For there shall come a day when I WON'T remember...
I REMEMBER...that there were three stores where I bought record albums as a kid (when I was between 8 & 16 years old). Drury's Variety, Gibson's and Cook's (none of which, it must be noted, have been in business for several years.
Drury's was on main street in the small town I grew up in, so it's to be expected that they had the skimpiest selection of the three. The first album I ever bought was from there: the self-titled debut of The Partridge Family . I know, I know...cut me some slack...I was only 8 or 9 years old...I probably thought they were a real family and road around in a real bus and wrote their own songs and recored them...I'm sure it didn't seem so far fetched to me. The first 45 RPM single I bought there was one of those early Carpenters hits..."Only Just Begun" or "For All We Know"...I tend to think it was the latter, because I loved those harmony choruses. Other seminal purchases I made there include "Bloodrock 2", "I Hear You Knockin" (Dave Edmunds) and "What Is Life" (George Harrison), both singles. In fact I bought a lot of those early Beatle solo singles there.
As for Gibsons...it was a variety store that could have been the prototype for Wal-Mart. They had a pretty good selection of records in two long bins you had to pass through on the way to the grocery section. I was hesitant to buy from them because I had a lot of problems with warped albums from there. But my folks went there fairly often so if I could beg them out of 4 or 5 bucks I wouldn't pass up the opportunity to add another disc to my collection while there. Case in point...I got at least two terribly warped copies of Alice Cooper's "Billion Dollar Babies" from there. That was a real bitch, too, cuz I couldn't wait to hear it (I thought Alice was "the man" when I was a kid). But, other than the Cooper album, I can't really remember what else I got there.
Cook's was like a department store without the emphasis on clothing. I always liked it best and not only for it's fantastic record section. It was a fairly big store and when we were very young my brother and I would walk around speaking gibberish to each other, hoping that someone would hear us and think we were foreigners. Getting back to the record albums...I don't think I ever had a problem with defective vinyl with anything I bought at Cook's. The bulk of my collection came from there. I got my Stones' albums, my Beatles, all that stuff at Cook's, but two purchases stand out in my memory...
The first was a 2-LP set from David Bowie called "Images". It was a re-packaging of Bowie's earliest recordings (some even recorded under his own given name, David Jones). I had become interested in checking him out after reading several articles about him in Rock Scene magazine. Of course this old stuff was hardly representative of the music he was becoming famous for...nothing like "Ziggy Stardust" or "Aladdin Sane". But for all that I was very fond of those older songs. All of that material can now be found on "The Deram Anthology", which I listen to every now and again. It still stands up pretty well against his later work, IMO.
The other was another repackaging, this time of Genesis' classic albums "Nursery Cryme" and "Foxtrot". The Buddha record label had bought the rights to distribute the material in the USA so they put together this 2 album set and called it "The Best: Genesis" (there were other artists in the "The Best" series, but I don't remember any of them. I was already on my way to becoming a hardcore fan, having been blown away by an appearance they did on a music performance television show called The Mignight Special. I had even bought their live album at Gibson's. I think I may have played this Genesis set more than anything else I had at the time.
So, my computer is trying to tell that it's battery is running low, so I guess I should get this posted. More "I Remember" entries to come.
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