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Record Digging Stories (Please Add On)
It was 1987 and a buddy of mine was coming up with sealed LP’s that I had been buying from him for a few months. Then another buddy told my brother and I about this place out in the East Texas town of Elmo that had lots of records for sale. That Saturday we headed out to Elmo unaware that this is where all the sealed LP’s were coming from. When we got there we were lead into a barn that was filled with junk. Cars, records, newspapers, etc. We dug through the records and pulled out quite a few. Outside of the barn were two 18-wheel trailers and we were told they were filled with magazines. The first one had newspapers dating back to the 1940’s all neatly piled up and organized. The second trailer was filled with porn magazines going just as far back in time. We flipped through them for the hell of it but none of us knew what/if they were worth anything. They were $0.50 each and I bought a box full of vintage black porn magazines, quite honestly because I had never seen anything like them before.
When we thought we were all done the owner asked if we had looked at the records in the cars?? He then explained that the 10-20 cars parked outside the barn were filled with records! We went to see what was out there and every inch of each car was filled with LP’s…the front seat, the back seal, the floors and the trunks!. I opened up one trunk and found a still sealed copy of Roscoe Shelton on Excello, a record so rare I have only seen one other copy. By the time we were done we had quite a nice haul. Our friend Mike decided that before we left he would climb up into the loft of the barn and see if there was anything up there. All he found was a shoebox filled with old Polaroid photos of 100’s of naked women. I have a feeling that at one time there was some wild shit going on out in Elmo, Texas.
A few years later I showed the box of porn to Miriam of Norton Records and only then found out that we probably left a fortune behind by not buying them all.
When we thought we were all done the owner asked if we had looked at the records in the cars?? He then explained that the 10-20 cars parked outside the barn were filled with records! We went to see what was out there and every inch of each car was filled with LP’s…the front seat, the back seal, the floors and the trunks!. I opened up one trunk and found a still sealed copy of Roscoe Shelton on Excello, a record so rare I have only seen one other copy. By the time we were done we had quite a nice haul. Our friend Mike decided that before we left he would climb up into the loft of the barn and see if there was anything up there. All he found was a shoebox filled with old Polaroid photos of 100’s of naked women. I have a feeling that at one time there was some wild shit going on out in Elmo, Texas.
A few years later I showed the box of porn to Miriam of Norton Records and only then found out that we probably left a fortune behind by not buying them all.
Alright..
2004, My friend Alex and I up and went to Mexico City with the sole intent of turning the city inside out record wise over the course of a week and a half. He had a friend there who was in the press corp and well connected with the ins and outs of the city, and I spoke spanish plus had a good enough grasp of what was what record wise. We arrived late the first day, I think it was a saturday, and the following day he was going to take us way the f out of town. We woke up early and got a juice across the street from the dude who would stand there and squeeze oranges - he turned out to be "DJ Hercules" but that's a different story. We hopped on the subway and about an hour later and at the end of the line we arrived outside a woman's prison. Everywhere you looked there where stands of vendors set up around the prison wall, and it was explained to me that most people selling used things were trying to raise money for their family members inside, and everyone else was selling provisions for them; the prison, of course, did not give the women anything. AS far as the eye could see there were piles and piles of stuff and junk completely unsorted with families trying to get whatever they could for them. Meanwhile there were drug transactions happening everywhere, guns for sale, and no shortage of people eyeballing us. The portable was going to have to stay in the backpack and i shifted, as i always did in these situations, my money to under my ballsack. As the sun beat us down we walked from stall to stall and soon realized a) all the records were going to be mostly warped and at the minimum skated and b) the experience would by far outweigh finding anything. I kept digging, I was getting bit up by fleas but somehow I rolled a pile of shitty blankets over and underneath them was - no kidding, 3 stone sealed Mary Lou Williams records. How they got there or WHY I just couldn't wrap my head around. I quickly copped for less then a dollar. As the day wore on i found lots of good Mexican rock and psych, all kind of tattered, included some wierd 45 i have yet to find any info on, a mini-lp 33 rpm with 2 meters covers on it but it is utterly rinked. f'd
Here's a quick comp i threw together just now if you wan to get a visual feel for what i was talking about:
We went home to drop off the records an change out of our filthy clothes, and on our way back out, as we were walking to the train station we spotted a dude wheeling around three crates of records on a dolly. Wtf? so we copped a seat on a park bench and watched him set up a makeshift record store under a freeway overpass. After about 45 minutes we sauntered over and had a dig. I found a bunch of weird private stuff which i assumed was mexican. The best one i found, was some weird mexican dude called "Matt The Cat". We bought our records - I think i got 40 records for $5 US and made our way back to the crib. When I got home i used the "Matt The Cat" record on a beat which made our Stepfather LP in 2006. With no publishing or writer information on the LP's sleeve, and with no one I knew at the time knowing about it, I had no reason NOT to think it wasn't a mexican dude and mexican record.
