May 31, 2022 · 9:00 pm

Dry spell

You’d think that over the course of a couple of months that have seen our local record show, a couple of pop-up record sales and Green Bay’s oldest record store having its long goodbye, I’d be hip deep in records.

Nope. Been going through a dry spell when it comes to record digging. A few finds here and there. That’s it.

That, in turn, has dampened my enthusiasm for the hunt. Just not digging record digging at the moment.

I’ve been through stretches like that before, but this one feels like it’s going to last a while.

Group photo of 4 record covers: "Mambo," Xavier Cugat, 1953; "Based on the ABC-TV show Shindig!" 1964; "Inner City Beat" theme compilation, 2014; "Laurel Canyon," Jackie DeShannon, 1968.

That said, some things I found at those recent digs:

  • “Where The Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets Highlights,” a cool comp of L.A. pop, circa 1965 to 1968.
  • “Mambo,” a Xavier Cugat 10-inch record from 1953.
  • A couple of 45s from Baby Grand and Truc, two early ’70s Wisconsin bands.
  • “The Many Moods of Willie Mitchell” from 1969.
  • A Hanna-Barbera Organ and Chimes Christmas record from 1966.
  • A “Shindig!”-inspired comp from 1964.
  • “Inner City Beat,” a comp of British spy, detective and thriller themes from 2014.
  • Another 45, this one “2+2=?/Ivory” by the Bob Seger System, a 2017 reissue.
  • “Laurel Canyon” by Jackie DeShannon from 1969.
  • “Call Me Man!” by the Jules Blattner Group from 1971.
  • Area Code 615’s first LP from 1969.
  • A reissue of the Dennis Coffey Trio’s first record, “Hair and Thangs” from 1969.

Yes, that is a nice stack of records. Some nice cover art, too.

But that’s three months of record digging. If that constitutes a dry spell, maybe I’ve been buying too many records. That is entirely possible.

Then again, when the folks from Strictly Discs in Madison picked up a collection near Milwaukee earlier this month, there were thousands of records in that basement. They showed some on an Instagram reel. “This is less than half of the 24,000 records,” they said as they walked between the floor-the-ceiling shelves.

Wonder whether that collector ever went through a dry spell.

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April 30, 2022 · 10:30 pm

The long goodbye

A bunch of the record stores I once loved visiting are long gone. So it goes when you’ve been record digging for 50 years.

Prange’s basement and Evans in Sheboygan, Prange’s loft and Bob’s Musical Isle in Wausau, Freedom Records and Earthly Goods in Green Bay, Resale Records in Madison, all closed after I’d moved away. Truckers Union is still there on Water Street in Eau Claire, but it got out of the record business in the ’80s, again after I’d moved away.

But in all that time, only one regular stop closed as I watched it go.

Amazing Records, at the time the only used record store in Green Bay, closed in slow motion in the spring of 2010. Jim packed it up and took it back home to northern California.

Now another regular stop is closing as I watch it go.

James Giombetti — Mr. G — was the owner and voice of The Exclusive Company, a small chain of indie record stores in Wisconsin. He died last November. His family didn’t want to continue the business.

The Exclusive Company, Green Bay, April 15, 2022

The liquidation sale at the Green Bay store started on April 12. With up to 50% off everything, the first few days were a zoo. At the end of the second day, this is what the vinyl aisle looked like.

My friend Tom has worked at the Green Bay store since 1988. (I never knew those were called header cards.)

On the fourth day, April 15, I finally made it down there, more curious than anything. The new vinyl bins you see above on the right looked more like this.

Exclusive Company Green Bay store bins during liquidation sale, April 15, 2022

Someone had put that new Beatles release among the used records. With the Beatles header card long gone, I repatriated it to the front of the “B” bin.

On the fourth day, as I dug through the bins, Tom announced a milestone: “That’s the last Hellacopters CD I’ll ever sell in Green Bay.”

Bob Seger System 2+2=?/Ivory 45 jacket

On the fourth day, I found only a 45 — “2+2=?/Ivory” by the Bob Seger System, a 2017 release on Jack White’s Third Man Records label. Here’s the title cut from the original 45 on Capitol from 1968.

