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               Every Record in My Collection
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[Don't mind me, just putting out the recycling. I wrote this
inventory of my record collection almost 20 years ago. It
resurfaced recently when I was going through some old
email. Only one person besides me has ever seen it, so I
think it's time to share it with a wider audience
... although given the medium I've chosen, not a /much/
wider audience ...]

I used to have a decent record collection. Not great; I was
never a music geek, not like say, my friend Frank, who could
have been the prototype for that guy in High Fidelity. But
it was a decent collection, maybe three hundred records. A
lot of the usual suspects (Talking Heads, Chet Baker, Tom
Waits, both Elvises, Billie Holiday, Johnny Cash) and some
less usual (Laibach, Yma Sumac). (In case it isn't obvious
by this point, I'd like to reaffirm that we are talking
Records here. Not CDs. Not tapes. Not wax cylinders, or them
newfangled mp3s.  Records. Big disks of mostly black vinyl.)

The decline and fall of my collection can be traced to when
my long time girlfriend and I split in the early 90s, which
not coincidentally was when I also lost my stereo. (OK,
technically it was her stereo, which her mother bought at
Linden Soles' garage sale when he was moving from BCTV to
CNN). And after that, through a series of unfortunate
housemates, I found myself moving around a lot. Five times
in 2 years, while finishing up my second masters degree (the
one that was supposed to, and eventually did, get me a
job). I became increasingly sick of packing, and of owning
stuff in general. So each time I moved, I sold or gave away
more of my records, until the three hundred had dwindled to
six.

I never did get another record-playing stereo - kind of
pointless when you only have 6 records - but I kept the
records anyway, now stacked against the wall in the den. Of
course, I have a CD player, and heaps of CDs, but this isn't
about them, but rather, as noted above: Big disks of mostly
black vinyl.

Considering how much good stuff I had, it's kind of
surprising what I kept. I don't remember ever consciously
deciding to keep these specific albums; I remember the
process as being more like whatever the equivalent is for
natural selection in the world of inanimate objects.  Not
quite survival of the fittest though; a certain serendipity
was involved. It could have been simply that these were the
records that no one wanted to take off my hands, but that
wasn't quite it either. These records do have some
significance for me, although to this point I've never
bothered to articulate it.

Nico: Chelsea Girl

Ah, Nico. Back in my impressionable youth, I had a
fascination with the not-quite-famous. Seemed to me, the way
I was thinking at the time, that it would be great to be
not-quite-famous. You would still get to go to all those hip
transatlantic parties, and yet you would retain most of your
anonymity, so nobody would pester you at the Safeway. Best
of both worlds. And Nico was a triple threat: she was
not-quite-famous for modelling (Paris Vogue), acting (La
Dolce Vita), and singing. For good reason.

At one time I had all her records. I even had the Marble
Index on 8-track, which provided great ambient music for
driving around Edmonton in my mom's Toyota: "Frozen warnings
close to mine/Close to the frozen borderline." I pretended
to like her music more than I really did, because I enjoyed
the occasional incredulous reactions from friends and
acquaintances. "No way! You actually like Nico?" I think
it's the same impulse that drives people to say they like
Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, but that's even more
extreme. No one could actually like Metal Machine Music.

Turns out, for Nico anyway, the whole not-quite-famous thing
really wasn't all that great. But then, maybe just being
Nico wasn't all that great. Having seen the documentary
Nico: Icon a couple of years back, I'd have to conclude the
woman was a monster.

Chelsea Girl was the first, most conventionally melodic, and
the best, of her LPs. Lots of great songwriting talent, even
if the vocals don't quite measure up.  "I'll Keep it With
Mine," Dylan's contribution, is a personal favourite.


Island Serenaders: Hawaiian Romance

Picked this up for 50 cents in a thrift shop at 49th and
Fraser, because I liked the cover (Hula dancers in grass
skirts in supersaturated colour). I was in the neighborhood
for the final close out sale of Honest Nat's Department
Store, a Vancouver institution of sorts. But I got there
late, when there were no more bargains to be had, just some
empty clothing racks and a black velvet painting of Snoopy
on the moon for which they wanted $50. So I decided to take
my business to the thrift store across the street.

Mostly it's your typical Hawaiian music, right down to the
obligatory Aloha Oe on the final track. Except that midway
through the first side there's this awesome, rockin'
Hawaiian garage surf tune with rockabilly electric guitar
and bizarre muttering vocals. Luau Lei I think it's
called. So, I had to keep this one, thinking that it was so
obscure, I could never possibly find it again. And although
I haven't listened to it in over 10 years, it's nice to know
that if I wanted to badly enough to track down a record
player, I still could.

