Hey, guess what? I actually went to a record shop on RSD for the first time ever!* Mrs 1537 hadn’t spitefully planned a holiday, or engineered some gargantuan DIY project to distract me for once. I had completely forgotten about it and only remembered after I’d been to work to do some overtime yesterday morning, to feed my bread head tendencies; I was just about to get the train home and a little vinyl lightbulb popped up in my head.
So I trucked right across Liverpool and made it to the font of all that is good and righteous in the world, Probe Records. By 12:30 all the queues and jostling had subsided and all I had to do was lever my burly frame across the path of several lighter built folk to take possession of the RSD shelves. Okay so I knew the hottest tickets in town would have gone by then, but experience shows that unless you’re madly into Bowie you can usually pick up what you want 6 months later, after all the initial profiteering has been and gone, for a little over cost price anyway, so that’s what I intend to do to snag the Manic Street Preachers 12″ I want.
But I digress, I grabbed The Heads Relaxing With …** an LP that had been on my radar, very casually for years and not just because it features a nearly nude voluptuous lady toking on a hookah on the cover. Nope, it was the reissue on blue vinyl that swung that one for me, honest.
My other purchase was World Destruction by Time Zone, a white vinyl 12″ which compiled all of Bill Laswell’s mixes of this great track. I’ve really loved this collaboration between Afrika Bambaataa and John Lydon for decades but never had a, non-illegally downloaded, copy of it.
I picked up and put down the Johnny Cash Children’s Album twice and if it is still there on Tuesday I may buy it but there was nothing else that tickled my fancy as much. But that wasn’t the best bit of the experience.
When I got to the counter I was handed a sealed bag of promo CDs that they were giving out to customers and I was asked if I wanted a beer. I ask you, does Ted Nugent shit in the woods? thank you Probe Records!!
Now I actually went against protocol and spun both of my purchases yesterday afternoon. The Heads album is absolutely terrific, it is bare bones almost-too-cool-to-sneer rock from 1996, almost in the same vein as Mudhoney, there’s a brilliant track on it called ‘Coogan’s Bluff’ that I can’t get enough of. This is wonderfully unhealthy music. World Destruction is still a brilliant, raucous collision of sounds and Lydon was in absolute top form vocally on it, it still sounds very prescient today; the remixes are all very good and very different too.
I might even do it all again in 2027.
751 Down (still).
*for the first time ever on RSD, I have been in record shops before, maybe as much as three times.
**I’m not keen on conversational LP titles like that because as we all know the true title is Relaxing With The Heads, but I can’t print it like that, because that’s just messing with my format. These things keep me awake at nights.