DiscWasher No. 29 / The (Only) Colored Mix-Tape

A Story to Listen to / March 21, 2026

Colored vinyl… huh, right! I’m not talking about the 1917 pressed, reddish-brown shellac 78 RPM records released by the Vocalion label. No way. I’m referring to the polyvinyl chloride discs, the ones that are naturally clear but have added carbon black to hide imperfections—the ones we call vinyl records. While colored vinyl dates back to the 1920s, it gained popularity in the ‘40s when RCA introduced color-coded singles. Green was for country, red for classical, and yellow for children’s recordings. These 45s had no sleeves, so it was easy to identify the genre you preferred. In the 1960s, Columbia Records started pressing colored vinyl records for promotional purposes. Red was the most popular color, used for Barbra Streisand’s 1966 release, Color Me Barbra, three years after a blue pressing of The Second Barbra Streisand Album hit the stores.

Apart from buying albums with Andy Warhol’s cover art — my last one being Soul Vacation by the Japanese pop band Rats & Star — I was never really into collecting novelties like picture discs or custom slip mats. I never actively sought out colored vinyl. But in 1977, unbeknownst to me, I bought my first colored record. It was like finding one of the 24 Yankees in a 10-card wax pack of baseball cards (even though it was César Tovar, who hit .154 in 1976 and was released months before the 660-card set came out); it felt like striking gold - even though it was pink. Bubblegum pink. The Pink Parker, which I thought was a play on The Pink Panther, was a 12-inch EP by Graham Parker and the Rumor (Hold Back the Night, a cover of the 1975 Trammps song, was the lead on the A-side). There was no round sticker on this imported record announcing its color. I simply saw it on the “new arrivals” wall at Prime Cuts Records on Northern Boulevard (known for their “choice selections”), sitting between Damned Damned Damned (The Damned) and The Vibrators’ Pure Mania. Over the years, a few others unexpectedly slipped into my collection. Klark Kent, an 8-song 10-inch, which was the 1980 solo debut by The Police’s Stewart Copeland (featuring the song Don’t Care), was Kelly green. The Simple Minds’ 1982 album New Gold Dream (Herbie Hancock plays synthesizer on track 8, Hunter and the Hunted) was gold-and-purple marble, while the UK post-punk album Smoke Time (1987) by Blurt was white.

Did you know that out of roughly a thousand studio-produced bands with colors in their names (Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, Cream, Purple Mountains, The Blue Aeroplanes), only seven have “magenta” in their titles? Four are named Magenta (a Norwegian band, a Welsh one, a UK band, and a hard rock group from Pennsylvania), there’s a Seattle-based Magenta Wave, a Toronto-based Magenta Lane, and who could forget Guy Magenta, a French singer from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Early blues and folk artists were among the first to incorporate color into their song titles - blue being the most popular, followed by red and black. When a track’s name includes a color, we sometimes associate it with a mood (Crystal Gayle’s Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue), but most of the time it’s just stating the obvious (Frank Zappa’s Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow). According to AI, The Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black is one of the most popular songs with a color in the title. Huh... I wonder how it really felt the first time it heard that song (I’m sure it prefers Mick to Keith). Do you think it has ever seen a color?

Thanks for reading. Try not to shuffle. And remember to always see color.

DISCWASHER No. 29 / The (Only) Colored Mix-Tape

Side A
1. Little Yellow Spider / DEVENDRA BANHART
2. Black Chicken 37 / BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB
3. Black Gold / THE BRKN RECORD feat. JERMAIN JACKMAN
4. Green Garden / LAURA MVULA
5. Behind the Blue Curtains / EL MICHELS AFFAIR
6. Is It Because I’m Black / KEN BOOTHE
7. Green Grass / BILL WITHERS
8. Black-Eyed Blues / ESTHER PHILLIPS
9. Brown N’ Serve / FRANK OWENS
10. Green Machine / O’DONEL LEVY
11. Mr. Brown / GREGORY ISAACS
12. Brilliant White / EVERYTHING IS RECORDED
13. The Red Blues / RED GARLAND TRIO & EDDIE “LOCKJAW” DAVIS
14. Blood Orange / HOWE GELB & A BAND OF GYPSIES
15. Blue Black Jack / MOS DEF

Side B
1. The Reds / OHIO PLAYERS
2. Madrugada Orange / THE HI-FLY ORCHESTRA
3. I’m So Green / CAN
4. Deep Blue Sea / GRIZZLY BEAR
5. Pink Lemonade / UNBUNNY
6. Oscar Brown / BAXTER DURY
7. The Darkest Part (explicit) / DANGER MOUSE & BLACK THOUGHT
8. The Green Door / DAVE GUY
9. Blue Light / MULATU ASTATKE & BLACK JESUS EXPERIENCE
10. The Browns at Home / THE GREYBOY ALLSTARS
11. White Walls / ASSAF SPECTOR
12. Black & Violet (explicit) / REEK0 feat. DOCHI
13. The Lemon of Pink I / THE BOOKS
14. Green Thing / GO KUROSAWA
15. Orange Sky / ALEXI MURDOCH

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