Vinyl Nation's News on Wax: Edition #11
Citizens of Vinyl Nation!
Kevin and Chris here. We’re so glad to have met so many of you new friends thanks to our one-weekend-only screening on April 18-19 on what would have been Record Store Day 2020 (sob).
Now, RSD 2020 has transformed into three mini Record Store Day Drops (Aug. 29, Sep. 26, Oct. 24), we have a movie about records that we’re dying to show more of you, we don’t know when movie theatres will be ready for us to do that, and movie theatres and record stores need us now more than ever.
Strange, challenging times indeed. But what we do here at the twice-monthly (for the most part) Vinyl Nation newsletter is throat-clear for a moment about the movie and our near-future plans for it (consider that a long lead-in groove), then spend the rest of the album on fun and useful information for people who love records and practice the good citizenship of Vinyl Nation.
That’s you!
Track 1: Updates
Our should-have-been RSD 2020 screening on April 18-19 went better than we could have possibly imagined.
All told, 3,690 tickets were sold raising nearly $37,000 for the 199 independent record stores in 45 states plus the District of Columbia that signed up. And while this event supported independent record stores in the U.S., record people bought tickets from 18 countries around the world. Vinyl Nation truly knows no borders.
The weekend received coverage in the LA Times and Salon as well as two dozen local news outlets. Vinyl Nation’s first review from Film Threat gave our film a 9/10 rating and called the movie “a lively, engaging affair, with excellent interviewees,” “visually stimulating,” and “regarding each piece as a story, it takes the macro to a personal level. That is quite a feat.”
Geez. Thanks, Film Threat.
We're also sitting on more stories than we can count from ya’ll about watching the movie multiple times this weekend and inquiries about when you can see it again or own it on DVD.
We really could not have asked for better. Even a premiere at a fancy-pants film festival only would mean a few hundred people in town would get to see our movie, not making new friends all over the world, and definitely not making a difference in the fortunes of record stores that have made such a difference to us.
So thank you. For your support, for your time and attention, for believing. We can hope to do right by it and and by you all going forward, as you all have done so right by us already.
Track 2: News Around Vinyl Nation
You’ve probably all heard already (because we might’ve mentioned it in the lede) that Record Store Day 2020 will not be a single day this year but be three separate, smaller days (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!
The 5th annual Vinylthon, an annual college radio celebration of the wax, will take place on June 20, i.e. what would have been RSD 2020. Hundreds of radio stations in America and across the world spend the entire day in celebration our favorite way to listen to music and all proceeds go towards the College Radio Foundation which aids young people looking to make careers in broadcasting.
A quick reminder during this very difficult time: Your favorite record store needs your support. So if more records aren’t a possibility right now (the thought!) consider buying merch or gift cards from them for others (birthday gifts, special occasions). Kevin, for one, is working with only three record store t-shirts per laundry cycle which seems about nine too few. He is determined to rectify this situation post haste.
Track 3: Vinyl Nation FAQ
i.e. the lowdown on the movie and how it happened.
Where did the idea for the movie come from? Kevin had been thinking about how to tell the story of vinyl’s comeback for a while when he and Chris started talking about it in 2018. But by that time, the record renaissance was a good 10 years old and the “Wow, look, records, again!” version of that story had been done already. So they both focused instead on what it meant and what it said about where we were as a musical culture. Kevin has written a few books about this kind of stuff but never made a movie, Chris had made a great movie called Cents, and they both thought they worked well together. Kevin knew how to tell a nonfiction story and Chris knew how to actually make a movie. A documentary meant the blending of those two things.
How do Kevin and Chris know each other? They both went to Johns Hopkins University (the name “Gilman Hall Pictures” is in reference to Gilman Hall, where class film screenings took place on campus) and had many overlapping interests. They linked up again in 2017 when Kevin was on book tour for his book on 80s teen movies and Chris invited him to present at The Guild, Albuquerque’s local arthouse cinema.
How’d you find the people you interviewed? Some we knew before we made the movie, most we did not and were introduced to after we put out a few open calls on social media for people who loved records, or shared records with their kids or who owned record stores or were musicians or who worked at record labels. We paid special attention to anyone who did not resemble Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons because we knew that wasn’t the story we were telling. We then talked to everyone on the phone beforehand and made sure we could physically get ourselves to them to film an interview without needing a team of sled dogs and a week’s worth of provisions. (Our apologies to the Iditarod pop-up record stores.)
