a blog for those who never gave up their turntables
BOOK REVIEWS ARE NOT MY THING here on Rather Rare records, but exceptions to unwritten rules are often good things. So here is a review of “Stacks Of Wax – The Complete History Of The Record Labels Of Cincinnati, Ohio,” a self-published effort by David Bottoms. [Read more] ““stacks of wax” is a history of record labels based in cincinnati, ohio”
JACKIE DeSHANNON entered 1963 as a 21-year-old singer with fifteen singles under her belt, not one of them a hit! Hundreds of artists who had been more successful—they’d heard thunder boom with at least one hit record!—had come and gone during that time, yet Liberty Records showed great faith in her and kept with her through the rest of the decade. [Read more] “I hear thunder boom every time jackie deshannon walks in the room”
WAY BACK IN 1984, way back when people actually believed in “trickle-down economics,” I was living in Scottsdale, Arizona, but I wasn’t getting out much. I had succumbed to the ubiquitous peer pressure question of “Why do you live in the past when it comes to music?” and purchased a couple of albums by the Psychedelic Furs. [Read more] “the bangs and the bangles’ versions of “getting out of hand””
IF I EVER GET AROUND to writing a book about the how’s, why’s, and wherefore’s of collecting records, I will include a chapter on “On How Not To Handle Your Records.” However the book is laid out, I would hope to use a photo like the one below for this chapter.
I assume everybody reading this blog knows not to handle their records in a manner that places the oil and dirt on their fingertips on the grooves of the record. [Read more] “on how not to handle your records”
I WAS NOT A FAN OF PUNK ROCK in the 1970s and ’80s. I admired the political aspect of the punk movement in the UK and the anybody-can-be-in-a-band spirit, but I didn’t connect with most of the music. (I still don’t care for most of it but have loosened up a bit with age.) [Read more] “an introduction to the punk note ideations of john yates”
I MOVED TO CALIFORNIA from Pennsylvania in June 1978. I naively believed I would find some semblance of “the sixties” hidden away in San Francisco. But in only a few years, most of it had been blotted out. There were still a lot of hand-painted Victorian houses and a few hip coffee shops and bookstores.
WHILE THE PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG is to address the records that were released decades before most of the people who spend the most time on the internet were even born, I can look at a current topic every now and again. I suppose my fascination with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in not establishing some objective standards for eligibility and the equally obstinate Wikipedia in insisting on “sources” but not on hiring editors to fact-check those sources. [Read more] “where was the “vinyl rapture” before the “vinylgeddon”?”
“DID YOU LOVE ELVIS PRESLEY?” That was the question that popped up on Quora on Friday and that I ignored over the weekend. It seems kinda dumb but this morning it caught my attention again and I thought I’d check out whatever answers had been posted in the past few days. [Read more] “elvis paved the way for artists like ed sheeran (who?)”
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a blog for those of us who never gave up our turntables
