Vinyl Resting Place

Crate-digging at Vinyl Resting Place in St. Johns. According to Terry Currier, Portland has the most record stores in the U.S., riding the vinyl boom that's reached into millions of sales since 2007. Ross William Hamilton/The Oregonian

"There's a real reason why there's a vinyl renaissance," John Vanderslice said. "There's a lot of people who are having an amazing listening experience. It's not false."

Vanderslice, the musician and producer behind the devoutly analog Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco, wasn't kidding. In an age of declining album sales and squabbles over Spotify and the other streaming services swallowing up the industry pie, U.S. vinyl record sales have quietly grown from less than a million in 2007 to more than 6 million in 2013, a number this year's soaring sales surpassed back in September. While vinyl numbers remain a drop in the overall bucket, just 2 percent of sales in 2013, they’ve become a pretty big drop — and the product of a global industry straining to deal with overflowing demand.

On Nov. 28, Record Store Day will drive music lovers to stores with more than a hundred Black Friday releases. As vinyl sales have grown, so have the biannual mom-and-pop-store events — one in November, one in April — that in turn lead to months of jockeying as indies vie with major labels and each other. The prize: Space on retail shelves and at record pressing plants forced to run 24 hours a day to keep up with demand. In Portland, the home of more record stores than any other American city, Black Friday’s vinyl lines may well challenge the rush on cheap TVs and discount laptops.

From the authenticity of its sound to the surprise of its comeback, vinyl’s return comes with loaded questions. We've dug through the history books, spoken with industry experts and surveyed the Portland scene to figure out where vinyl's been and where it's going next.

Birth of the cool

Record labels invented vinyl. While modern formats, from MP3 to FLAC, come from the tech world, it was Columbia Records that debuted the 12-inch, "long-playing" 33 1/3-rpm record, or LP, in 1948 — an advance quickly followed by the 7-inch, 45-rpm record developed by rival RCA Victor.

Vinyl records' ability to capture playing times of 20 minutes or longer per side was a major breakthrough for classical performances and other lengthy recordings. In vinyl's first 10 years, "a greater range of musical repertoire was brought into the home than in the entire history of recording in its first century," according to London musicologist Timothy Day.

By 1956, RCA Victor claimed to have mastered high-fidelity sound, with recording techniques that could handle "all sounds audible to the human ear, the entire frequency spectrum from 20 to 20,000 cycles per second." Vinyl's range actually stretches beyond this, though the high and low ends both present challenges to the format's delicate needle journey. And unlike digital recordings, the format hasn't changed much since the '50s. "Vinyl is a fantastic way to listen to music, but it's 60-year-old technology," Portland mastering engineer and record cutter Adam Gonsalves said. (Read his breakdown of the strengths and weaknesses of the vinyl sound here.)

Records would become music’s dominant home-listening format, but it still took years before the first artist sold a million stereo albums. In the pre-SoundScan era, that honor is said to have gone to conductor Annunzio Mantovani, who released 28 top 20 LPs between 1955 and 1966. The British Invasion was in full swing by then, though not quite how it’s often remembered. The Beatles may be the most enduring rock group of the ’60s, but "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" didn't come close to being 1967's most popular album. The winner? The Monkees' "More of the Monkees." Rock quickly took over the Billboard charts from there, but 1967 marked the first year an album in the genre was the year's top seller.

While it revolutionized classical recordings, vinyl’s length also allowed for pop music to link its brief songs together to form broader pieces of work. Rock 'n' rollers get the credit for the concept album, but lounge singer Frank Sinatra beat the Beatles and the Who to it with albums such as 1955's thematic "In the Wee Small Hours" — a style he continued into the rock era with 1970's "Watertown," a heartbreaking chronicle of parenthood and romantic loss. We might also give a nod to the narrative-driven "South Pacific" and "The Sound of Music" film soundtracks, which ruled the '60s charts until rock albums squeezed them out.

Inseparable from the vinyl it was played on, rock came to Portland early. Oregon groups such as Paul Revere and the Raiders (who signed to the mighty Columbia Records) and the Kingsmen, both recorded “Louie Louie” in town in 1963. Music Millennium, Portland’s oldest record store, opened in 1969 and has helped keep the city weird ever since. According to Terry Currier, now the store’s owner, its hunt for hard-to-find records inspired other new shops to do the same.

