Dennis Catron, former lead guitarist for the 70's Orange County band The Mechanics, is currently an art director, and a collector of vintage cheesecake album covers. We talked recently about LPs, cheesecake cover art, and music in this fascinating interview:
ephemera: Whe did you become interested in LP covers in this genre?
Catron: I'd been collecting records back to my 9th birthday. While my friends were listening to Partridge Family records after school, I was rooting out the most obscure British and Aussie stuff in cutout bins I could find. I'd always bypassed the cheesecake stuff figuring it wasn't anything I'd want to hear, so you'd flip past as fast as you could looking for the good stuff.
When I was about twelve, I was in Lovell's Records in Uptown Whitter and saw they'd decorated the place in cheesy 50's covers with pin-up girls on the covers. It looked extremely cool, especially with the checkerboard flooring and 50's fixtures! On the way out, I added to my pile a Pedro Garcia LP strictly for the cover, a nasty set of legs and what appeared to be a silhouette of a large breast at the top--hot stuff when you're twelve! It wasn't until years later that I found the un-airbrushed image elsewhere, and realized it was actually her shoulder! After that, I started including thrift and antique stores in my places to hunt, and that was that.
ephemera: These are amazing images. I never saw any of these in the bins I browsed through in record stores as a teen. What challenges or obstacles do you encounter in collecting? How do you overcome these challenges?
Catron: Used to just be storage, nowadays it's just having the money! The days to chance onto something cool, and possibly cheap, somewhere besides eBay are about gone. I'm too far from garage sales in old neighborhoods like Redlands...I live in new tract home-land in Orange County, far from homes with attics..., and all the great little record stores have been gone for years. Record shows are drying up, and there are so many non-collectors out there buying for eBay that even the thrift stores are barren. I'll give away an eBay
trick or two... You can select 'Worldwide' under your searches and bookmark foreign sellers which most buyers don't even know exist, and basically go to town. There are a lot of great sellers in France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden whose prices won't kill the pocketbook. Also hit the 'Buy It Now' section. It actually gets only 5% or less of the traffic the main site gets, so if you bookmark foreign sellers and sign up for emails when they've posted new stuff, you'll probably be the first person to see it. That helps. Oh! One more... There are foreign versions of eBay like Sweden's tradera.com, and a lot of times their interfaces mimic eBay's, so you can usually figure them out after tinkering with them. Tradera even accepts PayPal! Most of the sellers have someone that speaks English, so that's another low traffic place to hit.
ephemera: Those are some mighty important trade secrets you've shared! I'm sure that a lot of people didn't know about those auction tactics. What are your favorite items in your collection?
Catron: A 45 by Hedika called 'Hey Pony' from 1961 that's also worth a minor fortune--I know, I paid it! It's your basic poppy French rock, but she's aping Little Richard in a wild voice and taking it way over the top. Cover-wise it's Joe Cuba's 'I Tried To Dance All Night'. They do not make women like that anymore, and I've looked!
ephemera: You're right; that's a hot cover. What’s your advice for achieving success as a collector?
Catron: Probably to try not to impulse buy or spend more than you know you'll be happy paying out. Even the most obscure stuff will turn up again. I've become a little more Zen-like about collecting after the dot.com crash, since I barely worked during it. I was able to stay afloat by selling off LP's, my movie memorabilia collection, and 50's pottery and paper. Losing 90 percent of my goodies was kind of a blessing in that now I really pick my spots, instead of seeing something I didn't even know existed the day before and thinking, "I absolutely need that!" Plus having a three year old with a Thomas the Tank engine fetish pretty much kills any extra cash lying around!
ephemera: Great advice, Dennis. What resources and tools do you recommend?
Catron: In the old days, it was Goldmine magazine to check values. Nowadays, I basically fudge and check past sales on eBay to see what people have paid for things to see if they're in my range or not. Not really an exact science, but I've always felt buying guides were overrated since sellers always jacked up the prices anyway. Storage would be the usual thick vinyl covers and always keep the disk out of the sleeve and against the back. In it's own vinyl sleeve is even better.
ephemera: Thanks for sharing your insights into buying and selling these unique covers. You have an amazing collection, Dennis. I'm glad we were able to feature some of your LP covers here.
