While biking throughout Iowa this summer time, Mark Michaels loved a uncommon second of reflection. “You’re riding about 80 miles a day among cornfields, and it gives you a lot of time to think,” the United Record Pressing chairman/CEO says. “I spent a lot of time while I was peddling thinking about United,” he provides of the oldest and largest American-owned, U.S.-based vinyl urgent plant on this planet, which is able to have a good time its seventy fifth anniversary this fall.

Michaels is talking from his Nashville workplace, the place he’s surrounded by signed data from Buddy Guy, Jack White and extra of his icons, all expressing their due to him and his manufacturing group. (In 2014, White made historical past by recording, urgent and releasing a 7-inch of his single “Lazaretto” in below 4 hours, due to URP.) “It’s easy to forget those moments of euphoria and gratitude because you’re so focused on ‘How many records of this did we ship?’ or ‘What’s going on with that press?’ ” Michaels says. “But you don’t want too much life to pass by where you don’t stop and reflect.”

URP was based as Bullet Plastics in Nashville in 1949, turning into Southern Plastics within the ’50s earlier than touchdown on United Record Pressing in 1971. By the ’60s, a deal was signed for the plant to deal with singles pressings for Motown, and in 1963, the primary Beatles 7-inch, “Please Please Me”/“From Me to You,” was pressed, with a typo that spelled the band’s identify as The Beattles.

In 2007, a 12 months earlier than Record Store Day formally launched and simply earlier than the format was starting its first-wave resurgence, Michaels purchased the corporate — and helped maintain it by way of a very tough patch. As he recollects, half of URP’s output on the time was 12-inch singles created as promo data for DJs. “That was a lot of what we did, and shortly after I bought the company, the labels stopped doing that,” he says. “The DJs all got [music production software] Seratos, and the labels figured out that was a better business model. So all of a sudden, the health of the company was in serious jeopardy … We were doing everything to keep the lights on.”

By the summer time of 2009, a career-changing order got here in: a Fiftieth-anniversary urgent of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (a favourite of Michaels) — the plant’s greatest order up to now. Michaels himself oversaw high quality management, checking a document at random each half-hour. “I remember one night, it was two in the morning and I’m in my office listening to these records, and I thought, ‘This is crazy, but goddamn, I’m lucky.’ And it just gave me this boost of energy. The next month, we got another order of that size.” Since, URP has manufactured vinyl for each main artist, from Adele to Taylor Swift.

In the early 2020s, URP confronted one other difficult interval: the coronavirus pandemic. “Demand for vinyl exploded” throughout lockdown, Michaels says, however the orders put an unprecedented stress on urgent crops to maintain up. He says that was the catalyst for URP to develop, leading to an $11 million mission that constructed new infrastructure and supporting gear and added 26 new presses. “The challenge is you can’t do that overnight,” he says. And now, not solely can URP meet demand, however “the plant runs better than ever.”

He and his group of roughly 130 staff — all of whom have been sporting anniversary T-shirts that element the plant’s varied logos through the years — at the moment are able to toast such a feat and storied historical past, with Michaels saying the vitality “is palpable” on the plant as of late. A forthcoming celebration will deliver collectively companions, prospects, distributors and “people who support the format … There’s a renewed sense of pride and interest in what we do.”

Already, Michaels is concentrated on find out how to keep it for the subsequent 75 years, doubling down on the consideration he has in conserving the method — and workforce — in Music City. “Seventy-five-plus years of history gives you a lot of gas in your tank in terms of pride,” he says. “You don’t make the first Beatles record in America, you don’t make all these Motown records, you don’t accumulate all this history and know-how and not have something special. And I never want to lose that.”

This story seems within the Aug. 24, 2024 difficulty of Billboard.