MRH :    Did your collecting begin when vinyl was around, or did you start when CDs had become the standard format?

LT : ___My collecting definitely started with vinyl. At about age 10 I started bugging my parents to buy a record player, and they kept saying "No". I was the oldest of four children, and my parents were poor but hard working.

In 1962, at the age of 12, I received a small sum of money for graduating from grade school, and I bought two 45 rpm records, figuring if I started buying some music, maybe my parents would relent and buy a record player. In this case they did, and they bought me one of those small, portable phonographs of the era that looked like a large briefcase for my birthday.

Shortly after that I started working part-time jobs after school, and stepped up to better equipment and naturally a lot more 45s and LPs. While I liked the music of the era, like many in my age group, it was The Beatles and British Invasion groups that spurred me into record collecting big time.

By the mid 1980s, when CDs became big and I started selling off parts of my vinyl collection at record conventions (and plowing the money into CDs), my collection was close to 4,000 LPs and 2,500 45s. Today I only have a few hundred of each left, but my CD collection is near 4,000. My Japanese titles only comprise about 650 of that number, and soundtracks in general maybe 20-25% of my collection. I enjoy listening to a variety of music and have some of everything except Opera, Rap & Hip Hop which I have never been able to get into. Big portions of my collection are Blues and Rock music of the 1950's through 1990's.

MRH :    Japanese soundtracks are among the rarest and costliest albums to collect. When did you realize your interests had morphed into something pretty serious?

LT : ___It wasn't until the mid 1980s when CDs were becoming mainstream that I found and bought my first Japanese import CD. I was visiting New York City (about 80 miles south of where I live in upstate New York ) and was scouring various record shops for things I couldn't find locally when I stumbled across several of the Futureland Godzilla soundtracks in a Tower Record store. I bought three that day and loved them. The only thing I didn't like was that all the writing was in Japanese, so I had no idea what the track titles or anything else written were.

From there I found Footlight Records in lower Manhattan , where I found many Japanese CDs. Since they are expensive, I was never able to buy all that I wanted when I visited. By the early 1990s I had about 12 Godzilla CDs and found someone willing to do the track translations for me at a very low price. That's when I decided to start my website and share that info on soundtracks and English translated titles with the world.

MRH :    How did you manage to keep building the collection as the financial costs were getting pretty high?

LT : ___ Once I bought those first few CDs I was bitten by the collecting bug and just had to have every Godzilla soundtrack. Thanks to the internet and my website I was able to find places where I could obtain them. Of course, this opened up a whole can of worms, leading to many other Japanese discs, such as soundtracks to Gamera, Mothra, Ultraman, Spaceship Yamato and many others.

Over the years I bought what I could afford a little at a time, and now my site probably has over 700 CDs on it, most of which I own. In some cases CDs listed on my site have either been loaned to me for inclusion on the site, or the info and reviews have been sent to me by fans of the site. I always give full credit to anyone who sends me info I use.

MRH :    What the rarest album you have, and what is the most special to you?

LT : ___This is a tough one. Most are special to me because of the music and how hard they are to find. The rarest for me personally was the soundtrack to Godzilla 1985 (Futureland, TYCY-5360), and I don't know why but it took me over ten years to find a copy in order to complete my Godzilla soundtrack collection. Most places that had a copy, when you could find one, were in the $100 range and I refused to pay that much for it. Not only was it hard to find and expensive, it's not even among my favorites.

Another very rare find was the Godzilla vs Destroyer keychain with CD single disc (Toho 001/R500507). This was a promo item that I lucked into finding from someone who had one to sell. I guess if I had to pick a most special one it would be the first one I ever found and loved, which would be the soundtrack to Godzilla vs The Thing (aka Mothra vs Godzilla, Futureland TYCY-5348).