Record Digging Stories (Please Add On)

[tripledouble]

a story just came to mind that isnt really about crazy places or people, but more of how i am an idiot.


i was at a flea market outside of atlanta which was a long indoor hallway, where each stall had a garage door for an outside wall. i found a little record cubicle and found some nice things and i dug leisurely in the near empty market. there was a copy of the coffy soundtrack hung on the wall, so i hesitated to ask for it, but it was a dollar too, so i was pretty happy to put that alongside a copy of Jimmy Briscoe and someother funk things. it started pouring outside and so i stood around with a couple pld ladies and the guy who sold the records and we joked around about the weather. now, i was travelling and living out my van and when they started joking that one could take a shower for free, i started joking that maybe i should. they totally egged me on and finally, a little bit on a dare a little bit cause i needed a shower i went to my van, got in my swim trunks and lathered up in the parking lot. the old folks got a good laugh out of it, especially when the rain stopped right about when i was done with the soap. shit was corny, but at least they had a good time

 

[Dolo76]

About 8 years ago, I was meeting with my wife during our separation before our divorce, at her homegirls crib in a shitty part of Miami. After gettin tired of putting up with her bullshit, I take a break and walk down the street, towards a thrift shop that I had seen. Mainly furniture and junk, but he had a couple of decent piles of records I started diggin thru. I pull about 15 pieces, pay him 1.50 (the records were 10 cents a piece). A few days later, back in Orlando, I start going thru and put this kids record on, only to hear loud crispy banging drums hit my speakers.





It was this joint

for 10 cents





word.

 

[tripledouble]

goes to show you should get divorced more often!

 

[maldorurr]

Rockadelic said:She told tales of being invited to secret psychic conventions by the Soviet government. We spent about an hour with her trying to keep a straight face.




You know, that might actually be true. The USSR dropped a surprising amount of money & time on that kind of bizness.





I think Denton has more cat lady ??? possible sex criminal ??? obscure legend ??? fried-out shut-in collector types than anywhere else I've ever been, ever.

 

[Uncle Quilly]

Thank you Rockadelic! Your stories are doooope!





:endorse:

 

[Dolo76]

tripledouble said:goes to show you should get divorced more often!




That and you should never stop diggin,lol, even when times are bad

 

[RAJ]

Epic Thraed.





I'd like to talk about one of the most special days I've had in a lonng time (besides the birth of my two children and the day I got married).





It was September 27, 2008.





I used to run ads in the Philly and Allentown areas saying that I bought records... Towards the end of my hardcore digging days, I got burnt out driving down to Philly for house calls so I stuck to Allentown / Lehigh Valley which is a much closer drive.





I decided to take the day off from life and go hiking near where I went to school for two years (Penn State Mont Alto Campus near Gettysburg). It's a 2 hour drive but it's a place where I can find myself.





Unfortunately, it was a rainy miserable day but I decided to go anyway. As luck would have it, the rain stopped and the sun burned through the clouds just as I arrived. The hike was magnificent and it was just the escape I needed from my daily life.

After I completed the hike, I got a call on my cel from a gentleman who had "thousands of records from the 60s and all kinds of jazz." He was located conveniently on my way home just 10 minutes from my house in a major commercial area of Route 309.





It was a Lawn Mower Repair place that had been there for years and the owner was retiring.

It turned out to have 4,000+ jazz records, psych records, and northern soul promo 45s. Dude wanted $300 to take them away.





Best find that came to mind was a Promo of Vicky Baines - Country Girl which I ended up eBaying for like $1200











The place where I scored these records is now a diner / ice cream shop called The Inside Scoop in Coopersburg, PA....





Mega raer score.

 

[HomeChoppingNetwork]

A quick one:





Last weekend, a friend and I drove up to Woodstock, NY to see one of Levon Helm's Midnight Rambles. For those unfamiliar, check http://www.levonhelm.com/about_ramble.htm. On the day of the show, just by chance, we stumble upon a record tent sale and obviously go in to check it out. The guy running it was very friendly, wouldn't be surprised if he posted here, or at least knows people who do. After picking up a copy of The Band's self titled album (which had been missing from my collection for way too long for no good reason), the guy running the sale was nice enough to draw us out a map to Big Pink, which for those who don't know was a house rented by Bob Dylan and The Band in the 1960s where a lot of their best material was written. Got to take my picture in front of it, which is something I had wanted to do for awhile. Amazing that it still almost looks exactly the same as it does on the record sleeve of Music From Big Pink. Not really a record story, but just one of those cool things that all starts with digging.





