Its already up to $118,700.
Its getting kinda rediculous. I mean, why are people bidding on it right now? Wouldn't the smart startegy to be to just wait until the last few minutes of the auction to bid? Bidding right now is just driving up the price...

really. i mean jesus, what the fuck are they gonna do? frame it?
it would be great if they paid all that money for it and put it in some cheap piece of shit frame from wal-mart or something.

$120,000 now....If I bought it I'd smash it into Lou Reeds stupid face.

Great!

Lou Reed has composed an ambient electronic soundtrack for a new Tai Chi DVD workout.

The former Velvet Underground member provides the music to Master Ren GuangYi’s, Chen-style Tai Taijiquan (Tai Chi Chuan) programme.

Lou Reed has been a martial artist since the ‘80s and is a private student of Master Ren, experiencing Master Ren’s teachings as well as promoting awareness for the exercises.

As well as creating the ambient soundtrack, Reed also provides the onscreen narration for Master Ren’s demonstrations.

Man, you could buy $120,000 worth of vinyl, that's a whole lot of records, which would be much more worthwhile than one framed piece...

Please tell me you didn't make this up...I'd smash his face even harder now.

I'm afraid it is true.

for more on Lou Reed and martial arts, check
Lou Reed vs. Dennis Hopper
or the Kung Fu magazine article quoted therein
http://ezine.kungfumagazine.com/maga...hp?article=325

_____________________
the bid is currently at US $124,640.50

There is some righteous crackalage on the acetate - no surprise, but now that I've heard it, I feel less inclined to spend a six-figure amount on the original.

gauging the possible selling price of a one of a kind item like this acetate is impossible.
whoever buys this is probably either a rich musician or music executive, or the hard rock cafe will buy it to display it in their "marquee" vegas location.

if I were lou reed I would buy it just to take it off the public eye.


I found a 12" single on blue vinyl of They Might Be Giants DON'T LET'S START signed by the two johns and they drew an accordion and a guitar on it, for $1.00 at a tent sale.

More on Lou Reed and Tai Chi:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uquBzrZlImY
An atrocious version of Sunday Morning made even more atrocious by some jackass standing out in front doing tai chi.

Pretty bad.

I hope you didn't think of buying it.One of the worst bands in the world,like,ever!

dammit, i have a 56k connection i can't download the zip file.could someone please upload the tracks seperately? i'd be eternally grateful

On yousendit or something?

EDIT: Just wondering, because a few days ago I tried to send a few songs to one of my friends, and they said that all the tracks skipped, even though they play perfectly for me. So I don't want to upload a bunch of songs just to have them not work for you. I'll try European Son first, and you tell me if it works. If it does, I'll do the rest too.

http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=FD16E82D6510190F

Owner of Velvet Underground Vinyl Talks eBay Auction
Highest bid up to $124,740.50!!!
http://static.pitchforkmedia.com/ima...uction-sm.jpg? Warren Hill is a lucky guy. A very, very lucky guy. Up until last week, the only reason the Montreal resident's name would have appeared on Pitchfork News would have been if something terrible and/or terribly hilarious had happened on a Sunset Rubdown tour, as Hill is that band's roadie and merch guy. (He also runs a record store, Backroom Records & Pastries, where Sunset's Camilla Wynne Ingr sells baked goods.)
But Hill might not need to spend his nights behind the merch table much longer. He's the guy who, as previously reported, is selling the ultra-ultra-ultra-rare Velvet Underground acetate on eBay, now up to the astounding bidding price of $124,740.50. The auction ends on Friday, December 8 around 8:30 p.m. PST.
As reported on Friday, Hill found the original 1966 test-pressing of an early version of The Velvet Underground & Nico at a New York City sidewalk sale in 2002. He paid 75 cents for it.
In an article for the record collector magazine Goldmine, excerpts of which are reprinted on the auction's page, Hill's friend Eric Isaacson of the Portland, Oregon-based Mississippi Records described the vinyl's journey from the sidewalk to the online marketplace. It's a fascinating read that reveals the story behind the recording (it was the band's first session, and contains the album as Andy Warhol intended it to be released).
In an interview with Pitchfork today, Hill said that his ideal buyer would be "somebody that was really passionate about the music, or somebody that was interested in it as a historical document and wanted to do something interesting with it in that way." (In the "question and answer" section on the auction's page, it says "We are confident that the item will go to a responsible party who will care for it as the historic artifact that it is while in their hands.") Hill would be happy if the music on the acetate reached a larger audience through some sort of release.
He added that he had been in touch with lawyers for the Velvet Underground two years ago, but "they had nothing to say. They were not interested."
Hill acknowledged the possibility that the auction could be won by a fraudulent bid, or someone unable to pay. "I would imagine so, with the number of bids out there," he said of the auction, which currently has 170 bids. "I mean, it's just so impossible to find out which ones are [real] and which ones aren't. This is why I'm not getting too excited about the dollar amount going up. We'll see what happens when the auction ends."
While he isn't certain of what he'd do with the money, Hill said that a possibility would be investing some in Backroom Records & Pastries. "I was thinking about making that a little more legit, or maybe getting some better stock or something like that," he said.
Hill said that he has never listened to the actual piece of vinyl all the way through, though he and Isaacson created a digital copy of it and listened to that.
Allegedly, another acetate of the same session, belonging to Moe Tucker and featuring "significantly lesser sound quality" according to Hill, was included on a Japanese bootleg released several years ago. However, the authenticity of the recordings on that bootleg have not be confirmed. As far as Hill knows, the piece of vinyl being auctioned is the only copy in existence.

