Collecting the British Invasion, from the Beatles to the Sex Pistols: An Interview with Stephen M. H. Braitman

hope to be working more with collectorsweekly.com, a site that is dedicated to collecting. here is a great article and interview with famed music appraiser steven m h braitman:

By Dean Schaffer

Stephen M. H. Braitman has had a lifelong love affair with music, and has more than 20,000 vinyl records to prove it. In this interview, he discusses the British Invasion from a collector’s perspective, and explores the evolution of the technology behind the tunes—from 78s to 45s to LPs, from mono to stereo to quadrophonic. Braitman, who is both a music appraiser and collector, can be reached via his website, MusicAppraisals.com.

I was a Hollywood kid. My father was a TV and radio editor in the San Fernando Valley, and he allowed me to do my first writing to review concerts and shows for the newspaper. By 16 I was going to the Troubadour every week and reviewing all the acts—Joni Mitchell, Poco, Neil Young, Pentangle, Tim Buckley, all of them. I had a lot of friends in high school who really appreciated my being able to take them to the clubs for free.

The Idle Race was Jeff Lynne's Beatles-influenced group before he joined the Move and Electric Light Orchestra. This German single is from 1967



But as a younger kid, I really hated rock ’n’ roll music and pop music, and I disliked the Beatles and all that. I have a younger sister who was a total Beatlemaniac. She started getting into the ’60s scene, but I was more influenced at that time by my father’s interest in classical music.

I was, however, interested in the phenomenon, and it was fun to see what was going on, even though I was a classical-music snob. I mostly listened to Romantic music, but also getting into the 20th century, the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg and Webern. I loved Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and George Gershwin.

I recall the first time I heard the Beatles song “We Can Work It Out”—that changed my whole idea about whether this music was really worth spending any time with. That song is rather complex in terms of harmonic structure, and that just set me off. I think that shows the influence of classical music on my tastes in pop music.

Please read he rest of this fascination and indepth q & a at www.collectorsweekly.com