When Ben Frith was just a kid, his father Rob pulled him out of school for a very unique field trip: To see the last vinyl album ever pressed in Vancouver.

That album was the fourth volume of the History of Vancouver Rock and Roll series, a compendium of oldies from the Lower Mainland released in 1991.

The album was pressed at Burnaby’s Praise, the last remaining pressing plant in the Vancouver area after Imperial Records — also the country’s first modern mastering and pressing plant, opened in 1968 in Marpole — had closed in 1988.

(The very last vinyl platter to be pressed at Imperial, also known as IRC, was a commemorative record entitled The Last Record.)

Praise closed a short time after the History album was pressed.

“I honestly don’t really remember, but I’m glad I got to go,” Ben, 27, said while sitting next to his dad in the basement vault below Neptoon Records, the Main Street store the father and son duo co-manage.

Throughout the course of his childhood, Rob would take Ben out of school because of musical events: A Bo Diddley meet-and-greet here, a Buddy Guy concert there, and the list goes on.

“My parents would tell the teacher and the teacher would say, ‘Yeah, that’s probably more educational anyway,’ ” Ben said.

The son learned well.

These days, Ben not only helps manage his father’s store, he also helps release albums from local bands via the store’s music label.

And the label side of the business is busier than ever, thanks to a renewed interest in vinyl that has been an ongoing trend for the better part of the last decade.

INTO THE GROOVE

Putting out records was the main reason Rob Frith, now 59, got into the music store business in the first place.

Neptoon Records was first conceived as a label in 1980. It was meant to be called Comet Records, but there was another label of the same name. The idea was then changed to Neptune, then Neptoon to avoid another potential name conflict.

The first platter the label released was a seven-inch single by a Vancouver band called Pictures.

“It didn’t really do anything,” Rob Frith said. “We sent it to radio stations and no one played it. But Capitol Records phoned us and were interested and wanted more material. I forget what happened but, if I remember, the lead singer was so busy with other things she couldn’t make the commitment Capitol wanted.”

Rob Frith opened Neptoon’s brick-and-mortar location, originally located on Fraser Street, in 1981. Over the course of the next two and a half decades, the store/label would release a few more albums sporadically, including the four volumes of History of Vancouver Rock and Roll — although not officially Neptoon platters — and a compilation dedicated to the singles of B.C. folksinger and Mushroom Studios co-founder Tom Northcott, released circa 1990.

The Northcott album — Neptoon-003, also pressed at Praise — would be the last vinyl platter released by Neptoon until Ben’s own band Thee Manipulators, for which he plays drums, released its album Ease Up On The Breakdowns in 2010.

The near-20 years that separated the two releases saw the wax and wane of the CD era, a period during which Neptoon released a handful of shiny plastic discs including a live compilation featuring The Nocturnals, The Night Train Revue and other garage rock curios (Live! From The Grooveyard — Neptoon-005 — in 2004).

By 2010, buoyed by a combination of nostalgia, sound quality and collectibility, vinyl was back in the groove, and Neptoon was back in the label game in full force.

LOCAL MOTION

Over the past five years, Neptoon Records has moved away from compilations and banked on supporting up-and-coming Vancouver talent, releasing albums by psych rock band Three Wolf Moon (on a beautiful splattered colour vinyl), Little Wild, Hallow Moon and country-rock group Percheron.

In November, Neptoon will release Vancouver rocker Johnny de Courcy’s second solo album Alien Lake (Neptoon-021).

Granted, Neptoon isn’t shipping gold records. Most press runs range between 500-1,000 copies sold in store and on the road by the bands and Neptoon prides itself on quality.

“Each project has different costs,” Ben said. “Certain records you have to do a specific way. The Three Wolf Moon album was a very expensive record to do. With the Hallow Moon record, it was super straightforward — there were no special requirements.

“And the Percheron record — sonically it’s such an amazing sounding record that we did fancy mastering and we decided to use this pressing plant called Quality in Kansas.

“Any of the fancy $50 reissue pressings you see in stores, these are the guys that do them.”

Most Neptoon albums retail for roughly $20 or less.

Even some of the most visually striking packages are tailored for the independent market.

Alien Lake, which will be available in black or red vinyl and housed in a gatefold sleeve with extra goodies inside, should retail for roughly the same price as other Neptoon releases.

“Every time I put a record out, I always think I’m going to sell tons of them,” Rob said.

“Most records we break even on, and some records we even make money on.”

But there have been duds.

A single by garage rock band The Orpheans became a dust-gatherer in 2010 when the band broke up immediately after the disc was released. That’s the peril of running a music label.

Still, Neptoon constantly keeps its ears open and the level of Vancouver talent they’ve exposed over the past five years is considerable.

“You have to have a great record,” Ben said when asked what it takes for a band to get a Neptoon vinyl release.

“Gimme a show,” Rob added, explaining that the live performance is a key element that sells records nowadays, especially for a touring act.

“We hear lots of great records but it’s guys that sit in the studio forever — ‘Go and recreate that (in concert) now,’ ” Ben said.

Then there’s simple logistics: The Friths have expanded their vinyl output considerably of late, spending an estimated $15,000 to $20,000 on pressing albums last year, but the boom has created a bottleneck for the last few plants in North America: Quality, Rainbo (Los Angeles), A & R (Dallas, Tex.), Brooklyn Phonograph (New York City) and the only remaining Canadian vinyl pressing plant, RIP-V in Montreal.

NEEDLE IN A WAX STACK

In the ’80s, Vancouver was home to two plants: Imperial and Praise, the latter of which pressed everything from religious records to Elvis platters.

As one pressing plant after another closed and CDs became the norm at the tail end of the decade, vinyl faded away because of a lack of supply and demand.

Now that major labels are re-pressing their back catalogue and more indie artists get into the vinyl game, vinyl sales numbers are surging.

Yet vinyl is still but a small sliver of the North American music sales pie and a minute fraction of the numbers it had in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. (While many fans have turned to iTunes or music streaming, people still buy CDs.)

The latest reports have vinyl sales flirting with six million copies sold in North America, but the numbers are far from accurate, according to Ben Frith.

“The numbers you’re hearing are the SoundScan numbers,” he said, referring to the organization that compiles and charts album sales. “Not one store (in Vancouver) reports to SoundScan. Every single piece of vinyl in Vancouver is not reported.”

Ben said the numbers in reports are mainly sourced from major outlets like Amazon or the last few remaining big box stores that sell vinyl albums. London Drugs, for example, has been stocking vinyl for the last few years.

“The charts are probably fairly accurate,” he added, referring to artist rankings in sales. “But the numbers are way off.”

The boom has put enormous pressure on pressing plants.

“The turnaround times are brutal right now and most plants are operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They can’t press any more than what’s being pressed right now.”

If a record sells out, second and third pressings are becoming difficult to obtain in a timely fashion. If an album is a major hit, it often means a band won’t be able to replenish its vinyl stock fast enough to meet demand.

“It must be tough for an artist who’s got this momentum going and all of a sudden there’s no product,” Rob Frith said.

If Rob Frith could turn back time, he would go back to the ’80s when all the pressing plants were closing down and buy their old equipment.

“I had a dream the other night that I talked someone into investing in a mobile pressing plant, like Breaking Bad,” Rob said, laughing.

“You would go from town to town and make records for people. ‘How many do you want?’ ”

fmarchand@vancouversun.com

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