the hand you're dealt

When I was in college in the early 1990s, I spent my summer vacations trying to stay out of trouble with my friend Brownie, who lived in the same town and who shares a lust for digging up strains of strange/corny/brilliant music without borders. One regular haunt on hundred-degree days was a crummy used bookstore on the south side of town with rows upon rows of cardboard moving boxes abutting brown paper grocery bags full of Harlequin Romances. Strictly amateur level. It was here we learned the code of the dollar bin. Low-risk / High-reward. Whatever we found was valuable, on some level, even if it was simply to become a casualty of a pause-tape mix - Brownie dragging a needle across something that should never have been recorded in the first place, flipping it into gold. Children's records, unlistenable country and western, schlock-pop, power pop, power ballads, old peoples' music, music with no discernible audience whatsoever, and, if we were lucky, real quality finds (Do the Twist with Ray Charles. Sam Rivers Streams. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO - I pushed Brownie out of the way and mugged an old lady to get to that one).

I have a lot of people to thank (or blame) for getting into records. Like my uncle Howard, whose Frank Zappa collection was exhaustive, and who bought me my first records, took me to my first record store - Rolling Stones Records in Chicago, in what must have been 1981. I have a memory of him, in the mid-1980s, taking me to a record store in Tampa and being livid that they closed at 6:00 p.m. "How can a record store close at six on a Friday night?" he groused as we slumped back to our car. Truer words have never been spoken.

I spent fifteen record-spoiled years in Chicago, the Twin Cities, and Brooklyn. In none of these cities was there a shortage of records. One could walk down the street and records would jump out and cling to one's person. I'm not talking any old records. I'm talking RECORDS. Heat. Fire. Dangerous goodness in whatever sphere of music you decided to pursue. Like fishing at the hatchery.

At one point dear Karl opened a record shop in Brooklyn - He had my credit card number and a standing order for bi-monthly shipments to St. Paul. I spent bank. I got records.

I dropped a couple mixes for one of the great independent labels of our time. Pablito borrowed a gang of salsa records for his book. I even talked to other people about their records.

There are always records.

For example, Brian and I spent the better part of a prairie winter in the byzantine backroom of a northern Wisconsin dive bar which had warehoused the contents of a shuttered Duluth record store, our hands numbing, piling through hundreds of thousands of 45s, disoriented and slap-happy after eight hours in deep freeze, pulling stacks of great tunes, driving home sorting and trading our finds, wishing we'd had more time, more money, more knowledge of what we were looking at.

In a way, moving to Kassel was a relief - I had no job, no money, and there was no temptation because surely there couldn't be any records here, right? Besides, I had "gone to the desert" before - winning a bet with lily back in the 1990s that I could go a year without buying any records - pulling an 11th-hour miracle when, in the same lousy hometown bookstore, while checking out with what would be my last two records for a year, the cashier mentioned in passing that they'd just gotten in a really nice collection of classical recordings from a doctor and he didn't want to carry them up the stairs, and he'd give them to me for a song... This became my mother's wedding present to us, and cushioned the blow of a digging-free year.

After a solid year and a half without giving in to the temptation to dig records at any of Kassel's handful of used record shops, I broke down (wised up?) and started to dip a toe or two into the waters. First only at the thrift stores. Then in the cheap-y bins of the stores. Then into the regular stock. I still haven't bought any "wall records" - the kind of records that are so flossy the owner hangs them on the wall. I think my wall days may be over, in part because I've had such a good time in the dollar bins and thrift stores, mostly finding copies of things I've passed on earlier in life, or liked but never bought, or never had in a dollar bin in the states, like 1970s German rock and synthesizer music. The cheaper the record, the easier it became to justify it to myself as a little bit of recreation, a meditation, a way to stay sharp, to keep feeding the beast.

Yesterday I took Matt around to the shops. Matt's a music producer who's in town to work on the new dance piece at the theater. While out digging around, I found a few fun things, including one of Matt's own albums (it was in the clearance bin... Strictly (non) Commercial). On my daily jog, I thought about a life collecting and finding great joy in music. I thought about how when I started digging, there was no internet, and how I was a product of this relatively limited access... what was available to you was what was in front of you. You played the hand you were dealt.

With that in mind, here's a download link to a mix I cobbled together last night from records I've picked up in Kassel (and a few joints from Berlin): "I'll be your (man in the) Mirror" (click here to download or stream below) .



It's 90 minutes (so it takes a bit of time to download), in a nod to the old pause-tapes we used to trade. The mix opens with a beautiful Japanese flute record I picked up while visiting Lily in April 2007, (now known as: The First Record Bought in Kassel). It includes a record mailed to me by Karl last year (technically, my mailbox is in Kassel). The only non-German pick is from that record I mugged the old lady to get my hands on.