THE SHIRTS OFF THEIR BACKS: ROCK’n’ROLL NEVER FORGETS

Jason Sprinzen is flanked by his friend Carrie (left, holding a Beach Boys T-shirt) and appraiser Laura Woolley (holding a New Barbarians shirt). Displayed behind them is a Paul McCartney & Wings T-shirt. Sprinzen’s unique collection of 165 rare Showco-branded shirts has surprising value.

In 2007, Jason Sprinzen bought a Led Zeppelin T-shirt at Christie’s for $1,625 — pricey, but the garment had rarity on its side. It was part of a small run of Zeppelin T-shirts made by Showco (a pioneer in the world of arena-rock audio production) for its crew members and for the artists they served.

Today, the four-figure price feels like a steal: It sent Sprinzen on a passionate pursuit for now-valuable Showco shirts (more on that in a minute). Along the way, he’s become an authority on the subject: where they came from, what they look like, who wore them.

Appraiser Simeon Lipman (left) and Jason Sprinzen display the same Led Zeppelin T-shirt that once graced the cover of a Christie’s catalog. Sprinzen bought the T from Christie’s — and Lipman once worked in the Collectibles department at Christie’s.

I got a look at Sprinzen’s collection at Antiques Roadshow‘s New York event in August 2014 and recently followed up with him. Clearly, his collecting niche is as tightly focused as a hobby can be, and it’s populated by relatively few serious collectors. These factors made it easy for Sprinzen, during his first few years as a Showco hunter, to acquire worthy pieces at bargain prices.

Among his early finds: a Showco T-shirt originally owned by Ronnie Van Zant, the ill-fated lead singer of Lynyrd Skynrd. (Van Zant and two other members of the band died in a 1977 plane crash. Lynyrd Skynyrd later re-formed, with Ronnie’s younger brother Johnny Van Zant as lead vocalist, and continues to tour today; see http://lynyrdskynyrd.com.)

If there’s a holy grail in this hobby, the Ronnie Van Zant shirt is a major contender. “I purchased it a few years back from Joe Barnes, who was the second roadie hired in 1973 to work for Lynyrd Skynyrd,” Sprinzen says. “This was Ronnie’s favorite shirt. If you do a search [online], you’ll see him wearing it on and off stage more than any other he owned.”

THE COLLECTION: When I met Sprinzen, he had 163 other Showco T-shirts besides the Zeppelin and Van Zant rarities. Since then, he has added a half-dozen more. “In my lifetime, I’ll never be able to collect every one that was ever produced,” he says (see “The Showco T-Shirt Universe” below). “In a way that’s unfortunate. However, it’s the hunt — worldwide — to uncover the undocumented examples that does it for me.”

His hobby has inspired him to write a book that will depict and describe every piece in his collection. He’s calling it Showco: The Book/10,000 Nights on the Road, and he’s given it a Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/ShowcoTheBook) to keep fellow collectors informed.

THE PERFORMERS: Showco T-shirts, Sprinzen said, “were never made available commercially” — an important point. It means not only that there was a small run, but that virtually every one he owns likely was “there at a concert.” If they could tell stories, music fans would listen. Consider the names on the T-shirts in Sprinzen’s stash:

• Music legends Paul McCartney & Wings, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, and the Who, Eric Clapton, and Electric Light Orchestra.

• Chart-topping family acts the Bee Gees, the Jacksons, and the Osmonds.

• Soft-rock stars Bread, the Carpenters, and James Taylor

• Mainstream pop/rock artists David Bowie, Jackson Browne, Steve Miller, and Linda Ronstadt.

• Hard-edged rockers Black Sabbath, Boston, Alice Cooper, and Van Halen.

• A little bit of country (Willie Nelson) and some funk-rock (Lionel Richie’s band The Commodores).

THE APPRAISAL: At Antiques Roadshow, appraisers Laura Woolley, Grant Zahajko, and Simeon Lipman were excited by Sprinzen’s rock’n’roll treasures. The key to the collection, they agreed: a disciplined approach. As Sprinzen pointed out, “It’s very focused — Showco shirts only — and covers the years 1970–1981.”