Fast forward, 5 years and I get a letter from "Matt Cassell" aka Matt The Cat threatening to sue me. Someone had dropped the dime to him I had sampled his song. My first thought was, how the f did this mexican dude find out about this??!! Then I quickly realized it was a Bay area record all along. I explained the whole story to Matt and we had a good laugh over the complete randomness of the situation. At that point I went back and reviewed the 10 stacks of video tapes we had shot on the trip, not only did i have video of the dude i bought it from, but to my complete disbelief, the lady can be seen in the video holding the actual frickin MLC record! I slowed it down and here is a copy of the video i sent to him:
Some days buying records is just another day, but every once in a while, there is a day that is truly memorable, and this was one of those days. Digging around the world, in my life, I have collected more experiences than I have actual records, and I am absolutely fine with that.
As such, I will never live to have dug as much as Roc, and though we don't always see eye to eye, I have enormous respect for him and his history in this game. A true legend. It saddens me that ebay has created a generation of shut in record grippers. Life is out there next to the records!
2004, My friend Alex and I up and went to Mexico City with the sole intent of turning the city inside out record wise over the course of a week and a half. He had a friend there who was in the press corp and well connected with the ins and outs of the city, and I spoke spanish plus had a good enough grasp of what was what record wise. We arrived late the first day, I think it was a saturday, and the following day he was going to take us way the f out of town. We woke up early and got a juice across the street from the dude who would stand there and squeeze oranges - he turned out to be "DJ Hercules" but that's a different story. We hopped on the subway and about an hour later and at the end of the line we arrived outside a woman's prison. Everywhere you looked there where stands of vendors set up around the prison wall, and it was explained to me that most people selling used things were trying to raise money for their family members inside, and everyone else was selling provisions for them; the prison, of course, did not give the women anything. AS far as the eye could see there were piles and piles of stuff and junk completely unsorted with families trying to get whatever they could for them. Meanwhile there were drug transactions happening everywhere, guns for sale, and no shortage of people eyeballing us. The portable was going to have to stay in the backpack and i shifted, as i always did in these situations, my money to under my ballsack. As the sun beat us down we walked from stall to stall and soon realized a) all the records were going to be mostly warped and at the minimum skated and b) the experience would by far outweigh finding anything. I kept digging, I was getting bit up by fleas but somehow I rolled a pile of shitty blankets over and underneath them was - no kidding, 3 stone sealed Mary Lou Williams records. How they got there or WHY I just couldn't wrap my head around. I quickly copped for less then a dollar. As the day wore on i found lots of good Mexican rock and psych, all kind of tattered, included some wierd 45 i have yet to find any info on, a mini-lp 33 rpm with 2 meters covers on it but it is utterly rinked. f'd
Here's a quick comp i threw together just now if you wan to get a visual feel for what i was talking about:
We went home to drop off the records an change out of our filthy clothes, and on our way back out, as we were walking to the train station we spotted a dude wheeling around three crates of records on a dolly. Wtf? so we copped a seat on a park bench and watched him set up a makeshift record store under a freeway overpass. After about 45 minutes we sauntered over and had a dig. I found a bunch of weird private stuff which i assumed was mexican. The best one i found, was some weird mexican dude called "Matt The Cat". We bought our records - I think i got 40 records for $5 US and made our way back to the crib. When I got home i used the "Matt The Cat" record on a beat which made our Stepfather LP in 2006. With no publishing or writer information on the LP's sleeve, and with no one I knew at the time knowing about it, I had no reason NOT to think it wasn't a mexican dude and mexican record.
