Last month at a large, nondescript industrial warehouse across County Road 81 from Osseo High School, rock 'n' roll history was being made.
Literally "made," in the manufacturing sense.
A newly unearthed 1971 live album by rock legend Stephen Stills — part of the giant slate of LPs arriving for Saturday's international Record Store Day — was on an assembly line being converted from heated, oozing PVC goo into solid black 12-inch discs.
Those LPs signaled a first: Some of the vinyl albums being sold in Minnesota on Record Store Day this year were actually pressed in Minnesota.
"You'll soon be able to pick one of these up here at the Electric Fetus or in record stores across the country," bragged Justin Kristal, founder of Copycats Media, pointing to a large row of the Stills records yet to be hand-tucked into their cardboard double-fold jackets.
With the reborn popularity of vinyl LPs — they outsold CD sales in 2022 for the first time since 1987 — bands and record companies faced a logjam in vinyl production in recent years. Most of the 30 or fewer U.S. vinyl pressing plants still in operation were outdated and prone to breakdowns, leading to wait times of up to a year for albums to be pressed.
Egged on by their customers, Kristal's Minneapolis-born company — which made its mark printing up CDs in the 1990s — and its parent company the ADS Group have invested $2 million (and counting) to open the state's first major vinyl pressing plant.
Copycats' plant just started up in November, and with only one of its pressing machines operating at first. That was enough to get LPs by Sufjan Stevens, Alicia Keys and Dessa to stores before Christmas.