The miracle that is the internet gave me a chance to read the play by play of Friday night's tornado in St Louis which damaged Lambert Airport and towns and cities around the Interstate 270 corridor. About 7:25 PM one of the storm chasers showed a live cam of some of the blackest and darkest clouds that I have seen and remarked at that time, somebodys is going to get a bad tornado out of this. Usually when I stay in St Louis I hang around that area which is close by the Chain Of Rocks Bridge, one of the last reminders of what used to be Route 66 and it remains a special place in my heart. The tornado hopped over the river and took out some homes in the Granite City area too. Granite City I tend to visit when in that area too, their Goodwill and Salvation Army stores have some great vinyl albums that I did pick up from time to time although I'm sure when I was down there they benefited from a record store closing and some of the discarded items were there to which I bought. Two days later the airport has reopened but with limited activity and chances are they will be doing repairs to that airport for at least three months.
Hoppy Easter everybody. With that out of the way, I will not be doing any bargain hunts today due to Easter but tomorrow is another day. The folks at Half Priced Books, I like to know who prices the forty fives up there. The dufus has some 45s for 5 freaking dollars! Which is more than I paid for the Beach Boys Love You LP. I'm sure it's a slight look over or maybe the fat dude up there thinks he can make a killing on moldy and dusty DJ copies of crap that nobody bought for a quarter when Rock n Bach was in business. 98 cents is not that bad but anything over a dollar isn't worth it and I simply don't buy 5 dollar forty fives unless it's by Buddy Holly or Elvis. I can't get on the guy too much, he does throw the lesser selling cds in the clearance bins after a while and I'm sure once the 45's take up space they'll be marked down. Till then I settled on Paul Stookey's Wedding Song for 48 cents and in very good shape. I also tend to think Jim Kibler lives at HP books more than I do since I've seen him once again scoping out cd's in the buck bins.
Despite what people think, vinyl records still sell very well at HP Books. I thought about picking up the Cinderella Night Songs on vinyl when I saw it on Thursday but when I went back to pick it up it was gone. They had Def Leppard's 1980 On Through The Night LP (via RCA record club) and Tangerine Dream Exit (no they're not hair metal but they had it on vinyl), both picked up two days later. Never been a big Def Lep fan, when I want to hear them OTTN would be my go to album, till I traded it in when I lived in Arizona and had it on CD too, but bought it during Record Store Day up in Dubuque. Robert John Lange showed them the way to have hits and they got popular and exploded on the scene with 83' Pyromania but I prefer the Tom Allom metalized production more so. Joe Elliot seem to be a bit timid on the vocal back then but the guitar sounds was excellent. Wish I could say the same for Kick Axe Vices (Pasha 1984), with drums sounding like Quiet Riot and a vocalist that was HM OTT (heavy metal over the top) that he makes the album just about unlistenable. Rough Cutt Wants You (WB 1986) is a bit more metal pop friendly and most of side two worked for me till the awful ballad The Night Cries Out (for you) ends the record on a sour note. For silly metal fun, Cycle Sluts From Hell (Epic 1991) reminds me had Spinal Tap been led by women this would be the result. They had a minor metal hit with I Wish You Were A Beer. At that time they were touring the states with Motorhead and although the record sold fairly well, there was never a follow up album. To me CCFH sounded a lot like L7's Bricks Are Heavy but how L7 was alt music and not metal and CCFH vice versa is up for debate for the future.
Judging from the ratings I noticed that we are becoming a hit in Iran, since I had 4 readers popping in on the stats page. Hard to believe that. I'm sure the Ayatollah Ali Kemenini would be forbidding the people from reading Imperialist propaganda from Infidels in Death To America but can't imagine him popping in and leaving a comment saying more Crabb please. Still I'm flattered to see the Iranians stopping in from time to time. This is not about world domination but record collecting and music seeking here. Wouldn't mind coming out to visit y'all but I don't think you have record stores out there that keep me occupied. As of Monday, I seen 19 folk from Iran came to visit this site. Keep spreading the word and all good vibes to my Iranian dudes.
Finally, Drew made a blog about bootleg albums and tapes from over the years and basically I haven't made much of an effort to listen to bootlegs although I do have some in my procession. The Black Crowes New York 1990 comes from New York show and is fairly brief at 39 minutes. Most of the songs are from Shake Your Money Maker to which was released not too long after this show. One of the earliest bootlegs I do have is The Who Lifehouse Live (at the young vic London 1971 April) and the recording is very rough sounding. I guess Universal had a different mix and song set up for Who's Next Deluxe Edition but Lifehouse Life predates Who's Next by about four months. A more interesting find was the MC5 Phun City UK Festival 1970 (Sonic Records 1996) but it was recorded on a mono cassette. For historical purposes only. A better sounding one Thunder Express (Skydog France) which was their 1972 live in the studio that has been bootlegged a few times, I found this at the old Sam Goody up in Dubuque in 1996.
In the 1990s modern technology improved to the point that people could record a concert or good sound recordings from the soundboard and in my time of working at the record store many great shows from Nirvana or Metallica or The Grateful Dead was on out cd. And they sold for 25 bucks a cd, very pricey but lots of people bought them up and the Nirvana sides tend to bring big bucks via EBAY. There were two very good cd companies that put out Bootlegs, Oxygen and KTS were two of them and the Gin Blossoms In Bloom (KTS 259-1994) has two edited shows from Solana Beach and The Metro in Chicago in 1993 and some of the songs would find themselves on the New Miserable Experience Expended Edition and the DVD that Universal put out. Swimming With Your Boots On (Oxygen 1996) is Del Amitri's 1996 tour of Germany and Atlanta split up and the sound is outstanding. It's one of those cds that Jerry at work got me to buy for 15 bucks and it makes a nice addition to the Del Amitri collection if you can find it. Finally The Goo Goo Dolls Gaa Gaa is a radio recording from Milwaukee in 1995 and notable for the band stopping in the middle of Cause Your Gone to tell two dudes to stop fighting. Still known as punk rockers as they were riding the wave of their latest cd at that time Boy Named Goo, but you can sense the change of direction as they were promoting their new hit Name. Not much known about this CD company putting this out but the orgins lead to Taiwan. Last, not least Flashback gave us Roxy Music Bittersweet which gives us unreleased BBC performances of their first album and three songs from Boston. I guess in terms of bootlegs I tend to pick and choose a little more carefully than regular recordings. But I seem to be more attractive to the MC5 recordings than anything else.
For the lesser known Alive did have a Mitch Ryder/Detroit show from 1972 with pretty good liner notes but the sound is poor. A better sound was MC5 66 Breakdown which has some early live recordings. As they say buyer beware.
And its been a bad week for more musicians passings. Poly Styrene, the vocalist on X Ray Spex Oh Bondage Up Yours died from spine and breast cancer at 53. Tom King, the main leader of The Outsiders passed away at 68 and the remarkable Phoebe Snow has gone away at age 60.
But still alive and doing fine is Duane Eddy who turned 73 on Tuesday (the 26th).
No comments:
Post a Comment