Fast forward, 5 years and I get a letter from "Matt Cassell" aka Matt The Cat threatening to sue me. Someone had dropped the dime to him I had sampled his song. My first thought was, how the f did this mexican dude find out about this??!! Then I quickly realized it was a Bay area record all along. I explained the whole story to Matt and we had a good laugh over the complete randomness of the situation. At that point I went back and reviewed the 10 stacks of video tapes we had shot on the trip, not only did i have video of the dude i bought it from, but to my complete disbelief, the lady can be seen in the video holding the actual frickin MLC record! I slowed it down and here is a copy of the video i sent to him:
Some days buying records is just another day, but every once in a while, there is a day that is truly memorable, and this was one of those days. Digging around the world, in my life, I have collected more experiences than I have actual records, and I am absolutely fine with that.
As such, I will never live to have dug as much as Roc, and though we don't always see eye to eye, I have enormous respect for him and his history in this game. A true legend. It saddens me that ebay has created a generation of shut in record grippers. Life is out there next to the records!
Some of those sound pretty good but......
F it.
I'll contribute one story, Roc you choose:
2) Mexico City Womans Prison
great choice
i gotta a chance to hear it...i wanted andean priest but would have recommended the prison
The record priest of the high andes
I wish i had more time today to tell stories, but you guys know me in real life. We can chop shit up over beer.
at the Women's Prison make-shift mercado.
Down in Louisiana there was a chain of used record stores called “Goldmine” and after hearing about them for years my partner and I decided to take a trip down and see what was up. We left Dallas in full Hunter Thompson style with a rental car, a gallon of vodka and enough pills to kill an elephant. At around midnight we missed a turn just as we got to Ville Platte, pulled a ridiculous U-Turn, lost control and knocked down the “Welcome To Ville Platte” sign. We finally got a Motel room in New Orleans at about 3:00AM and were up and ready to dig at 9:00 that morning. We started at their Hanrahan location and were just pulling sick private press stuff…Iron Lung, Probe, Filet Of Soul, Third Estate, etc., etc. Then we headed over to their Gretna location which was a large plantation style house that had records in all of it’s 15+ rooms. It was a daunting task and the owner assigned us a “helper” as we dug through tons of LP’s. One room upstairs was completely filled with records stacked 6-7 feet high without an inch of floor visible. We literally had to climb up on top of the LP’s, shimmy our way in and “dig” by tunneling down though the piles.
Once again we found sick stuff including the first known copy of the Rayne LP to turn up amongst collectors. We called the band that night from the Motel and secured more copies. We had some other spots to hit and left Goldmine without seeing 80% of it. We knew we would have to go back and that return trip includes my brother, vomiting hookers, rabbit, randomly running into friends on Bourbon St…….another story for another time. We hit the other shops and did well at those as well even though our friend Carl Weiss showed up at one of the spots we hit a week later and pulled a gatefold Damon “Song Of The Gypsy” for a buck.
I remember that the trip home was a drag….we were totally wasted from days of non-stop digging and drinking and we were on a desolate stretch of road between Baton Rouge and Alexandria. Right there in the middle of nowhere with no other signs of life in a 50 mile radius was a large Trailer parked on the side of the road. Next to the trailer was a dude sitting in a beach chair and standing 20-30 feet away from him was an Elephant with a sign that said “Rides $5.00”. Life is always stranger than fiction.
