The following is an account of what someone purchased four years ago at a stoop sale in Chelsea, for 75 cents:
"In September of 2002 Warren Hill of Montreal Canada was perusing a box of records at a Chelsea, New York street sale when he happened upon a brittle 12" piece of acetone-covered aluminum with the words "Velvet Underground. 4-25-66. Att N. Dolph" written on the label. He purchased the three records for 75 cents each.
We cued it up and were stunned -- the first song was not "Sunday Morning" as on the "Velvet Underground & Nico" Verve LP, but rather it was "European Son"- the song that is last on that LP, and it was a version neither of us had ever heard before!
The next few days found us scrambling for clues and information about what to make of this find; calling every record collector/historian we knew and reading everything we could find concerning the early recordings of the VU. We pieced together that this was probably a surviving copy of the legendary Scepter studios recordings which had been regarded as lost (hence the epic moniker "the lost scepter studios recordings" applied to these unheard sessions over the years). The recording is comprised of the primitive first "finished" version of the LP that Andy Warhol had shopped to Columbia as a ready-to-release debut album by his protege collective "The Velvet Underground".
This acetate, which is possibly the only surviving copy, represents the first Velvet Underground album as Andy Warhol intended it to be released."
We will now stop at every stoop sale we pass in this city. And you've got one day left before this record is going, going, gone...bid away! Yep, it's on eBay, where you can read the rest of the story.
As of now, the most valuable record ever is the copy of Double Fantasy signed by John Lennon for Mark Chapman, who gunned down Lennon hours later. That went for $464,000. The second most expensive record is in the hands of Paul McCartney, who purchased the one-off acetate of The Beatles' first recordings from 1958 for an unknown amount (but it was estimated at just under $200,000) in the 1980s. The bidding for the Velvet album is up to $145,978, just under what Hendrix's guitar went for at the Christie's auction.
