What Did We Learn?

Mark Ryan from Supertouch was selling some records on eBay recently. As you would probably expect, he had a lot of NYHC classics. There were however only really two things that really caught my attention. One was a test press of the Revelation Records NYHC The Way It Is in the original packaging it was sent to him in and including a hand written note from Jordan. The thing is, this was clearly going to go well over a grand, so I was out. The second item was a test of the Supertouch 'What Did We Learn' test press. I'd never seen one of these before or known of anyone who had one. So it seemed like a rare opportunity and I wanted it big time. I put the word out to Doug to leave it off of Vinyl Noize, then I sat and waited for a few days to see what would happen.

This didn't go too crazy. When the price started rising, it didn't accelerate too much, and with a couple of hours to go it was sitting on $202. However, when the auction was about 40 minutes from the end, I noticed that the auction listing stated that the seller did not ship to my country. Sometimes when ebay says this I can still bid, but other times eBay actually prevents me bidding, so I needed to know what would happen here. So I placed a test bid, and eBay blocked it. Fuck! I entered a panic state. After watching this for days I suddenly only had 40 minutes to come up with a plan. I emailed Mike and asked if he could bid for me. I know he usually responds pretty quickly, so I figured he would get back to me straight away and confirm he could help. He took 12 minutes though, and in that time my panic was growing. Whilst I waited, I started to think about who else I could potentially ask for help. Fortunately though, Mike was down to play the good samaritan, and asked how much I wanted him to bid. I hadn't really considered this at any point during the week. I was waiting to see where the price would go. With it sat at $202 with 30 minutes left, it was anyone's guess as to how high it might jump in the last few minutes. So I instructed Mike to bid $666. I really didn't want to pay anywhere near that much, but I expected it jump significantly in the past few seconds, and I figured that amount should be enough to beat the opposition. So the bid was placed and I watched it end 'live', and much to my relief the price didn't move too much at all. In the end it stopped at $227 with Mike's bid taking first prize. Considering one of these has never sold before, I thought that was a pretty reasonable price, and if I was a drinker I probably would have opened a bottle of champagne at that point to celebrate.

So anyway, on to the record, which I now have in my possession. It comes in a plain paper sleeve, which isn't much to look at, so I pulled out my regular version of the 7" to make the photos more interesting:

Actually, the sleeve is slightly interesting after all. I asked Mike to ask the seller to 'write something cool' on the sleeve. I'm not sure that what he came up with fits the brief, but it definitely makes it more personal.

This now brings the 2013 test press count for 2013 to 24, and my Supertouch test press count to 4. Good numbers eh?