Once again we found sick stuff including the first known copy of the Rayne LP to turn up amongst collectors. We called the band that night from the Motel and secured more copies. We had some other spots to hit and left Goldmine without seeing 80% of it. We knew we would have to go back and that return trip includes my brother, vomiting hookers, rabbit, randomly running into friends on Bourbon St…….another story for another time. We hit the other shops and did well at those as well even though our friend Carl Weiss showed up at one of the spots we hit a week later and pulled a gatefold Damon “Song Of The Gypsy” for a buck.
I remember that the trip home was a drag….we were totally wasted from days of non-stop digging and drinking and we were on a desolate stretch of road between Baton Rouge and Alexandria. Right there in the middle of nowhere with no other signs of life in a 50 mile radius was a large Trailer parked on the side of the road. Next to the trailer was a dude sitting in a beach chair and standing 20-30 feet away from him was an Elephant with a sign that said “Rides $5.00”. Life is always stranger than fiction.
so on a trip down to malaga, spain i passed by a city called montpellier, i was driving through the center and stopped in an instance as i´ve seen a small "musique boutique" on the side, went in, and there was this old grumpy guy listening to bon Jovi Cd´s with one of his customers.... to make a long story short, guy was just a Wanker, didn´t like me from the second i walked in... Store was pretty messed up and had all kinds of used CD´s, VHS, Magazines and of course some Records, though most of it french chanson or 90´s disco folkloric weak all well overpriced... pulled out 2 records finally, one Rascalz Soul Obligation priced 6€ + a unpriced Foundation 7, walked to the guy and let my girl explain him i´d like to buy this records, guy said not now, so i had to wait watching them jamming to jon, as they found a minute he turned on this computer, while that thing was in progress to start he pulled the F7 out the sleeve, put it on the plate with 45RPM and said something foolish to his friend (african ancestor) in french bout those stupid kids listening rap music while the wax plays in wrong speed. Did go straight popsike that shit, but wasnt even able to turn up any results. Guess i´ve gave him a big F U when i walked out the door after paying 10€ for both loudly repeating COM-PRE-DA-TOR....
Another one (thinking about this stuff makes me realize how much more proactive I used to be). In about 1999/2000 I got a lead on a guy who apparantly had a lot of records. I made contact & they guy had been in bands here in the 60s/70s & had spent time in Texas in the early 80s & had brought a lot of vinyl back with him when he returned. He told me that they had been stored in crates under his house since then as he had never really bothered unpacking. So I made a time & went around there, he was super cool & we got on really well. He had great stories about the band scene in NZ in the 60s/70s & how he had been friends with SRV in Texas as well. We spent the better part of the day unloading dust & grit covered boxes of vinyl from under his house. We started unpacking them & there was heaps of really great stuff, massive runs of old Duke 45s he had picked up cheap in the South, Chess, Checker, tons of great blues records along with a bunch of great james Brown titles etc, definitely not the usual stash of records you find here. All the Meters LPs & essentially just really cool stuff. he also had a lot of promo/test stuff from NZ & overseas as he had also spent a time working in radio & also the record company here used to give his band tons of overseas demo 45s which they probably weren't going to release locally but maybe the band could do a local version instead. So he had kept the lot. We basically unpacked it all, he cooked a great dinner & we talked music over several return visits. He ended up giving me a amazing stack of records for free & we are still good friends today. Might have to call him & see what's up.
Probably the last one that compares remotely from me.
There used to be a US Military base down in Christchurch for a long time from the 50s through. There was a armed services radio station on the base which was supplied with all sorts of US press 45s. At some point it was decided the station would shut up & a local store in Christchurch got to buy all the 45 stock for a pittance. The guy who ran the store put them in storage with plans to just trickle them out over time to bolster his store stock. For some reason, this never happened & they remained untouched in storage for more than a decade. Eventually the store was bought out in it's entirity by another store & through some sweet contacts & calling on a favor owed I was allowed first digs at the untouched US Forces Radio Station stock. I will just say that after that, a good 40% of my soul & funk 45 collection of the time came out of it. It was absolutely mental, big catalog runs of stuff like Dyke & The Blazers, Impressions, Motown, Al Green, Hi, Spring etc etc, just really solid stuff, all numbered & clean as a bean. There was also stacks of other genres but I just went for the R&B & once the collection hit the floor in the shop after I had got to it the R&B content was minimal.
