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somethingvinyl · 2 years

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I’m writing a Vinyl Detective fanfiction

And I apologize for nothing. Here’s the summary and chapter 1--new chapter on AO3 every Tuesday! (I’ll put the link in a reblog.) Leave me a comment if you read it.

A mysterious client who maintains strict anonymity hires the Vinyl Detective to hunt down a dubplate by a long-dead reggae star. This record is more than rare—it’s unique. Only one was ever pressed. The Vinyl Detective enlists the help of a podcast host and a cassette-collecting DJ and circles in on the disc. But when the people who hear the song start to turn up dead, the Vinyl Detective has to question the motives of his anonymous client. This adventure will take the Vinyl Detective all the way to Kingston, Jamaica. Between corrupt politicians, car chases, and getting himself arrested, he’ll have a hard time figuring out who he can trust.

Chapter 1

I think I’ve hit a vein.

I was combing the stacks at a charity shop with my friend and sometime moocher, Jordon Tinkler. I’d just finished taking him out to lunch, but on this day he’d earned his meal fair and square by helping me customize a new laptop. Tinkler paid for his hifi habit as a computer programmer, and when he saw the off-the-shelf laptop I was about to buy to replace the my rapidly declining one, he’d looked at me as if I was thinking of trading in my Linn Sondek turntable for a portable record player made of cardboard. He’d had me buy a heap of components for a fraction of the cost of the new laptop and cobbled together a computer with much better specs on his living room carpet while listening to John Mayall and Small Faces records. He told me not to worry about it—he did it because he loved it. A sentiment I could readily understand. But I’d insisted he let me buy him lunch as a thank you. And of course lunch came with a crate digging trip afterward.

A crate digging trip at which, among the usual Sing Along with Mitch Miller and Christmas Classics records, I’d just found a 1968 original of the Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle on CBS, and in mono, too. Not my kind of music, but highly sought after, and worth a pretty penny.

Where Tinkler paid for his habit working with computers, I paid for mine selling records. I found some like this, out of nowhere in charity shops. But my specialty these days was hunting down rare records for clients willing to pay my way.

They call me the Vinyl Detective.

Okay, so I’d been the one to start calling myself that. And when I started, it was a bit grandiose. But these days, I felt I’d earned the title.

Behind the Zombies, I found a pile of Beatles albums—a little basic, but they’d sell briskly. A quick inspection showed that the later albums were early pressings, but the early ones were all late 60s pressings on Apple, which were much less valuable. But they’d all sell for more than I was about to pay for them. Worth a few biscuits for the cats and a few bags of coffee beans for the grinder, at least.

There was plenty I recognized in the pile near these—obviously the collection of a real music fan. I tried not to reflect on the most likely scenario for these records ending up here, which was the death of that music fan. I took some comfort from the idea that my default next-of-kin, my live-in girlfriend and technically-common-law-wife Nevada, would know how to get my records to the sorts of collectors who would really appreciate them upon my death—a death that I skirted close to much more often than one might expect for a record hunter. My beloved collection would never go to a charity shop.

I was flipping through a bunch of records I didn’t recognize when a title made me stop. It wasn’t an album or artist I recognized; it was by someone called Donnie “Ready to Run” Robertson. But the album title, Waiting on a Brighter Day, was familiar. Familiar in that way that if I didn’t figure out why, it would only bother me.

“Oh, there’s a keeper, mate,” Tinkler said, looking over my shoulder.

“You think so?”

“Oh, yeah. Dead rare, worth a king’s ransom to the right collector.”

I studied the bearded face that presumably belonged to Donnie Robertson on the cover—a dark-skinned, serious visage with deeply staring eyes, as if he’d been meditating on some vital philosophical question when the picture was taken. The face was surrounded by a black halo of dreadlocks. I turned the record over to find a pencil sketch reproduced on the back—a lion fighting a serpent—colored over with red, gold, and green stripes.

“Since when do you know about reggae?” I asked Tinkler. It wasn’t his genre. He was primarily a fan of the heavy blues rock of the 60s and 70s.

“I could hardly be a self-respecting dope smoker without dabbling in a bit of reggae,” he replied. “I’ve got originals of all of Bob Marley’s Island discography, and a fair few Trojan Records compilations.”

“Why do I recognize this album title?” Waiting on a Brighter Day.

“You’ll certainly have heard the Erik Make Loud cover.”

