Vulcan - Meet Your Ghost (1978)

Vulcan, aka Lyle Steece, of Spencer, Iowa, US, recorded some stuff, made an album, and only sold it through one retail store. Guess whose retail store it was? Ok, there were actually two different guys who once owned the retail store, and I am the second one, but I can still authenticate the album by my personal association with the artist.

This album has been extensively bootlegged on the Internet (run a little Google search and see), but legitimate copies rarely made it much beyond Spencer, Iowa, and there aren't many of those.

How can you tell a boot from the original, I hear you asking? After all, if nobody's ever SEEN a copy, and the catalogs don't include anything about it, what's there to look for? Well, the first thing to look for is whether or not it's sealed. Lyle couldn't afford shrinkwrapping. The second thing to look at is the label, intentionally not produced here. Lyle also couldn't afford labels. He produced his own with a typewriter and a photocopier, and meticulously "whited-out" several spots on every label, having changed his mind about some wording after photocopying them. Then he pasted them to the records. Additionally, the original label lists a slightly different track list from the cover for side two (the cover is correct, except in referring to Meet Your Ghost as "Title Track").

Meet Your Ghost covers come in several states (ALL marked "a re-issue"-Lyle got a little mixed up over what "reissue" meant): the Original, the Pasteover Version (being offered here), and a later re-issued re-issue (that one's easy; it has a professionally printed label). Legitimate "second state" Meet Your Ghosts will feature a rubber hand-stamp at the bottom of the back graphic, which says "P.O. Box 5221". Boots incorporate that address (if they use it at all) as another line of printing rather than as a rubber handstamp. The paste-over portion of the cover (visible in the photo of the back) features a photo of Vulcan which he apparently prefers to the photo originally used. It carefully obscures an earlier photo of the artist, as well as two statements: "Dedicated to Jimi Hendrix", and "Produced By L.J. Silver".

So, if no legitimate copies of this album come shrinkwrapped, how do we know that the copy being offered here is unplayed? Well, due to the hand-produced nature of the label, Lyle forgot to punch out the spindle hole on this one; it appears as photocopied circle, right where the spindle hole belongs. The lucky winner of this item, should there be one, gets to punch out that hole if they want to play the record. Nobody's done that yet.

Am I suggesting that this is investment grade material? After all, I've priced it a lot higher than most of my other records....This little baby is full of mysteries....like why does it say copyrighted 1982 on the cover, and 1985 on the label? Who is the girl on the cover? Who else played on the record? What kind of record is it, anyway (it's Hendrix-like, in a sort of Iowa way)? How many copies of the record does the guy who owned the store before me have? Who knew anybody from Iowa ever recorded any psychedelic music?

No, I really wouldn't expect someone who is just reading about this artist for the first time to be awfully interested in this item. But if you are a bootlegger, you NEED this reference copy of this record. You might need a copy of it if you are from Iowa. If you happen to know a lot about privately produced psyche rock records from the Midwest, you should probably feel comfortable with the authenticity of this item. If you are Lyle himself, I am sorry, buddy-it's time for me to cash in and I'm afraid the price has risen a little. (taken from a 2004 eBay auction)
"...a monster private psych LP from Iowa. Recorded in 1978, Vulcan is Lyle Steece, and this is his one-man-against-the-universe-rock-album. Dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, this features real primitive basement-psych guitar rock that is outrageously fucked, inspirational, distortion-overloaded and massively mindblowing. Of course, others just say it's dull and poorly played." (BUY IT @ ForcedExposure)

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Vulcan - Noname