Except ... it turns out that I'm not the only one who thinks
Luau Lei is kinda cool. Google "Island Serenaders" and
darned if you don't come across some exegesis on the Tiki
Central web board from 2003. It's even on the playlist of an
internet radio station, Luxuriamusic.com. I'm not sure how I
feel about this. On the one hand, it's great that Luau Lei
hasn't slipped into total oblivion.  On the other hand, what
happens to serendipity when literally everything is out
there, available all the time? Is there any difference
between wandering into a random thrift shop, and clicking on
a random link?  Does the whole idea of a music collection
lose something when nothing has any rarity value, and the
collection consists of a bunch of magnetized sludge on a
hard drive?

Since putting stuff online is what I do for a living, am I
maybe skirting the edges of insincerity here? 


Gamelan Semar Pegulingan: Gamelan of the love god

This record in fact belongs to my sister. So even though I'm
pretty sure she'll never want it back, I can't in all good
conscience get rid of it. Not that I'd even want to;
Balinese gamelan music is great. It has a certain
intensity/vitality that you don't get as much of from the
Javanese variety. But I'm not sure its even playable any
more. Back when I used to belong to a half-assed Edmonton
amateur theatre company (Crybaby Killer Theatre) we used
this as the soundtrack for one of our midnight Fringe shows
("Try, try!"  by Frank O'Hara). Unfortunately the venue was
an unfinished neo-heritage building and the dust from the
drywall got everywhere, including the grooves of the record.

Henry Miller: The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder

Picked this one up in the discard bin at the UBC library,
where I was doing my masters (the first one, an MFA in
painting). UBC had an great record library at the time,
including a section that very few people knew about, a
locked room in the back called the "Showbiz" room, where
they housed a donation of thousands of records relating to,
well, showbiz -- broadway musicals, crooners, big band
jazz. I used to hole up there when the poser postmodern
politics in the FA dept. just got too absurd, listening to
Mable Mercer's wise, mocking recording of "Ballad of the Sad
Young Men" until I felt better.

The Henry Miller is a spoken word album, issued in the late
50s on the "La Voix de l'Auteur" label in Paris.  Back in
the day, Miller was of course seen as a powerful liberating
force, grandaddy of the beats and all that. Now he mostly
has a reputation as a misogynist, sex-crazed jerk, which
isn't wholly undeserved. But the album shows he had a wider
range than either of those pigeonholes, alternately surreal
and sentimental, and sometimes both at once. He had a great
reading voice, too, which I assume was the happy result of
lots of booze and cigarettes.

I had an excerpt from this album on my answering machine for
a while, something about a sad clown seeking transcendance.

Jack Teagarden: King of the Blues Trombone (Box Set)

As with the Balinese Gamelan, I kept this one partly because
it too belonged to a sibling, in this case my brother. In
his younger days, my brother played jazz trombone
professionally, touring with some of Edmonton's better known
acts ( relatively speaking) to Las Vegas and the
Superbowl. I remember once driving out with some friends to
the edge of town to see him perform with Edmonton celeb
Bobby Curtola in a freezing cold Ikea parking lot in the
middle of the night, as part of some promotion. They were
happy to see us; it wasn't a big crowd. Bobby Curtola had a
couple of hits as a teen idol in the late 50s or early 60s;
by the time of the Ikea gig (the late 70s) his claim to
being "The World's Oldest Teenager" was on shaky ground;
local wags had started calling him "The World's Youngest
Senior Citizen" and he was best known for his IGA
commercials.

Anyhow, I owe my brother a big debt of gratitude for calling
my attention to Jack Teagarden, whose trombone and vocals
are filled with a great, mournful sadness and something else
for which I appear to lack adjectives.  "I'll be Glad When
You're Dead" is a big favourite, as is the Teagarden/Louis
Armstrong duet on Hank Williams' "My Bucket's got a Hole in
It", which unfortunately isn't anywhere in this box set.


Jazz Digest Vol. II

... on the Period label. Why did I keep this? Sure, there's
some good stuff on it - Mingus, Django Reinhardt - but
nothing I couldn't live without. Why didn't I keep that
Xavier Cugat album with the woman in the Mondrian print
dress with a raygun on the cover? Or how about that Elvis
Costello "Live at the El Mocambo" bootleg? Or even that
seedy burlesque compilation, "How to Strip for Your
Husband"?

Regrets. I have a few.


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Postscript, May 12 2024: Good lord, the Tiki Central web
board is still online! The above mentioned Island Serenaders
exegesis is here:

https://tikicentral.com/viewtopic.php?topic_id=10714