for those who never gave up their turntables
I KNOW, IT’S ONLY ROCK & ROLL, but I like it and so do millions of others (although the number of faithful may be dwindling as we age and the Hip-Hop Era endures). The phrase “rock & roll” as it refers to music and dancing has been with us for almost seventy years and appears to have originally been a black American euphemism for sex that goes back even further. [Continue reading]
FOR ALMOST FIVE YEARS I toiled at a restaurant doing everything or another while working on an as-yet-uncompleted book. We had piped in music via one of those satellite feeds: select a genre and hear the same damn songs over and over at a volume that was hearable but which rarely allowed for identification of the artist let alone the lyrics. [Continue reading]
THIS IS PART 3 of an ongoing conversation with or about Lawrence Bray concerning his career as a solo artist and as a member of the group Around Town. The group has a new record Out Of Control and both it and its accompanying video gave me great joy to participate within. Here [Continue reading]
EARLIER THIS YEAR, I posted my first Amazon review, this one of the Rolling Stones’ album THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES REQUEST. It had the over-long and grammatically cumbersome title of “Clearly their answer to PET SOUNDS—or at least Good Vibrations—SGT. PEPPER is actually as disparate an artifact as REVOLVER.” [Continue reading]
I INITIATED A NEW TOPIC on the Record Collectors Guild website in September 2004 titled “The Pseudo Psychedelic ’60s.” I had hoped for a lengthy and engagingly argumentative and informative thread that went on forever. Below is what I got instead: it was fun, but I did not really leave it with more knowledge that when I launched the conversation. [Continue reading]
THERE IS SOME CONFUSION regarding the use of certain terms for buying and selling records that is rampant on the Internet! It is also true at record stores, record collectors conventions, and through the mail using self-published sale lists, ads in magazines such as Goldmine—but not to the degree that one encounters it on the ‘Net. [Continue reading]
BUYERS AND SELLERS of collectables, whether records or record related memorabilia or bloody Beanie Babies, often fail to achieve their goals of financial success because they do not understand a few basic concepts concerning the nature of a collectable—any collectable. Because this a record collectors website, I will refer to records in this essay, but you can substitute almost any other collectable and the comments remain virtually unchanged. [Continue reading]