A hologram t-shirt with a spinning tree on a record player. Definitely possibly.
All that talk about Astral Weeks last week made me very antsy, so I said, "Enough of this craziness!" and pulled the eBay card. Initially I might have been a little disappointed to go that route instead of finding it, but this is a record I've let go to others at least twice having found it in record stores. Because I was shopping on those two occasions with people who had never heard the record and, seriously, how am I going to deny someone else hearing that record just so I can take it myself? Not that record. I can certainly get snatchy, snatchings of the Count Five's Psychotic Reaction and Led Zeppelin's first album come to mind, records that someone else pulled and showed to me and I was like YOINK. But when someone comes up to you with Astral Weeks in their hand and wondering aloud about it, all I could say was, "You should REALLY get that. You need it." So, having done that, I was going to let myself go the eBay route on this one. Plus I found it in a lot with His Band and Street Choir and Moon Dance. (Already had Moon Dance but the others I did not, so the second Moon Dance goes into the "To be sold under pancakes" pile) Got it in the mail this morning and man is it gorgeous. Worth all the waiting and searching, and definitely feeling no need now to get the 180 gram-mer.
Then I got curious and started browsing eBay further and found a guy selling my second favorite Van Morrison album, It's Too Late To Stop Now, and another one I don't see in record stores, for a Buy It Now price of 5 dollars and running some special where he wasn't charging shipping. We at Pancakes And Records have an endless obsession with free shipping, so I jumped all over that in a heartbeat. That hasn't come yet, because I decided to look at what else he was selling, and he has an Elmore James comp on auction that ends on the 26th, so I'm watching that hoping he'll ship the combo when I win that as well. Originally the Elmore James comp was not on a free shipping deal, and it's not a Buy It Now, but he says if I win that one too he'll ship it for free along with my first. SWEET! Even though it's eBay and it's not real hunting, I feel like I'm using some of my finding skills to work the deals a bit. Anyway, after that, I decided I would really like to have some Elmore James records, because I have none, and he's one of the very few people I think has a perfect discography. So I looked around a little and bought another comp. Then found another guy with another comp who was also selling a comp of Howlin' Wolf at Sun. Boner. So I jumped on those to get the combined shipping, but I need that douche to write me back and tell me what the combined shipping is so I can send him payment. After that, decided I wanted more Howlin' Wolf, so I went and found a 2-LP set of his best at Chess. That also arrived this morning and it's similarly gorgeous, though I have yet to spin it. Extremely successful eBaying.
Also got in my mail order from Fat Possum a couple of days ago, which included Paul 'Wine' Jones's Mule, Junior Kimbrough's All Night Long, and R.L. Burnside's Too Bad Jim. I definitely need to go through their lists. A lot of records I would love to have, and all 10 dollars new. That's hard to beat. Then I also got in an Amazon shipment with the Platinum Pied Piper's Triple P, which is also fantastic, as I try to expand on what little I have of neo-soul and R&B. Which reminds me, I really REALLY wish more modern soul and R&B acts would get on the vinyl bandwagon in a big way, like the way that involves them putting their stuff out on vinyl at the same time as CD, and also including a download coupon or something. There are a few records from last year, like Jazmine Sullivan's Fearless and The Foreign Exchange's Leave It All Behind that have apparently not come out on LP DAMMIT. And then for some reason the Jazzanova record was released in Germany (I think? Wherever amazon.de originates) on LP but I sure as hell can't get it here. At least not without paying crazy prices to import it. Why? WHY DAMN YOU?!?
Then I also made a quick trip to Goodwill this afternoon. Got Marvin Gaye's Live!, the Brothers Johnson's Right On Time, and Bowie's Let's Dance, which was fortunate because I've had "Modern Love" in my head the past several days.
But that should not be the end of it for me this year. My mom loves doing her Christmas shopping on Amazon, so of course the links I sent her as ideas were LPs. So tomorrow may be the first time since high school* that I've gotten records for Christmas, which will be awesome. Then tomorrow afternoon I'll head over to my dad's house, and sometime during my stay over there I'll hopefully make it over to Harrisonburg and see if that Plan 9 has anything. Not expecting much, but at least a couple records to make it worth my time. And hopefully when I get back my other eBay purchases will have arrived.
Also, I'm hoping to have a pancake report by the end of the year, because those coffee cake pancake commercials from IHOP are calling my name and I need to try them at some point. I don't know how the hell I can choose between blueberry and cinnamon apple though, because they're both making me salivate. Who am I kidding?!? The pecan streusel is calling out to me as well!
*I think it was my sophomore year of high school, my mom gave me some money to go to the Record Mart in Alexandria and I think one other place in southern Maryland, and buy some records as a Christmas present, because it was really all I was after. Which was wonderful, but then she made me give them to her when I got home so she could keep them until Christmas and wrap them up. Oh, you think I wasn't sneaking into her closet where she kept all the presents just so I could look at them like any other present? Even though I was the one that bought them? And I was sixteen years old? I most definitely was. I can't really remember what records they were, but it was only a year or so into my record buying career, so it was probably a lot of classic rock. I do remember that Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills and The Canned Heat Cookbook were two of them. I want to say there were around 8 total, but those are the only two I can remember, because I was majorly STOKED to get my hands on Cheap Thrills.
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