Armstrong Hot Five - "Yes I'm in the barrel" would be a good 'un. MG

Yup. Ta. MG

Thanks Chuck. Was I in the right ball park in guessing a materials cost of an LP & sleeve at 20-30% of the wholesale price? MG

Almost anything where Bu gets into that deep groove. Very true - Grant Green's "It ain't necessarily so" MG

Life is terrible without your avatar, BM! Hadda Brooks Cecil Brooks III Our Miss Brooks MG

Mongo Santamaria - Summertime - Pablo Live orig - red vinyl! Bill Saxton - Beneath the surface - Nilva orig Jimmy McGriff - Outside looking in - LRC orig MG

I've given some more thought to this. I can't see how an initial pressing run of 10,000 could have been the case, even for big selling albums (because BN didn't have so many that they could have forecast them that well). First, we don't know how long the period Michael Cuscuna was using as a yardstick for "initial sales". Let's assume it was a year. Pressing 10,000 and selling, say, 7,000 in a year gives an average stock position through the year of 6,500, for which you have to find space in your warehouse. I checked a couple of BN inner sleeves to see what the new albums issued between "26 years of BN" and "27 years of BN" were. Not all were advertised on the inner sleeves of course, but I got a highest cat no for 1965 (4185 - "Song for my father") and for 1966 (4235 "Bucket"), then worked out which BNs would have come out between times. Here's the list: 4186 Turnaround 4187 Into Somethin' 4188 Tryin' to get home 4189 Inner urge 4190 All that's good 4191 Waho 4192 Oh baby 4193 Indestructible 4194 Speak no evil 4195 Maiden voyage 4197 Out of this world 4198 Dialogue 4199 Rumproller 4200 Softly as a summer breeze 4201 Joyride 4202 I want to hold your hand 4204 Gettin' around 4205 Basra 4206 Contours 4207 Night of the cookers vol 1 4208 Night of the cookers vol 2 4209 Dippin' 4213 Components 4214 Down with it 4215 Right now 4216 Spring 4217 Compulsion 4219 All seeing eye 4220 Cape Verdean blues 4221 Unity 4224 Golden circle vol 1 4225 Golden circle vol 2 4226 Complete communion 4227 Mode for Joe 4229 Got a good thing goin' 4231 Happenings 4235 Bucket That's 37 LPs. Three of them sold well - "Cape Verdean blues" and "Bucket" got on the pop LP chart. "Maiden voyage", which MC says sold as well as "Alligator bogaloo", must have sold rather slower than those other two, because it didn't make the chart. So let's forget about the big sellers, which presented different kinds of problems. 34 "normal" sellers, with an average stock position of 6,500 makes 221,000 LPs in your warehouse. Plus, of course, the stock that needed to be held of almost all the albums previously released by BN, because they deleted comparatively few. I haven't tried to work out what that might come to but, sticking my finger in the air, I would guess that the earlier releases could have brought BN's average stock position up to something like half a million. Frankly, I can't see Alfred Lion putting that much money (around $200,000) into stock (quite part from the cost of warehousing such a large number). Don't forget, BN only issued, more or less contemporaneously, somewhere around half the albums they recorded, hence the wonderful vault the company has had, to the delight of all of us. So a large chunk of the company's previous and current profit was tied up in sessions paid for but unissued. I reckon the pressing strategy must have been to have as few done as they could get away with, having regard to the price differences between runs of different sizes and what their manufacturer would have been prepared to put up with (which would only have been reflected in the price as far as the manufacturer was prepared to go) and how quickly reruns could be supplied. If I'd been running it, I'd have gone for something like 3 months' worth - about 2,000. But this is all a big guess. I would REALLY like to know about this side of BN (and PR, Riv, Chess, Atlantic, PJ, Contemp etc). Which, I suppose, is part of the reason I speculate about it. MG

It was a very comon practice for the proprietors of indie record companies to keep two sets of books, one of which they showed to the musicians. Whether this is true of BN I don't know. Musicians' criticisms of their record companies may well be slanted - see Jackie McLean's statements in "Hard bop" about Prestige "slavery". MG

MG, just a word of caution regarding the box set that King Ubu mentioned above. It IS a great one but if you eventually would like to get more of the music recorded by the artists featured on this set during roughly the same period you wil find that a LOT of these Mercury tracks have been reissued elsewhere (particularly the Ammons, Byrd, Vinson, Lee and Humes tracks) so you might end up with these tracks on other reissues over and over again. And I do think all the Rex Steward and Cootie Williams tracks have been reissued on the Chronological Classics CD series as well. So if you are both into Jazz and into R&B you might perhaps be better off checking out the other 8-CD box set mentioned in the earlier set: "The Mercury Blues'n'Rhythm Story 1945-1955". It has a far larger variety of artists and tracks and quite a few that have never been graced with reissues elsewhere. Thanks Steve - I've got the Williams and Lee tracks plus one or two by Ammons father & son (pre Joey De & Papa John De) - they're the only ones I have on this comp. Helen Humes, Vinson and Ammons are the two others I'm really keen on in this and I doubt whether I'd be getting round to this material of theirs anytime soon. I have all the Humes Contemporaries to get first. But I'll think about this issue deepy before I decide. MG

AND "MAIN STEM"! MG

David Rosenthal's "Hard bop" (OUP, 1992), pp65 & 68, gives some info about BN sales, quoting Michael Cuscuna as a source. "average sales for the company's singles were 3,000 to jukebox operators plus another thousand or so to individuals in black neighbourhoods." "Average initial sales for more straight-ahead [MG: compared to "Maiden voyage", "Alligator bogaloo", "Song for my father" and "Sidewinder"] hard-bop LPs like Jackie McLean's "New soil", again according to Cuscuna, ran from 6,000 to 8,000 copies, the break-even mark being about 2,500." Interesting that BN's list price (1967) was $4.79 (mono) and $5.79 (stereo). I guess the LPs went to distributors at about $1.25 - $1-50. Perhaps there might have been as much as a dollar profit (contribution) in each sale. So, if the break-even point was a sale of 2,500, a production cost, including sleeve design, notes, RVG, musicians, Ike Quebec/Duke Pearson rehearsal supervision, mastering etc, and freebies for the DJs would have come to $2,500. OK, there's been a good bit of inflation since then. But these BN records look damned cheap. I'd love to know the comparable numbers for Impulse, Atlantic or Prestige. Come in Chuck. MG

From the BBC: And I bet this guy listened to Cheech & Chong, back in the day. MG

That's not what happens when you buy through Amazon UK. The album I ordered had the standard Amazon UK postage charge for a UK delivery, even though it had to come from the US. Perhaps that's the reason Caiman weren't too bothered about filling the order... MG

MG

older thread Thanks Ubu. I'll look into that when I've absorbed all my New Orleans, swing bands, Stitt and Cousin Joe boxes (where's the smiley for wiping the sweat off your brow?) MG

Leo Parker Leon Spencer Jr Winston Spencer Churchill

I used to have that. Flogged when I was on the dole. Never seen it since. That's one I'd like to see Concord reissue. MG

No sweat about definitions, Ubu. They're a marketing aid, which means if there is general agreement on what they cover, that can serve as pointers for people to follow to other things. But they're no more than that. I've never come across that set before. Thanks for going to the trouble of posting the tracks. Looks very good to me and I haven't got much of it. What's it called? MG

Reid Miles Mike Read Freddie Redd