Woolley drove home that point. “By putting all those ‘eggs in a basket,’” she said, “his hobby turned into a creative — and valuable — collection.”

How valuable? Many of them would sell for $200–$300 at auction today; others would push well beyond that. And those rare Led Zeppelin and Ronnie Van Zant shirts? They’d bring several thousand dollars each.

Woolley’s final assessment: an estimate of $8,000 combined for the Zeppelin and Van Zant shirts, and around $400 each for the other 163 T-shirts. Do the math, and the grand total is $73,200.

“That’s crazy,” said Sprinzen, himself a musician who has played guitar for many years. “I’ve never really thought about the value of the whole collection.”

HOW MANY Ts?: So how big is the universe of Showco T-shirts? “The exact total of how many different T-shirts were made isn’t known, and may never be known,” Sprinzen says. “While they were being made from 1970–1985, no one— meaning the manufacturer and the Showco employees — ever documented the number produced. To them, they were just really nice quality and comfortable work shirts. Who would have thought they’d take on this ‘iconic’ status?”

“To make a long story short,” he continues, “I have documented 253 examples — ones I personally own and ones I have seen in the collections of Showco alumni. My educated guess? There are perhaps more than 300–350 different examples.”

Yet he also points out that the shirts “were sometimes made in an infinite color combination, depending on how big and how long a tour may have been.” That fact makes it near-impossible to pinpoint the size of the Showco T-shirt universe. But he’ll keep searching, using a variety of sources. “I’ve bought some shirts on eBay,” he says, “and sometimes I get them directly from roadies.”

ABOUT SHOWCO: Showco, launched near Dallas in 1970, provided audio services at arena-sized concerts. Co-founder Rusty Brutsche once described the company’s mission as such: “We were one of the first to realize the amount and scale of equipment that the major arena concerts required. Jack [Maxson] was a recording engineer and I was a musician. We learned that most public address systems were built for the amplification of a single announcer over crowd noise. The dynamics of live music and the power required to generate the sounds we hear at concerts today were almost unthinkable at that time.”

So if you attended concerts in the 1970s and 1980s, you likely experienced Showco sound. Now… you need the T.

BYE-BYE, “AMERICAN PIE” LYRICS

It may be the most analyzed song in pop music history: Don McLean’s “American Pie.” From the time it was released in 1971, fans and media alike began trying to decipher the 8-minute, 29-second pop masterpiece.

By April 7, 2015, any mysteries surrounding the long and winding lyrics should disappear. That’s when McLean’s original manuscript goes up for auction at Christie’s in New York. The 16-page draft — 237 handwritten and 26 typewritten lines (complete with notes, edits, and deletions) — is expected to reel in $1.5 million. And fans of the song will find out for sure what it all means: “The writing and the lyrics will divulge everything there is to divulge,” McLean told Reuters.

From the beginning, McLean acknowledged that Buddy Holly’s death was the springboard for “American Pie.” Early in the song, he took us back to the winter morning in 1959 when, as a young paperboy, the shocking headline jolted him: Buddy Holly, his musical idol, had died in a plane crash along with fellow pop stars Ritchie Valens and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson.

       February made me shiver/With every paper I delivered
       Bad news on the doorstep/I couldn’t take one more step
       I can’t remember if I cried/When I read about his widowed bride
       But something touched me deep inside/The day the music died.

Pictured: 1972 publicity photo of Don McLean.

Otherwise, he left “American Pie” shrouded in mystery, even as listeners probed, examined, and chewed on it. Over four decades, though, all that probing and chewing has made collective sense of the 872-word song. One of many lengthy analyses on the Internet appears at a website called  www.UnderstandingAmericanPie.com. Its creator, Jim Fan, reviews the lyrics verse by verse, line by line, and offers this summary: “McLean was clearly relating a defining moment in the American experience — something had been lost, and we knew it.”

Holly’s death, for McLean, marked the beginning of that loss. As the new decade unraveled, the social climate in America “was changing radically,” as Jim Fan wrote, “passing from the optimism and conformity of the 1950s and early 1960s to the rejection of these values by the various political and social movements of the middle and late 1960s.”

