With the vinyl collection increasing steadily and continuously, erroneous or defective copies of official releases have gradually accumulated over the years in my collectible archives. As summarized
here, such flaws range from tiny careless typos on record labels, sleeves and Obi-strips, to one-of-a-kind production errors like
a lyric sheet mistakenly used for making the inner sleeve for Disc One of
THE RIVER LP. Although
BORN IN THE U.S.A. and its associated vinyl releases have never been my prime target of hunting and collecting, I own two such examples for this album. Shown here is a U.S. copy with the record labels that are incorrectly aligned to the vinyl disc.
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Disc can be set on a turntable and played normally. This error results from wrongly processed paper labels because the center hole has to be punched out before vinyl pressing. |
Off-centered labels are rarer than labels with typos, since generally, the latter circulate in quantities, for example, of more than hundreds or thousands, especially when such errors remain uncorrected. Long widely known are misprints of the
BORN TO RUN U.S. and
U.K. album credits (note that the
U.K. issues have not been corrected) and the
disc 2 track lineup found on the inner sleeve of
THE RIVER released in
Holland and a few other countries like
Brazil (pictured
here). A recent stand out example came from the 2011
Record Store Day campaign 10" EP
Gotta Get That Feeling /
Racing In The Sreet ('78) (
Columbia 88697 87461 1) which has not been withdrawn or spell-corrected probably because of the limited run.
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The vinyl disc is a later pressing with no MASTERDISK stamp/RL hand-etchings (left). Because of the mis-alignment, part of the run-off grooves is pressed on the paper label but not on the wax directly (right). |
Usually, the center hole is punched out of a bundle of paper labels designed for each side, before they are set on a pressing machine and pressed on a hot vinyl clump by a pair of stampers. So, if something wrong happens during the processing of paper label-print outs, such a flawed batch must be discarded as a whole to avoid faulty disc production, or in the case if error-bearing labels are indeed used for
vinyl pressing, the defective
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Mis-folding on the bottom side of the inner bag (left). The two bags also differ in surface gloss and color tone, which is not considered as error. Not sure if the difference is print factory-specific (i.e., pressing plant-specific) or pressing phase-specific (i.e., early or late copies). Most copies of the blue & white sticker LP (= early pressings) in my possession are associated with the rather matte surface/lighter blue sleeve (right). |
discs should be destroyed even if they are
played normally. This copy must have somehow escaped from disposal
facilities even though the production error is evident and easily
recognized by the appearance. It is noteworthy that not only
Side One, but also
Side Two suffer from the mis-alignment, which (I think) makes it further rarer.
And just for the record. There is yet another sort of error associated with this copy. The inner record sleeve looks a little different from the normal U.S. version due to a mis-fold along the bottom side, which is apparent if you compare the opening side between the two bags (note the white space expansion). Maybe not worth mentioning though.
— To be continued.
They should have fit properly, as the die-cut center holes since about 1972-73 stood at 0.289" diameter for LP labels for the Pitman, NJ plant. How they veered so far is another story in and of itself.
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