Vinyl Taiwan

[Blossom Stemmer]

Esliteone of the largest retail bookstore chains in Taiwan, is famous for its massive scale. The bookstore has expanded since its opening to now housing boutiques and food courts in addition to its literary offerings. You would not expect a store with so much on its hands to have a stellar collection of vinyl, but that is exactly what Eslite offers. Their vinyl collection includes Taiwanese, Japanese, and Western pressings of new and used records covering all genres from classical to metal, and includes a substantial amount of music from local indie musicians. The store also stocks a variety of audio accessories like turntables and headphones for audiophiles to pick up.

This established and long-running vinyl store keeps it simple with music and music alone. Xiao Sung Music, located in Wanhua district, stocks shelves upon shelves jam-packed with vinyl records including Japanese and Western pressings of jazz, classical, and Taiwanese indie.

The first time I saw a Taiwanese pressing of FIFTH DIMENSION (Large World LW-200) in July 1978, I bought it. But I bought it for the opposite reason that I had purchased the original version a decade prior: the Taiwanese album was so shoddy a reproduction of the original that it looked like a cynical joke. The photo of the four Byrds was blurred and the blackness of the void had been replaced with a ghastly blue.

This motivated me to buy other Taiwanese albums on colored vinyl for resale. Unfortunately, the $35 bid was a fluke, and it was difficult to sell the other records at any price. Collectors did not see these records as necessary additions to their collections. They saw them as something best avoided.

The pirate would acquire a copy of a legit LP and create a straight disc dub, which became the master. From the master, stampers were made and new LPs were then pressed in one of the plants [in Taiwan]. Up until the late 1960s, the sleeves and labels were printed in Taiwan. Afterward, most were printed in the Philippines.

The albums were usually pressed in batches of about 500, with no two batches looking or sounding the same. Covers were usually recycled, meaning art for a different album was on the reverse side of the paper. The covers were thin paper wrapped in cellophane.

1. This is usually a copy of all or part of the original album with some kind of interesting and attractive creative input. Covers with a 1 should be of interest to a variety of collectors.

2. This is usually a copy of all or part of the original album that shows some care or creative thinking. In a few cases, it may be an alternative cover design. Covers with a 2 should be of interest to collectors who have everything and need to look outside their normal parameters.

3. This is usually a shoddy copy of all or part of the original album without any redeeming graphic qualities. They are of interest only because of the ugliness and shoddiness. Covers with a 3 should be of interest to collectors of ugliness and shoddiness or those with a droll sense of humor.

I use the term reproduction rather loosely. It means that most of these covers appear to be reproductions made with a photocopy machine. Full-color copiers were not available commercially until 1968 when 3M introduced the Color-in-Color copy machine. Not coincidentally, the quality of Taiwanese pirate albums increased dramatically in 1969.

The overwhelming majority of the pirate albums here were featured photocopied cover art. Occasionally, the record company had an artist paint a copy of the original album cover photo! Most of these look like the work of a competent fan or student.

This is a reproduction of the original Capitol album that replaces the brown background with mustard-yellow. Reflecting the return-to-roots movement in rock music and the back-to-the-earth movement in the counterculture, here The Band looks like the bad guys in True Grit or a spaghetti western.

This is a reproduction of the original Capitol album that replaces the orange background with pink. Reducing the original color photos to blue and pink was an interesting decision; surrounding them with a pink background was not.

This is a reproduction of the original Capitol album but the original cover has the song titles in red, blue, and black print. This Sun Shine cover has red and black titles and adds a blue border around all four sides. This is actually a more effective design.

This is a decent reproduction of the original Brother album but with some alterations. On the original, the vegetation is several tones of green and brown with shading. The title and artist credit are green.

The Hae Shan album is a reproduction of the original Parlophone album but with the Beatles cropped out of the photo and set into a not particularly attractive green field. This one looks like a high-quality bootleg from the early 1970s when there were no high-quality bootleg manufacturers.

