What's In My Bag

Tax Return Edition

I go digging. I don’t spend hours and hours in the stacks because I’m not producing music, but I AM an enormous fan. As such, I keep my weather eye open and my Spidey Sense on full. I’m drawn to places through intuition, happenstance, and sheer coincidence. This also happens to describe my mother’s sense of religion. Shit! I guess crate digging is my religion. This is about records I’ve found recently that I needed for my stacks.

Marvin Gaye - What’s Going On, 1971, gatefold, 1st pressing

Rolling Stone magazine’s greatest record of all time is one Motown head Berry Gordy didn’t want to release. This 35-minute psychedelic soul song cycle moves out of the traditional five-star rating system. This is a six-star album. It’s essential listening. It’s required. It’s that easy. It’s a holy document.

Miles Davis - On the Corner, 1972, gatefold, 1st pressing

An alien funk bomb, commercial flop upon its release, a swirl of free jazz and electronic music when that genre was in its infancy, and the Miles record that pissed the squares off the most.

Iggy Pop - The Idiot, 1977, German pressing

German pressing indeed! The Stooges were gone, Pop and Bowie were wasted on pills and powders, so they naturally headed to Berlin, and then on to France to record Pop’s debut solo album. As if James Brown met Kraftwerk, Iggy got poetic and, dare I say, self-referential. Kid Dynamite put on his big boy pants.

John Cale - Fear, 1974, 1st pressing

“Stop trying to hit me, and hit me.” -Morpheus. On Fear, Cale stopped trying to be intriguing and stylish and just became intriguing and stylish for the first time since he left the Velvet Underground. And don’t come at me shouting about Paris, 1919. That album is many things (accessible, literate), but cool it ain’t. Who else would be cool enough to name tracks Fear is a Man’s Best Friend and the eternally awesome The Man Who Couldn’t Afford to Orgy?

Junior Wells - Hoodoo Man Blues, 1965, mono, 1st pressing

Speaking of cool… with all the smoky atmosphere they could muster inside a recording studio in 1965, Junior Wells and his Chicago Blues Band, alongside long-time running mate Buddy Guy (listed hilariously under the pseudonym Friendly Chap) pressed into wax what the hottest southside juke joint must’ve sounded like in the City of Broad Shoulders in the middle ‘60s.