Of course. Our friend—Tinkler’s more than mine—the former guitarist for the legendary 60s band Valerian, who went on to a mildly successful solo career as a guitar god. Born Eric McCloud, but self-rechristened Erik Make Loud. Though I suppose the Vinyl Detective has no room to scoff at silly self-invented nicknames. None of his albums were my cup of tea (especially seeing as how my cup of tea would contain coffee), but I’d certainly heard them round Tinkler’s plenty.

“All the guitar greats were messing about with reggae in the mid 70s,” Tinkler went on. “Eric Clapton helped launch Bob Marley into mainstream success with his cover of ‘I Shot the Sheriff.’ And Erik Make Loud discovered Ready Robertson for the British audience.”

“With somewhat less spectacular results,” I said. I’d heard of Bob Marley, but never this Robertson. I was scanning the rest of the songs on the back of the sleeve, and none except the title track seemed familiar.

“Well, Erik Make Loud, love him as I do, is no Eric Clapton. But Ready Robertson is much beloved by serious reggae heads. I’m sure there’s plenty of demand for an original press of his most well known album.”

A quick scan of Discogs on my phone confirmed this—very few copies changing hands, and for plenty of money each, with none on sale right then. Find the right collector and I’d certainly get a nice pay day.

Back at Tinkler’s house, we listened to my acquisitions to play grade them on his Thorens TD 124 and enormous horn-loaded speakers. The Zombies record was a few steps shy of perfect, a solid VG+, still worth plenty. But the Ready Robertson sounded amazing, perhaps unplayed, near mint for sure. As we listened to side two, we opened up my brand new laptop and Tinkler helped me craft a post for my blog about my Ready Robertson find. We looked up some biographical details for background. His career had been awfully short—he’d been in the UK for a few years in the early 70s, traveling in the same circles as Bob Marley’s Wailers and making a name for himself. But when he returned to his native Kingston, Jamaica, he’d been picked up for a gang murder that happened before he left. He maintained his innocence, but he’d been convicted and died in prison a few years later. He could easily have been another global superstar if his recording days had not been so rudely truncated. Waiting on a Brighter Day was his only proper album. He’d released a bunch of singles in Jamaica, which wasn’t an album market in those days, and those had been compiled and recompiled in every imaginable configuration since—you could buy ten different Ready Robertson albums with ten titles on ten record labels, but they were all composed of the same few dozen tracks. Lax copyright laws. Waiting on a Brighter Day was different: recorded in Britain at Abbey Road Studios, released by EMI, copyright rigorously enforced. And excellent production values, my audiophile heart noted. But only issued a few times, despite the obvious interest in the music. And the copy I’d just bought was the absolute first pressing.

Tinkler put on Erik Make Loud’s 1974 cover version after we’d finished the original. Ready Robertson’s “Waiting on a Brighter Day” was a gorgeously melancholy song reflecting the ills of the world and the singer’s hope for the future. Erik Make Loud’s was faithful to the words and melody, even the characteristic reggae choppy guitar strokes on the upbeats, but substituted the reflective feel of the original for a party atmosphere. It was much more radio friendly. I could imagine Tinkler and his friends passing a joint around to it in school. But it was obvious which was the superior version. That depth I saw in Ready Robertson’s eyes on the cover of his LP was very much present in his music, and very much overlooked by his British interpreter.

I published my blog post about Waiting on a Brighter Day. I didn’t elaborate on my feelings about Erik Make Loud’s cover except to note that Ready’s less famous original was the better version. I gathered my records and left for home, having promised Tinkler a percentage of my profit from the Ready Robertson record for his expertise. Entirely too small a percentage, considering that I’d probably have left it in the shop without him, but he had a day job and I hadn’t. I had an offer on the record by the end of the week, and it was safely enclosed in an LP mailer and sent along to Brighton the next day. The others needed no blog post—the Zombies sold immediately for a number with a comma in it, and the Beatles moved quickly enough. Together, that day’s charity shop haul paid my rent and all my bills for the month with enough left over for a dead mint copy of Chet Baker’s Chet album on Riverside for me and a splurge bottle of Rhone red for Nevada, even after paying Tinkler his bit. And with that, I considered my brief career as a reggae historian satisfactorily concluded.

I’d almost forgotten all about Ready Robertson when I received an email two months later.

#vinyl detective #the vinyl detective #andrew cartmel #vinyl #music #audiophile

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