One of the minor miracles of living in my neck of the woods is that once every three months or so, a record show happens in a garage about a mile from my house. The records are all reasonably priced (there are multiple dollar bin full of gems for those, like me, who like their records rough and ready to go) and it's never overly packed full of creepy know it alls hawking 500 dollar "West Coast" pressings of Doors records like at the Uptown record show.
Saturday brought about a great day of digging. I walked out of the record show $39 dollars poorer, but I did leave with a couple of garage records (Electric Prunes, Shadows of Knight), some new wave (The Beat, The Vapors), the Bob Seger classic Mongrel, and a turntable to replace my broken down one that I've been "loaning" from my pops for 15 years.
Two additional finds from Saturday transported me back to my childhood. Which is strange, since the records are from 1970 (approx). When I was just a youthful boy, my mom somehow acquired a cassette of a bunch of the 45s she had as a girl. At least I thought it was...it also contained this horrid song, which dates more to 1984 rather than the Nixon period.
But I digress. The cassette tape was all bubblegum killer and no filler besides the Rick Dees joint. Gems like "Indiana Wants Me", "Heartbeat-It's a Lovebeat", "Don't Pull Your Love" and "Midnight Confessions" all bring me back to trying to read Sports Illustrated while my mom Nordic Tracked (god, that is so 90s). Two of the songs that stuck with me the most were "Band of Gold" by Freeda Payne and "Build Me Up Buttercup" by the Foundations. And Saturday I was able to acquire the parent records of each for a buck.
There is no sensation in the world of consumerism quite like finding a record that you have been looking for on a dig. It is a mix of unbridled joy and nostalgia for the time in your life when you first fell in love with the song, or songs on the record. You cannot wait to get home with the record, play the record, tell fellow diggers what you found. It is life affirming.
Neither one of the records mentioned disappointed at all. The Foundations record has one side of live cuts and another side of studio originals. "Build Me Up Buttercup" is great, but so is "I Can Take or Leave Your Loving", and I am shocked it didn't become a hit on it's own as it is "Buttercup" Adjace. The Freeda Payne record is great too, but pretty much anything even vaguely associated with Motown at that time was (Holland-Dozier-Holland produced and wrote the record for their own label).
As I was coming down from my digging high, having a few delicious Point IPA's last night, I went back and re-read probably one of my favorite digging articles from Dust and Grooves about going to Africa to dig for Afrobeat and Funk records. The joy, frustration and kinship of digging is all spelled out in the article, which can be read here (sorry about the lack of embedding, I am typing this on the Mrs. MacBook and I have no clue how to work this with a Mac):
http://www.dustandgrooves.com/digging-in-ghana-with-frank-gossner/
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