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MONO
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STEREO
3. release timeline
4. foreign exchange
POST-1984
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mono release cheatsheet
(click to skip down to more detail)
June 1957
July 1957
1958
1958/9
1959/60
mid-1960s
By the first week
of December 1956, Sonny Rollins had given Prestige Records enough sessions — seven LPs’ worth in the previous twelve months alone — to satisfy his contract with the label. He capped the year by leading a session for Blue Note (Sonny Rollins Vol. 1) as the first act in an intentional stretch of freelance exploration.
He was, however, still on sideman duty in the Max Roach Quintet, which in early 1957 secured a three-week stint at Jazz City in Los Angeles. The group traveled west and, on March 1st, stepped into a limelight vacated by Contemporary leaders Hampton Hawes and Lennie Niehaus the night before.⁽¹⁾
Picturing now the tableau of west coast jazzheads there to witness New York’s finest, it’s not surprising that Sonny intersected with Lester Koenig. In the Contemporary chieftan, an artist yearning for freedom found a patron willing to facilitate it.
He left the choice of material completely to me. I was out West, and I had these Western songs in mind. Just being there was enough to stimulate the romance of the Wild West for me…
I said, “How about Western themes?" He said, “Great.”
Sonny Rollins ⁽²⁾
The session came together quickly, with Poll Winners Shelly Manne and Ray Brown called in to be sidemen. Their prior club and studio bookings left only the wee hours free— so the session was scheduled for 3 AM on Thursday, March 7th.
Session times indicated in the recording contract.
Thursday morning arrived and the players put to tape one of the most peculiar and celebrated albums of the era. Its lasting popularity has sustained several generations of reissues, leaving us dozens of vinyl deliveries by which to trace changing variables over time.
So, for the purposes of this site, Way Out West provides excellent checkpoints for deconstructing Contemporary history using runouts, design, pressing rings, jacket construction, zip codes, and all the rest.
Considering the scale of the thing, though, we need to separate mono and stereo into separate timelines to keep things coherent. Let’s start with MONO below. We’ll continue on Page 2 with STEREO (coming soon).
mono release timeline
the original US release:
June 1957
RED TEXT JACKET The initial release of C3530 was housed in a front-wrap tip-on jacket, with Gakubushi construction strip (on either top or bottom seam). The back liners were printed in 2-color and featured red artist text & a red tracklisting box.
‘TIGHT PADDING’ In two spots, layout padding was especially tight on the initial jacket design: Sonny’s liner photo and the front catalog number. These would be relieved and given more space on a redesign soon after release.
D1/D1 LACQUERS Inside the jacket was a pressing from RCA Hollywood, on canary yellow labels and imprinted with a ~69mm “deep groove” ring. Metal used for the first release came from D1/D1 lacquers cut at Capitol.
Mono Delivery 1
June 1957
Jacket:
tight padding & red text
Lacquers: D1 / D1
Mastering: Capitol
Plating & Pressing:
RCA Hollywood
July 1957:
revised D2/D2 mono lacquers
The D1/D1 pair is relatively rare compared to the similar age D2/D2 metal. Both lacquer pairs sport the eccentric lead-out typical of a Capitol cut prior to 1958, so at first blush one might think them tandem sets (or at least sonically comparable ones) which could both be considered “original.”
This July 1957 letter from Lester Koenig implies otherwise. Amidst other notes, he writes to Sonny Rollins that two enclosed copies of Way Out West are “made with revised masters, with improved quality.”
What revised cuts is he talking about? Contemporary’s in-house lathe was not operational by July 1957, so the revised lacquer set was cut at Capitol… meaning it would have eccentric lead-outs. The only possible answer here is D2/D2, as the later D3/D4 set carries concentric lead-outs typical of the Contemporary lathe.
So it appears the mono D2 pair was specifically cut in mid-1957 to improve sound quality over for the D1 plates, which were then retired.
side 1.
side 2.
Mono Delivery 2
summer 1957
Jacket:
tight padding & red text
Lacquers: D2 / D2
Mastering: Capitol
Plating & Pressing:
RCA Hollywood
PROMO copies, 1957-1958
(delivery 2 equivalent)
In Contemporary’s early LP years, dealers were provided complementary copies marked for in-store demonstration. These were standard pressings from the current run, so not necessarily “first off the press” or “original” or at all different from the latest retail customer copies. Thus we see the second-gen D2/D2 lacquer set sporting the 1957-era “Demo/Dealer” stamps.