Music Millennium owner Terry Currier in 2010.

"At one point in the '70s, there were more record stores per capita than any other city in the United States," Currier said, a fact that’s now true again. He compared the plentiful storefronts in those days to Portland's current craft beer movement. "That made for a lot of great record purchasing by people, which created this really great aftermarket with all this used vinyl that became available as people downsized their collections. It gave a lot of stores opportunity."

Vinyl’s popularity faded in the ‘80s, as the CD displaced the format with the digital promise of “perfect sound forever,” but it wasn’t entirely abandoned. Per SoundScan, the sales-tracking system that began in 1991, sales of new vinyl LPs were actually on the rise in the '90s, heading from 625,000 in 1994 to a peak of 1,533,000 in 2000. But sales took a dive along with the rest of the industry in the post-Napster early days of the online era, bottoming out at less than 900,000 in 2005 and 2006 before sales began to grow once more.

The great gig in the sky

In 2008, vinyl sales nearly doubled, ending the year officially at 1.88 million copies and marking the format's sudden comeback. A range of rock favorites led the charge, with a boost from reissues of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" and Radiohead's "OK Computer." But guitar-driven indie acts infiltrated the charts that year, too: Neutral Milk Hotel's underground gem "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" was the No. 6 vinyl seller of 2008, with Seattle’s Fleet Foxes' self-titled album at No. 8.

The vinyl revival's rock 'n' roll emphasis has held true ever since, a sign of collectors' distinct tastes. This year's top vinyl albums so far include records from Jack White, the Arctic Monkeys and Beck. Of this year's best-sellers, only Lorde's "Pure Heroine" made the mid-year Top 10 in digital, CD and vinyl formats. White, the guitar god and analog fanatic, set a one-week vinyl record with this year's "Lazaretto," which sold 40,000 copies — nearly a third of its 138,000-copy overall debut.

Jack White

Jack White performing in Seattle. Credit: David James Swanson

Ask any record shop and they’ll say the official numbers don’t tell the full story. The big revival might be a lot bigger because SoundScan doesn't track sales of used vinyl, long the domain of crate-diggers, vinyl newcomers and flea-market collectors alike.

"You could go through a store's $2 bin or even $1 bin and find some things and check it out at a really cheap price," Currier said. "Once you got hooked into vinyl, the next thing was, 'Oh, I gotta buy a new release on vinyl."

SoundScan's numbers also don't include every indie store, which make up a healthy chunk of documented sales. Currier estimates there are 1,800-2,000 indies selling vinyl in the U.S., many of which don't register in the sales metrics. ( SoundScan told the New York Times in 2013 that it weights its figures for the discrepancy.)

"Nobody knows exactly for sure how much vinyl's sold in the United States, but it might be as much as 10 percent of the industry," Currier said, well above 2013’s official 2 percent mark. For Music Millennium, vinyl’s now about 35 percent of sales. "For independent stores, (that) seems like a low number," he said. "We still sell a lot of CDs."

With music-centric chain stores long gone after the 2000s' CD bloodbath, renewed record sales have opened unlikely opportunities. Corporations from Whole Foods to Guitar Center to Urban Outfitters have jumped onto the trend, though contrary to reports, the youth clothier is only the No. 2 vinyl seller in the U.S. (Amazon is No. 1.) Starbucks is still putting its efforts behind CDs — for now.

But it’s the independent stores, which have supported vinyl for decades, that many consumers trust.

"There's no more Tower (Records)," said Ben Hubbird, who works for indie distributor CD Baby and co-runs Portland's Party Damage Records. "Everyone's pushing music out of the big box stores, which means the retail stores that are selling music are mom-and-pops."

No city is primed for it quite like Portland, which has more than 20 vinyl-centric stores as well as an LP presence in shops such as Floating World Comics and Smut, a vintage store. Currier said Portland not only has the most record stores per capita — it has the most record stores, period. And some of the best, too: The London DJ and producer Jamie xx (of the xx) recently called Mississippi Records his favorite record shop in North America. Mississippi and stores such as Beacon Sound have also launched vinyl labels of their own.

