I’ve decided that rather than my usual rants about my preferences, I will focus on the original intention of this column — where to get cool stuff cheap.
Records, for example. Vinyl, wax — call them what you will. I call them DJ Frisbees. They’re usually cheap and a great way to find music you might not be able to locate on CD. I’ll state right off the bat that I’m not one of those vinyl crusaders: those whiny Luddites who wouldn’t use a CD for a coaster so much as listen to one. “Vinyl sounds better than digital,” they all say. You notice these types tend to spend a lot of time at home. Records tend not to be a very portable form of entertainment. At least I can go for a walk while listening to a CD.
That said, I do enjoy listening to vinyl. Once I get my damned record player in working order I’ll enjoy it even more. Until then, I just haul a few down to my gig on campus radio and play some cuts for the entertainment of the masses, assuming the masses are awake at the ungodly hour I do my show.
Now if you want to buy cheap records, thrift shopping is the way to go. Goodwill, St. Vincent de Paul’s, Salvation Army — all of them have a wide range of crappy records at low prices. Searching through them is like gold mining: lots of digging with the occasional reward. The ratio is about ten Barry Manilow’s for every Commodores album. If they weren’t so cheap I wouldn’t bother.
I always thought it would be a great joke to play on someone, sending them all that bargain basement crap for their birthday or something — Manilow, Wayne Newton, Lawrence Welk, Barbara Streisand and Kenny Rogers. The input would probably drive them to suicide.
My best finding at a local thrift shop recently was a copy of a hard-to-find 1970s album from The Ventures. It’s a rock/instrumental/classical album called “Joy,” with the band covering Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, et al. Very cool, but it took me all day and three stores to find anything worthwhile. So, rather than finding decent music, I’d say thrift shopping is for masochists or those just interested in pure sonic input.
For those looking for quality recordings of the vinyl persuasion, I’d have to recommend House of Records located at 258 E.13th Ave. Just a big bad selection of cool records. The best finds there for me have been a couple of albums by Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ “Blank Generation” and “Destiny Street,” the Butthole Surfers’ “Live PCPPEP” and Joy Division’s “Warsaw.” Yummy.
Another good spot is the annual Eugene Record Convention at the Eugene Hilton. It happens the weekend after the Super Bowl and is probably the best indication of a benevolent higher power in the universe. Picture a convention hall holding a cornucopia of rare singles, classic albums, bootleg tapes and whoop-ass poster art.
As I mentioned before, I tend to use vinyl as a way to get stuff that’s tougher to find on CD, or that can only be found in overpriced re-releases. It’s getting increasingly more difficult, but I have some hope for the good ol’ wax discs. For all my problems with dance hall DJs and the hip-hop genre, they have kept those old records popular and in circulation.
But do records have a future beyond being tools for sonic manipulators? As long as I can’t find old singles from the Cramps on CD, then I would like to think that they do. And part of the fun is in the search for great music.