These stamps were replaced with the pared-down “Sample Record” style in 1958. Way Out West’s jacket and metal remained unchanged to this point, so the latest runs were no different than back in July 1957. So the original tight-padding jacket design was now marked with the later 1958 stamps. We’ll see these Sample Record stamps again, on a subsequent jacket iteration.
1958 layout revision (“loose padding”)
The original jacket positioned the catalog number C3530 close to, flush with, or partially cropped by the open edge. This point of visual stress was ultimately relieved by a layout revision in 1958.
This was not printing/pasting variance; this second “loose padding” design employs a different crop of the artwork. Text remains overlaid as before, but the crop is moved right to equalize space across the art. If printing variance were to blame, we’d see spines 5mm off-center… which is wider than the spine itself. It’s pretty clear this new layout was a choice.
Print brightness seems adjusted as well, as the later “loose-padding” jackets look consistently brighter than the original. This is tough to trust on a computer screen, but when sampled across numerous examples, the change seems significant enough to signal intention.
On the back another crop/padding change was made. Sonny’s photo was assigned a new tight crop but otherwise left in position, which freed up additional padding for the caption below.
If the front change is too confusing or feels ambiguous, this photo crop is easily identifiable. The original 1957-58 jacket shows about an equal section of tie and tie knot; the later 1958-59 jacket crops the image just south of the knot.
Notice the red accents remain on this second jacket.
Mono Delivery 3
1958
Jacket
Loose Padding & red text
Lacquers: D2 / D2
Mastering: Capitol
Plating & Pressing
RCA Hollywood
1958 / 59 PROMO
(delivery 3 equivalent)
Timing for the “loose padding” design tweak isn’t clear, but some soft evidence comes via demo stamps. Earlier we saw original tight-padding jackets stamped with both 1957 “Demonstration” and 1958 “Sample” stamps; here we see a second-gen loose-padding jacket stamped with those same ’58 “Sample” stamps.
Which suggests the jacket design change came in 1958… though this theory rests on stamps for which the timing evidence is not precise.
1959 (?) design change:
Monochrome liners
Most Contemporary titles between 1955 and 1958 featured color accents on the liner notes, usually focused on the title and tracklisting box. It’s a well-known pattern that later reprints revised or removed these colors.
Way Out West was no exception, and its liners were soon translated into single-color monochrome. This C3530 jacket with black liners was, however, unusually short-lived. It was introduced in 1958 or 1959 and likely not seen past 1960.
Of curious note: these black-only liners again adjusted Sonny’s rear picture crop, opting closer to the original 6/57 “tight padding” layout. Meanwhile the front print adopted the “loose-padding” style. You can see the designers dialing in the layout step by step.
1957 'Tight Padding'
1958 'Loose Padding'
1958? 59? 'Mono liners'
1958 or early 1959:
D3/D4 cuts @ 8481 Melrose Pl.
Roughly simultaneous to the black-liners jacket reprint, Contemporary cut new mono lacquers for Way Out West. Cuts side 1/D3 and side 2/D4 made it to market, while Side 2/D3 seems to have been discarded somewhere in the production process.
These sides carried concentric lead-outs and were cut on the 8481 Melrose Place lathe, which broke ground in 1958. Both sides have the RCA Hollywood ‘H’ plating mark stamped at 2:30 or 3 o’clock (when viewing the lacquer string as 6 o’clock), which points to cutting and plating prior to spring 1959 (See Reading Runouts).
MONO Delivery 4
c. 1958 / 1959
Jacket:
C3530 w. black liners
Lacquers: D3 / D4
Mastering: Contemporary
(1958+)
Plating & Pressing:
RCA Hollywood
1959 or 1960:
M3530 ‘banner’ jacket
As designwork for new titles shifted to a hybrid “banner” style, older titles were slowly phased into the same scheme. To do so meant revising their original C3500/S7000 catalog numbers to M3500/S7500 (see Jacket Design).
The mono Way Out West received this translation around 1959 or 1960 — which we can deduce from the jackets’ Gakubushi construction, a manufacturing style phased out around 1960.
