Sunday 8 May 2011

A couple of old B9 7"s

Picked up a couple of old Bridge Nine releases on ebay recently through random events.

Firstly, The Hope Conspiracy 'File03' 7". Bridge Nine number 14. This one is an interesting one for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because the regular pressing was a two song 7" with an etched b-side, yet this one is the ultra rare double sided 7" with two extra songs. Only one hundred of these suckers out there, as the text on the poly bag suggests:

The other thing that makes this interesting is how it is numbered. Well, I guess the label must have lost their stamps and not been able to find any in any local stores, because these were numbered with a date stamper. So, record number 1 was 'Jan 01', and so on and so forth. Although, as you may have worked out, date stampers only number up to 31, so number 32 would have been 'Feb 01'. Which means that number 100 of 100 would have been 'Apr 10'. Seems a bit shit to me, but never mind.

I got pretty lucky with this one. Tre sold his a few weeks back and it ended on $57. I didn't bid because I was hoping to score it for less at some point. Then literally a couple of weeks later some other dude listed one, I watched it, and then ended up winning for $6.50. I think this usually goes for around the $50 mark, so I'm pretty happy to have scored a bargain.

I saw The Hope Conspiracy a couple of times back circa 2001/2. One time I asked the singer if anyone had ever mistaken him for David Arquette. He said he got it all the time. Sheep was also there and asked me who David Arquette was. Christ.

The second 7" is the Tenfold 'Now Is Our Time' 7". Bridge Nine number 2. This came out in 1997. I've had a blue one for years, but this clear vinyl copy is the rarest version, being numbered out of 100.

As you can see, this one is numbered using a proper stamper. I wonder what happened to the stamper in the years that followed so that it wasn't around when the label wanted to stamp the Hope Con 7"s?

Tenfold was a band that had Neal & Luke from In My Eyes in before they were in In My Eyes. They had another 7" on Stand Hard Records that I still never got around to picking up for some reason. Ah well. It's only been 14 years. I'm sure I'll get around to it one day.

3 comments:

Mike said...

Man, I used to obsess about B9 releases. I kept an Excel spreadsheet that contained all the different pressings, and I would use it as a checklist. As time went on, I lost interest in trying to collect them all. It has been years since I picked up any of their older releases...

xfarsidex said...

$6.50 is what this usually goes for. Tre had the Deathwish/label dude-bonus.

Chris Wrenn said...

The Hope Con 7" was numbered like that because the whole theme at the time was designed to look like files (hence "file.03" and we thought that numbering them like dates in a file might be more interesting than just straight numbering them...