Bargain bin LP bids zoom past $150G

[needlefingers]

Bargain bin LP bids zoom past $150G


A scratchy record bought for 75 cents on a Chelsea street corner four years ago could end up making its owner a rich man.

Bidding soared past $151,000 on eBay yesterday for an acetate - a sample pressing designed to last through only a few playings - of the cult band Velvet Underground's influential first release.

"I don't know if people are scamming or what," owner Warren Hill told the Toronto Globe and Mail earlier this month.

"If it comes true, great. But I'm not going to get super excited until the auction is over and the buyer is legit. I've been excited before and it didn't pan out."

Hill told the paper he plunked down 75 cents for the hidden gem on a table of used records on a visit to New York in 2002.

The auction wraps up at 11:30 tonight.

The acetate, recorded in April 1966 at New York's Sceptor Records, includes early versions of nine songs from the band's March 1967 debut album, "The Velvet Underground and Nico."


The most expensive single record ever sold was the album John Lennon autographed for his killer on Dec. 8, 1980. It fetched £234,000, or about $468,000 at current exchange rates.

David Hinckley

From needlefingers: I'm a big time bargin bin, flea market and street buyer of lps. Lots of valuable disco lp's are out there. And for only a buck or two.

[needlefingers]

Velvet Underground rarity sells on eBay

By VERENA DOBNIK, Associated Press WriterSun Dec 10, 2:06 AM ET



Forty years after it was made, The Velvet Underground's first recording has become a financial hit — in cyberspace. Bought for 75 cents four years ago at a Manhattan flea market, the rare recording of music that ended up on the influential New York band's first album, "The Velvet Underground & Nico," sold on eBay for a closing bid of $155,401.

The buyer is a mystery, only identified by the eBay screen name: "mechadaddy."

But a greater mystery endures: How did the 12-inch, acetate LP end up buried in a box of records at a flea market?

Warren Hill, a collector from Montreal, bought the record in September 2002 at the flea market, according to an article written by his friend, Eric Isaacson of Mississippi Records in Portland, Ore. in the current issue of Goldmine Magazine.

Isaacson helped Hill decipher the nature of the lucky find.

"We cued it up and were stunned — the first song was not 'Sunday Morning' as on the 'Velvet Underground & Nico' Verve LP, but rather it was 'European Son' — the song that is last on that LP, and it was a version neither of us had ever heard before!" Isaacson wrote.

The recording turned out to be an in-studio acetate made during Velvet Underground's first recording over four days in April 1966 at New York's Scepter Studios. The record reportedly is only one of two in existence; the other is privately owned, with rumors circulating about the owner's identity. Columbia Records rejected the album.

"I immediately took the needle off the record, and realized that we had something special," Isaacson wrote. Hill and Isaacson photographed the album, made a digital backup copy of the music, and decided to put it up for auction. The first bids, which began Nov. 28, rose $20,000.

Velvet Underground left its musical stamp on hundreds of other bands.

The band, named after a book about edgy sex practices in the 1960s, was fueled by Moe Tucker's hard-driving drumming, John Cale's anxious viola, and lead singer Lou Reed, whose lyrics spoke of drug-induced beauty and gritty Lower East Side realities.

The first album featured Nico, the European model-actress-singer in a first and last recorded appearance with the band.

[ol'skinflint]

I've already had a bit of personal experience with this. I saw someone in a local paper offering $5000 for an old Beatles album, and I have it, but I don't think anyone would give me 5 g's for my copy because it's only in so-so condition (I paid a quarter for it). Sometimes it does pay to be a skinflint and go through bargain bins periodically.