The Midnight Ramble was amazing, by the way. Highly recommended to anyone who has the means of going.

 

[behemoth]

HomeChoppingNetwork said:A quick one:





Last weekend, a friend and I drove up to Woodstock, NY to see one of Levon Helm's Midnight Rambles. For those unfamiliar, check http://www.levonhelm.com/about_ramble.htm. On the day of the show, just by chance, we stumble upon a record tent sale and obviously go in to check it out. The guy running it was very friendly, wouldn't be surprised if he posted here, or at least knows people who do. After picking up a copy of The Band's self titled album (which had been missing from my collection for way too long for no good reason), the guy running the sale was nice enough to draw us out a map to Big Pink, which for those who don't know was a house rented by Bob Dylan and The Band in the 1960s where a lot of their best material was written. Got to take my picture in front of it, which is something I had wanted to do for awhile. Amazing that it still almost looks exactly the same as it does on the record sleeve of Music From Big Pink. Not really a record story, but just one of those cool things that all starts with digging.





The Midnight Ramble was amazing, by the way. Highly recommended to anyone who has the means of going.




the guy with the tents? was it on a dead end street? did he have an Aussie accent or something? named Zip? i went to his house once. looked through a lot of stuff. didn't leave with much of anything. he sells at FMU. always sets up like 100 tables...

 

[HomeChoppingNetwork]

behemoth said:HomeChoppingNetwork said:A quick one:





Last weekend, a friend and I drove up to Woodstock, NY to see one of Levon Helm's Midnight Rambles. For those unfamiliar, check http://www.levonhelm.com/about_ramble.htm. On the day of the show, just by chance, we stumble upon a record tent sale and obviously go in to check it out. The guy running it was very friendly, wouldn't be surprised if he posted here, or at least knows people who do. After picking up a copy of The Band's self titled album (which had been missing from my collection for way too long for no good reason), the guy running the sale was nice enough to draw us out a map to Big Pink, which for those who don't know was a house rented by Bob Dylan and The Band in the 1960s where a lot of their best material was written. Got to take my picture in front of it, which is something I had wanted to do for awhile. Amazing that it still almost looks exactly the same as it does on the record sleeve of Music From Big Pink. Not really a record story, but just one of those cool things that all starts with digging.





The Midnight Ramble was amazing, by the way. Highly recommended to anyone who has the means of going.




the guy with the tents? was it on a dead end street? did he have an Aussie accent or something? named Zip? i went to his house once. looked through a lot of stuff. didn't leave with much of anything. he sells at FMU. always sets up like 100 tables...




Yeah that's the guy. Only other thing I came away with was a copy of The Pursuaders - Thin Line Between Love and Hate. Still, a pleasant surprise, as I wasn't really expecting to do any shopping for records on my trip.

 

[The_Non]

Yall don't know bout Zip. I've got tons of fuckin heat from him. Cool about Big Pink, he's a nice dude.

 

[HomeChoppingNetwork]

The_Non said:Yall don't know bout Zip. I've got tons of fuckin heat from him. Cool about Big Pink, he's a nice dude.




Not trying to hate on Zip. To be honest, I was under time constraints and wasn't able to go thru his stash as thoroughly as I would have liked. I've discovered, in my email correspondence with him, that I looked over some Boosey & Hawkes library joints. My bad. But yeah, he's good people.

 

[rogb]

Is this thread a sticky yet?





Some of you may know me as the guy who posted Owen Marshall mp3s some years back. Here's my story about finding Captain Puff.





I wasn't out digging that day. In fact, I was probably driving home from my local walmart (there's about 5 on Oahu). On my way home I decided to swing by a random garage sale and see if they had any records. This was when I first started out digging, and i had few clues on what to look for since I didn't have al lot of experience. I knew I wanted jazz or soulful music at the least.





So I pull up to a typical suburban home in the middle of Oahu, and there sits a lady and her teenage daughter in the garage, waiting for another bargain hunter to stop by.





"You got any records?"


"Yeah", the girl says and points to a single crate. The records belong to her father who isn't around at the moment.





Remember, I came to the sale unplanned, so I didn't exactly have any cash on me, just a debit card.





So I flip through the crate not knowing what I'm looking for, and in retrospect I wish i did, because there were probably a few more cool jazz funk fusion LPs in there. I was getting to the end of the crate and hadn't pulled anything yet. Thats when Owen Marshall caught my eye. Cool hand sketched cover art. Skimming the liner notes, turns out he worked for Blue Note and invented his own musical instruments! Plus it was signed. And yes, the photos of him jamming naked in his studio were raer-worthy.