"I was just back there (in New York) last month,” Currier said. “Everybody in the industry was just clamoring, 'Wish we have record stores here like you guys have out there.’”

Big day coming

Record Store Day launched in 2008, developed by the three coalitions of independent stores as a way of building excitement and offering special, limited-edition LPs to supportive collectors. Its launch year coincided with vinyl's wild sales spike, and the April event has helped set sales record after record for many retailers. In 2014, Music Millennium had its best Record Store Day yet, a feat echoed by store owners such as John Kunz, who told Billboard that Waterloo, his Austin, Texas, outpost, had its "best sales day ever" this year.

The event hasn’t come without backlash. Special releases for Record Store Day ballooned to more than 400 this spring as major labels dove in to a previously niche market, and once ordered by a store, records — unlike CDs — can't be returned. If expensive releases, such as a $30 2013 Nick Drake compilation, don't sell, owners are stuck with them.

"It's going to bankrupt the store," Bill Daly of Washington, D.C.'s Crooked Beat told Wamu.org, adding that he planned to cut back on his Record Store Day offerings going forward.

But Record Store Day's breadth of releases are becoming the norm, as vinyl’s rising numbers make the format difficult to ignore.

"In the last four years, there's been a tremendous increase in the amount of titles that come out on vinyl," Currier said. "Previous to that point, there really wasn't all that much available, except for little indie labels."

Those indies have doubled down, with labels such as Merge (home to albums by Arcade Fire, Spoon and Destroyer) releasing vinyl for every new album. Artists of all kinds are pressing older releases to vinyl for the first time, from the Dismemberment Plan's 2001 album "Change" to Daft Punk's "Alive 2007."

The pressure to stand out — not to mention bands' limited manufacturing budgets — means many new albums, for Record Store Day or otherwise, are made as collectors' editions, pressed in the hundreds and trading vinyl's signature black for, say, green swirl. Sleater-Kinney's "Start Together" box set offered the Portland band's seven albums each in a different color and promptly sold out its 3,000-copy first run.

.@LUNAmusic just hipped us to this pretty, pretty vinyl from Whirr and Nothing on @graveface_recs pic.twitter.com/Ejq5Zf8jfj — Record Store Day (@recordstoreday) November 14, 2014

Temporary ground

Selling more vinyl records means making more vinyl records — not an easy task for an industry now straining to scale up. According to one count, there are only 15 major pressing plants in the United States, and not many more abroad.

"There's been a real glut in the system," said Mike Jones of Portland's A to Z Media, a broker whose job it is to get records from a mastered lacquer to the pressing stage quickly and affordably. He works frequently with California's Rainbo, whose turnaround time had stretched to 14 weeks earlier this year. Nashville's United Record Pressing, which operates the U.S.'s biggest plant, runs its 22 presses on 24-hour shifts six days a week. It's been planning to expand, but record pressing plants, plating facilities and mastering engineers are all working with old, refurbished technology recruited back into service. With start-up costs potentially in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, new production equipment seems unlikely.

"Nobody's ever going to make another lathe again. Never," Gonsalves said. He cuts lacquers for labels such as Sufjan Stevens’ Asthmatic Kitty with a recovered 1960s Scully lathe that once belonged to Hasbro and made children’s toys.

Gonsalves noted that lathes also happen to make the best record players, thanks to their vacuum seal and sturdy mechanics, which is why a number of them are off the record-cutting market and being used by private collectors. In Portland, it appears three are in varying degrees of use: by Gonsalves, Sky Onion Mastering and Fred and Toody Cole, who cut their Dead Moon albums with the mono lathe that cut the Kingsmen's "Louie Louie."

(I can't get no) satisfaction

For many, delays in the production pipeline reached the tipping point this year.

"I'd say 2014 has hit all of the indies pretty hard," said Matt Jones, label manager of Portland's Bloodmoss Records. " Working with (Los Angeles plant) Erika, it takes three to four months for the vinyl to be pressed ... with Record Store Day and Black Friday, mainstream labels really take advantage of that day. The Jack Whites and those types of people, which is fine, there's nothing wrong with it, but they definitely are holding plants up."

