Larry Hardy interview

Ryan Leach

sixbigboys The underground scene from the 1980s is interesting. How they worked in a grey area, using loopholes to publish what we'd call zines -- samizdat. To this day, it's underappreciated.

Kevin E

The value of 7"s in the old days was when you could barely listen to anything ahead of purchasing it, you could drop $3 on a band you never heard before and if they weren't very good, it wasn't a big deal. Now with Bandcamp and everything, in order to release anything, you basically have to be good enough to do a LP. There is no reason for a 7" because if you're good enough, people will want more.

It seems like the only 7"s that sell these days are reissues of old collectible records. It's too bad because there used to be a lot of bands good enough to record a few songs but not a whole album. I don't own a single Rave Up record because I would rather pretend all those classic bands only released 2-4 songs. I don't want to hear their other songs.

Ryan Leach

Kevin E 7"s are the result of a format war between RCA and Columbia. 10"s are holdovers from the 78 rpm days. There's no inherit superiority to any of these formats. DAT is largely forgotten because the record industry wanted it that way. Bands tend to do well with 7"s at the merch table.

In the 1980s people made the argument that vinyl was anachronistic due to the superiority of CDs. People dumped their LPs, bought CDs. I got a lot of that stuff for cheap that goes for $50+ now. That wasn't planned. I just preferred vinyl and it was a few bucks.

You remember Myspace? So much music was posted on that website. It was a real resource for music. It's all gone now. You need a tactile format or you've got nothing.

7"s have always been a difficult format. There was never much meat on the bone. STAX under Al Bell made a conscious effort to transition to LPs -- that was back in the early 1970s. That being said, even LPs are hard to sell. If you're only pressing 300-500 copies of a record, you're losing money. If anything, it's emblematic of the decline of physical sales. In the Red could move 10,000 Blues Explosion 7"s. Now Larry can only get those numbers on a Fuzz LP. Long-term prospects of vinyl? Probably not good beyond all the hype of the past decade.

B.F. McGee-zax

stoked to have this Tav Falco article out at the end of the month or early April. Thank you, Ryan, for all the help with getting ahold of some of the characters.

Preview:

TAV FALCO: There were no plans to record in Amerika when I decamped from Vienna. In '98 in Memphis, after a rare festival appearance with Billy Lee Riley band and Panther Burns, a guy in blue jeans walks up to me beside the stage and sticks $6,000 cash in my pocket. It was Larry Hardy.

LARRY HARDY: I was there for the first two days of recording and Tav seemed in good spirits and I thought he was enjoying it. It was only after the release of the album that I learned he wasn’t happy about it. The album received a really positive review in the Memphis Flyer saying it was a return to form and one of their best albums. A couple of weeks later the paper ran a letter Tav had sent them complaining about the review and saying “I’ve made much better records than this one”.

ROSS JOHNSON: Tav and I got along [during the session]. There was no snarling Chilton.

JEFF EVANS: [Laughs] You have to keep in mind, I wasn’t [Tav’s] first choice, or his second choice, his third choice or tenth choice for producer. I think everybody said “no,” so… But I was happy to be involved with it …. People have called me a “musicologist” but Tav is a real musicologist. His research is original – taking a video camera into Mississippi [sic] in the ‘70s.”

Ryan Leach

It's great to see Jeff on record.

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