But wait, I don't have any cash on me! So I turn to the mom and daughter and ask the price.





"One dollar each. "


"Ok, let me run to my car and see what I can find. "





Rummaged through every compartment and, sh*t, only three quarters! No matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find an extra 25 cents. What the hell, I'll try anyway. I walk back up, holding up three silvery coins and apologetically say,





"Um, I could only find 75 cents..."





The mom didn't know what to say, probably dumbfounded that I'd even try to lower the price below a dollar? But the daughter turns to her mom and says.





"Oh c'mon mom, just give it to him!"





And that's how I got 25% off the selling price of an LP now worth 2000x those three coins. Oh, the mystical powers of the Naked Truth.

 

[rickwilkerson]

Early 90's story from Indianapolis that a few of you may know.





There was a mail order dude, Golden Memories in Mooresville, about 20 miles south of Indy, who had around 1 million records in a warehouse. Apparently he bought up every label and distributor's overstock that he could find. Dude reportedly defaulted on a bank loan and skipped town, so the bank was stuck with the warehouse. Story is that they initially sold it to a buyer that i've never been able to identify for something like $25k, but then his financing fell through. So then they approached a local record show promoter, and as the story goes, asked him if there were any books that could help them figure out record values, and if so they were going to turn to him to get help liquidating it. Supposedly, said promoter said, no, there were not. They checked, and found that there were indeed such books, so said promoter's cred was shot and they moved on.





At that point, someone (don't know who) helped them connect with big collector-dealer dudes around the midwest and invited them to come buy records at a low fixed price per record. After the initial pillage--which supposedly netted major raers of all types for the big dudes--they opened the doors to the public and let people buy records at, I think, 50 cents each. The place was open all summer, I'm thinking summer of 92 it was. The building itself was ramshackle and filthy, some parts didn't have lighting so you had to have a flashlight. Some areas had water leaks and water on the floor.





i had an intense day job so i only made it there a few times, and probably bought all the wrong stuff as I was pretty clueless back then. I can't even remember what I found now. Stan Denksi, on the other hand, had the summer off and more or less made his record bones there, he found box lots of stuff like Grodeck Whipperjenny and other obscure psych, trading like a banshee afterwards. At the end, they sold off all the remainder to one dude who messed with it for years, hosting out of town dealers, etc. Even then, there were still lots of Lamp label and other local/regional raers being pulled.





A couple of years ago a local digger that I knew told me he'd bought out a little warehouse in eastern Indiana, and I ended up buying part of it from him. Turns out that many of those records came from Mooresville, identifiable by the Golden Memories boxes. Not many great titles in there, but lots of $10-$20 private label funk and soul.





Anyone who knows this story is welcome to correct/update the info. Some of the above is fourth hand rumor quality info.

 

[delasp]

wow lots of good stories here..





mines? long story short, the first year i started digging i overlooked this record and left it in the bin and I will never forget that moment, it haunts me still.





Price? $1.99


Condition? NM (would have been sealed had it not been for the record store's preference)


Location: Reckless Records in Chicago.

I did happen to pick up some decent latin records but truth hurts.

 

[delasp]

musica said:I was in Colombia last summer for work but had about a week of vacation time to dig around a little bit, party, and put in some quality time on the beach. The city where I spent 3 days of that week (Santa Marta) is not known for its abundance of records, but I tried my best to find some stuff nonetheless. After hitting up all the antique stores in town, going through a closed shop's stock (mostly mid to late 80s turds, but I did find the first Son Palenque LP in there), hitting up the local radio station (only to find out they had sold all their vinyl 6 years earlier to a famous DJ from Barranquilla), & numerous other dead-end local leads, I was just about to throw in the towel.





The end of my 3rd day there I was calling a final contact from a street corner Llamadas stand (vendors who let you pay to use their cell phone). The contact turned out to be yet another dead end lead. I was seconds away from giving up and heading out to the beach resort I had reservations at (thus ending my digging opportunities), when the teenage girl working the Llamadas stand overheard my phone conversation and said she used to clean someone's house that had thousands of old records. She gave him a call for me and within 15 minutes he picked me up from that same corner and drove me to his house (he also happened to be a taxi driver).

Turns out this dude was a champion local salsa dancer and collectionista, and did in fact have around 2,000 records. Pulled around 50 choice titles from him and had a great time smoking cigs, drinking beers and jamming out to descarga tunes on his loud sound system. At one point he pulled out a bag of percussion instruments and handed them out to his brothers and me and we played along to Kako's Tribute to Noro Morales LP (which I copped from him that day as well). Thank you Pepe Salsa!

