The College Crowd Digs Me

"Love" - Love (1966)       Finding  Love's  debut album in one of the 2 or 3-dollar boxes on the floor at Spektrum Muzik, located in the Delano District, was a pretty cool and unexpected surprise.   It was the latter part of May, the first of June, right before the weather started getting hot.  Just sitting in one of their bargain boxes.  It was an original copy with some expected ringwear, but there were no seam splits, and the spine was clean and readable.  The album had someone's name written on the front cover up in the top-right corner, but it was small and fairly neat.  Usually, a name on the front is a deal-breaker, but honestly, I hardly noticed it.  As for the vinyl, it looked almost VG, but for a weird, hard crumb stuck in one of the grooves on the very first track on side one.  It was tiny, but I could feel it.  Still, for less than a Lincoln, I thought it might be worth it to take the record home and try to res...

"Electric Mud" - Muddy Waters (1968 )     "Electric Mud" is the album where Muddy Waters went psych.  Still the blues, but with rock guitar distortion and fuzz.  A little more guitar juice.  Muddy does all the singing, and he shares the guitar work with his band.  Apparently, this album alienated many of his fans, ala Dylan, and maybe I get that, but it's all biscuits, gravy, and hot coffee to me.  "Electric Mud" is a fun spin, and it rocks out wicked.  The best of both worlds.  It was 1968, and this square is fire.      I'd been looking for a copy of  "Electric Mud"  with the black cover for a very long time, and I didn't want to listen to it until I found one to spin for myself.    This is an original copy pressed in Germany on Chess Records.  The vinyl is very clean, but with a couple of light scuffs, and it sounds really good.  It is the black cover album; the white cover albums are the mor...

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (2003) Softcover, 935 pages NO SPOILERS:      The novel  Shantaram is an ambitious adventure loosely based on events that occurred after the author  Gregory David Roberts escaped from a prison in Australia.  Trying to avoid discovery, he finds himself swallowed up in Bombay, India, where the story begins.  Whether this is a 'true' story or one that has been carefully crafted and roadmapped doesn't matter.  It rings the bell of authenticity, and I was all in.         The exotic atmosphere of Bombay is captured in the traffic-heavy city as well as the crammed-together, slum-like villages.  The prose pulls it all in so tightly I could almost feel it, taste it, and smell it.  It's heady stuff.  Descriptive and emotive, dozens of characters pass through the pages, and I never lost track of a single one.  It's beautiful here and dangerous there.  Sometimes both. ...

"Violent Femmes" - Violent Femmes (1983 )      I picked up a copy of the Violent Femmes album in Goddard, KS, for $40 at a yard sale.  I've seen them go for much higher.  The record had three stickers plastered on the front cover, and after taking a closer look, I thought that when I took it home, I could remove them by using the blow-dryer trick.  I'd had some good luck in the past, and it almost worked...but then it didn't.  Not this time.        The first sticker came off easy-peasy.  It practically fell off on its own.  But the sticker right above was not as friendly.  It started coming up easy, but slower…at first.  And then right about in the middle, the sticker began pulling the ink from the album.  I wasn't rushing, but it was too late.  I don't understand it.  The third, smaller round sticker, I just left alone.  I'm so bummed.  I'll leave a picture of the album cover belo...

"Below The Salt" - Steeleye Span (1972 )      I don’t dislike the medieval Renaissance music, I do.  I just don’t actively seek it out.  But I will occasionally pick one up if it’s the good stuff.  I had recently read about Steeleye Span in the AMG and remembered  "Below The Salt"  was one of a couple of their albums that received 5 stars.  So when I saw a beautiful copy in a box on the floor with a two-dollar price tag, I couldn't leave it behind.  The album doesn't go for big money anyway, but $2 is still a win.      The album sounds like one might expect...except it doesn't.  The bar is higher.  You can hear it especially in the sound of the instruments, cast from long ago and electrified, adding a little meat to the bone.  And you can also hear the love of the song in their voices.  Especially, and those in the know, already know... Maddy Prior... who somehow slipped through a time-crack from 400...

"...but then they started playing the whole side  of the Zazu album.  For some reason, that became our trademark whenever the radio played us." ~ John Melnick ~      This is the 50th anniversary of the little-known 1975 " Zazu"  album filled with tasty prog-rock and prog-pop nuggets.  Led by John Melnick , Zazu's self-titled square fries and bakes while still maintaining a slice of pop sensibility.  Add the lightest of lysergic dustings, and it's a fun spin.   Upon its release, radio stations in Chicago, St. Louis, and New York, among other places, began spinning  Zazu  on their after-midnight airfare, and the album became a staple of late-night radio.   Then disaster.  Zazu's debut album had barely started shipping out the door before their record label, Wooden Nickel, suddenly closed up shop.  No forewarning.  No heads up.  Wooden Nickel was gone faster than 'Hey, Hi you.'   And unfortunat...