When You're Broke and Your Friends Dad Gives You a Big Stack of Records!

Due to tight financial circumstances etc etc, I have been unable to feed my addiction for a few weeks.  Then like a gift from the gods my friends dad passed all his doublers on to me.

BIG.  HUGE.  THANKS.

Bootleg Beauties - The Adventure Continues

A couple of treats from my recent flea market adventure.

I went to my first record fair, and after spending around thrice my original budget there, found a flea market around the corner with so many irresistible goodies.  I decided to venture further down the bootleg rabbit hole and while stocking up on some nice rarities to sell to my lovely customers on Discogs, I naturally selected a couple for my own collection!

Pearl Jam - Eddie Sings The Blues, side-A sees Eddie perform 3 tracks with the Doors, the grit and gravel in his voice giving the songs a whole new aura.  Side-B has a particularly cool rendition of The Who's My Generation performed right here in the UK.

Numero Dos, The White Stripes - BBC sessions.  It would appear that the tracks are taken from two John Peel Sessions in 2001 and this makes the record very special to me, as I know that John Peel was very fond of The White Stripes, and that The White Stripes were very fond of John Peel.  And well I'm very fond of them all.  I notice there's not a great deal of information about which tracks come from which session out there on the world wide web so I've tried to unpick it for you below.

Full track listing Eddie Sings The Blues:

A1	Roadhouse Blues (Eddie Vedder and the Doors, Century Plaza Hotel, LA, 1993)
A2	Break On Through (Eddie Vedder and the Doors, Century Plaza Hotel, LA, 1993)
A3	Light My Fire (Eddie Vedder and the Doors, Century Plaza Hotel, LA, 1993)
A4	Catholic Boy (Basketball Diaries OST)
B1	Hunger Strike (Riverside Club: UK Tour 1992)
B2	My Generation (Riverside Club: UK Tour 1992)
B3	I've Got A Feeling (Riverside Club: UK Tour 1992)
B4	Keep On Rocking' In The Free World (MTV Music Awards, with Neil Young, 1993)

Full track listing BBC Sessions:

A1	Lord Send Me An Angel (Peel Acres, November 2001)
A2	Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground (Peel Acres, November 2001)
A3	Little Room And The Union For Ever (Peel Acres, November 2001)
A4	The Same Boy You've Always Known (Peel Acres, November 2001)
A5	I'm Finding It Harder To Be A Gentleman (Maida Vale, July 2001)
B1	Screwdriver (Maida Vale, July 2001)
B2	St James Infirmary Blues (Peel Acres, November 2001)
B3	Boll Weevil (Maida Vale, July 2001)
B4	Rated X (Peel Acres, November 2001)
B5	Build A Home Memphis (Peel Acres, November 2001)

Blondie's Parallel Lines: Teenage Kicks Retro Style

Charity shops can be hit or miss for records, amongst the endless boxes of Val Doonican and Vera Lynn I come accross the odd album that could find a home in my record collection.

It's not all fun and games, I once unearthed a cover for a rare Hawkwind album with nothing inside.  I checked every other record cover there in case it was in the wrong sleeve.  I turned the shop damn near inside out looking for it, I then returned a few weeks later and went through the whole process again.  I never did find that record.

I did get a copy of Blondie's Parallel Lines, which is a great album by the way, for just 99p in the local Barnados though.  There is a cool documentary called Blondie's New York... and the Making of Parallel Lines, explaining how this LP captured a little bit of Zeitgeist of New York, carving new territory in the punk and disco worlds which had little respect for each other.

My copy came with it's own little bit of history.  Inside the sleeve I found several sheets of lined A4 - some darling from a bygone decade had written the lyrics for each track out carefully and placed them inside.  With the album released in 1978, the creater of my home made lyric sheet was not doing anything that I had not done myself 20 years later in the 90s.

I got a sudden flood of memories, from stopping Eternal's Just a Step from Heaven at the end of every line to write down the lyrics, to listening to the Top 40 on Atlantic 252 with my left and right index fingers carefully poised over the 'record' and 'play' buttons on the tape deck to try and get the songs whilst editing out the DJs voice.

I guess listening to music in your bedroom, feeling like the lyrics could have been written exclusively to suit your particular adolescent gripe at that time, is a quintessential teenage experience.

After breaking up with a childhood sweetheart, a friend of mine bought me Cher's Believe from Woolworths, because quite naturally my world had ended.  I played it over and over and over, then a week later with my world miraculously reformed, I got a new boyfriend and played Bon Jovi's Bed of Roses incessantly, much to the annoyance of everyone else in the house.

Check out the below inner sleeve from my copy of Deep Purple's 24 Carat Purple, where another youngster has graffitti'd the names of his favourite bands.  I particularly like that Led Zeppelin has fallen out of favour at some point and been crossed out with the word 'pants' scrawled underneath - ah the fickleness of youth!