Thursday, 2 October 2014

War Zone 'L.E.S.C.' Aborted Pressing

It's not very often you get a chance to own a record like this. So when the chance comes along, you have to take it.

What you are looking it is the 'aborted' press of the War Zone 'Lower East Side Crew e.p.'. It's not 'officially' known as the aborted press, but that is how it has become known among the die hard Rev collectors. I'm not exactly sure of the story behind this either. It's just one of those variants that the world only really became aware of in the internet age. Prior to that, I imagine that the only people who saw them probably thought that they were copies that some fool had ruined with an orange marker! I guess the theory is that the first few copies made had the wrong colour (white) labels; a mistake that was quickly spotted and corrected, with the remainder of the copies being pressed having the blue labels. Like I said, that's just a theory. But maybe that's not what happened at all. Perhaps there was just a small batch of white labels mixed in the blue. Or perhaps the plant ran out of blue labels towards the end of the run and used white. I guess the story doesn't really matter. The point is that there aren't many. There are either 41 or 42, depending on which of Rev's two discographies you are looking at. The text version states:

There was 41 copies of the initial pressing that come with white paper labels rather than blue and have the 'Warzone' logo on the sleeve colored in with orange magic marker. Besides the normal lyric sheet, a number of the first press come with one of two fold out inserts that have a photo of a band member on either side.

Note the total absence of the Revelation logo on this record. The logo hadn't been designed at this point in time.

As the discography says, a number of the first press come with one of two fold out inserts that have a photo of a band member on either side. This has one of those inserts, which I don't remember ever seeing before. It also comes with the standard lyric sheet, and a War Zone sticker too. There's a lot of paper with this record for sure.

And here's everything all in one shot:

This also represents a different kind of record for me, in terms of being the most expensive record I have ever bought. I'm not going to tell you how much I paid, but it beat my previous record by $200. And what's more interesting, I have owned this now for precisely one week, yet today I packed it up in a mailer and tomorrow I will be mailing it to someone else. Yup, I decided to trade it to someone who needs and wants it more than I do. I hope he's happy when he receives it. I'm pretty sure I will be when my side of the deal shows up. I imagine that you're intrigued as to what I've given this up for. All will be revealed in the near future...

1 comment:

massivewaste said...

Congratulations. That is awesome. Interested to see what you traded it for. Cool story anyway.