Things I Will Keep #1: Introduction and THE SWEET

One of the worst things about collecting records is that there are rarely any great stories to go along with it these days. It’s not like those accounts that you read from the 1960s and 70s when record collectors would knock on doors and ask befogged senior citizens if they had any old 78s laying around and then go inside and maybe meet a schizophrenic or a former Nazi in hiding or a woman who once gave Robert Johnson a handjob.

That’s not how it works anymore. If you did that today, it would be creepy. Now we have Ebay and Discogs and you can sit at home at 2 AM and hunt for records with one hand on a computer keyboard and one hand playing with your balls like a normal person. Leave the elderly ALONE. They don’t have obscure rockabilly 45s anymore. Lux Interior and Poison Ivy already found ‘em all by 1972.

Besides, I personally started collecting records because I DIDN’T want to talk to people. It was a hideaway, a great retreat from life. A lot of my collection came from thrift stores where there are few signs of life anyway beyond the decades of microbes on everything.

I’m not saying that every record collector is a miserable person desperate to fill a void in their life with as many plastic trinkets that they can afford. I’m not saying that every collector is a bore accumulating cool things in vain hope that some of that coolness will rub off on them. I’m not saying that everybody with thousands of records in their house, trailer or small apartment is an addict sublimating their tendencies into this hobby that’s relatively harmless but still depressing.

But all of that was true of me at my worst, which was in my mid-20s to early 30s, my post-college Lost Years, my Hoarder in the Making years. I’d been around enough by then to have bargain-hunting down to a sick science. The cheap vinyl bins were were my church and I bowed down to it every Sunday (literally, when it came to Half Price Books, where the $1 section is on the very bottom shelves, which require one to get down on the floor to browse). And Saturday. And any other day in which I had free time and spare cash.

It was normal for me to leave a store with twenty to thirty records. I would buy ANYTHING. Soundtrack albums to movies that I’d never seen. Albums of religious sermons. Records by lounge singers nobody ever heard of. The ignored LPs and singles by any and every disco and synth-pop also-ran. Piles and piles of shit, some of which, to this day, over a decade later, I’ve never played. It was near-mindless accumulation.

The cheap treasure was my Holy Grail. I wanted to find that strange and amazing Christian vocal group record that nobody else had discovered. That great 60s bubblegum B-side that no one was talking about. That unsung new wave album.

I lost interest in new music even, so hooked I was on dumpster-diving into music history’s expired meat.

But it got old. Real old. As I write this in 2018, it’s been about eight years since I’ve browsed a cheap record bin. I can’t do it anymore. I get bored. You see the same stuff all of the time. I don’t want to flip past another record by April Wine, Barbra Streisand or Hugo Winterhalter again for as long as I live.  I’m done. I’m finished. I’m out of the game. I’m burned out. (See my “review” of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream and Other Delights for more rambling on this subject.)

This is good news. I don’t miss it at all.

I also sold off most of that junk awhile back. Made enough shekels to pay off some debts and travel a bit.

More good news: I actually did discover some great music along the way. Records I might not have even thought about if I hadn’t been such a giant dork for at least a decade. Records that I can’t bring myself to sell. Most of them aren’t huge classics. Most of them aren’t worth much.

But they’re worth a lot to me.

And that’s the kind of collector that I am now. I still like having physical artifacts of music around, but I won’t sit on the floor at Half Price Books anymore. I will no longer drag thirty LPs home. I would rather tongue kiss an Ebola patient than flip through record bins for hours these days.

Here’s what a jerk-off I was back in my collector days: I used to keep around records that I didn’t even like.

I kept them because they were curiosities. Or they were things that I hoped to someday grow to like. Or they were things that seemed like something that a good “library” of records ought to have.

Fuck all of that.

It’s time to finally admit that I don’t care about Bob Dylan. Or Steely Dan. Or Sonic Youth. Or Black Flag. Or Pavement. (I’ll stop now.)

I’m okay with a small collection. CD reissues are fine, too (I used to hate ’em).

Today, I don’t want any record in my home that I don’t absolutely, 100% love, even if they’re trashy and embarrassing and stupid.

