Vinyl Nation News on Wax: Edition #12
Citizens of Vinyl Nation!
Stay safe, listen to records, support record stores and live concert venues if you can to get them through this difficult time, and take care of each other. We want to come out the other side of this better than before.
Track 1: Updates
We’re hard at work looking for a next home for Vinyl Nation where you all can either see it again or watch it for the first time. We can promise you two things: You will know as soon as we find it, and Vinyl Nation will be available in physical form some day in the future. Any movie about physical media for those who love the wax deserves that much.
Track 2: News Around Vinyl Nation
You’ve probably all heard already that Record Store Day 2020 will not be a single day this year but instead will be three separate, smaller RSD Drops (Aug. 29, Sep. 26, and Oct. 24) with different releases dropping on each date. On June 1, RSD HQ will publish the list of which records will debut on which days. Mark your calendars! So far as we know at this point, RSD Black Friday remains on the calendar for November as usual.
Your favorite record store needs your support during this very hard time. So if more records aren’t a possibility for you right now (the thought!), consider buying merch or gift cards from them for others (birthday gifts, special occasions) if you have the means. Also, many of your favorite record stores are in states that have begun reopening retail businesses. Whether your favorite record store decides to open or remain closed, please respect their decision. They’ve made it thinking first about the safety of their employees and you.
Pro-tip: Many of your favorite record stores have sections on their websites where you can pre-order records before they come out. This is both a great way to support your favorite shops and to know what’s coming down vinyl pike before it gets here.
Track 3: Vinyl Nation FAQ
i.e. a few more answers to a few more questions you might have about the movie.
How’d you decide on the look of Vinyl Nation? Though Chris had made movies before and Kevin hadn’t, both of us knew we weren’t cinematographers and would need to hire someone who could not only shoot but work with as a third collaborator. Sherri Kauk was that person and more. She was able to score an incredible deal on an absolutely baller Arri Amira camera package, she brought her own light kit, and she operated her own drone, which is how we got our fabulous cityscape shots.
For the interviews themselves, Chris and Kevin had already decided that, since records are physical objects in the real world, we wanted the environments we captured in our interview subjects’ wide shots to tell a story about the people we were interviewing and their connection to vinyl records while the close-ups pulled us into their personal stories. Plus, Kevin had a thing for framing our interviewees asymmetrically, which Sherri and Chris tolerated but also adjusted to find the best final framing.
How much did it cost to make Vinyl Nation? Certainly on the low-end of independently financed feature films but way more than if Chris and Kevin had filmed it on iPhones and composed the score via Garageband and a kazoo. Traveling around the country to capture 45 interviews in 4K ain’t free. Neither is a great post-production team (David Fabelo & Jason Wehling, with assistance from Jacobi Alvarez) nor a fantastic score (Kathryn Bostic) and soundtrack (Morgan Rhodes).
How’d you raise the money for it? Zeroing in on a specific group of investors and making our pitch. If we didn’t have a good indication they would say yes, we wouldn’t have made the movie. We admire the heck out of any movie made on chewing gum and grit but if we’d made this movie that way, we’d still be making it right now.
How’d you choose which places in a very big “Vinyl Nation” to film in? We knew from the beginning that, given the title of the movie, we weren’t going to just film in places like Nashville, Austin, New York and Los Angeles with high concentrations of music industry institutions. But given our limited time and resources, we also had to cluster interviews together. So our final list of folks we talked to came down to where everyone was and were they within driving distance of someone else. We literally took out a map to figure out our shooting schedule. Some of the hardest decisions we made were when we had to cross a city off our list because we just couldn’t make the schedule or finances work.
Where’d the name of the movie come from? A moldering corner of Kevin’s idea files. He had the name and very basic concept long before he and Chris started talking about making the movie together.
Do Kevin and Chris split all the work equally or is one of the two of you guys really the one in charge? In terms of total labor and all big creative and business decisions, yeah, completely evenly. Like any movie, this one was a true collaboration. But in general, Chris is more experienced with the mechanics of filmmaking and Kevin has spent more time interviewing people. So when it came to making the movie, Chris handled the big picture stuff (hiring the crew, scheduling shoots, getting people paid, etc.) and Kevin handled the interviews.
