"Open The Door To..." - Darrell Banks

Ed, I'm sure your grey copy is fine. I currently see two grey-label 45 copies
of "Open The Door..." offered on eBay, as well as one for his follow-up 45,
which also made the Hot 100, on a grey label. One of the Revilot pressing
plants clearly used grey labels....

Ed, is your copy vinyl or styrene? How's the sound quality? Judging from the "T" inscribed in the deadwax (which I would presume to actually be "T||") it would appear to be a Columbia Terre Haute pressing, on styrene (that plant used "T|", "T||" and "T|||" over the years to denote various cuttings and re-cuttings.)

If it is a styrene pressing, the odds are extremely high that it's legit, because there was no way counterfeiters could afford the high cost outlay for the injection molding equipment required to manufacture styrene 45s (about five times the cost of conventional new vinyl presses.) Aside from the obvious cost savings of polystyrene over vinyl, the other major reason CBS, Shelley, Monarch and other styrene manufacturers invested in this expensive equipment was that the metal plates lasted far longer, since the injection-molding manufacturing process inflicted much less wear and tear than that caused through the physical impact of stamping each individual vinyl record. Fewer metal parts meant big cost reductions when pressing runs were huge.**

Counterfeiters, of course, were never going to manufacture anywhere near the number of copies needed to justify that level of equipment investment, instead opting for the cheapest used (and ancient) pressing equipment and the lowest grades of vinyl (hence the scarcity of styrene counterfeits.) Some oddball '70s styrene 45 reissues, like the Turtles' stereo "Happy Together"/"It Ain't Me Babe" on Buccaneer 3002 or the "96 Tears" reissue on the red-label Million Seller 800 were Columbia-pressed (not so for the white-label Million Seller 800; that one's a vinyl counterfeit, with different mastering and a different (slightly fancier, actually) logo font.

The vinyl Revilot 201 45s (the first release for the label) were likely the initial pressing, manufactured for the local Detroit market. I've seen a few other Detroit-based vinyl 45s carrying CBS' matrix prefixes (like ZTSC) that are legitimate copies that were mastered and pressed outside of the CBS plants, including my vinyl Impact pressing of "Oh How Happy."

A label scan posted on Discogs shows a vinyl grey-label Revilot 201. I'm not familiar enough with this record (never played in my market) to know whether it's 100% legit, but it doesn't appear to be an obvious counterfeit, either.

---------------

** The much-longer service life of the metal stampers used in the injection molding process for styrene records explains why the first generation of Monarch-pressed styrene Dunhill Goldies 45s used the identical stampers Monarch had used for the original releases. Ditto for the original CBS mono DJ stampers that were dusted off for additional duty in the Columbia Hall Of Fame reissue series.