Buddy Holly’s death was the inspiration behind “American Pie.” Don McLean grew up during the jukebox and sock-hop days of the 1950s, when Holly songs like “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” and “Words of Love” were part of any teen’s soundtrack.

So as he raced through the imagistic verses of “American Pie,” McLean mourned the nation’s fading idealism. His references, as countless analysts have noted, were heavy on pop culture. Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan are there (“While the King was looking down/The jester stole his thorny crown”), and so are Beatles, multiple times (“The quartet practiced in the dark” and, later, “The sergeants played a marching tune”). The Byrds also appear (“Eight miles high and falling fast”), and the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger is supposedly “Jack Flash,” who “sat on a candlestick, ‘cause fire is the devil’s only friend.”

McLean also uses a football field, speculators have written, to symbolize the battles between the establishment and all kinds of champions of change. Back to Jim Fan: “As the 1960s revolution gathered momentum, the youth movement itself also gathered more players, as the more organized and pragmatic unity of the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left … began fragmenting into the Women’s Rights, Black Power, and Antiwar and Counterculture movements,” among others.

When McLean’s “American Pie” manuscript details circulate, they’ll no doubt corroborate these and other widely held interpretations. For now, McLean is at least painting broad strokes. He posted this personal note at his website in February 2015:

McLean was the cover boy for the May 1973 issue of UK magazine Zigzag.

“For more than 40 years I have rambled around every state of the union and many, many countries of the world. My primary interests in life have been America, singing, songwriting, and the English language. I love the English language as much as anything in life, and words really do mean something.

 “I thought it would be interesting as I reach age 70 [Oct. 2] to release this work product on the song ‘American Pie’ so that anyone who might be interested will learn that this song was not a parlor game. It was an indescribable photograph of America that I tried to capture in words and music and then was fortunate enough, through the help of others, to make a successful recording.

“I would say to young songwriters who are starting out to immerse yourself in beautiful music and beautiful lyrics and think about every word you say in a song.”

So… will McLean’s “American Pie” manuscript reach $1.5 million? If it even comes close, it’ll be in good company. Consider these prices paid for lyric manuscripts of iconic pop songs in recent years:

• $2.045 million for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” lyrics, written on four notebook pages. (Sotheby’s, 2014)

• $1.203 million for John Lennon’s “A Day in the Life” lyric, a single page. Paul McCartney’s middle section (“Woke up, got out of bed…”) was not included. ( Sotheby’s, 2010)

* $1 million for Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” one- page lyric. (Cooper Owen in London, 2005)

• $833,653 for Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” one-pager. (Christie’s, 2008)

• $485,000 for Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” lyrics, a two-page document. (Sotheby’s, 2014)

Collectors of important pop culture artifacts clearly will open their wallets for historical, one-of-a-kind items. Here’s hoping that whoever winds up with “American Pie” will share the backstory.

• • • • • • •

 

BASEBALL BONANZA: AN 1870s REVELATION

The “other” Wright Brothers as captured on 1871-72 cards: professional baseball pioneers and Boston Red Stockings stars Harry Wright (captain, outfielder, and occasional pitcher) and his brother George Wright (“short stop”). [Photos by Larry Canale]

Leila Dunbar has been serving as an Antiques Roadshow appraiser for 19 years and has been a dealer, auction-house director, and auctioneer for nearly three decades. The daughter of a salvage-yard owner in Maynard, Mass., she grew up around antique and collectible “stuff,” got involved in the family business as a teen and while in college, and went on to serve around 10 years at Sotheby’s coordinating major sports and entertainment auctions.

But Dunbar had never seen anything like the 1871-72 Boston Red Stockings baseball cards that landed on her table during Antiques Roadshow‘s stop in New York on Aug. 9. Dunbar appraised the cards along with several related artifacts at a cool $1 million.

It’s a monumental find—the biggest sports item, dollar-wise, ever to get taped for television at an Antiques Roadshow event—and a reminder that even when you think you’ve seen everything, an undiscovered relic can turn up. “No one could have ever expected that something like this would exist,” Dunbar says, “but I have found that even today, rarities are being discovered. That is the beauty of Antiques Roadshow.”

