What's In My Bag
Records I've Scored Recently
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 personal stacks.
Cowboy Junkies - Sweet Jane - 1989 - 7”
Lou Reed is on the record (pun definitely intended) that this version of his song is his favorite. How’s that for an endorsement? The whole saga of the eternally, ethereally haunting The Trinity Session merits a lengthy piece in and of itself. Famously recorded inside Toronto’s Church of the Holy Trinity on Nov. 27, 1987, with a single microphone, the record wouldn’t see wide release for another 51 weeks, and this lead single wouldn’t come for another year after that. I can only assume the suits were scared to release the record, which, if I’m correct, illustrates how little those gasbags know. This is some kind of perfect, and Margo Timmins’ voice is a thing worthy of a church of the Holy Trinity.
Dexter Gordon - Our Man in Paris - 1963, first pressing
Jazz musicians always have the coolest names. Seriously. Only Italian racers have cooler names, but tragically they don’t play music. Dexter decamped to Copenhagen because he didn’t want to play in segregated concert halls stateside. Dex caught up with fellow ex-pats Bud Powell and Kenny Clarke in Paris and decided, apparently on a whim, to cut this for Blue Note. I know I’m supposed to extol the virtues of John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins, but Dexter is my DUDE and he’s also on my saxophone Rushmore. This contains Dexter’s staggering version of Scrapple from the Apple and my second favorite version of A Night in Tunisia (Art Blakey’s if you must know).
Go - OST - 2018, yellow vinyl
I’ll hear no guff about this delightful inclusion in my record collection. You can fight me. This shit is as perfect a document of 1999 as one can possibly find. Also, it’s not lost on me in the least that I’ve been big-game hunting for Dexter Gordon’s Go when this soundtrack to a film of the same name. The late ‘90s was an absolutely bizarro time period, a total fucking free-for-all in every way imaginable, and this movie put a beautiful time capsule in place for all of us to unearth some years later. This was really what it was like.
No guff from me on the Go! Soundtrack. Just the opposite, actually. When my (now) wife and I first started dating, this hadn’t been out too long, and was one of the CDs in her car. we listened to it quite a bit. Any time I see it, it takes me right back to those early days of our relationship.
The junkies. Almost can’t hear that track, haunting and beautiful, without the NBK voiceovers. I’ve had to listen again and again like wearing out an old memorex cassette to erase Woody & Juliette. I’m almost there. Just one. More. Listen.