12 March 2015

Old Records Department



What I love most about buying old records from stores that sell old shit is the randomness. You just never know what you are going to find, how old it is going to be, how fine its condition, how much you are going to enjoy listening to it and what sort of value might be assigned to it.

A few such recent purchases dated from 1970 or thereabouts, an album and a couple 45s. The album is Melanie's. Has a great cover of the Stone's "Ruby Tuesday" - one of my favourite songs - on it as well as another cover and some Melanie originals. Great singer and songwriter. Never got to see her perform in person. When you open the record up there is a picture of Melanie, a bunch of schoolkids and a big peace symbol made out of bricks at their feet.

Love you Melanie!

Those were different times, motherfuckers.

Both of the 45s are Made In Fucking Japan. First one is Crosby, Stills and Nash's "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." Picture sleeve. Plays as new. Worth $12 or so these days. Worth more than that to read the b-side "Long Time Gone" misspelled as "Long Time Gome" on the label.

Love you Japs!

Second one is Serge Gainsbourg's "Goodbye Emmanuelle." Comes with a little poster of Emmanuelle star Sylvia Kristal. The value of the thing, due in no small part to its soft porn history, is apparently in the $300 range.

Love you Sylvia Kristal, even though you are dead!

The three of them cost me $4.    

5 comments:

Danneau said...

Jethro Tull Living In The Past. I say this not as a criticism, but rather as another who has a sense that there may have been a time when we collectively tried harder and had a vision of a constructive future. Keeping in touch with that past and that sense keeps a person from being overwhelmed by the sheer idiocy of so much of what happens of late. It can be downright eerie to see what happens when we peel back the layers of the myths that surround us.

Mr. Beer N. Hockey said...

Well said. The great mass of us appear to have arrived at the same moment Hunter Thompson arrived at a few years back except, unwilling to follow the logic one finds in such moments, we do not have the fucking balls to blow our brains out, or, heaven forbid, start or restoke the fires of the fighting spirit men and women with vision once collectively and individually strove for.

Jethro Tull? On the weekend I'll put the record on and see what you are on about. Can I play my Horslips records while I am at it?

Danneau said...

I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't already know when I say that you get to play any fucking thing you want whenever you want ( have to be careful about taste and volume when my lovely wife is about the premises, so I'm not quite so free). The Tull piece is not particularly revealing beyond the title. I used to be a blues bigot but was able to get off that horse, so I can appreciate where a man might hanker for a dose of Horslips from time to time. Have a great weekend.

ib said...

I suspect Hunter Thompson could no longer live with his own decay. That's all. No broader picture than the x-ray of one's own balls shrinking.

Mr. Beer N. Hockey said...

ib - On balance you are right but, given the decay of Freedom in his country during his lifetime, and supported, I think, by the increasingly hopeless tone of his later writing (or was that just the hopelessness of the Oakland Raiders?) I got the sense all that shit got to him more than his own personal decay.

Danneau - Tull I associate with how FM radio turned to crap. Like them or not FM radio used to play whole album's worth of their unique stuff. Has not been like that for decades - to our society's detriment I reckon.

Horslips, who I saw a couple times when I was living in England, came to mind because they too were known to dress up some, play flutes shit and, well, St. Patick's day is just around the corner and it was Horslips who took the original initiative to haul old Irish music from the past back into the present where it will remain, forever I suspect.