It’s fitting. The Exclusive Company bins have yielded a couple of records with the cool vintage cuts Bob Seger disavows, the LPs mentioned in this 2018 blog post.

I stopped in again yesterday, on the 18th day. Still plenty of records, still new releases on the new release wall, but the bins are clearly emptying out. The liquidation sale goes on through May and June. Still plenty of records, but none for me on the 18th day.

There will be other days for digging at The Exclusive Company in Green Bay, but they’re dwindling to a precious few.

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March 30, 2022 · 9:30 pm

The search for Seger continues

I read the news that day, oh boy.

That last item in my friend Jon’s news roundup at The Vinyl District (a highly recommended read) … the little Ohio record shop we’d visited when our son was in grad school was in transition, its owner retiring.

That brought back a nice memory.

In late April 2019, those pre-pandemic glory days, Evan and I visited Main Street Vinyl in Hamilton, Ohio. It was a few doors down from a comic book store Evan enjoyed visiting.

This is what I found and what I wrote that day:

Bob Seger's "Brand New Morning" LP in a bin at Main Street Vinyl in Hamilton, Ohio, on April 27, 2019

Evan and I squeezed in a wee bit of record digging this morning at this fine little shop in the next town over. This was at the front of the collectible crate. One of the two early Bob Seger records I don’t have. $75 is another thing I don’t have, at least not today. So it goes. But fun to see it in the wild after looking for it for so long.

I’m still looking for “Brand New Morning.” That’s the only time I’ve seen it in the wild. (I’m still looking for “Noah,” too, but even my friend Dave Benton, who has sold records for 40 years, has never seen it.)

There’s good news, though. I still can stop at Main Street Vinyl when we’re in Ohio this summer. The three brothers who own Unsung Salvage two doors down have bought the record store. Over the weekend, they set it up inside their building.

Wonder whether they still have the collectible crate, and whether “Brand New Morning” is in it. Oh, sure, I could call, but the fun is in the digging and in record store travel. And, yes, I could listen to the whole album on YouTube, but that takes the mystery out of it.

The record store isn’t the only thing that’s moved. That nearby comic book store — Future Great Comics — moved a few miles up the road to Oxford, Ohio, where Evan went to grad school at Miami University and where we’ll be come June.

Wonder whether it still has this battle royal.

Wrestling action figures standing in a box

Yeah, that was a fun day.

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February 28, 2022 · 9:00 pm

No stickers? Hey, no problem

“Oh, man! I don’t even have any stickers to give you!”

“Don’t worry about it. I took some pictures.”

Friends of Sound Records, San Antonio, Texas

That was my final exchange with one of the friendly gents as I checked out here, at Friends of Sound Records in San Antonio, Texas, earlier this month.

We were in town for our nephew’s wedding, and I took a couple of hours to go record digging on the day before the wedding. It was quiet at Friends of Sound early that Friday afternoon. A couple of guys were doing a photo shoot, perhaps for a local magazine, so I worked around them as they worked.

Friends of Sound Records, San Antonio, Texas

All along that beautiful back wall are 45s. I sent a couple of pictures to my friend Larry in New Jersey. “That looks like a place where I could have some fun,” he said. Indeed.

But I’m not a 45 guy. I like LPs, and I had the time to look at a lot of them.

“Wow, you’re really checking everything out,” the same friendly gent said.

“Yep, I’m from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Doing a little record store tourism.”

He found that an interesting notion. I said traveling gets me into the neighborhoods and often offers chances to see records I don’t usually see.

Sure enough, I found one at Friends of Sound.

Then I stopped at one more place.

Janie's Record Shop, San Antonio, Texas

Everything I read about San Antonio record stores said Janie’s Record Shop was a must stop. Janie’s is a little roadside storefront about 3 miles west of Friends of Sound, more or less right on the way back to my hotel, as it turned out.

Juanita “Janie” Esparza, who died last fall at 94, put her 14 kids through high school, then in 1985 realized her dream of opening a record shop. Janie and the shop became south Texas legends. She sold a rich selection of regional music genres — among them Tejano, conjunto, ranchera and the Westside Sound (aka Chicano soul) — supported the artists and preserved and shared its history.

