Recent Arrivals

 by whiteray

When the Texas Gal and I first set up housekeeping in 2001, she asked me if I had a list of all the LPs I owned. (At that time, there were about 3,000 of them.) I said I didn’t, and she said it sounded like a good day-time project for me. (I’d left the workforce in 1999 due to health concerns). 

So I fired up Excel and got to work, researching and entering, and when I was done with that, I moved on to our much smaller collection of CDs (about 200 at the time). And I’ve continued to do that, with our collection of CDs now numbering not quite 1,400. That’s actually the number of CD albums and not the number of discs; a multi-disc CD album like, say, the complete collection of The Basement Tapes by Bob Dylan and The Band includes six discs but is counted only once. 

But I’ve fallen behind. I’ve run out of the labels I use to tag CDs before I enter them in the database. So I have twelve CDs sitting on a TV tray by my desk, waiting for attention, and I thought maybe Consortium readers might like a snapshot of what a few months of mostly scavenging at the thrift store or the library bookstore brings me. 

On December 27 at the library, I found both CDs of the two-disc anthology of the work of Todd Rundgren, covering the years 1968 to 1985, and I found a CD titled Russian Favorites, offering various classical pieces as performed by several Central and Eastern European orchestras. 

Not that much earlier, the Texas Gal and I had noted that there are two singles by Rundgren from the early and mid-Seventies that we both liked: “Hello, It’s Me” and “I Saw The Light,” and I told her I’d keep an eye out for an anthology. I got lucky, and we’ll see if we like any Rundgren beyond those two singles. As to the other disc, I’ve been fascinated by the music of Russia and Eastern Europe since high school when our orchestra director often chose pieces from those traditions. 

Not quite a month later, January 22 brought me five finds at the largest of the thrift stores in the area: An anthology of the work of Tommy James & The Shondells; an anthology of the work of the late reggae genius Bob Marley; an anthology of some of the best work by Benny Goodman; the 1992 album Fat City by singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin, and Just Like You, a 1996 album by bluesman Keb’ Mo’. 

Tommy Jame, with and without the Shondells, provided great AM radio fare in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though I would not have admitted it back then during my infatuation with album rock. I don’t know the albums by Colvin and Mo’, but I’ve liked pretty much everything the two have done, so I expect to like them. And the Marley and Goodman anthologies fill gaps once filled by LPs that were sold about five years ago when I downsized from 3,000 LPs to about 1,000. 

A few days later, on January 27, I was back at the library, and the racks had been refreshed. I grabbed The American In Me, a 1992 album by folk/rock/Americana artist Steve Forbert, a greatest hits collection by pianist Peter Nero, and the second hits collection by Barbra Streisand. 

I’ve liked Forbert since his 1979 album Jackrabbit Slim, which included the delightful single “Romeo’s Tune,” and although I have a lot of his stuff digitally, I have very few actual CDs, so I thought I’d give The American In Me a try. I got the first Streisand hits CD a couple of months ago (also at the library bookstore), so the second one seemed like a good idea. Released in 1978, it covers the first two-thirds of the Seventies, from 1971’s “Stoney End” to 1977’s “My Heart Belongs To Me.” And I love 1960s and 1970s easy listening instrumentals, so the Nero album was a no-brainer. Besides, Nero once left a comment at my blog on a post about “The Summer Knows,” the theme from the movie Summer of ’42. (He disagreed with me about the worth of the lyrics to the song, and he persuaded me I was wrong.) 

The only CD I’ve purchased anywhere else in the past six months or so showed up in the mail a little more than a week ago: Carole King’s 1976 album Thoroughbred. During the pandemic lockdown, I realized that our collection had only one Carole King album, It’s Too Late. I quickly sent off for a slipcase collection that included five of her first seven albums (excluding It’s Too Late and Thoroughbred). The arrival of Thoroughbred the other day gave me her work through 1976 in CD form (though there is much stuff from later years on what I call my digital shelves). And, as her work became less and less interesting over the years, I think the only additional King I need on the CD shelves is Pearls from 1980, on which she takes on songs she wrote in the 1960s with then-husband Gerry Goffin. 

So there’s two-and-a-half months’ worth of collecting, perhaps not the most interesting piece you’ll find at this blog this week, but it’s a look into one of my compulsions. And to close, here’s one of the best pieces in the twelve-CD haul (though I would not have said so when it came out in 1971), Tommy James’ “Draggin’ The Line.”