How long did it take to make Vinyl Nation? A bit less than two years, all told. We started discussing it in March of 2018, raised money at the beginning of 2019, filmed from March-June of 2019, and completed post production around December 2019. We owe a huge shout-out to our editors David Fabelo and Jason Wehling (Jason was also our post production supervisor) for helping us find and shape the story of Vinyl Nation, parsing through over 50 hours of interview footage plus hours more of b-roll, and finding choice archival footage to add to the mix. We had an aggressive post-production schedule, and they delivered time and time again (with some great help from our assistant editor Jacobi Alvarez).
How did you choose the music? Kevin and Chris had a very general idea that since Vinyl Nation was a movie about an old music technology becoming new again, they wanted music to sound like the past, present and future at the same time. With that tiny kernel of an idea, our genius music supervisor Morgan Rhodes and supremely gifted composer Kathryn Bostic deserve credit for getting us there.
What’s next for Vinyl Nation? We’re sorting that out now. We’d love to have the movie available to you and everyone who wants to see it via a streaming service and for purchase on DVD. But all those those things were based on someone actually caring about our screening on Record Store Day. Since so many of you did, we’re in the middle of figuring out next steps for our film’s distribution right now. We can promise that nothing will happen next without us telling you all about it via this newsletter or our Facebook Page and our Instagram account. Stay tuned!
Track 4: Vinyl Vocabulary: History of the material “vinyl” in the term “Vinyl”
You probably know already that records are called “vinyl” because, principally, they’re made from polyvinyl chloride, the same material found in sewer pipes. But vinyl wasn’t the first stuff records were made from. Polyvinyl chloride actually was an emergency substitute after Pearl Harbor when Japan cut off the United States supply of shellac (which principally came from Thailand and is made from the resin excreted by the female lac beetle). Shellac had been the dominant material in records up to that point. Polyvinyl chloride, first proposed by the chief engineer at Columbia Records, was cheaper, lighter and held more information. It’s the reason records manufactured after Pearl Harbor are physically similar to records today.
We learned this stuff from the fantastic website A Journal of Musical Things, which is a can’t miss.
Side 2:
Track 5: Records in the Movies: Some of Our Favorite Moments
Have you seen the 2018 gem Hearts Beat Loud, wherein Nick Offerman plays a record store owner who starts a band with his daughter before she heads off to college? It’s an absolute beauty of a movie about records and music and family. Available on Kanopy and Hulu.
Track 6: Keeping up with Record Releases While Sheltering in Place
Since we’re not able to walk into our favorite record stores right now to find out what’s just dropped, we’ve discovered a number of digital ways to do this and then order online from our favorite record stores.
The music publication Consequence of Sound continuously updates its monthly list of Upcoming Album Releases, divided by day. The critical compiler Metacritic pretty much does the same in a bit more stripped-down fashion. The band directory site All Music will allow you to filter by genre. Upcoming Vinyl includes album art if you want to see your records before chasing them down. The Sound of Vinyl has the same layout but focuses on colored and limited edition records. Every Spotify account has an automatically generated playlist called “Release Radar” made up of new songs/album from artists you have previously “liked” or played on Spotify.
Friends, wherever you find out about new records, be a good citizen of Vinyl Nation and purchase your wax from your favorite local record store. They need us now more than ever.
Track 7: Playlist
Ordinarily, we put together a five-song playlist every newsletter for your listening enjoyment. But we’ve been so inspired by how many talented people have been posting DJ sets and their own playlists during Shelter-in-Place that we decided to share theirs this time around.
Canadian DJ Ol Nerdy Bastard does regular sets of 80s new wave, reggae and soul on the Mixlr platform.
Hare’s Breath Records in Baltimore (featured in Vinyl Nation!) posts regular mixes of soul and funk crate digs on Mixcloud.
Rainbow Records in Newark, Delaware (Chris worked at its Wilmington outpost in the 1990s) posts regular playlists on Spotify.
The folks at Tres Gatos record store in Boston have built a six-hour (!) stay-at-home playlist on Spotify.
One of the owners of City Music in Springfield, MO (who participated in our RSD 2020 screening) has a regular Friday night radio show called “The Roundabout” complete with playlists.
We’ve also been enjoying the heck out of the 4 multi-hour DJ sets Questlove posted on Youtube in tribute to Prince on the anniversary of his death this April.
Track 8: Next
You can always find out what’s happening day-to-day with the movie and in Vinyl Nation at large at our Facebook Page and our Instagram account.
In 33 and 45,
Kevin (smokler@gmail.com) & Chris (cbboone@hotmail.com)