It was cool to see a shop full of those styles of music — even if I know only a little about them — and the people running the shop were really nice. They also had rock, R&B and soul records and soundtracks, so I dug through those. I found these records.

5 Stairsteps, Billy Williams and Ernie Banks record albums

Went all the way to San Antonio, Texas — 1,400 miles from home — to find four records from Chicago. At Janie’s, I found a copy of this Five Stairsteps LP without its jacket and these baseball instructional records with the Cubs’ Billy Williams and Ernie Banks on the covers.

Back at Friends of Sound, I found this one. Had never seen it before.

Willie Henderson and The Soul Explosions "Funky Chicken" LP cover

Willie Henderson is a sax player who started leading the studio band at Brunswick Records in Chicago in 1968, working there until 1974. He also did arrangements for Tyrone Davis, Barbara Acklin, Jackie Wilson and the Chi-Lites and produced Davis and Acklin.

Here’s a cool cut.

“Off Into a Black Thing,” Willie Henderson and the Soul Explosions, from “Funky Chicken,” 1970.

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January 24, 2022 · 9:00 pm

Reviews in review: ‘His lush gush’

Records in Review logo, Green Bay Press-Gazette, January 1972

50 years ago yesterday, on Sunday, Jan. 23, 1972, the CloseUp section of the Green Bay Press-Gazette carried record reviews, as it did almost every Sunday.

Some of the records reviewed on that day by free-lance writer David F. Wagner: “I Wrote a Simple Song” by Billy Preston, “The North Star Grassman and the Ravens” by Sandy Denny, “Angel Delight” by Fairport Convention and “From the Witchwood” by Strawbs.

Billy Preston? “He jumped off soul’s deep end, and every cut here is overripe and out of hand.” Sandy Denny solo? “Not exactly stimulating.” Fairport Convention? “Few ideas of consequence.” Strawbs fares best. “The lyrics get a little pretentious at times, but … a pleasant combination of rock and English folk music.”

But I’m burying the lead here, and the lead item in the column was Wagner’s vaguely racist review of “Black Moses” and the “Shaft” soundtrack, both by Isaac Hayes. It’s astonishing that his editors deemed it suitable for print.

“WHAT is obvious to anyone moderately familiar with r&b through the years is that much of the soul of ‘soul music’ is self-indulgence; understandable in a musical format in which ‘form’ consistently overrides content.”

Hm.

“Enter Isaac Hayes … again. Friend or foe? Don’t answer that; after all, he’s the best Black Moses we have.”

Huh?

“Hayes’ recordings have been superfantastic sellers, presumably in the black community. True, he goes over extremely well in concert before the blacks and is a sex symbol for many sisters. But I suspect a good many honkies are buying his lush gush, too.”

GOOD LORD.

Here is an ill-informed white guy, 31 years old, writing for a white audience his age and older, at best trying to be edgy and at worst fancying himself a music critic on par with those in Rolling Stone.

“What he does is done well — except for the slight consideration that he can’t sing at all. It’s just that he is the epitome of corniness, black or white. He reads beautifully, but his narrations (better known as raps) are embarrassingly banal.”

Isaac Hayes, damned with faint praise. For what it’s worth, the Rolling Stone review of “Black Moses” — out the same week — had many of the same objections to Hayes’ vocal style.

Save for the most adventurous of them, Press-Gazette readers likely never heard anything by Isaac Hayes beyond “Theme from Shaft.” Wagner declared the “Shaft” soundtrack “the preferable product” because “it is mostly instrumental, so there are no raps and only a minority of bad singing.”

Anyone else feel like they need a shower? Let’s let Isaac Hayes wash over us for the next 19 minutes instead.

“Do Your Thing,” Isaac Hayes, from the “Shaft” soundtrack, 1971.

For those wondering, Mr. Wagner — by all accounts a good man who had a bad week in January 1972 — is no longer with us.

Here’s the review in its entirety, for those who wish to read more.

Green Bay Press-Gazette review of Isaac Hayes' "Black Moses" and "Shaft" soundtrack, Jan. 24, 1972

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