A special treat for you special people: CRATE DIGGING WITH FIRSTNATIONS!
-Culled from five different secondhand stores!
-Strange and odd! And generally filthy and covered in cat hair for some reason.
This is true of all good secondhand records: the best ones are full of cat hair. This has always been the case for me. Of course most old records are covered in cat hair for some reason - I mean yes, duh, the presence of cats; but still, it's odd when you consider all the things that get donated to these places, and it's only the records that are 99% likely to contain the stuff.
I don't know how interesting this is but I thought I'd throw it out there.
Here's the one I bought. One record, and I've been looking for months. I am stoked, too. The vinyl is pristine.
And what follows is a fraction - nay, a smidgen! - of the records I had to dig through to find that album - spanning two counties and five different stores over three months.
I am a little nutty when it comes to vinyl.
The last person who owned this evidently liked their ketchup because dried ketchup was smeared all over the cover, the dust jacket and everything. Owned a cat, too, by all the evidence.
Hell, maybe he got sick of the cat shedding and took kitty to visit Mr. Deep Fryer. Just, you know, add ketchup.
To the fried cat.
That you ate.
Well, that this guy ate. In my imagination.
Yes, we started at The Madame's Piano and ended up with Deep Fried Ketchup Cat.
We did.
...And Other Fun Songs For The Family!
"Hey honey, after dinner let's get the kids together and sing along to 'Lady Of The Evening!' "
This was found in the collection of a former DJ. Imagine the club smokers this thing has seen.
Bruce Springsteen meets Precious Moments in the Bellingham WA Humane Society Thrift Store GAAAH MORPHODITES
I personally would not want to stick around too close to anybody named Uncle Lumpy, let alone let him interact with my children. But that's me.
There's six of them. They're fat. I don't know if they're from Holland, Germany or Czechoslovakia.
I am starting to really like this old album cover art.
Even this vintage cover has a certain...LSD-ish appeal.
Oh come ON.
This is just a bizarre combination of instruments - her on the Swiss bells and the Vibraharp, along with piano, organ, marimbas, and a b-flat tenor sax...? Not sure what kind of a sound they were looking for, but Ms. Matar seems happy with life.
Know what, I'm just going to put this here.
FINE SHE'S THE FIRST LADY OF THE ORGAN and she has galloping fingers.
This is actually worth a few bucks.
Another old album cover I like. And I love the downmarket salon color scheme too - Pepto pink, carbon black and apple green.
This is the kind of music you listen to when you feel like a Cuba Libre and a Marlboro, man.
Or even a Cuba Libre and a Marlboro Man.
Is it true that this dude was a huge star in the UK? Because the first time I ever heard him was on the soundtrack of the movie 'Mars Attacks!' in 1996. That's when most Americans heard of him, too. He wasn't big here at all. This is not the sound of the American Cowboy, folks. I guarantee you that no cowboys were out on the range hooty-hooting like this. It would have spooked the cattle.
Bonus stegasaurus playing the trumpet French horn!
Dolls which are not haunted
And a plate which is haunted.
Can you get much more "Soft Tempo Lounge" than Cal Tjader..?!
ReplyDeleteThis shopping trip is another feast for the senses - we used to have a habit of collecting "weird and wonderful" old LPs in charity shops, just for their covers [hence my continuing "On the Jukebox" slot over at my Dolores Delargo Towers Museum of Camp blog], and found some gems. Just as you have!
Surprised that Slim Whitman's such a mystery Stateside. He was on the books of Colonel Tom Parker and toured with Elvis, and had a stack of hits in the 1950s the US as well as the UK... However, his version of Rose Marie did have a (then) record-breaking eleven weeks at #1 in our fledgling charts, until Bryan Adams beat that in 1991, so he was indeed very popular over here. Fuck knows why. I suppose yodelling was a "thing" back then. Jx
PS The world needs more "stripper music"!!!
No way! I've loved Tjaders sound since I was 13, listening to the local jazz station at 2:00 in the morning when I was supposed to be asleep. I think the thing with Slim was that he was a regional hit in the US, meaning De Sout', no right-minded folks would have listened to him east of the Mississippi. The guy wasn't stupid, not at all. He market himself as 'The Sound Of The West' in Europe and (you guys bought it hook line and sinker) that was clearly the right move!
ReplyDeleteThat was me, FirstNations, by the way Jon. I have yet to enable third party cookies and Blogger is throwing a tantrum about it.
DeleteI don't know what browser you use, Ms First Nations, but on most of them, there's a little icon to the left of the web address that uopu click on and switch off "cross-site tracking" or "enhanced tracking protection", and that fixes the issue. Jx
DeletePS As for Mr Whitman, I don't like his music anyhow, so it's a moot point how commercially savvy he was to beguile the British public as he did...
What was Walk on the Wild Side doing mixed in with those insipid stripper numbers? And I think it very considerate of the thrift store to separate the haunted dolls from the unhaunted ones.
ReplyDeleteIt isn't the Lou Reed 'Walk on the Wild Side' sadly - that would have been awesome, though! It was this one: https://genius.com/Marvin-gaye-walk-on-the-wild-side-lyrics which is a Gospel-style admonitory ditty. I would not strip to this song. Would you??????
DeleteAAAAAAA Jon you were right I found it OMGWTFBBQ the elusive site specific setting! XXOO!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteGosh that's an impressive haul of the weird and wonderful.
ReplyDeleteI am trying to imagine what listening to Swiss bells, Vibraharp, piano, organ, marimbas, and a b-flat tenor sax would sound like accompanied by Mantovani with Slim Whitman Yodeling the vocals.
Now that would be more freaky than your haunted plate