RECORDS
Independent American label: Reprise Records was started by Frank Sinatra in 1960, as a vehicle for his own recordings and those of Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. It was sold to Warner Brothers in 1963, and its output seems to the casual eye to have been more or less indistinguishable from that of WB throughout the '70s and '80s. In Britain, Reprise was handled by Pye throughout the '60s. The first, pink, label lasted until late 1970, when a new label design featuring a steamboat was adopted. Pye-era Reprise singles were mainly numbered in the RS-20000s - numbers reached the 21000s in 1971 - but there was an occasional RS-23000 series, which operated from 1965-71, and an RS-27000 one, which dates from 1969-70 and seems to have featured only British artists. Starting in 1971, singles on the various Kinney Corporation labels - Warner Brothers, Atlantic, Elektra and Reprise - were all given numbers in various K-00000 blocks; Reprise was allotted a K-14000 series, which it used for the rest of the decade. I assume that the change in numbering coincided with the switching of manufacture and distribution from Pye to CBS, which happened in July of that year. Parent label Warner Brothers switched at the same time. The 'steamboat' label remained the same, and the promos initially retained a Pye-style appearance; by 1974 promos had been given the usual CBS 'large thin A' marking. Reprise and the other Warner labels stayed with CBS until WEA set up its own distribution network, at the start of 1976. As far as company sleeves are concerned, a blue-grey one was used for most of the Sixties; it was replaced briefly by a dark-fawn coloured one, which evolved into the familiar orange form. Around 1978 WEA started using a common sleeve for all its labels, including Reprise. This sleeve lasted for about a year before undergoing a comprehensive re-design. A 'Warner Giants' series from 1974, consisting of K-14340 to K-14351 together with some titles on Warner Brothers, had its own special sleeve. Reprise headed on into the '80s as a constituent of the Warner group. The discography below as usual, is full of holes. Some of these holes can be accounted for by the fact that the singles with those numbers were only issued abroad witch have been added. Thanks to Robert Lyons For The Info.
A FULL DISCOGRAPHY OF Reprise K-14000 SERIES 1971-1982 CAN BE FOUND HERE