He wasn’t the only industry member to point the finger at major labels and their newly massive production runs. White’s first-week 40,000 sales alone would account for an entire day of peak production at United.

“We saw (it) this year with major labels stepping in on Record Store Day and completely shutting down vinyl manufacturing in the entire country for about two months," Hubbird said. "They were doing runs of 10,000 or 20,000."

Still, United's Jay Millar told Billboard this year that they'd made an effort to make sure indies made their Record Store Day target.

"I wasn't aware of any indies that failed to meet the Record Store Day deadline, but I was aware of major label stuff that didn't make the deadline," he said, adding that the company has been on its round-the-clock schedule for two years. "It has gotten to the point where there really is no slow time. It's year-round."

It seems everyone is operating on a longer calendar, which complicates album releases as bands navigate digital and physical street dates and grapple with fan expectations. And with its twice-a-year schedule, Record Store Day is never far off.

"I was at the Warner Bros. Music offices and one of the guys there, he just got back from Amsterdam to check out pressing plants," Currier said. "He was running into the wall here in getting everything manufactured in a timely method. He's already putting things into manufacturing for April for Record Store Day."



Plants aren't the only bottleneck. Gonsalves said another hurdle is in plating — the chemical process that imposes a mastered lacquer's imprint onto metal stampers, which then press out those hundreds or thousands of vinyl records.

"United has a plating capacity, Quality (Record Pressings) has a plating capacity," he said. "But there's way less of those places than there are places to press a record."

And release dates often assume a measure of quality control, a worry missing from identical iTunes downloads. Vanderslice has been a vocal critic of United and other plants he's found erratic, comparing the busy Nashville business to a Carl's Jr. fast-food restaurant. Both he and Gonsalves vouched for Quality Record Pressings in Salina, Kansas, which they consider worth its premium price.

"There's a press operator assigned to each press who can't leave the press. They're monitoring the temperature, they're monitoring the gauges," Vanderslice said. "They're completely bonkers."

John Vanderslice in Portland. Credit: David Greenwald

Ain’t nothing like the real thing



Aside from vinyl’s hand-held collector appeal, its chief draw has been its warm, analog sound. But many new releases aren’t coming straight from the tape. There’s often a digital conversion before material for mastering lands in the hands of an engineer such as Gonsalves, and beyond analog advocates such as White and Ryan Adams, it’s more common to find music recorded on computers in Pro Tools — or at home in GarageBand — and sometimes without consideration for the higher-resolution audio that vinyl allows.

"You don't really need to spend $30 for some 180-gram piece of vinyl that was sourced from a CD-quality file. You're better off with your $10 CD," said Andy Zax, who has produced reissues for the Talking Heads, Rod Stewart and the 2009 Woodstock box set, among others. He warned against buying modern reprints of albums still circulating in the used market.

"The odds the thing is going to be fantastic is infinitely low versus the $8 used one you could find from flipping through the bins,” Zax said. Still, a number of labels have sprung up around thoughtful, high-quality vinyl releases. "Your Numero (Group) and Omnivore (Recordings), they're trying very hard to get it right.”

That’s not to say analog purity’s the answer. Both Zax and Larry Crane, the owner of Portland’s Jackpot! Studio and Tape Op magazine’s recording guru, said digital-to-analog conversion and vice versa have made significant strides over the years.

"It's way easier" to master in digital, Crane said, recalling the technical trevails of mastering his band Vomit Launch’s first album the old-fashioned way with producer George Horn in 1987. “It's a joke that people get all worried about that.”

"If the source is 16-bit and 44.1 kHz in sampling rate,” Gonsalves said, citing the technical specs of CD audio, “we're not going to magically abracadabra more fidelity into it. But in terms of this current marketplace, they'll probably have an easier time selling the vinyl than the CD."

No one's invented a better way to make records — yet. In one promising advance, designer Amanda Ghassei has developed an algorithm to 3D-print a resin LP, though the process requires significant sound quality loss and an end product destructive to turntable needles. In an interview with 3DPrint.com, she wasn't expecting to change the industry.

"It’s never going to be as good as vinyl,” she said.

-- David Greenwald