What's In My Bag

Record Store Day 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.

We’ll begin with the RSD goodies.

The Doors - Live in Detroit - RSD Release 2025

You ever wonder what Jim Morrison would’ve sounded like if he wasn’t ten sheets to the wind and about one bad trip away from a Viking funeral? Well, wonder no more. This is The Doors as they could’ve been, maybe as they should’ve been—a laser-sharp Morrison, freshly shaved and slinging charisma like a snake-oil salesman, backed by a band that sounds like they’ve finally woken up from the peyote dream. At four LPs, this set is a monolith. The sound quality? Shockingly good for the time, like the tech gods smiled on Detroit that night. And if you’re not left slack-jawed by The End and When the Music’s Over, check your pulse. This is The Doors alive in every sense of the word.

Morphine - Bootleg Detroit - RSD Release 2025

Ah, Detroit — where the beer’s cold, the skyline’s gritty, and the music’s hotter than the tailpipe of a '69 GTO. Morphine came through St. Andrew’s Hall and left an indelible smear of noir-jazz-punk right on the Motor City’s soul. The band was built for this kind of space: a thousand bodies pressed into the dark, swaying to the sound of that smoky two-string bass, saxophone seduction, and drums that feel like a lover’s heartbeat. Tracks like You Speak My Language and You Look Like Rain make you want to lean in closer, maybe too close. By the time the last note fades, you’re practically undressing yourself in the glow of their groove. They didn’t just play Detroit; they made love to it.

Post Malone - Tribute to Nirvana - RSD release 2025, yellow vinyl

You’d think a livestreamed Nirvana tribute from Post Malone would either be sacrilegious or utterly ridiculous, but surprise — it’s neither. This is Posty channeling the raw nerve and ragged edges of Cobain like a man possessed. Backed by Travis Barker pounding the skins like he’s got something to prove, this set swings between straight covers and wild reinterpretations that feel reverent without being derivative. It’s like Nirvana filtered through a haze of tattoos, beer, and AutoTune dreams. Yellow vinyl just sweetens the deal. Who knew Post Malone had the guts and the gall to pull this off? Turns out, he does.

Prince & the New Power Generation - Live at Glam Slam - RSD Release 2025

If you haven’t yet realized that Prince operated on a plane mere mortals couldn’t even fathom, here’s your crash course. This is the man, the myth, the purple wonder himself, holding court at his Minneapolis club and putting on a show so dripping with funk and sweat you’ll need a mop just to listen to it. Diamonds and Pearls was a watershed moment, and this live set is the baptism. Three LPs, five sides of music, and a diamond-etched sixth side just to remind you who’s boss. Prince doesn’t play songs; he constructs grooves so infectious they rewrite your DNA. Worship accordingly.

Rage Against the Machine - Live on Tour 1993 - RSD release 2025

This isn’t a live album; it’s a riot pressed onto wax. Rage’s 1993 tour was less a string of concerts and more a series of controlled demolitions. The untouched, unmixed recordings on this release drop you straight into the chaos, where Zach de la Rocha’s spitfire delivery and Tom Morello’s guitar wizardry light the fuse, and the whole crowd detonates. Rage was a seismic shift. They were the nuclear option when punk rock needed a bigger bomb. Listening to this is like stepping into the blast radius of an era-defining moment. Handle with care.

Thievery Corporation - The Cosmic Game - RSD release 2025, red vinyl

Imagine a sonic cocktail that mixes dub beats, Brazilian whispers, sitars, and a smattering of Flaming Lips-era psychedelia, shaken with just enough cosmopolitan cool to feel like you’re getting away with something. That’s The Cosmic Game. Thievery Corporation was always about infinite possibilities, and this record takes those possibilities and launches them into orbit. It’s personal for me — this album soundtracked a few fever-dream years of my life, and hearing it again feels like stepping back into a time when everything seemed expansive and slightly dangerous. On red vinyl, it’s a damn portal.

Tom Waits - Get Behind the Mule (Spiritual) - RSD release 2025, 7”

Tom would probably tell you that all of his music is spiritual; it just depends on who your god is and where you choose to worship. I worship in plenty of churches, with a variety of altars, hymns, icons, and preachers, and each of them moves my soul in myriad ways. There’s Jimi’s Sky Church of Electric Blues, there’s the Funkasaurus Bop Gun Baptists, Sister Aretha’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T Tabernacle, The Church of the Holy Folsom Line, and a host of others. I don’t attend services at Waits’ Church of Bawlers, Brawlers, and Bastards much these days, but each time I do my soul is restored.

One of the real beauties of RSD is that smart record store owners keep the killers they’ve acquired over the month or so before RSD so they can unleash them when their stores are likely to be overflowing with visitors. I come strapped, flush with cash, because if you don’t think I budget for this day, then you just don’t understand how solidified my position is on the matter.

The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground (1969) - 1st pressing

This completes my private collection of first pressings of the first four Velvet albums. Let’s be honest, everyone disregards 1973’s Squeeze as often and as hard as everyone disregards The Clash’s Cut the Crap, or the steaming pile of excrement that is Rocky V. I won’t go into too much detail here because I’ve already detailed by thoughts last week when I went album by album without stopping. Now that this is in my stacks I suppose it’s time to chill for a bit before I get back to the big game hunt, but I probably won’t.

The Who - The Who Sings My Generation (1965) - U.S. release, stereo

The hardest mod pop album recorded by anyone. Pete Townshend’s guitar split the air like a chainsaw, chord crunches so violent they practically saw through the grooves. Those distortions on My Generation and Out in the Street? They’re alive, clawing their way out of your speakers, ready to rip your complacency to shreds. And Keith Moon — Jesus Christ, Keith Moon — plays like he’s got the devil himself chasing him, every drum hit a thunderclap of chaos and control.

Yeah, it’s crude. Yeah, it’s messy. But that’s the point. The Who would go on to refine their sound, to craft more elegant statements, but they would never match the sheer, unrelenting energy of this record, and it still hits like a brick to the skull.

The Cure - Disintegration (1989) - 1st Pressing

If Disintegration were a person, it’d be a pale, trenchcoat-wearing specter whispering dark poetry in your ear while the world crumbles around you — and you’d be powerless to walk away. This is a black hole of yearning and dread that sucks you in and refuses to let go. Robert Smith and company took the arena rock flirtations of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, slowed them down, stretched them out, and then drowned them in a sea of reverb and synths until they transformed into towering cathedrals of sound.

What makes Disintegration so damn mesmerizing isn’t just the atmosphere, though. It’s the songs themselves, built like fortresses of despair, every note, every lyric, every echo carefully placed to lure you deeper into the abyss. This isn’t a commercial breakthrough in the traditional sense — it’s an artistic exorcism that somehow resonated with millions.