It’s been hanging around the news feed on my phone since the end of last month, taunting me with its tender ministrations, unwilling to let me go without taking a bite from the fruit it has dangled before my eyes. No! I cried. Enough!
Last night, I finally succumbed, feeling like someone committed to a life of sobriety caught holding a box of chocolate liqueurs.
It wasn’t a painful read, in fact it barely impacted on my life in any way, other than causing me to chuckle quietly a couple of times. Which, to my horror, I realise now has made it even worse.
Having thought about it far harder than is probably good for me, I am hypothesising that the coward inside me was defending me against the possibility the article might lead me to listen to a whole album by AC/DC, and from there onto a Townsman Al-style exploration of metal – akin to his journey through Ayers/Cale/Nico/Eno territory.
Busy day ahead, but a couple of newsy notes have come across my desk that I thought might be of interest for this week’s All-Star Jam. Let’s kick things off with this tribute to Kamala Harris, who according to some right-wing nut has a “Jezebel spirit.”
Now, for a story in the New York Times that interested me… I hope you can get past the paywall. If not, this piece starts with an artist who saw his albums being resold on Discogs for as high as $77, so he priced his new album at $77, thinking he might as well get that money. And he has! The article also references the single copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album that was released and auctioned off years ago, an event I was highly jealous of, because I’d been thinking for years, as a highly unsuccessful artist, Why bother pressing 1000 independently released albums when we could press one and possibly sell it at a high enough price to equal what we make when we press 1000 and end up with 600 unsold copies in my garage? Plenty of food for thought in this article.
Too many things tend to bother me, and the older and (hopefully) more mature I get, I have trouble letting all the little things that bother me rush to the front of the queue.
Get back, new formulation of a favorite childhood candy, I’ve got a pain-in-the-ass interruption of my hard-earned career aspirations to attend to!
Stand down, idiocy of a band ditching its unintentionally racist band name for a sexist one, I’ve got two sons to help through their slow journey into manhood!
It’s for reasons like these that I have trouble cranking out the daily content I once did here in the Halls of Rock. Trust me, I’m thankful for seeing you all in this context during our Pandemic Relief reboot. I hope I’m doing my part.
I was thinking about this over the weekend: What stupid thing continues to gnaw at me enough that I should move it in front of my concerns over the health of our planet or the idealism on which my country was founded? Then it came to me:
The most expensive record I ever bought was a live album called June 1, 1974, by Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Eno & Nico.
I bought it in 1974 or early 1975 at E.J. Korvette’s in Springfield. I didn’t understand why an album with that title was available at that point in the discounted rack. I was totally unfamiliar with Kevin Ayers. I knew Cale from the Velvet Underground and the same with Nico, but knew nothing of their solo work. I knew Eno was a member of Roxy Music; I knew a bit about them but, again, nothing of his solo career (which at that point had only just started).
I take flyers on albums all the time now, but it was unusual then; there wasn’t a lot of disposable income and each purchase had to count. But the price tag on this album was $1.99 and so was a small risk to learn about Cale, Eno, & Nico. And Kevin Ayers, whoever he was.
But wait a minute…$1.99…most expensive?!?!
Here’s how that makes sense; here’s the sense in which I mean it.
I don’t think there is any other album in my collection which has so directly led to so many other purchases.
It started off with two Eno songs, “Driving Me Backwards” and “Baby’s On Fire.” I loved them. Then Cale’s version of “Heartbreak Hotel.” Wow, great! And then Nico’s cover of “The End.” The remaining five songs were Kevin Ayers.’
This is my favorite track from the album and my favorite ever Kevin Ayers song.
This show was an Ayers gig at the Rainbow Theatre in London, to which he invited Cale and Nico. Cale brought along Eno. Robert Wyatt and Mike Oldfield were also guests, sitting in with the band.
Ayers was the real revelation of this album for me. I immediately loved him. I’ve since bought all his solo albums as well as the first Soft Machine album; he was a founding member of that band but only stayed for the first album. I still love John Cale and have bought everything he has put out. And I was definitely in for Eno’s pop albums and do have a few of the early ambient ones including the collaborations with Robert Fripp. Add in a couple of Nico albums.
Those Ayers albums and the Eno ones were all imports, pricey at the time.
So, this $1.99 album led directly to about 80 albums being purchased. Yes, it was a mighty expensive album. But it was a lot of great music.
What’s the most expensive album – in this way – in your collection?
I hope you’ve been enjoying our Pandemic Relief Reboot of Rock Town Hall. I believe all of you who have been regular participants in our resumed discussions have contributor/author rights, meaning you can enter the Back Office and draft new thread content for the Main Stage. Let me know if you have any questions or need a refresher on how drafting posts works. This is your Rock Town Hall. Feel as comfortable as the members of a reunited Buffalo Springfield felt in Stephen Stills’ living room in 1986. Thanks.
In a nearby thread, my close personal friend E Pluribus Gergely mentioned his regret over having missed The Specials‘ show in Philadelphia in June 2019. It was a rare show I didn’t regret missing, and better yet, I took my oldest son to the show with me. It was our first show together where he could be among the drinking-age crowd. Thinking about this made me realize that many of us are probably old enough now to have a great concert experience or two with our kids. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard stories direct from a few of you. And perhaps we were all once young enough to have had a cool (or not-so-cool, as I know is the case with Townsman andyr) experience of being taken to a real-life concert by our parents. Share away!
I was uplifted by the Specials’ show, and my son loved it, too, which raised my spirits even higher. He’d already developed a taste for third-generation ska, which I try not to be too didactic over, so it was important to get him closer to the real thing. Was this the full-blown reunited Specials I promised I’d hold out the rest of my life to see, at least a reunited Specials involving both Terry Hall and Jerry Dammers? No. (How does a guy like Dammers pay his bills after all these years seemingly doing almost nothing? What do I know about the daily lives of Dammers, Tom Verlaine, et al. That’s a topic for another day…)