Nice, just looking at the picture I want to flip the bananas out of his collection just to take a peek.

 

[Rockadelic]

Had a trip planned to Northern Oklahoma this past weekend so I ran a Craigslist ad and got a bunch of response.....weeded out most of them quickly ......."I have 3 Beatles picture discs" & "Really rare.....blah blah blah.......ebay.....blah blah blah.....my uncle's will......blah blah blah.......house payment is due.....blah blah blah........thousands of dollars.......blah blah blah....Tommy Dorsey......LET ME STOP YOU RIGHT THERE!.......but one response seemed pretty promising.....2,000 LP's of all genres that were their late Dad's collection.....we agreed to a visit Saturday morning.





The trip had a curve ball thrown at it at our end so I tried to reschedule.....dude tells me he was really hoping I'd come because he had moved all the records from a storage building into his house....I decided the right thing to do was to go and my wife and I made the 5 hour drive stopping at Antique Malls and hitting restaurants from Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives along the way.





I schedule to meet them early Saturday morning and I go by myself, letting the better half sleep late. I follow my map and get to a dirt road and call the dude to see where to go...he tells me to take the dirt road about 1/4 mile......8 dogs chase my car down the road. I'm greeted on the end of the road by a woman and her two brothers who very much resemble the two brothers from the show Swamp People....they bring me in the house and the Dining room table is covered with 8 three foot piles of LP's.....there were literally 100's of Sweet 'N Low packets strewn around the Dining & Living room floors.....some empty....some filled.

They explained that their father, who had passed away in 2010, was a pack rat. The LP's were the worst of the worst....VG- Charley Pride LP's.....the entire split seam Design label catalog.....when I was done looking at them they suggested we go out to the "buildings"....on about 2 acres of land were 3 buildings and junk covering the property. ....the building with the records was an old barn.....there was piles of junk and about 10 x 100 count boxes of LP's....it became apparent that 1) Their records sucked....and....2) They thought their records were worth thousands of dollars.





I felt bad and paid them $20 for a Tony Valor LP on Brunswick and a Sam Lay LP on Blue Thumb.

 

[behemoth]

went to Half Price Books today for the first time. no records but many a cute girl in flower print dresses. VG+

 

[ako]

this thread is fucking insane. i was definitely born 20 years too late. amazing stories.





rockadelic i need to meet you someday.

 

[Delay]

About 5 years ago, I was on tour in Germany and Switzerland. I found a lot of great stuff but here were a couple things that warrant a story.





I was staying in a flat down the road from a record store called '6 pack' that was owned by a guy named DJ Nail. He was super friendly and I ended up hanging out at his shop a lot since I had long days with nothing to do. Every day he would bring in a stack of records to show me, and i realized quick that this dude had a serious collection. One day he played me this Swiss banger:

He told me it was really rare and I would have a really hard time finding one. I rolled a joint and left the shop, smoking it down a side street. I got a few blocks away and found a another little record shop. I walked in, eyes glazed over, and looked through the bins. Pretty standard stuff. Just as a long shot, I asked the owner, "You don't, by chance, have a copy of a swiss record called 'Proud Mary, do you?"


He replied, "You're joking?"


I immediately figured he thought it was a stupid question because of how rare it was, but then he reached behind the counter and pulled out a fresh shiney copy.


He says, "I havent seen a copy for 5 years, but one walked in this morning"


I asked how much, thinking i'd get hit over the head with price or he'd tell me it wasn't for sale, but he shrugged appathetically and replied, "20 Euro"


I bought it and walked back to 6 Pack, smiling when i walked through the door, and held it up. Nail was flabergasted.





Also, on the same trip, I was in Munich with Large Professor. We had a really poorly attended show and the club owner disappeared at the end of the night with my money. I was supposed to get on a train to Berlin that night, but this dude told me he could help me find the club owner the next day and let me crash on his couch. The next day, I went to the owner's house and with a lot of struggle, got my dough. I had a bunch of bags and I was running late for my train, but i couldn't help but make a quick stop in a little record store on the way. I flipped haphazardly through the bins, finding nothing. I grabbed my bags, and headed towards the door, when a tiny little corner of a record cover behind the counter caught my eye. I asked the guy, "Is that Niagara"?


He looked down and pulled it out saying "Wow, how did you see that?"


I asked how much, and he sold it to me for 15 euro. The disasterous evening ended up being a blessing in disguise.