This was pre-Soulstrut, but just after I started posting here I had first dibs on a massive warehouse shipment from Wisconsin which yielded well also & had much more rare stuff.
Now I mainly e-dig. It kinda bums me out.
There used to be a US Military base down in Christchurch for a long time from the 50s through. There was a armed services radio station on the base which was supplied with all sorts of US press 45s. At some point it was decided the station would shut up & a local store in Christchurch got to buy all the 45 stock for a pittance. The guy who ran the store put them in storage with plans to just trickle them out over time to bolster his store stock. For some reason, this never happened & they remained untouched in storage for more than a decade. Eventually the store was bought out in it's entirity by another store & through some sweet contacts & calling on a favor owed I was allowed first digs at the untouched US Forces Radio Station stock. I will just say that after that, a good 40% of my soul & funk 45 collection of the time came out of it. It was absolutely mental, big catalog runs of stuff like Dyke & The Blazers, Impressions, Motown, Al Green, Hi, Spring etc etc, just really solid stuff, all numbered & clean as a bean. There was also stacks of other genres but I just went for the R&B & once the collection hit the floor in the shop after I had got to it the R&B content was minimal.
This was pre-Soulstrut, but just after I started posting here I had first dibs on a massive warehouse shipment from Wisconsin which yielded well also & had much more rare stuff.
Now I mainly e-dig. It kinda bums me out.
Down in Louisiana there was a chain of used record stores called “Goldmine”
Even post-Katrina, the last location of the chain (in Gulfport) was outrageous.
alot of my family lives there in gulfport and long beach so i have been going to that area my whole life.
i got to be pretty good friends with kim that worked there. she would open up on christmas/thanksgiving for me and we would smoke, listen to records and dig.
i called her about 2 years ago to ask what was up with the records and her boyfriend took her phone and cussed me out for trying to fuck his girlfriend.
i'm gonna be there in the next week or two and might drive by and peek in the window.
anybody ever pull anything out of the thrift across the street?
me=never
there was another shop in town that was there forever but ended up closing before goldmines did.
i think it was called ace if memory serves me correct.
that guy was always a dick.
loving all these stories. it occurred to me that i dont have any "proper digging stories", despite having scored a lot of cool stuff over the last 10+ years via local friends/contacts who do house clean outs and such. Ive seen some pretty incredible attics and basements in houses they invited me to help dig out, but 97% of that isnt record related - though thats where some of the best of my stuff came from - records and otherwise. Ive never gone on a proper digging road trip even though ive traveled worldwide - mostly because i wasnt on my own clock. Mostly ive just hit as many stores as i could find wherever i happened to be, learning by experimenting like most others. How i got started is sort of a story.
my collection went from zero to 60 in the early 90s because my buddies dad let us clean out his basement. the 5-6000 records (LPs mostly) there were actually originally owned my buddies dads friend, who had been a lawyer for several upstate NY radio stations in the 70s. i never met that guy but he loved music and got free promo copies of everything for years and years till he switched jobs in the mid 80s. around that point he apparently asked my friends dad to store the stuff for him, and as it turned out, he never came back for it. since me and my friend were like 14 in the 80s we had been going down there, playing records and pawing through the stuff (all unsorted and randomly stacked) in wonder and awe. it was a nice counterpoint to our then-raging punk rock and hardcore record buying/listening habits. By the early 90s, i was out of college, and it turned out that my friends dads second wife did not like the "clutter in the basement" (despite the house being huge), and thus my buddy and i were encouraged to "clean it up". No problem! After about 6-7 dangerously full loads in a Ford Bronco, it was all in *my* basement.
