Yard sale sounds

I have spent a lot of time over this last year learning about vinyl records and record collecting. It turns out that Marin is like some kind of a frickin' gold mine for digging after records and I've gotten pretty hooked on searching for interesting music on vinyl.

I am a fiend for yardsales and most of my best finds have come on an early saturday morning. There are a ton of people every weekend trying to get rid of those old heavy records around here. I usually pay about $1 a record at the average yardsale, but today's haul came at $3 per.

I found a sale near my house on craigslist that I thought would yield an interesting collection. I could tell because the guy was selling vintage stereo equipment as well as tools and records. I showed up at 9, when he advertised his sale would start. I was pissed because there were already people rooting around, I try and respect the "no earlybirds" ads. However, none of these people were after records and he hadn't brought his music out.

I got the first try at looking through his collection and I came up with some really great finds, some of which appear to be pretty valuable. I love getting the first look at a collection!

I found several great Zappa albums, a few Talking Heads albums (including a 45 rpm 12" of 3 songs I've never heard and a limited edition clear vinyl of Speaking In Tongues). There was a lot of jazz and I picked out a few promising looking albums of that genre. I don't know a lot about jazz and I don't really know classical either, and there was a lot of classical in there as well.

The big finds of the day were a couple of bootleg recordings from the 70's: The Who "Decidedly Late Response" which is some live recordings from their 1973 north american tour and Van Morrison "Van the Man" which is a live recording from the Fillmore West in 1970. These are in very good condition and both are pretty valuable so I'm hoping to pay a good chunk of next month's rent with these.

I also found a great copy of Lightnin' Hopkins "Live at the Bird Lounge" and a wierd experimental recording from Sweden by Ralph Lundsten and Leo Nilson called "Elektronisk Musik" that appears to be fairly valuable as well.

I should take some pictures, some of these have really remarkable covers. Actually, I should take my camera to the yard sales- this guy had a bunch of really cool stuff. I don't know, people may actually have very little interest in hearing about this kind of thing... Oh well, it keeps me off the streets at least.