Saves The Day

Saves The Day – “I’m Sorry I’m Leaving” 7″

Saves The Day released this acoustic 7″ called “I’m Sorry I’m Leaving” in 1999, I think.  It was released on Immigrant Sun Records, a small label in NY that always went all out on packaging. They had done this Morning Again 7″ with hand tied twine booklets. I can’t even imagine tediously tieing hundreds of those damned tiny things.  The STD 7″s were similar in that they were hand-screen printed and then cut out manually in the shape of a butterfly. Ugh!  I have a special appreciation for the manual effort involved in this process from end-to-end after running Rivalry and also doing a small DIY screen printing business with Ryan Mattos (Arctic, whattup!).  But they look super cool!  Much respect for the effort put in, it was totally worth it.  That’s what’s so cool about DIY punk labels.  Anyway, I first saw a white vinyl copy for sale in a small distro outside a show at the Old School House in Portland, OR.  I was on a 2 week vacation with my aunt and grandma up to BC, Canada in summer 1999, and they wanted to stop in Portland for the night. I convinced them to drive me over and drop me off at a Committed/Good Clean Fun show that was happening.  There were no smart phones or anything like that back then, I don’t even know how I knew about the show. Maybe I looked it up before we left and hoped we’d end up stopping in Portland for the night.  I remember my aunt being all sketched out on dropping me off at this spot by myself, with all these kids out front and all.  But I assured her this was probably one of the safest places I could be in the whole world – at a hardcore show.  I still feel that way.  So I saw this 7″ in the kid’s distro box, and I picked up the white vinyl copy with blue butterfly for $3.  7″s were 3 bucks back then, haha.  I thought it was super cool, and the kid was explaining that they were hand-screened with all sorts of custom colors.  So when I got home from vacation, I looked up Immigrant Sun and found out there were a couple different butterfly colors, and also a pink vinyl variation out of 100 (the white vinyl is out of 400).  I wrote the dude a letter, put some cash in an envelope, and mailed off $12.  About 5 or 6 weeks later, 4 more copies of the STD 7″ showed up – white vinyl with brown butterfly, white with orange butterfly, white with green butterfly, and a pink vinyl copy with green butterfly.  He wrote in the letter that there were actually 12 RED vinyl copies and 88 pink copies, due to pressing plant mixing variance when mixing white and red vinyl to make pink. So I’d always wanted to get one of those.  About 8 years passed, and I was looking through my records and came across these 7″s and got to thinking about this 7″ again. I somehow found the dude from Immigrant Sun’s contact info again, and asked him about a red vinyl copy, and also about a test pressing. I had heard they had silver butterflies, and I thought it would be need to have one of only 10 copies on black vinyl.  I was able to work out a cash deal with him for the red vinyl copy, the black test pressing with silver butterfly, as well as a one-of-a-kind “tiger striped” mixed screen printed butterfly with orange, green, and brown. This is shown in the lower right hand corner.  After I’d completed everything, I saw someone selling a pink copy with a blank label on the Bridge 9 trade board.  I figured the blank label was another nice little variant to pick up.  Oh, the butterfly is autographed by Chris Connely, haha.  I picked it up for a decent price, but I sold it a while back. I was able to pull out the eBay photo and included it here. All of these 7″s have gone for BIG bucks on eBay over the years. The test pressing sold for $600+, the RED copies have gone for $300-$400, pink copies for $300+, and for a while the white copies even sold for $150-$250 each!  They have all fallen off a bit, but still fetch a decent amount.  It’s wild that I was able to get that entire top row of 7″s for $15 in 1999, but that’s the beauty of being a life long collector, and it’s really how record collecting should  be. It’s wasn’t always all about eBay!! 🙂

Saves The Day – The LP’s…As far as Saves The Day LP’s, I used to own all versions of the first two LP’s including test pressings.  The picture above shows the 1st pressing colored vinyl on Equal Vision. I actually do like the 3rd album a lot too, but I didn’t try to collect multiple copies of that one, or any albums after that. In fact, I’ve never even heard any album after “Stay What You Are”, haha. Maybe I should check them out.  Anyway, I always had a soft spot for the Lifetime rip-offish “Can’t Slow Down” LP, as well as the more teeny-bopper-type “Through Being Cool”.  I still enjoy listening to both of those records, they’re fun.  I sold the test pressings a couple of years back, as well as all other copies besides the first pressing CSD on white and TBC on blue.  I’ll try to pull out the old eBay photos and paste them here.

