Vilo Perry "Standing Room Only" Guinness GNS 36055 LP

$

20

Up for auction very rare Tax Scam Release

Vilo Perry ?– Standing Room Only                                      

In 1976, some record label executives discovered that it was possible to create an entire label as a subsidiary to the major label, and to write it off as a huge tax loss to help the “real” label remain profitable. The idea was that a large number of albums (for instance, Tiger Lily and Guinness released almost 100 records each in just under two years) would be on the new label, and the entire batch (ie, every copy of all of the records) would be listed as unsold. They would probably list something like 10,000 copies pressed of each record, even though it’s possible that they pressed up only a few hundred or so. The ones they pressed were never even attempted to be sold; they were sent as promos and dumped into warehouses with cutouts.

Where this gets even more interesting is that in order to create 100 albums in just over a year’s time, the labels had to dig up everything they had in the vaults: demos, albums that were intended to be released but were not, tapes that were purchased from other labels, re-releases of albums that they had released on real labels under different names, stuff that was not ready to be released yet, etc. Many of these are clearly not finished or not properly mastered. The album covers follow a bare bones principle: a simple cover photo and a white back cover with a minimal amount of info (song titles, label info, maybe credits, though many of those are missing and/or fake.)

Apparently whatever loophole they discovered was closed by 1978 or so, as every one of these labels existed only in the years 1976–1978 (although it is suspected that the legit label B.T. Puppy, run by the Tokens, released about a dozen or so albums purposely at a loss in the early ‘70s, as there are many albums on that label that are very very rare, and the official word is that the small releases were “contractually obligated,” whatever that really means.)

Obviously, every one of these labels was associated with a larger label, but nobody knows the actual connections, except in the case of the most famous tax scam label, Tiger Lily, which was a subsidiary of Roulette, run by Morris Levy, who is known to have had connections to the Genovese crime family. The other very large tax scam label is Guinness (and Dellwood, which is another name for the same label), which released about 100 albums. Other known tax- scam labels are Tomorrow, Tribute, Illusion, Rocking Horse, and Crazy Cajun, and a few more are suspected. There is also one called “Album World,” which pulled the neat trick of giving every release a different “label” name, though they all had catalogue numbers that started with AW and all had the Album World address on the back cover.