It’s that time of year when we add up our wins, try to minimize our losses and remember to change the calendar hanging on our kitchen wall… but doesn’t my computer now do that automatically? Still, there’s something bittersweet about one year fading into the recent past and another beseeching us into the always (at least in my humble opinion) promising future. My main-man F. Scott Fitzgerald got it right in the last paragraph of The Great Gatsby:
“… the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…”
And in that spirit, I’m stretching my arms farther and once again embracing the vinyl LP, which is the medium that launched me on a career in music business, where I still am, over 50 years ago. To make a record with my name on it! was all my 22-year-old mind desired when I began this journey into the grooves of recorded music in 1973. And everything that goes around comes back around again, doesn’t it? I hope that’s true for great rock ‘n roll…
We all keep reading how vinyl records are continuing to make a robust come-back and I’m among the born-again devotees. Some years ago, I dusted off my turntable (eventually buying a new one) and found myself full of regret when I thought wistfully of all my 70’s Hi-Fi gear that I sold off somewhere along the line when money was tight, or during a geographic moving expedition, apartment to apartment or even continent to continent. It’s hard to believe but when my first album Aquashow was released in 1973 I had absolutely no Hi-Fi to play it on until my wonderful producer Peter K. Siegel (who was also the director of Artist and Repertoire at Polydor Records) came to my rescue and scrounged around his record company offices to see what he could dig up for me. Miraculously, he came up with 2 A&R (a well-known audiophile brand at the time) speakers, as well as a matching turntable and amp. I loved it and the first time I gently slid Aquashow out of its cover (me and my brother Matthew posing in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel), placed it on that turntable, dropped the needle into the groove, and heard my opening guitar chords on “Last of the Rock Stars,” I knew I had arrived!
My next gear upgrade came when I signed with RCA Records a few years later and accompanied my then pal Lou Reed on an audiophile shopping spree to some legendary downtown hole-in-the-wall electronics shop with wholesale prices and an amazing Hi-Fi stock. Lou talked me into buying a beautiful Macintosh Amp along with two JBL L100 speakers (they had fuzzy foam covers with rectangular cutouts and came in Orange and Blue, actually these were the home version of the studio models that Lou himself had) and if I remember correctly he either gave me an expensive turntable as a gift or bought himself a new one and passed on his old one to me. Years later when writing my novel Marty May, (first published as a short story “Cold and Electric” in Rolling Stone) I was inspired by that outing with Lou to write a similar story of how down and out guitar hero Marty May was treated to a cool system by his own rock star idol.
And soon, I had a prestigious amount of albums to choose from as well, many of them gratis of the three major record labels I was on in the 1970’s. Polydor distributed Deutsche Gramophone which was an esteemed European classical label and so each time I was up at the office, my wonderful publicist, Lloyd Gellason, would allow me to take a few of these classy albums home with me and thus my education in classical music began. I still have a few of the Debussy and Mahler that I got at that time. Also on Polydor was guitar wizard Roy Buchanan (Peter Siegel produced him as well) and James Brown – and their current releases became part of my library as well.
When I moved on to RCA there was a plethora of wonderful artists to choose from including Harry Nielsen, Jefferson Starship (who I opened for at many of their east coast concerts) and David Bowie, and their LPs soon enhanced my library as well. Ironically, when I moved on to Columbia Records with the most impressive artist catalog of all (Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen) they were a bit stingy when it came to giving records to their own artists and I think I ended up buying most of those myself.
Now here comes the sad part: when I moved to France in 1989, taking all my vinyl with me was a practical impossibility and so I sold the bulk of my collection to an avid Japanese collector who gave me what seemed like a tidy sum. Years later, I found out that just my rare copy of the Mothers of Invention debut album Freak Out, which was included in that sale, was probably worth more than the total I received from him. I’m not even gonna mention the signed test pressings of Metal Machine Music that Lou gave me that somehow disappeared along the way.
My own forty some albums have been released in every known format. When Aquashowcame out there were LPs and singles and often promo singles would include a mono version on one side and stereo on the other. I think both “How’s The Family” and “Last of the Rock Stars” dropped that way. At RCA, along with LPs in “flexi-vinyl” they were big on 8 Track cassettes for car stereo systems and both Lost Generation and Night Lights can still be found at vintage record shops in those formats. Columbia was aggressive on cassette sales as well (which sounded surprisingly good) and Just a Story From America was one of their more successful cassette releases at the time – don’t ask me why. My own first CD release was 12 on New Rose in 1985 but it was also a double vinyl LP.
Honestly, when I think of recorded music as an art form, I think the epitome of that endeavor is a vinyl 33 1/3 RPM record with about twenty minutes of music on either side and a cool photo or provocative artwork on the substantially sized cover. And in that spirit, I decided to release Wonder-Works which is a kind of “best of” vinyl LP from the last two years and includes tracks from my last studio album Wonder as well as the EP Wonder-Full and the single “Old-Timer,” a popular streaming-only release. All of these tracks have been remastered especially for vinyl, with a new package designed by my long-time graphic artist Chloe and a portrait on the cover by acclaimed French photographer Muriel Delepont.
Murphyland Records is only pressing a limited amount so it’s a now or never deal. Available, of course, at the official Elliott Murphy online store. Please Note: We hope to have stock by Monday, December 16th and orders will begin to ship shortly after that. However, keep in mind that all orders may take longer than usual due to the Christmas holidays.
And for the next few weeks, I’ll be finishing up my new album scheduled for a March 2025 release but that’s another story …