“Can’t Slow Down” LP test pressing. This is a test of the original 1st pressing. You can tell because it has a custom message etched in the matrix!

Red vinyl, later pressing

Black vinyl

“Through Being Cool” LP test pressing. Original 1st pressing on EVR.

White vinyl, later pressing. I also had a regular black vinyl copy but sold it before I could take a pic.

Saves The Day – The early stuff…
Here is an original Saves The Day demo tape, released sometime around 1997.  Also shown in the photo is the Sefler 7″, which was a band that a few members did before Saves The Day.  It’s thought of as the “pre-Saves The Day band”.

The outside of the Sefler 7″ layout.

The inside of the Sefler 7″.

V/A – “Supersoul: The Rebirth of Hardcore 1999” LP CompIn 1999, Ray Cappo (Youth Of Today vocalist) released “Supersoul: The Rebirth Of Hardcore 1999” LP Compilation.  The comp featured songs from Saves The Day, Fastbreak, In My Eyes, Ten Yard Fight, Rain On The Parade, Atari, Better Than One Thousand, and a bunch of others.  I believe this was the first appearance of the new In My Eyes song, “Welcome To Boston”, and my friends and I were all stoked on it.  This particular copy happens to be the “band member pressing” on gold vinyl, out of only 50 copies with blank labels.

Here’s the reverse side of the huge fold out poster on the Supersoul comp.

Shirts

This is an early Saves The Day shirt. It was highly sought after because of the cheesy text on the back – “Insert Knife Here”.

The back of the “Insert Knife Here” shirt.

I bought this shirt at a Saves The Day / Fastbreak show at The Cocodrie in San Francisco, CA.

The back of the shirt says “stop me before I say too much”, a quote from their first “Can’t Slow Down” LP.

My Saves The Day collection, at its peak:

• Saves The Day – I’m Sorry I’m Leaving (TEST PRESS, out of 10, BLACK vinyl with SILVER butterfly)
• Saves The Day – I’m Sorry I’m Leaving (RED, out of 10, WHITE SPOTTED BUTTERFLY, one of a kind!)
• Saves The Day – I’m Sorry I’m Leaving (PINK, out of 88, GREEN butterfly)
• Saves The Day – I’m Sorry I’m Leaving (PINK, missing A-side label, ORANGE butterfly, autographed by Chris Conley, out of ??)
• Saves The Day – I’m Sorry I’m Leaving (WHITE, out of 400, Half GREEN/Half ORANGE BUTTERFLY, one of a kind!)
• Saves The Day – I’m Sorry I’m Leaving (WHITE, out of 400, BROWN butterfly – the rarest of the solid butterfly colors)
• Saves The Day – I’m Sorry I’m Leaving (WHITE, out of 400, GREEN butterfly – more rare than BLUE)
• Saves The Day – I’m Sorry I’m Leaving (WHITE, out of 400, BLUE butterfly – more rare than ORANGE)
• Saves The Day – I’m Sorry I’m Leaving (WHITE, out of 400, ORANGE butterfly – least rare of the butterfly colors)
• Saves The Day – Can’t Slow Down (TEST PRESS)
• Saves The Day – Can’t Slow Down (WHITE, 1st press, out of 300)
• Saves The Day – Can’t Slow Down (BLACK, 1st press)
• Saves The Day – Can’t Slow Down (RED, 2nd press, out of 500)
• Saves The Day – Through Being Cool (TEST PRESS)
• Saves The Day – Through Being Cool (BLUE, 1st press, out of 300)
• Saves The Day – Through Being Cool (BLACK, 1st press)
• Saves The Day – Through Being Cool (WHITE, 2nd press, out of 500)
• Saves The Day – Stay What You Are (BLACK)
• Saves The Day – Original Demo
• Sefler – 13 Hours Of Everything (BLACK, pre-Saves The day band)
• V/A – SuperSoul Comp – The Rebirth of Hardcore 1999 (GOLD, blank BLACK labels, out of 50, STD, TYF, IME, Fastbreak, BT1K, ROTP, Atari, etc)