MY NEWEST ENDEAVOR is writing a column for another blog! The blog is Sixties Music Secrets, an informative audio/visual blog with insight-filled conversations between knowledgeable, curious, and nostalgic readers regarding all things musical from the 1960s. The column is “The Avid Record Collector.”
In this column, I will look at records that were mass-produced in the 1960s and subsequently deleted from record company catalogs. There won’t be much about Elvis in this column. While several poor-selling soundtracks were deleted in the ’60s, few of them showed up as cut-outs.
Want to read a monthly column about LPs that could be found in the cut-out bins of US stores in the 1960s and ’70s?
That said, I will divulge a secret here: One of the first albums that I review will be an imported copy of an Elvis album that I found in the 3‑for-$1 section at my local Woolworths in 1967.
Another blog’s got me!
The first few columns will contain basic information for understanding the column, looking at how the cut-out craze took form in the late ’60s. Unlike my publications on Medium which recycle articles published on my blogs, the columns in The Avid Record Collector will be all-new material and will not appear on my blogs until the distant future!
If you want to read all my stuff plus other writers, you need to subscribe to Sixties Music Secrets. To subscribe, click here.
The first installment (“An Avid Record Collector’s Introduction”) has been published! To read it, click here.
FEATURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page is of the 1965 Cobra 427 that was used in the 1966 movie Spinout. This car was on display in the Hollywood Memorabilia Exhibit at the Hollywood Casino in Tunica, Mississippi, in 2011.
POSTSCRIPTUALLY, after the single Spinout started getting airplay in 1966, my nickname among a certain group was “Spinout Umphred,” as I was the only openly “out” Elvis fan in ninth grade in Kingston High School in Pennsylvania. Those were the days, heyna?
For more on The Avid Record Collector, click here.

Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)