They are the Things I Will Keep and I can’t think of a better record to formally kick off the series than…

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The Sweet
Featuring “Little Willy” & “Blockbuster”
1973, Bell Records

There were a lot of great bubblegum bands in the early 1970s. Nice boys and girls recording sweet songs about love, candy, sunshine and kiddie-level drama. Sugary verses, whipped cream choruses. The audience were kids, grooving to AM radio or 45s on portable mini record players. Sometimes the lyrics slipped you some dirty innuendo that no 8-year-old in 1969 would catch, but overall these were wholesome, silly songs performed with maximum vanilla efficiency. Even with killer hooks, bubblegum music sounded completely harmless.

Except for when The Sweet did it.

The Sweet brought violence to bubblegum. Performing the songs of hitmakers-for-hire Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, this British band pounded hard on guitar riffs, shouted, screamed, went full bug-eyes and raced through the verses and choruses at hellhound speed. You don’t want to be around me when “Block Buster” or “Hell Raiser” come on. I turn ’em up loud and sing every line, with no regard for the fact that I can’t hit the high notes. I’m transported every time. It’s top-shelf trash.

Part of what makes The Sweet great is that they were a real band, not a front concocted by the record company like most bubblegum acts.

There were a few–and I do mean just a few–real bands out there in the bubblegum scene. The Lemon Pipers. Ohio Express on their first album.

They all have the same story about being “serious”, “heavy” bands who got discovered, signed a contract and then the next thing they knew they were banging out kiddie pop songs written by others because that’s what the record company demanded.

Funny thing though, a lot of those kiddie pop songs were great.

Also, these bands often still got the chance to showcase their own visions because singles needed B-sides and LPs needed filling.

This album was The Sweet’s first North American release, compiled from British singles and six of these ten tracks are the band’s own songs. The four songs from the Chinn-Chapman team are the highlights for being such relentless hook-monsters, but there ain’t a damn thing wrong with band originals such as “New York Connection” and “Man From Mecca”, sturdy rockers that reach for the intensity and guitar squall of Deep Purple. Then there’s the gentle “You’re Not Wrong for Loving Me”, a glittering acid-ballad that shows us that The Sweet know how to chill out, too.

It’s a great record that catches the band at a time when they came into their own. Their first album, Funny How Sweet Co-Co Can Be (released only in Europe in 1971), is straight-up Archies-style sugar, for the most part. I wouldn’t call it a hidden treasure, but it has its charms (the song “Funny Funny” is a capital moment in bubblegum history). Over the next year, The Sweet’s balls dropped and they emerged as full-on English glitter-rockers, festooned in camp and competing with the likes of T. Rex and Slade.

But they still had bubblegum stuck to their shoes.

When they recorded a song called “Wig Wam Bam”, it was every bit as catchy and stupid and ridiculous and great as a song called “Wig Wam Bam” should be. That the group rushed through it like the hook was a hot potato in their hands only made it better. It’s one of my favorite songs of all-time.

I can’t sell this record. It’s got the kind of bloodshot fury that I need in my life.

Also, the band re-recorded a lot of these songs in later years. I don’t know why. Some kind of stupid record company problem, I guess. All I know is that I’ve tried to add some of these songs to my Spotify playlist and every time, I get a re-recorded version. They’re not bad, really. The band puts earnest effort into hitting every note and nailing the tempo of the old takes, but something is still missing. It’s not the same air around the microphones. It doesn’t have the same heart. I don’t want to hear it.

As someone who’s not an expert on the Sweet discography, I’m not sure exactly where else on vinyl, CD or digital download that these definitive versions of the songs can be found (short of the vintage 45s, some of which I have). I’m sure that they’re out there. I just don’t know about it.

And I don’t need to know about it, because I’ve got all of the original ass-kickers right here.

Also, this is a good place to give a shout-out to early 1970s vinyl. I have played this album for what feels like hundreds of times with different needles and different turntables. I’m not super-uptight about my records. I don’t throw ’em around the room, but I don’t handle each one like it’s a Ming Dynasty artifact, either. I’m like a kid. I think that records are to be played and enjoyed, not treated like museum pieces.

So, I have played the shit out of this record ever since I first bought it around the spring of 2004.  And it has yet to skip or develop any intrusive surface noise. If it has, this record is too loud, punchy and full of sound for it to be noticeable.

Lay a needle anywhere on it and pure thunder comes out.