‘My Happiness’: The 1953 vinyl Jack White spent $300,000 on
Have you noticed that the price of vinyl records has gone through the roof recently?
In the not-too-distant past, you’d regularly be able to grab yourself a bargain when out crate-digging in your local high-street charity shop, but ever since the vinyl resurgence, people have realised that their dusty old collections might just be worth a tenner or two, and have begun taking their more recognisable records to second-hand retailers to cash in, instead of just giving them away.
Though you can still find untold treasures at record fairs and markets up and down the country week in and week out, or on the anorak’s favourite website Discogs, buying a brand new release is likely to set you back a fair bit these days.
Probably owing to a combination of the closure of so many pressing plants when contemporary interest in vinyl seemed to be gone forever, and Taylor Swift hogging up all the production-queue times with her endless album variants of slightly-different mixes or shades of beige disc, the cost of new pressings and new releases has gone up to the point that, the higher costs will probably burst the bubble of excitement and interest about the physical format again before long.
Thankfully, there’s either not usually a huge demand for the kinds of things I like to buy on wax (I know) or there were enough pressings made when they came out that has meant they aren’t worth all that much these days, like José Feliciano’s Feliciano! or Carole King’s timeless Tapestry, but occasionally I’ll spring for a new release if the album arrives at a reasonable price point.
I was pleasantly surprised when my local record shop, Some Nice Things in Margate, presented my pre-orders of the recent repressing of Bob Dylan’s MTV Unplugged and Courtney Barnett’s album-of-the-year contender Creature of Habit at under £25 each.
Other music fans haven’t been so lucky. The recent 30th anniversary reissue of Oasis’ thoroughly overrated (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? would set you back an eye-watering £60; meanwhile, a picture disc release of BTS’ fifth album ARIRANG was priced at a whopping £70, and yet still somehow sold out in HMV.
These kinds of prices aren’t uncommon across HMV and other record retailers, with everything from the Marty Supreme OST and Hillbilly Vegas’ A La Mode and a reprint of the 1965 Muddy Waters compilation The Real Folk Blues, and hundreds of others, going for similar prices.
But, whatever the most you’ve ever spent on a record is, you can always comfort yourself with the thought that somebody out there has likely parted with more for just one rare record than you have for your whole collection combined. Currently in the UK, if you’d be so inclined, there are certain versions of the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen that are estimated to be worth around £12,000, and ultra-rare editions of The Beatles by The Beatles (that’s The White Album, to you and me) which are valued at over double that amount.
But all of these seem like a bargain in comparison to the $300,000 that Jack White once paid for a single disc that dated back to 1953. Although, in fairness to White, that single disc was the first ever recording by Elvis Presley, which is practically a priceless piece of history. Recorded on his very first visit to the Memphis Recording Service (soon to be reborn as Sun Records).
After paying the $3.98 fee to have his songs recorded and then pressed onto an acetate disc, Elvis stepped up to the microphone on July 18th, 1953, to sing two songs: ‘My Happiness’ and ‘That’s When Your Heartaches Begin’.
Having presented the disc to his beloved mother as a present, Elvis never publicly returned to either ‘My Happiness’, but did later go on to re-record the song on the flip side. Over the years, the acetate has become one of the most legendary artefacts in music (much like the similar early recordings of The Quarrymen). The disc had at various points been valued as high as $500,000, but when it went to auction in January of 2015, a mystery buyer, later revealed to be Jack White, managed to get himself a cut-rate deal.
And he’s made some money back on the investment, too, through his Third Man Records label, where he digitally transferred the recordings and now sells facsimile copies for around $100 a pop, which come complete in a clear brown paper bag because, in White’s words, “That’s what Elvis would have walked out of Sun Records with”. That and because he has to keep any additional costs down, presumably, if he is to have any hope in recouping his original outlay.
Incidentally, if you adjust the $3.98 that Elvis originally paid to record the songs in the first place for inflation, it works out to roughly $49.95 in today’s money, meaning that it’d cost just about as much to make your own vinyl record as it does to buy new releases these days. Still, all that pales in comparison to the $4million paid by the PleasrDAO collective for the only vinyl copy of Wu Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin in 2021.
