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| Beatles CD-Rs on Ralph Records |
Today at a car boot sale, I came across a box of pirate CD-Rs that were free to take. It had needle drops of artists such as Barbra Streisand, Graham Nash, Focus (I have to get the official one for Boris, of course), Carly Simon, the Mamas & the Papas, Hermans Hermits, and maybe the Bee Gees for that matter just to name a few. They're on a label called Ralph Records, a division of "Antarctica Group, Ltd.", which doesn't exist. There was a real indie label called Ralph Records in the Bay Area known for the cult band The Residents. Not much is known about this other Ralph Records, who make Beatles bootlegger Dr Ebbetts look like Peter Jackson (who worked on
Get Back). I picked up
Jolly What! with Frank Ifield, who passed away this past May, and
The Savage Young Beatles, the first US release of the Tony Sheridan sessions (also not official, while the ones that were came out on two separate labels with lesser known groups mixed in). Like real reissue labels such as Friday Music and Air Mail Archive, Ralph imitate the original label almost to the point of parody. Not much can be found on them. The covers were printed on Kodak inkjet paper. Someone went to great expense to make all of these, only for these to be on the house, making Babs at the charity shop look like a ticket to her fundraisers (she or pretty much any artist would go mad if she saw one of her albums like this). If it was something out of print, maybe, but many of these weren't really that rare. The CD-R seller in Madison County I wrote about some years earlier has nothing on this. Even though I have the Beatles tracks on better sounding official and unofficial CDs and LPs, I never had the original LPs, which were considered cash-ins during Beatlemania in 1964, along with cover albums by other artists and novelty records. As for all the CDs, they have scans of the original sleeves. I am on this sellers e-mail list, so I know where he'll be next, which is likely the record fair I know now held on NY 173 in Taunton, so I could grab a handful more if anyone wants some, since this sort doesn't seem to gather that much interest. These are too good to just donate or even have binned. You can't legally sell them, of course. There were also some CD-R bootlegs, but I just took a couple ELP ones, and only one works. As for Ralph, this may just be some little operation over twenty years too late.