the material included a lot of white label promos and test pressings and duplicates. but on he downside it wasnt very strong in the soul dept, and it was iffy in the smaller label dept. But it was fierce in the classic rock from late 60s to early 80s department, plus tons of comedy and spoken word, childrens, soundtracks etc. it had a smattering of major label soul and jazz 60s-70s, with a few killer earlier pieces in every genre (50s/60s) that i assume was the dudes personal collection prior to his job that got him all the free stuff.
my buddy moved around a lot and eventually settled out west, and basically over a few years i shipped him 500-1000 of the doubles and he said cool we're straight. i still hook him up with a yearly xmas box of whatever new extra stuff i accumulate that i think hed like.
i do remember one very odd record store experience. in 98 i was visiting this same friend and we drove down from portland OR to norcal where, somewhere in the wilderness mountains east of Sacramento, he had a step-grandmother who was rich and had just remarried this dude who was a jazz musician guy. the guy was sort of a stoned gold digger but still a funny dude and she indulged him by building him a recording studio up there in the woods, attached to the house. So me and my buddy went there with the plan of making some demos in a real studio for free. As that turned out, the guy was a real flake and didnt know how to use his studio at all - but he loved to jam out on his trumpet at all hours. But we figured the mixing board out and plus he had a great hammond c-3 organ ("not a b-3, a c-3. the 'c' is for church" he said. ([he was an ex addict who had found jesus and was active in local choirs etc - AND loved to get high haha]) with the giant rotating leslie speaker box - it worked great and figured heavily in the demos we made of course.
the house was on a dirt road, only 3 houses from the edge of "the grid" - the people who lived up that way had self sufficient houses unconnected to the power, water, phone grids. hardcore. but the only records anywhere up there as far as i could see were the ones the flakey jazz step-step grandfather guy had - and they were nice 50s and 60s OG stuff on Bethlehem, impulse, blue note, prestige etc. we ended up going home with a nice little stack of those, for free, just because the dude was like that - "you like those? take em".
But down in the town (i think Diamond Springs?, which was like 45 minutes downhill on twisty roads) we stumbled across a record store one day, and in we went. today it would be picked clean im sure but in 98 it felt like a goldmine. not that it had stuff that was that great really (i think), but it was all cheap (1-5$) and i found a ton of soul and weird ethnic stuff id never seen. i remember spending $78 and my stack was at least a foot high. The place smelled a little funny, like rubber cement. at first we didnt think much of it.... (see below..)
The store had 2 staffers, a random assistant dude who looked burnt out and confused, and this really fat guy in denim overalls and coke bottle thick huge glasses apparently permanently seated at a table. i think the fat guy ran the joint because he rang us up (no register of course, he just looked and came up with a total and pocketed the $). but its what the fat guy was doing that ill never forget. he had a HUGE bottle of rubber cement with the lid that has the attached brush. And with this he was slowly, methodically soaking a whole piece of paper with the cement, up and down, up and down.... He was FOCUSED - bent over his work, his nose like 3 inches away. then he'd take another piece of (blank!) paper and attach it to the first one. then, hed start all over again! that guy had to be so high on rubber cement fumes im surprised he didnt pass out. he spoke verrry slowly, his voice was like Wilford Brimleys ("die-beetis") but he didnt say much. we didnt ask him what was up with the gluing process, it was too weird. and as soon as we cashed out he was riveted, face hovering over the table top again, brushing the rubber cement on, slowly, layer after layer...
my collection went from zero to 60 in the early 90s because my buddies dad let us clean out his basement. the 5-6000 records (LPs mostly) there were actually originally owned my buddies dads friend, who had been a lawyer for several upstate NY radio stations in the 70s. i never met that guy but he loved music and got free promo copies of everything for years and years till he switched jobs in the mid 80s. around that point he apparently asked my friends dad to store the stuff for him, and as it turned out, he never came back for it. since me and my friend were like 14 in the 80s we had been going down there, playing records and pawing through the stuff (all unsorted and randomly stacked) in wonder and awe. it was a nice counterpoint to our then-raging punk rock and hardcore record buying/listening habits. By the early 90s, i was out of college, and it turned out that my friends dads second wife did not like the "clutter in the basement" (despite the house being huge), and thus my buddy and i were encouraged to "clean it up". No problem! After about 6-7 dangerously full loads in a Ford Bronco, it was all in *my* basement.
