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Pickwick Records was an American record label and British distributor known for its budget album releases of sound-alike recordings, bargain bin reissues and repackagings under the brands Design, Bravo (later changing their name to International Award), Hurrah, Grand Prix, and children's records on the Cricket and Happy Time labels. The label is also known for distributing music by smaller labels like Sonny Lester's Groove Mechant, Gene Redd's De-Lite Records, Chart Records and the Swedish label Sonet Records (for which it distributed late-1960s recordings by Bill Haley & His Comets in Canada and the US). They also issued records from Britain's Hallmark Records label. ==History== Pickwick Records (originally formed as Pickwick Sales Corporation, later Pickwick International) was founded in 1950 by Cy Leslie, whose first business was a prerecorded greeting card service that in 1946 turned into Voco Records, a label of children's records. In 1957, after successfully marketing their Cricket children's label of 78 and 45rpm records, Pickwick entered the LP market with low-priced records, beginning with their Design label.〔Hoffmann, Frank Editor & Ferstler, Howard Technical Editor ''Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound'' Routledge (2005)〕 The albums from the 1960s into the early 1970s bore the "Pickwick/33" imprint. Singer-songwriter Lou Reed once worked as a staff songwriter for Pickwick Records, and gained experience in their small recording studio. Several of Pickwick's soundalike albums from 1964 to 1965 feature Reed as an uncredited session musician. Two of his songs, "Cycle Annie" (credited to The Beachnuts) and "You're Driving Me Insane" (as The Roughnecks), both appeared on the ''Soundsville!'' compilation in 1965. "The Ostrich" and "Sneaky Pete", two earlier songs by Reed, united him with John Cale, leading to their founding the Velvet Underground. Amos Heilicher and his brother Daniel Heilicher merged their Musicland retail chain with Pickwick International in the late 1960s. Capitol Records had an early interest in Pickwick, and many of its artists had items on Pickwick; however, Capitol sold its share in the company in 1970. Pickwick was sold in 1977 to American Can Company, who relocated their corporate headquarters from Long Island City, New York to Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the 1970s the label changed direction, and began reissuing LPs that had been deleted from catalogs of the major record labels, in particular the RCA Records subsidiary RCA Camden, itself a reissue label. Besides the RCA Camden catalog, the company also put out an edited reissue of Elvis Presley's soundtrack album to ''Frankie and Johnny'', and a two-LP set of mostly movie songs entitled ''Double Dynamite''. After Presley's death in August 1977, RCA Victor began reissuing Presley's catalog, and Pickwick's Presley series ended. Pickwick also reissued numerous LPs from the Motown catalog during the 1970s. On many of these albums, the cover art was changed, and/or the track listing was altered (with two or more songs deleted). In the early 1980s Motown began re-releasing its own catalog albums, thus ending Pickwick's series. The company also started the subsidiary label P.I.P and started distributing Gene Redd's De-Lite Records, to issue original material. De-Lite hit it big in 1974 and 1975 with million-selling singles & album (music)s by funk band Kool & The Gang. P.I.P had a couple of big dance club hits with "7-6-5-4-3-2-1 (Blow Your Whistle)" and "Drive My Car" by Gary Toms Empire in 1975. Pickwick's assets were purchased by PolyGram Records in the late 1970s. PolyGram maintained the De-Lite Records label for releases by Kool & the Gang who experienced a second wave of success after the addition of new lead singer, J.T. Taylor, beginning with the group's 1979 album, ''Ladies Night''. Polygram later did away with the De-lite imprint, and subsequent Kool & The Gang records were issued by PolyGram's Mercury label. After the purchase by PolyGram, Pickwick started putting out new material again, but this time it was "Sound-Alike" albums which featured covers of a certain artist or group on one album, and Disco Christmas albums. Most of those albums were performed by session musicians and singers dubbed Mirror Image. This lasted until 1983 when PolyGram folded Pickwick. The Hallmark name has since been revived as a budget record label owned by the Pickwick Group. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Pickwick Records」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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