These albums feature a different image than the original Parlophone album. They are reproductions of the original Capitol picture sleeve for the Help! single. The monochromatic blue of the Chung Sheng cover is kinda nice looking while the First album has a modest pop-out head effect.

I bought the MR. TAMBOURINE MAN album as soon as it came out in 1965. I was 13 years old and had never seen an album cover that looked anything like it. The fish-eye lens photo cropped into a circle set against a black backdrop looked like the Byrds were peering from California through a hole in the universe into my room in Pennsylvania.

This is a reproduction of the original Columbia album. If I had to choose a Favorite Album Cover of All Time, it would be the cover of the original stereo release of YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY. But all the subtlety and beauty of the original is lost on this Sun Shine album.

The pointillist effect of the original cover art (click on the link on the title above) was lost in the multiple generations of photocopies used for this cover. The glorious color photo was reduced to black and white with pink, green, and blue tones added. This makes the four Byrds look like creatures from a bad horror movie!

The Chung Sheng album is a reproduction of the original Atco album but with a yellow border. The original Atco album featured one of the first outrageous album covers with black line drawings by Martin Sharp. The art was covered with a faux silver foil finish that made the gatefold jacket shine.

The clothes that Baker, Bruce, and Clapton wore and the instruments they played during their mind-altering tour of the US in 1968 were designed and painted by Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger They were the leaders of a Dutch art collective known as The Fool. While Cream was colorfully psychedelic in person, little on this album topped DISRAELI GEARS for psychedelicness.

The First album eliminated the original cover art and replaced it with graphics that look like they were done by an 8-year-old. This may be the cheesiest cover on this page! I awarded it a 2 instead of 3 for sheer chutzpah.

This is a reproduction of the original Fantasy album but with a pop-out effect on the entire figure of the four band members. The original cover design was kind of cheesy: a nice color photo of CCR hanging out in the woods was bordered on three signs by what looks like the type of filigree art associated with 19th-century books.

This album features a different image than the original Elektra album. The original album has a photo of a group of circus people, including the gentleman above in the photo above. It hinted at the carnival of sounds and effects on the record within.

The Chung Sheng album uses the photo on the back cover of the Elektra album, adding a blue border. This ruins the whole effect of the marvelous original cover. The back cover of the Chung Sheng album features the lyrics to the songs.

This is a reproduction of the original Columbia album that blurs many of the details that made the cover so interesting to Dylanaddicts for years. Many of them believed that Dylan selected and arranged the items in this Daniel Kramer photograph as clues to the puzzle that Dylan was becoming in early 1965.

This is a reproduction of the original Reprise album with the subtle shaded pink and orange rays in the background turned into garish red and yellow beams. While the original is more attractive, the boldness of this design makes the First album more of an attention-getter.

This album features a different image than the original Capitol album, using a photo from another source. It bears no resemblance to the original album, which does not have any image, just text against a blue background.

This is a reproduction of the original Vanguard album with the colors washed out. Haishan took the original full-color photo and reduced it to black and white, they then added blue and red tones to everything but the faces. Interesting effect.

This is a reproduction of the original RCA Victor album without the big white stars in the blue banner at the top. The original design and art were done by Ron Cobb, the king of the underground press cartoonists at the time.

This album features a different image than the original RCA Victor album. First Record took the multi-exposure photo of the group from the back cover of the original album and superimposed it over an atomic fireball.

The cover for the Liming album is a collage that was lifted from a movie poster. The cover to the First album is a collage of images from the movie and, while amateurish, is more effective than the staid photo of Mr. Thackeray (Sidney Poitier) at his desk in school gracing the cover of the actual soundtrack album.

This is a decent reproduction of the original Musicor album with the original solid black background replaced with bright red and all those stripes. This is a more effective design for attracting the eye of a record buyer.

This is a reproduction of the original Columbia album but Tongsheng cropped the group photo and surrounded it with a gold border added to the photo. The border makes the album look like the quadraphonic albums that Columbia released in 1973-1975.

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