MR. PIGMAN STORIES - THE MADE IN HOLLAND LABEL
The "Made in Holland" idea came from the fact that some of our distributors in Europe and here in the US were getting hassled by the powers that be of the time. In the Netherlands they didn't care about about copyright so much. So I came up with the idea to put "Made in Holland" on the labels to throw people off where the records were being pressed. In reality the LPs were still being pressed in the US in Inglewood near Los Angeles (LAX) airport.
A couple of funny stories about this:
Our biggest distributor at the time was in Amsterdam. He was selling our records to shops all over western Europe, including the UK. Our first air freight shipment of TMQ arrived at customs in Amsterdam with this "Made in Holland" label on the records. Our guy there went to pick up the shipment from customs and the customs officer showed him the labels with the "Made in Holland" on them. The customs guy laughed, shook his head and told our guy to just go away with records.
Another thing that happened: The British "Copyright Control" decided to bust shops in the UK for selling pirate records. To make a good example of someone they hit the original Virgin shop on Oxford Street across from the big HMV store. They went in and roughed up the employees, smashed some counters and confiscated all the bootleg LPs they could find. Then they called in Scotland Yard. In one newspaper account one Scotland Yard officer was quoted as saying, "After careful investigation many of the illicit records have been traced to Holland!" I wonder how they figured that one out?