The million-dollar appraisal figure, she emphasizes, is based on insurance value, rather than auction or retail estimates. “We determined an insurance value because the guest has no intention of selling,” Dunbar explains. “She  wants to keep the archive in the family. The  archive was valued as one group because, given the provenance, the total value is greater than the individual parts. It is unique.”

The 1870s stash centered on 12 paper-thin cards hand-cut — though not very well — from scorecards published by Mort Rogers, a former player. One of them is a collage of players — “The Boston 11.” The other 11 cards of are single-player issues featuring a sepia-toned image topped by a banner reading “Photographic Card.” (Mort Rogers’ name originally appeared above those words.)

The lot also included an album that housed the cards; the earliest known cabinet card of Albert G. Spalding; a game pass; and a handwritten letter.

The latter document may have the most value: It includes notes and signatures from future Hall of Famers Spalding, Harry Wright, and George Wright, among other players. The double-sided letter’s content involves the meals the players were getting while on the road playing in Washington. Apparently, it wasn’t as inviting as the meals they were used to at their Boston-area boardinghouse, run by Mrs. Parker. Harry Wright wrote: “I am just going up stairs to supper and feel awful hungry but do not expect much, poor meals here. Too hungry to say more.” Spalding: “‘Would that we were home again.’ My sentiments have been expressed in the above paragraphs….”

Sports appraiser Leila Dunbar and Antiques Roadshow supervising producer Sam Farrell flank the owner of a collection of virtually unknown 1870s baseball cards and related memorabilia.

Dunbar was visibly wowed by the find, as were her fellow sports memorabilia appraisers at Antiques Roadshow. The owner of the collection (her name was withheld) was, naturally, excited as well, but also surprisingly calm considering the seven-figure valuation. She had been offered $5,000 for the collection a while back but declined. Smart move. She said she inherited the collection from her great-great-grandmother — the same woman who ran the Boston boardinghouse where the Red Stockings stayed in the early 1870s. Charlie Parker, her son, was the baseball fan who owned the season pass and collected (and trimmed and stashed) the player photographs from the scorecards.

The find, Dunbar says, “is extraordinary in that it combines some of the earliest known photo cards of the pioneers of pro baseball, the earliest photo cabinet card of Spalding, and a letter that shows the human side of the players — an intimate glimpse into their lives and their relationship with the owner of the boardinghouse, which really was their home during the season.”

The website Baseball-Reference.com shows that the 1872 Boston franchise finished first in the old National Association with a 39-8 record. The team’s leading hitter was second baseman Ross Barns (.430).

On the mound, Albert Spalding was the man. In those days, pitchers tended to throw complete games almost all of the time. There were no five-man rotations or bullpens packed six or seven deep with relievers. So Spalding pitched — per baseball’s record books — 404 innings in the Red Stockings’ 47-game season and compiled a 38-8 record. Harry Wright is the only other name to show up in the team’s pitching stats: He tossed 25 innings, won one game, and saved four others during the season. Both men were tough to hit: The rubber-armed Spalding had an ERA of 1.85 and Wright’s was 2.10. Boston’s starting lineup usually went the distance, too. After all, the team’s bench included just one utility man — in this case Dave Birdsall, who played in 16 games. (The 11th player to be pictured on a card in this collection never actually got into a game for Boston.)

The National Association was one of a number of professional baseball leagues to sprout up during the era. It disbanded after the 1875 season, which featured a fourth straight title by the Bostons. The following season, the Red Stockings moved on to the fledgling National League and ultimately would become, yes, the Atlanta Braves. In between, they were the Boston Beaneaters (1883-1906), Doves (1907-1910), Rustlers (1911), Braves (1912-1935), Bees (1936-1940), and Braves again (1941-1952). They moved west to Milwaukee in 1953 and played as the Braves until moving to Atlanta in 1966.

So the biggest story during Antiques Roadshow‘s visit to New York, ironically, involved Boston baseball. What are the odds?

For me, personally, the find ranks among the most memorable I’ve seen at Antiques Roadshow events over 13 years (see earlier blogs). To be honest, there was another big-ticket, eye-popping baseball item that was about to land in this space, but… as I wrote last time, it’ll have to wait.

The million-dollar baseball collection, with “Photographic Cards” and a letter signed by two future Hall of Famers leading the way.