Contains Previously Released Selections

I asked my mother to buy me a copy of Let’s All Sing with The Chipmunks. (“Songs from The Alvin Show”, read the cover.) I would have been 4 or 5. My mother asked me if I didn’t already have this record, and of course I didn’t and knew so.

When I got home, I discovered the album included “Chipmunk Fun’—which had originally appeared on The Alvin Show, except that it was missing the introduction, a parody of Person To Person. I tried explaining the difference to my mother, but she just shrugged it off with “I told you so.”

This was likely my first record collector experience. Around the same time I can remember being intrigued by label designs (the Apple label and the swirled Capitols were an early favourite), stickered covers (by the time I was around to be gifted with Chipmunks LPs, Liberty had moved the Bagdasarian catalogue to its budget-line subsidiary, Sunset, and they stickered over the Liberty labels on some of the front covers, which I found bizarre even then), and inner sleeves on LPs.

I’ve been fascinated ever since.