We’re Off on a Lengthy Trip, We Are!

Jim Copp once said that he had not really made his quirky recordings for children. “However,” he added, “I thought that maybe that was the best way to sell them.” Copp and his partner Ed Brown devised an innovative approach to promoting and distributing their postwar kidisks, which were released on their own independent label, Playhouse Records. As my last two posts have shown, Playhouse was a postwar indie label working at the same cutting edge of innovation in multi-track studio technique as better known rock labels like Sun, Chess, and Atlantic. As Andre Millard and other recording industry historians have noted, the biggest business problem facing the indie labels was not in the studio, but in distribution. Millard writes that this was where being a major label really counted: being a major meant national distribution networks, ownership of record presses and systems of warehouses, wholesalers, and record jobbers. Indie labels selling musical genres like rock and rhythm and blues got a much-needed boost in promotion from risk-taking radio DJs. Copp and Brown not only lacked access to major label distribution, but there was little chance that their idiosyncratic kid’s records would be promoted on the radio. Their solution was to develop an alternative circuit of promotion and distribution based around the children’s departments of upscale department stores across the country. Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, Copp and Brown had an annual work schedule whereby they would record a new LP, and then hit the road to visit children’s departments in stores like F.A.O. Schwartz in Beverly Hills, Neiman Marcus in Dallas, I. Magnin and Marshall Field’s in Chicago, Bloomingdales and Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, and Woodward and Lothrop in Washington. Copp and Brown made these cross-country jaunts the subject of a track entitled, “We’re Off on a Lengthy Trip, We Are!” which is an essential part of any road trip mix CD.



National toy manufacturers and media companies like Walt Disney had long marketed their wares in year-round toy departments that had emerged in American department stores during the 1910s and ‘20s: children were enticed to such spaces with parades, fairy-tale plays, and manufacturer-sponsored doll’s tea parties; and Mickey Mouse merchandize had been a fixture in toy departments since Disney sold his licensing rights in 1929. Copp and Brown hijacked this marketing infrastructure to sustain their two-man, unorthodox operation, and so became a “Disney alternative” for postwar children’s media in more ways than one.