How much would you pay for a record you just had to own? The world of ultra-collectible and ultra-expensive records is a strange and murky place.
On July 18, 1953, an 18-year-old truck driver dropped into Sun Records in Memphis to record a song for his mother. It was to be a birthday present. He recorded a version of a 1948 song called “My Happiness.” The B-side was a track entitled “That’s When Your Heartache Begins.” It was a one-copy-only 10-inch, 78 RPM acetate.
That trucker’s name was Elvis Presley. This record, which cost him four dollars to make, is where the legend of the King started. It’s the “big bang” of rock ’n’ roll.
No one is really sure what happened to the record after that. It appeared to have been acquired by someone who kept it in a bank vault. But we know where it is now. Jack White bought it at auction for $300,000 in January 2015. He’s since digitized it and released it for everyone.
When the Beatles released The White Album, each copy had its own serial number. The first four went to members of the Beatles. Ringo got number 0000001. He kept it safe until December 2015, when he auctioned it for charity for $790,000.
We can go higher. There’s a one-off recording of Bob Dylan singing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He recorded it with producer T-Bone Burnett in March 2021 as a 60th-anniversary commemoration of the original recording, which came out in 1962. It was pressed onto a special playable disc—not of vinyl, but aluminum. It was then sold at auction for $1.8 million in 2022.
But that’s still not the most expensive record of all time. That honour goes to a compact disc that was recorded over six years. And when it was released, a whole weird series of events was kicked off. It involved criminals, lawsuits, and a seizure by the U.S. government.
This is episode 61 of Uncharted: Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. This is the story of the great Once Upon a Time in Shaolin caper.
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