This story begins and ends in a blizzard. Monster blizzards. So much snow, to this day I can’t believe that nothing went horribly wrong and that all of the beautiful records went safely from point A to point B with no major problems.
I get many calls everyday from people selling records. I route all of the calls directly to my cell, much to the annoyance of my wife and kids. When the person with this collection (I call it the WAWA collection, explanation later) first called, like all collection calls, I asked him the basics -
1) About how many records, ballpark?
2) Big ones (LPs), small ones (45s) or both?
3) What styles of music?
He replied that it was all 45s, at least a few hundred - and that he thought they were promotional records, many with white labels and marked with words like “FOR DJ USE ONLY” “PROMO COPY” etc. And he thought it was mostly 1960s or so, he named the Beatles and some more popular Motown artists as things that stuck out to him.
So, to me - this sounded pretty good. The quantity was decent, nothing crazy - we get calls for 200,300,400 piece collections quite often. 1000+ isn’t that rare, either. The fact that they were most likely promo 45s is definitely interesting, although not a guarantee that it will be amazing. Beatles and Motown artists will be in almost every collection, so that also isn’t a bad thing to say but doesn’t guarantee it will be good, or infer that it will be bad. Most of the records that would appeal to us or our customers, and have decent to high value, will not be records by household name artists, they will be by lesser known/unknown by-most artists.
We scheduled a Tuesday evening appointment for me to see the 45s in his basement and left it at that.
By late Tuesday AM, it became clear that the city would be mostly shut down by 1-2 feet of snow that had been falling since early morning. I was fairly excited by this call, though, and had a 4 wheel drive SUV - so I called and told him I was still game if he was. He very kindly offered to snow-blow a path all the way down his alley for me. He greeted me at the end of the trail and told me some of the basics of how he acquired the records, and his history with the former owner while we were still out in the snow-lit alley.
He had moved to Milwaukee in the early 70s from NYC, looking for a fresh start after a stint in Vietnam. Knowing no one in town, his landlord took him under his wing and gave him his first local employment with various odd jobs around his properties. The landlord, as it turns out, was a radio station program manager for local AM station WAWA. He had this position from the very beginning of the station in the early 60s, and seems to have left the role around the late 60s or early 70s. He had passed well into his 90s and his widow had told this guy he could come and take any of her husband’s possessions he wanted. He had grabbed 10-12 boxes full of promo 45s from the basement and brought them back to his house. He had also found 20 or so un-opened 1960s-era promo record envelopes from labels like Chess, RCA, and Motown.
When I went down into the seller’s basement, I immediately saw what looked like rows of unplayed 60s x 45s in their original promo company sleeves. It was amazing. I sat down and randomly pulled out one record and it was Willie Hutch’s debut single for the Dunhill label, a very sought after soul 45, unplayed! Everything else I pulled was amazing as well. Instead of looking through all of them immediately, I stopped after a minute or two and simply said, “This is a great collection, I want it”.
This isn’t how I typically handle a collection, even a large one - It would be much more normal to go through the whole thing and value it out, ballpark a percentage of what I thought we could sell them for and make my offer based on that. This collection was very big though, and the seller had told me he thought there was more. I didn’t want to make him a great offer, and then have him come back and say “I have 4x more records still at the widow’s house” - So one thing I did, and I try and do as a general rule - is make him get EVERYTHING - to make sure there is NOTHING left at the other house. I need to see it all, and then we can make one big deal. This did involve me waiting (very impatiently!) a few more days for him to get it all together. Also I needed to figure out how to put together a lot of cash quickly!
He called on Saturday and said he had all of them at his place now. Every last 45. We made an appointment for Sunday afternoon. Sunday AM and guess what? Two more feet of snow were in the process of coming down. Honestly, I wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of bringing those back to my newly rented storage space that evening, so I took the normally 20 minute, now 90 minute drive (at 5MPH!) back to the house. I had sorted out a bunch of cash, wanting to seal the deal right then and there. His furnace and fridge had both died that night, so it turned out to be very fortunate timing for him - and he really appreciated my dedication. We haggled a bit, not too much - and got him sorted out. I’m not going to kiss and tell but I will say it was enough for a new furnace, fridge, and then some!
The final bounty? Approximately 8000 x unplayed 60s promo 45s, soul - garage rock - tons of rare local band’s records - surf - you name it. A lot of crap, too, but the hit rate was about 50% great stuff and 50% meh, not bad. The next month sifting through them in my storage locker with a space heater, a lantern, and a portable turntable was about as close to heaven as I will probably get in the record game. As a collector and DJ of 60s soul music, I knew a lot of the titles already - most I had never had in any condition, though, much less stone mint unplayed. Absolute paradise for me.
Anyways, I’m writing this blog more for the reader who is in the process of selling records and is curious what a really big payout collection looks like. This is just one possible scenario that led to one - but I think the key takeaway is the industry connection. If the person who initially assembled the collection was in radio, music promotion, or even just worked at a record store - the chances of the collection being valuable is MUCH higher. And if the records are still largely unplayed, all the better.
Next post, I will go full circle and write about the most common buys we see where the sellers are convinced they are going to get rich only to find out they have ZERO dollars worth of vinyl - Happens a lot sadly!
-Andy