Rare Prince album found in Canada
• It’s considered rare even among rarities: A Canadian-made vinyl copy of Prince’s disavowed Black Album. And it can be had for US$27,500.
The L.A.-based memorabilia company Recordmecca has put it on the market, billing it as so rare that it had never even been rumoured to exist.
“Nobody’s ever heard of a Canadian one,” company owner Jeff Gold said Tuesday from Los Angeles. “It’s literally one of a kind.”
The rarities expert said he was skeptical of its veracity when someone contacted him claiming to have saved the disc from the garbage pile. Gold said the seller is a former employee of a Toronto pressing plant that manufactured the album in 1987 and wishes to remain anonymous.
The disc was among more than 500,000 copies Prince ordered destroyed just before the album’s planned release in late 1987, said Gold.
The late superstar had initially planned it as a surprise followup to his poporiented double-album Sign o’ the Times, insisting there be no title or name on the cover, and no advance promotion, said Gold.
It was followed up instead by Lovesexy, and although bootlegs flourished, The Black Album wouldn’t get an official release until 1994, when Warner gave it a limited run.
Gold knows of only eight other original copies that have surfaced, all in the United States. He sold one at auction in February 2018 for $42,298.
He said the owner of the Canadian disc contacted him in April after learning about that sale, announcing that he, too, had something of value.
Gold didn’t believe it at first.
“But he sent me some pictures and he told me his story and I thought, ‘God, that really sounds and looks real,’ ” said Gold.
“When he read that article he had no idea it was a really valuable record. He just thought it was a record that had been cancelled and he saved a copy from being destroyed and had it in his record collection and never thought about it.”
So much of the lore surrounding The Black Album is unusual, added Gold, a former Warner Bros. Records executive who worked with Prince in the 1990s.
The top-secret circumstances and Prince’s abrupt change of heart — reportedly the result of a druginduced epiphany — has lent even more mystique to the disc, which include the dance jams Superfunkycalifragisexy and Le Grind.
“There are a lot of people interested in it,” said Gold, who put it up for sale Monday and describes it as being “in near mint condition, having been played perhaps two to three times.
“His records are voraciously collected and this is the pinnacle of Prince collectibles.”