During pre-production, we crafted general interview questions together to match up with our story outline. As the shoot progressed and Kevin got more comfortable on set, he customized the interview questions for each person while Chris focused on logistics (backing up our camera cards, managing schedules, driving the minivan all over the place, etc). Before we wrapped any interview, Kevin conferred with Chris to make sure we hadn’t missed any questions we needed to ask for our story (Chris admits it’s much easier to listen to an interview when you’re not worried about the next question you’re going to ask).
We gave our DP Sherri a lot of leeway to craft the images with Kevin telling her what he wanted to capture in a particular environment, then pulling in Chris for his opinion on the final framing (or to help figure out camera placement with particular difficult setups).
Putting the story together in post was a collaborative effort with our editors David & Jason. Chris was much more comfortable drilling down into the finer details of the cut with David & Jason to make scenes work and cut scenes that didn’t while Kevin asked the questions that our audience would ask to make sure our story stayed on track. Ultimately, we both had to agree on the big decisions to get to the final cut.
After we finished making the movie, our roles have stayed pretty much the same: We decide on all the big stuff together and the day-to-day is Chris running the shop and Kevin standing on the sidewalk out front wearing the sandwich board.
(Speaking of sandwiches, Kevin was in charge of finding where we would eat lunch every day during our shoot. He has a crazy knack for finding fantastic food in any neighborhood in America. And they always had vegan options for Chris.)
Track 4: Vinyl Vocabulary: “Tip-On” Jackets
Record advertising and promotion can get a little silly sometimes: “180 gram” may mean the record is big and heavy, but the term’s been so thoroughly abused (a 180 gram record can still be recorded and mastered terribly and will sound like junk), it no longer speaks to much else. And there’s a bit of a fear that “tip-on jackets” will suffer the same fate, a hot-air word that gets slapped on an album to bilk the unsuspecting fan out of an extra five bucks.
In a not-so-deceitful world, the phrase “tip-on” refers to an older method of printing record jackets, where the sleeve itself is a blank piece of cardboard and the artwork resembles a large sticker glued to the sleeve by hand. “Tip-on” refers to how the artwork is folded over the corner tips of the sleeve to hold it in place.
In Vinyl Nation, we visited Stoughton Printing to see the process of making “tip-on” jackets in person, and you can see the result in our film (personally, we think it’s fascinating).
Each of us must decide if “tip-on” means “better” when it comes to vinyl packaging. The newer alternative, direct-to-board printing, came about when technology allowed album art to be printed directly onto record jackets but also allowed record jackets to be thin and flimsy at times. Personally, we don’t give the weight of the law to either term and recommend you don’t either but hold both in your hand and make up your own mind.
Side 2:
Track 5: Record Stores in the Movies: Some of Our Favorite Moments
Who could forget Mike Damone offering Mark Ratner lousy first-date advice in the immortal classic Fast Times At Ridgemont High?
Track 6: Great Music Writing
We love reading about music almost as much as listening to it. Which is why lately we’ve been obsessed with…
Dave Grohl’s encomium to the live concert experience in The Atlantic which you have probably seen already. The New Yorker’s appreciation of Little Richard who died earlier this month at age 87. Variety’s dissection of the slow, sad decline of Los Angeles’s KROQ, one of the most influential radio stations of our lifetimes and its profile of Jaxtsa, an Australian company looking to be “the IMDB of Liner Notes.” The Seattle Times on the closure of the cities legendary store Bop Street Records but the happy ending for their vinyl collection. NPR Music’s series on the art of sampling called THE FORMULA. Vinyl Me Please’s interview with Chicano Batman. Pitchfork’s look at how musicians over the age of 70 are touring in the age of Coronavirus. Goodbye to Google Play, A Journal of Musical Things reports. The Undefeated on how “Stevie Wonder Wrote the Soundtrack for a Fragile America.”
Track 7: Playlist
Every Vinyl Nation newsletter features a 5-song Spotify playlist we put together just for you. This time, in honor of Stevie Wonder’s 70th birthday, we’re featuring a half-dozen deep cuts from the legend himself (we just couldn’t stop at five tracks for Stevie).
and who could forget this performance?
Track 8: Ideas We Have
We’re thinking of having…
A virtual town hall for you all to meet each other and meet us.
A regular thing where we profile record store owners/workers and you can meet them and ask them questions.
A regular get-together where we simply share what records we are listening to these days.
Tell us how these sound at our Facebook Page or our Instagram account, where you can always find out the latest about the movie and the sonic heartbeat of vinyl nation, which never stops, even when oxygen is low.
In 33 and 45,
Kevin (smokler@gmail.com) & Chris (cbboone@hotmail.com)