Fred McDowell, 1st edition.

Dick Pennington agreed to become our third partner and finance the first release of our independent record company when Tom played him the Fred McDowell tapes I’d recorded at the Village Gaslight. Tom planned the 9 tracks he wanted on the record (Dick and I sure didn’t know enough about the country blues) and he and I went into a 14 hour marathon editing session to put everything in shape. It was a tough session since we were trying to edit each LP side like a seamless live performance. The end results were a little funky, but we thought the effect worked. And remember, the original recording was one track, monophonic; there were no separate tracks for musicians, vocals, and audience to fudge with at all. And the WKCR engineering board was a radio console, no equalization, or any sophistication for record editing.

Tom did a lot of the hard work of figuring out the manufacturing. That meant he got the name of a one stop shop down the highway from us (Viewlex Corporation, owner of Buddah Records, in Happauge, New York) who would take care of acetate mastering, vinyl pressing, jacket and label printing, and shrink wrapping. They patiently walked us through all the preparations and we got together the elements. At the time it didn’t occur to us that we’d end up with crappy printing and crappier pressings. But, then again, that’s the blues, or at least, it was at Oblivion in 1972.

Tom had a color photograph of Fred performing for the cover. He wrote the fairly cliched blues liner notes you can read above (or here) that gave the listener a quick McDowell history. I bought a book about graphics, convinced a couple of people to set the type for the jacket (a difficult process requiring expensive, rare equipment), and laid out the whole thing on a breadboard on my living room couch, as you can plainly see by the unevenness of much of the text. Our friend Lisa Lenovitz designed the Oblivion logo, and we got fine print inspiration from Tom’s love of roots pioneer (and a McDowell label) Arhoolie Records.

The youthful anarchic side of Tom took particular joy in the small details that flowed from naming the label Oblivion Records. He researched all the Long Island post office boxes and found that Roslyn Heights could give us “Post Office Box X.” Which led perfectly to our catalog numbers which would have the prefix “OD.”

Boxes of “Mississippi Fred McDowell: Live in New York” were ready to be picked up in Tom’s car around April 1972. We had no idea where the whole thing would lead us, but, hey! “We’re in the record business,” a great place for young men in the 70s.