the material included a lot of white label promos and test pressings and duplicates. but on he downside it wasnt very strong in the soul dept, and it was iffy in the smaller label dept. But it was fierce in the classic rock from late 60s to early 80s department, plus tons of comedy and spoken word, childrens, soundtracks etc. it had a smattering of major label soul and jazz 60s-70s, with a few killer earlier pieces in every genre (50s/60s) that i assume was the dudes personal collection prior to his job that got him all the free stuff.
my buddy moved around a lot and eventually settled out west, and basically over a few years i shipped him 500-1000 of the doubles and he said cool we're straight. i still hook him up with a yearly xmas box of whatever new extra stuff i accumulate that i think hed like.
i do remember one very odd record store experience. in 98 i was visiting this same friend and we drove down from portland OR to norcal where, somewhere in the wilderness mountains east of Sacramento, he had a step-grandmother who was rich and had just remarried this dude who was a jazz musician guy. the guy was sort of a stoned gold digger but still a funny dude and she indulged him by building him a recording studio up there in the woods, attached to the house. So me and my buddy went there with the plan of making some demos in a real studio for free. As that turned out, the guy was a real flake and didnt know how to use his studio at all - but he loved to jam out on his trumpet at all hours. But we figured the mixing board out and plus he had a great hammond c-3 organ ("not a b-3, a c-3. the 'c' is for church" he said. ([he was an ex addict who had found jesus and was active in local choirs etc - AND loved to get high haha]) with the giant rotating leslie speaker box - it worked great and figured heavily in the demos we made of course.
the house was on a dirt road, only 3 houses from the edge of "the grid" - the people who lived up that way had self sufficient houses unconnected to the power, water, phone grids. hardcore. but the only records anywhere up there as far as i could see were the ones the flakey jazz step-step grandfather guy had - and they were nice 50s and 60s OG stuff on Bethlehem, impulse, blue note, prestige etc. we ended up going home with a nice little stack of those, for free, just because the dude was like that - "you like those? take em".
But down in the town (i think Diamond Springs?, which was like 45 minutes downhill on twisty roads) we stumbled across a record store one day, and in we went. today it would be picked clean im sure but in 98 it felt like a goldmine. not that it had stuff that was that great really (i think), but it was all cheap (1-5$) and i found a ton of soul and weird ethnic stuff id never seen. i remember spending $78 and my stack was at least a foot high. The place smelled a little funny, like rubber cement. at first we didnt think much of it.... (see below..)
The store had 2 staffers, a random assistant dude who looked burnt out and confused, and this really fat guy in denim overalls and coke bottle thick huge glasses apparently permanently seated at a table. i think the fat guy ran the joint because he rang us up (no register of course, he just looked and came up with a total and pocketed the $). but its what the fat guy was doing that ill never forget. he had a HUGE bottle of rubber cement with the lid that has the attached brush. And with this he was slowly, methodically soaking a whole piece of paper with the cement, up and down, up and down.... He was FOCUSED - bent over his work, his nose like 3 inches away. then he'd take another piece of (blank!) paper and attach it to the first one. then, hed start all over again! that guy had to be so high on rubber cement fumes im surprised he didnt pass out. he spoke verrry slowly, his voice was like Wilford Brimleys ("die-beetis") but he didnt say much. we didnt ask him what was up with the gluing process, it was too weird. and as soon as we cashed out he was riveted, face hovering over the table top again, brushing the rubber cement on, slowly, layer after layer...
("not a b-3, a c-3. the 'c' is for church" he said.)
Cat I knew who used to buy and resell organs/electric pianos/what-have-you from Goodwill joints told me that the C3 was indeed the "church" model -- had the speaker below the keyboards, rather than detachable, so that you couldn't creep on lady organists on some proto-paparazzian skirt action.
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