Alfredo's book has various reviews from Sept/Oct 1971 for the VU and Chelsea Girl reissues - one of them says they are result of a new distribution deal between Polydor and MGM, so that seems to be the time frame that the copies of VU&N in the US sleeves, as the peelable banana is mentioned in some reviews. But did some first-gen 1971 VU&Ns come in UK-printed sleeves? Dunno - see below.
Stamper numbers are not something I've looked at before, so I did some research into Polydor matrix numbers. The last 3 numbers are the father, mother and stamper numbers. Then I realised I didn’t know what this meant exactly, so I searched some more, on the Hoffman forums and elsewhere, and found out some more stuff.
The process goes like this. First there is the lacquer, the cut master of the record. A mirror-image copy is made, called the father, then another mirror-image copy is made from this (the mother), then a third mirror-image copy is made of that to make a copy of the father, and that is the stamper used to make the record itself. This process has been used since the 1920s - here is a detailed description from a modern pressing plant:
http://www.gzvinyl.com/Manufacturing/Me ... ssing.aspx
Numbers are not precise but it goes something like this: 1 lacquer makes 1 father, 1 father makes 10 mothers, each mother makes up to 10 stampers, each stamper makes about 1000 pressings - so a pair of lacquers make about 100,000 discs (incidentally - this is where the first silver presentation discs for sales of 100,000 records came from, they were originally the actual stampers - starting with George Formby in 1937.)
Stampers are very fragile, quality checks are random, and the life of the stamper depends on the kind of music or how loud the cut is, so broadly that’s how the mother and stamper numbers get out of sync on each side of an LP, and the code doesn’t necessarily progress logically from 1 1 1 to 1 1 2, 1 1 3 etc, because not all stampers pass quality control to make actual records. We can know that stamper 1 1 1 is made before 1 1 2, but if they are made in the same batch there’s nothing to say that the first records pressed are from the first stampers made.
The inverted triangle and 420 means they were pressed at the former Philips plant in Chingford, East London/Essex. From ’69 to ’79 the plant was owned by Phonodisc Ltd, but it wasn’t known as PRS Ltd until 1979, though the marks didn’t change.
So - going back to ‘first pressing’ refs on discogs and Olivier’s site, these could (and probably do) refer to codes on early copies bought in 1971, but for industrial scale record production the stamper codes are not very reliable indicators of when a record hits the streets. Iaredatsun’s copy in a UK sleeve has lower stamper codes than both of these published sources (and mine), but it wasn’t bought until autumn 1972. This could be evidence that the first copies pressed were not made from the lowest-numbered stampers. Can we assume they made a bunch of stampers in batches, or did they only make a new stamper when the old one wore out or was damaged? Dunno. Certainly for big selling acts they would want capacity to meet demand, but how many copies of VU&N did Polydor expect to sell in 1971/2? Dunno again.
And so going back to the main subject again, the stamper code on the misprint label is not the significant thing, it’s the misprint itself. Doh!
Oh well - I learned about how records are made, but will refrain from further speculation about stampers. I did find this amazing rant from a 45 dealer which covers some of the issues. It relates to Beatles /Stones etc so is on a different scale to the VU, but I did find it entertaining!
http://select45rpm.com/pages/stampercodes.html
