Kenny Burrell – Blue Lights Volume 1

Things are slow at work today and i’m also highly unmotivated so i figured why not get this out of the way as well. I’m not really sure what i might have to add though after Guy Minnebach did a short but sweet post on the album a while back. There you can see all the versions and colors as well as the original image. Early on this record and cover was a big mess to be, some were selling for thousands of dollars, some where basically given away and foolishly i couldn’t work it all out. Eventually i got my act together and the professor side of me figured out that it’s all about stereo and mono. And by then i also realized that an original mono issue would most likely never grace my shelf. This is one of the best looking covers so i still wanted some kind of copy, and eventually i somehow got the not so good idea of getting the Andy Warhol’s Jazz Album Covers Vol.2 box set. Clearly, with hindsight, this was a stupid decision as the covers in those boxes are nothing but terrible in every way.

I got the book From Silverpoint To Silver Screen based on Guy’s recommendation and it really is a fantastic book filled with more than a couple of drawings familiar to those interested in the record covers and/or dust jackets. A definate must have! Anywho… as said originals of this record are selling for big money, right now i could only find one, well two if you don’t mind some water stains. And even if prices have gone down a little i guess you would still have to consider yourself pretty lucky to find one of those for under $1000. I don’t want to pay that right now so i’m taking little baby steps up the ladder towards the sky going from something terrible to something that’s at least a little bit better.

What i got is the stereo reissue of Volume 1 that i think was released in 1967, at least that’s what Discogs tells me. It’s far from a rare find on ebay and these days i don’t keep track of prices in the same way that i did before. So i might have gotten a little overexcited and triggerhappy when i saw this a while ago. I think i payed $30-35 or something like that and had i bothered to check Discogs i might have gotten a better deal since there are several available there. At least i wasn’t completely ripped off. And i still need to get Volume 2, so a note to self – check Discogs. Always check Discogs.

This record is also one of the few of these old ones that has a Wikipedia article. It doesn’t say much but it at least it mentions Andy Warhol. Apparently the album has also been released on CD, both as seperate discs and as two disc set. I mentioned that i think this issue was released in 1967 but i don’t know… I know i said this was less of a mess to me now but to be honest i’m not so sure. I mean, look at this from Discogs. There are apparently three reissues as BST81596 released in 1967, 1973 and 1975…. I have no idea which one i have and i doubt it matters much. Maybe i should go and have another look at the actual cover. There are also several and more recent reissues, primarily from Japan. For anyone interested in those there are always A LOT of them on ebay.

So yeah… for now stereo will have to do. And when it comes to the condition there is not much to say and it’s also another thing that’s of little importance, at least when it comes to these reissues. But anyways, it’s partially still in shrink, has some tiny stickers and a cut corner but that’s about it. If nothing else i can put my previous copy back in it’s jazz box and never look at it again. And it does look a lot better in blueish/greenish than the pale almost grey version that i guess was meant to serve as a sorry excuse for pink. And who knows, now that the book collection is nearing completion maybe i can get back to putting more focus on the record covers again. And as time moves on maybe my brain will start convincing itself that $1000 is cheap for getting rid of the word “Stereo” and the Blue Note logo or whatever. Hmmm, now that i think about it the cover would look better without them…

Andy Warhol’s Jazz Album Covers Vol.2

This feels a little bit like déjà vu… Even though it’s another one of my christmas gifts for myself it’s something i just want to get out of the way and move on to other things. I basically could have just copy/pasted my previous post but let’s see what we got here. This is the second volume of DOXY’s boxes of Warhol’s jazz album covers and as with the first one there’s really only one reason that i got this and that’s Kenny Burrell’s Blue Lights. Well, i also kind of wanted it just to have both boxes so maybe it was more like two reasons. As i wrote in my previous post i wasn’t aware of the quality of the covers when i ordered this, i would most likely have ordered it anyway for the above reason but i would not have been so eager and payed a little more than $100 for it. But oh well, what’s done is done.

Besides Blue Lights this volume contains copies of Both Feet in the Groove, The Congregation and The Story Of Moondog and once again the circumstances are the same in that i already had reissues of all of these and in the case of Both Feet in the Groove an original copy. All references to Blue Note and things like that are of course removed and when it comes to Blue Lights they decided to make a double album kind of thing and thus the text “Volume” has been removed from the front cover. As far as i can tell they also added a track called I Never Knew that i don’t think is on either the original Vol. 1 or 2. All other covers might have underwent similar small design changes but i haven’t looked at them close enough to give any more examples. As with the first box this one is of course also a limited and numbered edition of 500 copies and my copy is number 340. I guess they might have fooled some people with this “limited” thing but crap is rarely limited and even more seldom numbered… I won’t bore anyone with any more thoughts and comments about the condition of the records, but things are exactly as they were the first time around. In short these boxes are really only for the closest mourners.

So there it is. I’ve now put both of these away and most likely will never look at them again…. If nothing else i will have played a nice joke on my daughter when she finds these after i’m gone and thinks they must be worth a fortune!

Cooler things to come later in the week!