Kris Howland Brings Classic Bluegrass LPs Back to the Future
Photos by Chelsea LaFond
It’s an excellent time for bluegrass LP seekers and collectors. And the folks at Heady Wax Fiends, with help from Real Gone Music, have certainly sweetened the pot by bringing classic bluegrass LPs back on premium vinyl. Their rerelease of Manzanita by the Tony Rice Unit sparked our initial interest. Turns out, there’s much more to the story than just reproducing that majestically mysterious black album, its cover showing only Tony embracing the Antique, SN: 58597, and wearing a florid polyester shirt that somehow still looks cool 46 years later.
Long since out of print on vinyl, Kris Howland decided to see if Manzanita could be reissued in a limited edition so fans could experience it on vinyl today. Howland is a founder of the Facebook group of vinyl record fans called Heady Wax Fiends that post about favorite LPs, both popular and obscure. Discussion in that group runs to legendary albums across genres. And those discussions often end up as fresh releases on 180-gram vinyl through their Heady Wax Fiends Record Club. Members get first dibs on new releases, but the LPs are also available to the general population.
The rerelease of Manzanita by the Heady Wax Fiends Record Club in conjunction with Real Gone Music, as we learned during Bluegrass Unlimited’s phone interview with Howland, actually is just one of a handful of high-end premium vinyl reissue bluegrass LPs that combo has resurrected so far.
It started with an earlier rerelease by Real Gone Music of John Hartford’s genre-rejecting record, Steam Powered Aereo-Plain that the group promoted via its Facebook group. That release set the group on its bluegrass pilgrimage, just as it did for so many of us who discovered bluegrass through Hartford, New Grass Revival, David Grisman, and other artists bringing a youthful exuberance to the music in the ‘70s.
Other recent releases from the club form a treasure trove for bluegrass LP fans, who scour flea markets, antique shops, and record stores for vintage Monroe or Jimmy Martin, but also love modern vinyl pressings of both vintage albums and the current trend among bluegrass artists like Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle to release new music on vinyl. These new rereleases are reproductions of some of the most sought-after and powerful bluegrass LPs, giving fans the chance to own a pristine vinyl LP without the dust and scratches, and pops vintage LPs inevitably bring.
In addition to the Hartford and Rice rereleases, their bluegrass catalogue currently includes Bela Fleck’s Drive, the truly immortal Rounder Records serial number 0044 release, J.D. Crowe and the New South, and Doc Watson’s debut album on Vanguard. Howland was kind enough to send BU samples of each to evaluate.
Reproduced immaculately and with great attention to detail, these reissues offer modern listeners the opportunity to hear these great albums exactly as they were engineered and mastered—to be played on a turntable. The pressings, as expected, are done beautifully on marbled, high-grade vinyl.
So, just how did the Manzanita project happen? “We had been a club for a year, and we called Real Gone Music to license out-of-print LPs. So they did the Aereo-Plain reissue, and we posted that to our Facebook group, and it did really well,” Howland explained. “We sold a lot of records in a very short time, including some (Grateful) Dead stuff, too.” Manzanita, he added, was a prime target for the group to reissue.
But bringing classic LPs back from the dead is not always easy. Here’s how Howland describes their operation. “Heady Wax Fiends Record Club is a subscription-based vinyl record club born from the Heady Wax Fiends Facebook group. We are without genre or theme and concentrate on working directly with artists to bring our subscribers the best releases available,” he explained. “The group started during the pandemic with a group of people who wanted talk (safely online) about music; no attitude, no rules, and no negative opinions.”
Howland, 44, who grew up in Whitehouse, Ohio, never heard bluegrass or country music growing up. But, he tells Bluegrass Unlimited, “I’ve always been a big music fan. I’m not scared to try new music.”
Moving to Colorado after college, he began hearing that new music, which Howland quickly adopted into his own listening and shared with the group. It also expanded his ideas on how to reincarnate classic bluegrass LPs and make them available to modern listeners.
Howland says he “came to bluegrass backwards,” and slowly explored the genre and its treasure trove of classic LPs. He gravitated initially to local Colorado-based jam bands such as Yonder Mountain String Band, String Cheese Incident, and more of the progressive side of bluegrass. But the legendary soundtrack of O’Brother, Where Art Thou spurred his interest in the truly traditional side of bluegrass and old-time country.
Heady Wax Club “didn’t start with Aereo-Plain,” Howland explains. “Real Gone Music did the repress, and we posted about it in our Facebook group. That helped them sell a ton of copies and opened the door for us to press projects with them. Same with the Grateful Dead projects. Those were promoted in the Heady Wax Fiends Facebook group and sold well. Those events led to Real Gone Music wanting to work with us on the bluegrass represses.”
As Howland explains it, joining the record club keeps members in the loop for early releases. “We have a fledgling club, and when we reached out to Real Gone Music owner Gordon Anderson, he came back and said let’s talk about it. We put together a list of labels, Flying Fish, Rounder, Sugar Hill, Vanguard, and others, that had out-of-print releases such as Drive, 0044, Manzanita, and Doc Watson. We wanted to release albums bluegrass people knew well. So we’re not digging stuff out of the vault, alternate tracks, that sort of thing.”
And even now, the success of these reissues surprises the group’s spokesman. “Ten years ago, if you had told me I would repress Aereo-Plain on vinyl, I never would have believed you. It’s still hard to believe.”
