How Walter, Thrift Stores, Tarantino, Neil Diamond, and Hugo Montenegro led me to a life of collecting records.
Hi, here is our little blog for the record store. This is Zach and I'm going to tell you what led me to start collecting records.
I'm from a small town in the middle of nowhere, West Texas. I didn't have wide exposure to music but when rap music migrated there I felt like I had found something that was my own. I stopped listening to Ratt and the Footloose soundtrack and started listening to RUN DMC, EPMD, Salt & Pepper... even Maestro Fresh Wes and Velore & Double O - it was all good.
Sometime in the 90's, I went to college at Texas Tech in Lubbock. It seemed like I was the only person there who liked rap, but then during my second year I heard Public Enemy blasting LOUD from a door down the hall. I heard it a lot but it was always behind a closed door. One day the door was cracked a bit and I'm sure I stuck my head in and said something like "Hey, uh, you like Public Enemy?". That ended up being my friend Walter. I don't know that he really loved Rap so much as he loved sticking it to The Man, but our mutual love for P.E. started us off on a lasting and influential friendship.
Walter had a turntable. I think it was missing a counterweight and had some sort of apparatus taped to the back of the tone arm instead. He also liked to dig around at thrift stores. This was something I hadn't done because you don't have thrift stores in small towns. Some people would rummage through the county dump and it's the same concept, but I never got to do that.
Another thing Walter did when not listening to Public Enemy full blast with his door shut was to listen to Pink Floyd full blast with his door shut. That was cool since I liked Pink Floyd too. One day when I was at this thrift store looking for junk I saw this Pink Floyd record called Umma Gumma. I thought it would be cool to buy it and try it out on Walter's turntable since I hadn't heard this album before.
I brought it by and he was pretty thrilled. It was cool that something that cost a dollar could be so thrilling.. and we hadn't even listened to it yet! He said this LP had his favorite Floyd song on it, Astronomy Dominie. He put that on and it was indeed awesome. It sounded mysterious coming out of the grooves of the record.. like someone was sending us a scratchy transmission from the past.. or maybe the future. I continued to occasionlly buy records for his turntable until a nice guy at a garage sale GAVE ME a complete Pioneer hi-fi set from the 70's. Top of the line stuff too!
This was rad because I could play my own records and start building my very own RECORD COLLECTION. We had, and still have, a friendly rivalry going to find the coolest/weirdest/rarest records. Now Tarantino comes in to play. Pulp Fiction came out and it was a big deal. Everyone had the soundtrack CD but I was inspired to try and find a lot of the original records from it. I wanted to find Miserlou, but no luck. I found the Ventures and Duane Eddy which was close. I was sure I could find the original version of "Girl, you'll be a woman soon" since you couldn't flip through a row of thrift store records without Neil Diamond staring back at you. After much digging, I found this greatest hits compilation called "Neil's Diamonds". I took it home, excited to hear Neil's crooning on my new turntable.
I eagerly dropped the needle on the first track, Porcupine Pie, and what happened next was a revelation. WAH WAH... WAHHHHHHH BE BE BE BE BWEEE BWAAHHH. What the hey!? Where was Neil Diamond? What is this? I had no clue what was going on, but I was pretty sure whatever it was was WAY better than Neil Diamond. I must have listened to the start of that song five times before finally grabbing the cover again. I had actually purchased a record by some guy named Hugo Montenegro who had "fashioned" all of Neil's diamonds in to something much stranger using a "Moog Keyboard".
So that was it. When I heard that sound and that goofy rhythm it all became clear. It was a realization that there was a LOT of music out there that I knew nothing about. Looking for Pink Floyd or Neil Diamond was fun but looking for something weird and strange that you had no prior knowledge of... could be REALLY FUN. And it was. I started picking up anything that looked interesting: soundtracks, lounge records, comedy records, sound effects records, motivational selling technique records, or weird rock or country records if they looked interesting. Buying a comp that had The Fendermen singing 'Mule Skinner Blues' was a revelation just as Neil's Diamonds had been. I still love all this music and have most of the original records I bought then. Hugo Montenegro, Martin Denny, Esquivel, Dick Hyman, The Ventures, Ennio Morricone, Henry Mancini... true dollar bin heroes.
So that's how it all started. My collecting has since elevated to a more serious hobby and now my job. But while I now can tell VG from VG+ and I keep all my records in plastic sleeves - it's still all about trying to dig up some random record that sounds crazy awesome on the turntable.
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