The new M3530 numbering made it only as far as the jacket; disc labels continued to carry the C3530 numbering.
1959 or 1960:
Side 1/D4 lacquer
A fresh lacquer was cut for side 1 (D4) in 1959 or 1960. This bears the “1950s small” RCA stamp style, which positions it in 1960 or earlier. Some expressions of this lacquer show NO Hollywood ‘H’ stamp, which would normally point to cutting/plating after early 1959. So we can bracket the cutting of this new lacquer (LKL-12-127-D4) in 1959-60. That this timing coincides with the Gakubushi jacket is nice and neat and adds a bit of support to this delivery arriving before 1961.
Some (probably later) pressing runs feature the RCA Hollywood ‘H’ plating stamp on side 1/D4 at 12 o’clock. Note this was the common placement of the H stamp for all lacquers processed at RCA after summer 1961 or so. However in this case the lacquer was clearly not stamped with the H, as some pressings exist without it.
Best guess, the H was stamped into the metal master or mothers after summer 1961 and any copies with the H stamp on side 1 come after that checkpoint.
Side 1/D4 with NO H stamp Consistent with 1959/60 lacquers
Side 1/D4 plus H STAMP @ 12 o'clock Added to 1961+ pressing runs?
MONO Delivery 5
c. early 60s
Jacket:
M3530 banner jacket
(LA46 code, Gakubushi)
Lacquer A: D4 / D4
Side 1 carries ‘H’ stamp on some copies. Likely indicates post-1961 pressing run.
Mastering: Contemporary
Plating & Pressing:
RCA Hollywood
mid-1960s:
D5 / D5 lacquers
Both sides were eventually re-cut in the mid-1960s. These new D5/D5 cuts show RCA “baby” stamps which point to cutting/plating between 1964-1968 or so (see Reading Runouts).
Keep in mind: Contemporary would take all its mono variants (of titles recorded in stereo) out of print in the late 1960s. I’d bet these D5/D5 lacquers were cut before that, probably in the 1964-66 timeframe. (Metal from these D5/D5 lacquers was sent to Sparton in Canada for their red-label mono pressing in the mid-late 60s.)
Aside from the fresh metal, the D5/D5 delivery was identical to the D4/D4 that preceded it. The jacket remained Gakubushi construction, which points to old-stock pre-1961 jackets finally put to use. The labels meanwhile continued to bear the C3530 catalog number which should technically have been retired back in 1959.
Side 1/D5 mid-1960s lacquer (RCA baby stamps 1964+)
Side 2/D5 mid-1960s lacquer (RCA baby stamps 1964+)
MONO Delivery 6
mid-1960s
Jacket:
M3530 banner jacket
(LA46 code, Gakubushi, likely old stock from pre-’61 manufacture)
Lacquers: D5 / D5
Mastering: Contemporary
Plating & Pressing:
RCA Hollywood
Subsequent jackets or M3530 labels?
It’s unclear if the M3530 jacket was reprinted with non-Gakubushi construction (after 1960) and/or with the LA69 postal code (anytime after 1962).* I’m also not sure if the title was ever given proper M3530 labels, but the C3530 still in use for the mid-late 60s D5/D5 run leaves me skeptical it was ever revised.
*The S7530 stereo jacket was, at some point in the mid-late 60s, reprinted with the 69 postal code; the hybrid mono/stereo nature of those banner design assets means the mono jacket could have been just as easily assembled from the same prints. However, it’s possible that the stereo Way Out West didn’t transition from Stereo Records S7017 branding to Contemporary S7530 until 1966 or later, meaning the mono title variant may have already been out of print by that point.
Sources
(1) Harrod, James. “JAZZ CITY PART EIGHT JANUARY - MARCH 1957 - Jazz Research.” Jazz Research, 8 Apr. 2016, jazzresearch.com/jazz-city-part-eight-january-march-1957/. Accessed 2024.
(2) Myers, Marc. “Interview: Sonny Rollins.” JazzWax, 6 Oct. 2009, www.jazzwax.com/2009/10/interview-sonny-rollins-part-1.html. Accessed 2024.
(3) “Good Time Ups Retail Price on Its LP’s.” The Billboard, vol. 68, no. 18, May 1956, p. 22. Google Books.