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.
Continue reading “Things I Will Keep #1: Introduction and THE SWEET”