“Papa, they sure made cool robots in the ’60s.”
As we charge toward Christmas and the end of 2011, it’s only natural I would eventually find myself with the masses, shopping! My Idelic destination of choice this year was the Long Beach swap meet. In all honesty I’m not a huge fan of swap meets and thrift stores. Even most used record stores tire me. In reality, I prefer surfing the internet to the physical treasure hunt.
Swap meets mean milling around in junk. I’m fairly over what I call “stuff.” Maybe it’s a product of the hard economy, but over the last couple of years I’ve streamlined things. I’m “stealth” – into only family, friends, rock ‘n roll, and coffee. The only “stuff” I’m remotely interested in buying are “guys” (meaning action heroes/robots for my 3 year old son) or an odd piece of vinyl.
Over this past year I’ve found that if I’m going to shop, the third Sunday of the month at the old Long Beach College stadium is the most appealing of treasure hunts. At meets, I never pay attention to record dealers, but I can almost never resist someone’s personal collection. If I’m intrigued by a collection for sale, I will always purchase a few records, if for anything they are souvenirs of someone else’s rock ‘n roll journey.
Such was the case last Sunday when I came upon OC Mike and his son unloading a half dozen well kept boxes of vinyl. I was immediately drawn into the collection by a copy of The Rolling Stones, Now! Noticing the copy was in mono, I grabbed it like a hundred dollar bill laying in the street. For anyone who does not own or haven’t heard an original mono version of a ’60s album, they are the holy grail of record collecting, especially Bob Dylan releases. The sound of these records are freakishly cool.
I started chatting with OC Mike and he told me a couple of people had completely gone through the collection and bought twenty or so records each. Hmmm? I wonder what those records were? Fingering through I could tell he or she had some serious taste. I settled on four LPs: The Stones, I nice copy of the first Elvis, Booker T’s Soul Limbo and a clean copy of Robin Trower’s Bridge of Sighs, the album Chris Wright recently told me was his favorite release from his Chrysalis label days.
Loaded with a couple of old robots and some precious vinyl my Idelic Christmas list is complete. May your Idelic wishes in 2012 be as easily made.
Dig it, and yo fucking ho ho…
—xosidealer