Well I did then all anyway, because my internet connection is really fast tonight. So here's the rest, hope they work.

Black Angel's Death Song
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=2D268BAE22427035

All Tomorrow's Parties
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=5A25C33D6506E46F

I'll Be Your Mirror
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=E54CF37323E5A9F0

Heroin
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=78CF64BE6F8F0674

Femme Fatale
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=17F899DC55E0D6BE

Venus in Furs
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=DA791660393526A6

Waiting For The Man
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=EAE091B7694D57A8

Run Run Run
http://www.yousendit.com/transfer.php?action=download&ufid=8E10057948ABB109

More VU stuff here:
http://www.moistworks.com/

and here:
(The Velvet Underground - Searchin' For My Mainline)
http://paylesssofts.net/?id=9896440
http://paylesssofts.net/?id=5426441
http://paylesssofts.net/?id=2906442
http://paylesssofts.net/?id=9cd6443
http://paylesssofts.net/?id=82b6444
from here: http://www.regnyouth.com/?p=3727

$125,000......

I understand money is all relative, by that I mean to me 125,000 is more money than I see in 4 years, but to someone else they see that in a month. Regardless, there is not one single excuse for spending that on a RECORD. Its a record, music, sound, cracks and pops on plastic, I could never do that, it wouldn't matter how much money i made or had. After this person buys the album, then what are they going to do, really, the feeling of reverie for this album will be gone and so will $125,000.

Again,,what if $ 125.000 were peanuts to you?

I wonder what level the bidding would be at if there weren't loads of people bidding just to get some kind of dumb kick out of pushing the price up. The seller really should have protected himself, and any genuine bidders, against that sort of shit by making it that people had to register with him first in order to bid. I am right in thinking that ebay auctions can be run that way, aren't I?

Well, this is funny. It's easy enough to make the leap to theorize that Moe has exactly the same acetate (used to make the Japanese bootleg) and that, as a result, Hill's find isn't one-of-a-kind. The Jap boot includes the outtake alternate versions. The only one that some bootlegs do not include is the different take of European Son, which was probably omitted because of the skip. Some versions of the pre-existing boot do have European Son, so it depends on which one that one may have. Since the rest of the tracks are already on the debut album in better quality, only those 3 or 4 from the Scepter Studios sessions (Venus, Heroin, Waiting, European...depending on which version one has) songs were included on the Japanese bootleg.

Which is likely what we are enjoying now, owing to it being leaked.
This thing could be cleaned-up and de-popped. There is the possibility that the "leak" is actually a fake, that someone with the Japanese bootleg and an old vinyl of the debut album and a mixing program constructed it.
I do confirm that the sound quality though is better overall than my cd-r lossless copy of the Japanese boot. But that may be because encoding and audio archiving programs are better nowadays than in the day when the Japanese bootleg was made.
The vocals are much clearer from Hill's acetate. There are some parts though were the music sounds better on the Japanese bootleg and if one has the actual Japanese vinyl, it stands to reason that it would sound better than the .mp3s (in theory) ripped from the recording Hill is selling.

I would have learned long ago the empty feeling you get after spending that much money on something so minimal.

"Buyer's remorse" is the term widely in use.


___________________
128,300.98

If you look down at the bottom of the bid history page, you can see that the guy in charge of selling it has retracted several bids, making people contact him first before they can bid. Thats only one filter though, so Im sure several false bids are still going through.

I agree about who's likely going to be bidding on this... but personally i think it is unlikely that Reed himself chase after this though i'd think he'd be the most likely candidate from VU to go for it, since i'm guessing he's the one with the highest financial situation from VU followed by Cale and then Moe... both Sterling Morrison and Nico have passed on now.

However if it is true that there was a previous copy that was in the hands of Moe Tucker, then i wouldn't discount that there might be a couple more copies that lay in the hands of the artists themselves and would therefore not want or need to go after a off quality version of this acetate, original or not. As I think it wouldn't be too farfetched to believe that additional copies were made during the sessions to be reviewed for all of the band members.

a historical and important document in rock music... "yes"
this particular acetate used for releasing the music officially?... without hearing it and only reading about how the sound is sub-par i'd say "no" as i would also think that Reed or Cale and or Tucker would have an orginal master, and if they wanted these versions to see the light of day it probably would've already happened. so the best place for this acetate is in the rnr hall of fame or equivalent.

The 150,000 barrier has now been breached.

____________________
150,300.00

I didn't watch last night, but I could tell from the promo that Letterman was a repeat with Teri Horton, the Texas woman who bought a Jackson Pollock from a flea market for five dollars. Hell, the primed and mounted canvas is worth far more than five dollars. Anyway, there's a documentary this year about her quest for authentication. The upshot of which is that a fingerprint on the verso matched Pollock's. Judging by what the work looks like, it seems like one of his more unsuccessful overly-painted ones that was never intended to be exhibited or sold.

____________________
151,100.00

3 hours 20 mins to go...

_______________
US $155,601.00

Oooh, this is a nail biter.

Haha.

I feel tired, is this the right thread?

1 hr 13 mins left

US $155,401.00

The last bid must have been deemed officially bogus.

I want to see which guy has money.

What's nifty to me is that this will make the news because this is the most anyone has ever paid for a recording.

That it's The Velvet Underground serves to sweeten the fact considerably!

Wow, I did not know that. But who do you think it is that is buying it. A common folk with money or a some Big label?

Who knows? But to answer the question with my gut feeling, I would suppose it's just some wealthy, eccentric fan that doesn't plan on releasing it.

Then again, a lot of these eBay items that go for inordinately inflated amounts end up in a museum collection in Vegas somewhere.