It’s been exactly one year since Joe acquired his first record lathe and learned to cut records on it. In that time he’s gotten a few more lathes and has also taught me (Katie) how to cut records, and together we’ve made a lot of them. It’s been quite the journey so far. To honor the occasion I asked Joe some questions about all this, for your edification and our amusement. Enjoy!
Katie: When did you first find out about and get involved with lathe-cut records?
Joe: Well, I had my first record made in 2012. It was a 5” square record of my own music called Worry About Your Future. I was a fan of People in a Position to Know Records, and label owner Mike Dixon mentioned in an email that he was now making short run, lathe cut records. I had him first explain what they were, then hired him to make me 50 copies of Worry About Your Future that I funded through a Kickstarter campaign.
Skip ahead a few years and I’m running my own cassette label, This & That Tapes, and making zines for Joyful Noise Records’ bands Tall Tall Trees, Deerhoof, No Joy, and Sound of Ceres, and hear word that they’ve just hired Mike to make a monthly lathe record series for them. He and I reconnected, and it turns out that he’s spent the past decade purchasing old record lathes and mastering how to restore them.
After I had a few disastrous pandemic pressed record releases—one of which, a split I put out with Murder City Devils’ Spencer Moody and Dead Milkmen’s Joe Jack Talcum, took 13 months from the time I submitted it to the time I received the records—I thought it was time to take control of making my own records.
Katie: Mike is the one who taught you how to use a lathe, right? Tell us about what it was like to attend his Lathe Cut Camp!
Joe: He sure was! Mike runs this great weekend-long lathe cutting camp from his studio in Tucson, Arizona. I learned about the history of lathes, what type of machines are in use today, how to use the most popular Presto 6N lathes, and a lot about lathe maintenance and best practices. I flew home from that weekend with my own Presto 6DSP, “The Original Presto Record Lathe.”
Joe with his Presto 6D on its first night at home with us
Mine’s likely from ~1937-1939, and was used in a radio station to record and replay news broadcasts on 16” records. It’s a real beast, you should have seen me wrestling it through the airport on my way back home to Philly! When I got home, I rebuilt the lathe with your help, and the help of Antiquated Future’s Joshua James Amberson, who happened to be staying with us for a few days. Little did we know that in just a year’s time there’d be THREE lathes in this studio!
Katie: I remember that weekend well. It was the start of our lathe adventure! Tell us a little about the other lathes you use.
Joe: Oh boy, you shouldn’t have gotten me started, I can talk about them all day. In March of this year we got our second lathe, a Rek-O-Kut Challenger from ~1947. As you know, we colloquially call that the “Katie Lathe” since that’s the one you use when making records. The ROK is more modern and more compact, probably used to cut test records in studios and for home use. That was was also restored by Mike Dixon, and has a great backstory: it was bought from Sam Phillips Jr., son of Sun Records founder. We don’t know exactly how it was used, but we know it was in his Sun Studios in Memphis in the 60’s, so who knows whose records have been cut on this machine! The third lathe we have is what’s referred to as a “franken-lathe” and it’s my first restoration project: the overhead system is from a 1939 Rek-O-Kut we bought from a nice guy in Pittsburgh, and the original amp and body are from a different ROK Challenger we bought from the RCA Victor headquarters in Camden, NJ. When we went to pick it up, we could hardly believe where we were, but there was a huge stained glass image of Nipper, the dog listening to the gramophone! This one I’m building to be ultra portable to we can cut records on the road, directly from people’s cell phones.
Katie: Once you trained me up on how to cut records we were off and running. We’ve put out a bunch of interesting stuff in the last year. Which projects were the most exciting for you to work on?
Joe: Gosh, it’s hard to pick just one. Here are some of the highlights: in January, we put out a book of my poetry accompanied by a record shaped like a leaf called Dark Nature. I recently put out the self-titled debut album from a jazz supergroup called The Blind Seekers which is phenomenal. But my absolute favorites are the really strange projects, the thing you just couldn’t do with traditional record pressing, like a clear 6” record titled Three Minutes of Philadelphia Gas Works Working Outside My Home Studio, And The Guys Are Doing TV Impersonations which is exactly what it sounds like. And Cats on My Mind, a song I wrote with my friend Chris Baldys to accompany the launch party for your book Cat Party, which we cut onto cat-head-shaped records, complete with whiskers and ears and everything. We're just about to hit our 1,000th record cut, and we’ve had 22 different record release projects in this year alone. It’s so magical to have an idea and then be holding a record of that idea soon afterwards.
Spencer Moody cutting live records with us this summer
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