In the Dread of Night

One of five (I think) Roxy albums distributed by Firefly Records, the first cheapo CD-R label that I ever came across.

From Roxy Art

From Roxy Art

For all I know, there were similar low-priced CD-R bootleggers set up at flea markets and swap meets and things all through the '90s. You could easily imagine Orange County, California, being full of these things for years. Well, the story I heard - and this could be complete baloney - is that these students up at Duke University invested in a burner and a stack of CDs and a cheap color printer and a couple of reams of standard office paper and sold the heck out of whatever they liked and could get their hands on for five to ten bucks a single, eight to fifteen a double. Lots of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd because that sold at $10, and then smaller runs of quirky groups that you rarely saw bootlegged, like Simply Red (really?!) and these four Roxy Music titles for cheaper. I paid less for five concerts as I would have a single silver bootleg from either of the downtown record stores in Athens in 1999.

When CD-Rs were still mostly a new thing, the general public didn't yet realize that this technology was within their grasp. So while you had the less scrupulous people investing in the technology and selling CD-Rs for the same price as conventional boots, you suddenly started to see fly-by-nighters at the flea market with tables full of the same titles for a fraction of the cost. I suggest that this kickstarted things in a way that will never, ever be documented properly. If Clinton Heylin's book and ICE represent "the secret history of the recording industry," these were the secrets of the secret history, and a whole world of twelve-copy print runs that nobody can ever fully research.

What you see here is a slightly revamped version of the original purchase. The scan is of, literally, a sheet of photocopy paper run through an inkjet, but years ago I remade the spines for legibility's sake, leaving the text and the chosen font (Mistral, just slightly less obnoxious than Comic Sans) intact.

Whoever they were, Firefly Records was a huge inspiration to one or two starry-eyed fans, even if most of the next generation of traders and designers put a grain more thought into the layouts of their sleeves. On the other hand, when Mr. Monopoly started designing, he certainly remembered Firefly's "cover model" credit and thought it worth adapting.