Record Show Blues
I Did This to Myself
Vinyl record shows can be a truly depressing affair. I have to make a concerted effort to suffer politely the shitheads and terminally lonely and focus on crate-digging for cool records that move my boogie bone. I was indelicately reminded of this at 8:15 this morning.
Not every record collector is a lonely, middle-aged man, but seriously… we don’t do fuck all to help our cause. I walked into the Knights of Columbus building about three miles from my house at 5 past 8 this morning for the early-bird picking and I was painfully reminded what kind of affairs these shows are. To begin, there are entirely too many men with grey ponytails dressed like they’re roadies for a reconstituted Humble Pie on a state fair tour. There was exactly one woman in the room and she was handling admission. She looked like an extra in an episode of Golden Girls set in a Knights of Columbus meeting. Maybe she was linking up with Rose later for breakfast. She definitely wasn’t kicking it with Blanche or Dorothy. I learned later she was handling her husband’s booth while he was doing some crate-digging of his own. This tracks.
I’m 43 years old. For a solid hour, I was the youngest person in the room. I can’t confirm that, of course, but FUCK! I can pass for 35 or 6, sure, but the people in this room have just as many opinions about hip replacements as they do about mono vs. stereo recordings. Also, there were far, far too many CDs in the room. Do you remember compact discs? Of course you do. You might even still have the tech required to burn a CD or two. There were too many CDs in that room. “No, brother, I do NOT need a five-disc box set of KISS songs digitally remastered with 30 unreleased demos, outtakes, and live recordings.”
In digging through the crates I made a few realizations. There are STILL a ton of popular country music fans out there hocking records by Conway Twitty and Connie Francis. This is absolutely not to disparage Conway or Connie. It actually speaks to their legacy. Holy shit! Y’all are STILL moving LPs. Damn! Good on ya. Also, Boomer men will mansplain to other men. I don’t think gender matters to Boomer men - they just have a psychological need to explain shit because no one born after them has ever learned anything without their expert tutelage. For example, I’m sifting through a stack of 45s and each carries the Sun Records label. This is not insignificant. I held up a copy of That’s All Right by Elvis from 1954. I held it up and smiled out of sheer nostalgia - as people of my era might if they saw an X-Men #1 from ‘91 or a copy of Pump Up the Volume on VHS. Nostalgia smiles. That’s all. (That’s a good name for an album now that I think about it. Nostalgia Smiles by the High-Class Tailors.) This was his first track, and in a lot of circles, it genuinely matters. The price tag was $3. Boomer with a skin rash looks at me and says “That’s not a first pressing.”
No shit? The $3 89th edition of Elvis’ first track that looks like a team of figure skaters danced on it is NOT a first pressing??? Color me shocked, good sir. I bow to your infection and wisdom. Good luck with the gout situation.
I gave up hope of finding any rad punk singles with the sleeves still intact after 30 minutes. This being the Detroit metro area, I did run across a lot of Stooges records, early Bob Seger cuts, Ted Nugent, Mitch Ryder with and without the Detroit Wheels, and the MC5. This was expected. As was the number of men in comfortable walking shoes battling male pattern baldness.
I shouldn’t knock them. I’m 15 years away from being them.
I did find some things that made me smile with sheer joy. Etta James’ At Last full-length tops the list. I saw a first pressing of the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa that’s insanely hard to find but the price tag was out of reach. I walked away with the Mekons’ debut album, Them’s eponymous debut Them featuring the Belfast Balladeer Van Morrison, and that Etta album. I stayed around just long enough for the raffle drawing which, if I had won, would have cut that Surfer Rose price tag in half. I did not win. So it goes.
Folks, we have to make record shows cool again. It’s too big an ask to get attractive women in the mix - I accept this. Can we at least get vendors who don’t look like Scooby-Doo villains? I don’t know if I want this Pink Floyd record or if I want to solve the Mystery of the Record Show Phantom.