A New Mini Adventure in Jazz Collecting

I decided to bid on that Monk record from the Jazz Record Center auction: The Unique Thelonious Monk, Riverside 12-209. The main reason was that I really wanted the record. As you can see from the accompanying photo, the record I own is a blue label and the cover has ugly taped seams both on the top and on the bottom. Plus, the record plays with a lot of surface noise, not anything you would really want to put on your turntable. But that wasn’t the only reason for my interest in bidding. I probably haven’t bought or sold a record on eBay in at least 10 years. I wanted to go through the experience again, see if anything had changed, see if the old adrenaline rush would still be there. I also wanted to write about the experience to share with the dwindling Jazz Collector audience, which is what I am doing now.

The first thing I did was check the time that the auction closed: 6:50 p.m. my time on the East Coast. Perfect. I would definitely be home. But, just in case, I decided to see what was available in the sniping department, since that is the method I would often use in the past when I was buying regularly on eBay. I did a search of “sniping software for eBay” and a bunch of options came up: EZsniper, BidSlammer, eSnipe and a few others. I decided to try a service called GIXEN, mainly because it was free. I figured, if I’m going to bid on a record every 10 years, I may as well not pay for a sniping service. I went to the GIXEN site and signed up. It was surprisingly easy, and I didn’t have to give a credit card or anything. Good start.

I went to eBay, found the item number for The Unique Thelonious Monk and plugged it into my new GIXEN account. At the time, the bidding was about $105 with two bids. I wanted to win the record because I really did want the record, and I figured it would be a better story to tell if I did win it. But I also didn’t want to pay top dollar. After all, neither the record nor the cover was in mint condition. So, I tried to come up with a number that would give me a good chance to win but wouldn’t make me feel bad about winning. I figured I would be comfortable with $400 for the record. And If I lost it at that price, so be it.

I took a quick look over at Popsike and, to my surprise, the record has sold for more than $1,000 once, and has sold for more than $400 maybe 15 or 20 times.  I figured $400 would give me a fighting chance, considering that the description said that the first track on each side begins with “sporadic tics” and the picture shows that the cover is in maximum VG++ condition, with clear wear on the bottom seam. So maybe more like VG+. I put in a bid for $411 on GIXEN with about eight hours left on the auction. I put an alarm in my phone for 6:40, 10 minutes before the auction was scheduled to close. My plan, if I was home and unencumbered, was to remove the GIXEN bid and bid live at my computer, watching the last 10 minutes of the auction to see what happens. I didn’t fully trust GIXEN, having never used it before, plus I wanted to see what it felt like again to bid live after all these years. I also didn’t want to be bidding against myself.

At 6:35 p.m. I turned the alarm off my phone and went to the computer.  I clicked on the link to The Unique Thelonious Monk. The bidding was barely higher than it had been earlier, perhaps $130. I wanted to make sure I could still get a bid in, so I put in a number, maybe $150. eBay told me that there was already a higher bid. That was a feature that was not available last time I participated in an auction. Interesting. So, I put in $180. eBay told me that would be the highest bid. This was with about 10 minutes left in the auction. I didn’t actually make the bid, but I felt that was useful information. With about two minutes left in the auction, $180 would have still been the highest bid. I figured I’d probably still have a shot with my bid of $411, so I put that number in and began the countdown. With six seconds left, I hit the button for $411. With two seconds left eBay came back to tell me that I was outbid. Too late for me to change to a higher bid even if I had wanted to do that, which I didn’t. I tried and lost. The winning bid was $416. Who knows how high the winning bidder would have been. He was probably using sniping software, perhaps even GIXEN, and could have bid as much as $1,000 for all I know. I didn’t mind losing the record at that price, and I feel like I had another mini adventure to share with everyone here at Jazz Collector.

BTW, while preparing this account this morning, I looked over the other Jazz Record Center auctions that ended yesterday. OMG, they are insane. A Monk Columbia record selling for more than $1,000? A later pressing J.R. Monterose on Blue Note with no deep grooves selling for nearly $2,000. Seems like I’ve been away too long and in just a couple of months the market has gone completely nuts. Or perhaps it is just because it’s the Jazz Record Center? Whatever it is, I feel like I am now back in action, so perhaps you will begin to see me posting more frequently again. If you’ve been away for a while, as I have been, welcome back.