Thrifty Music, Vol. 1: John Lennon Suxx!

Townsman Hrrundivbakshi introduces a coming series on Thrifty Music!

Sorry to have to resort to that idiotic, thrill-seeking headline to get your attention, but something Very Important has happened, and I wanted to make sure you were properly focused. What has happened, you ask? Well, I finally retired my Technics SL-D2 turntable — faithful friend since junior high, and conduit for virtually every slab of rock and roll vinyl that ever meant anything to me — and I plunked down a modest sum of new cash to buy a turntable that features not just standard RCA audio “outs” but a lovely USB cable as well. This means I can go straight out of the turntable and into my laptop — and that means I can finally start sharing some of the weirder, more wonderful and noteworthy discs I’ve unearthed in my cheapskate peregrinations to the finer thrift stores in the Washington, DC area.

See, I love thrift store music. Flipping through old vinyl — 50 to 99 cents an album, maybe a quarter per single — allows me a freedom to explore the dusty corners of recorded music that I simply don’t enjoy on the digital side of the fence. Here’s the reason why: I’m not looking for anything in particular. Sure, I could find a Russian mp3 site where I can hear the finer tracks off of the Atlanta Rhythm Section‘s surprisingly good first album — but I’d never make the point of looking for that album in the first place… so I’d never find it. I tell you, this notion that the Internet helps us all broaden our musical minds is hogwash!

No, in order to really allow our musical brains to expand in new and unexpected directions, it’s incumbent upon us to stop looking for stuff. That means no tangential connections, no previous incarnations, no niche-y satellite/Internet radio stations, no AllMusic name-drops, and most especially, no “customers who purchased (insert album here) also enjoyed…” recommendations.

If you’re looking for quality brain manure, you gotta fearlessly stand in the middle of a dusty, kaleidoscopic torrent of weird album covers, making your selections for reasons that have only the most tenuous connections to anything you already know. Here’s some advice, based on my experience:

Typography: What you want to look for here are the extremes of typographical design — covers with surprisingly artful deployments of words and letters or covers that look like they were put together by analphabetic Yoruba tribesmen. One way or the other, these covers deliver — and (key point here), if the purchase you made sucks the bad part of your ass… you can always throw it away! See, that’s the other thing about thrifty music — at 50 cents a pop, it’s not precious!

Look: This one is obvious, but — once you start making purchases solely on the basis of what the artist looks like, you develop a fine eye for Look details. You learn how important shoes are, or the way scarves are deployed. Haircuts, in particular, become especially relevant when all you can glean from a record can be found on the cover.

Paper-weight: Is your cover super-heavy and cardboardy? That’s a good thing — though unusually flimsy and thin covers can also deliver the goods.

Gear: Pay careful attention to what those guys and gals are playing in those Band Action Shots. A black guy playing a battered Les Paul Custom is a really good sign — and anybody with the stones to play a cheap-ass, workingman’s guitar like a Telecaster in an otherwise Look-dominated enterprise shows signs of greatness. Avoid all covers featuring acoustic-electrics, Paul Reed Smiths, and guitars with acute angles and points. On those rare occasions where drums make a visible experience, look for the jazzbo brands — especially if they’re in an incongruously rock setting: Gretsch, Slingerland, and so forth. Any off-brand basses are a sure sign of a Winner.

Fawnk: Look, we all know that 90% of all “undiscovered” funk artists from the 70s are mediocre at best — but don’t let that stop you from plunking down two or three quarters to explore the kind of music produced by the man under that magnificent afro. Remember, if you don’t like what you hear, just throw it away!

Nerdiness: Here, I’m talking about you, brother. Follow obscure studios and songwriters you remember penning fave tunes. Producers leave behind easy crumb trails — for 50 cents, you can do better. Look for engineers, or session musicians!

Anyhow, I just wanted to pass along these thoughts and admonitions in anticipation of my first real Thrifty Music Digest, scheduled to appear in a day or two. In it, I plan to share some of the more remarkable finds I’ve made in the last couple of weeks. Don’t look for back-cataloguery, or know-it-all obscurantism. I hope to share the discs that opened my eyes to new ways of seeing music; that grabbed a fresh lobe of my brain and yanked on it — and, hopefully, to share music that provides provocative new perspectives on this moldy universe of bands and artists that obssesses us. In my first post, for example, I’ll be using a 25-cent single to illustrate that incendiary headline you see at the top of this document.

I look forward to sharing with you.