Saturday, 19 June 1999
I just got back from a little trip to Menlo Park. Two weeks ago I was there with John and Charlie at a place called The Record Man. The guy has got a gold mine in vinyl—unfortunately you pay through the nose for it.
Anyway, when I was there last, I found one of the records off my "hot list," the soundtrack of Trocadero Bleu Citron, a very obscure recording by Alec Costandinos, which also happened to be the first record Steve Golden ever gave me. While musing this on the drive down 280—and wondering what the hell ever happened to that the framed photo of him spinning music at Hotbods that I'd given him back in '81 while simultaneously wishing I'd had it now—an idea came to me.
Dangerous, I know, but the thought was to take the good 3×5 copy of that portrait (I no longer have the negative), scan it at a very high resolution, and then print it out at 8×10 on the glossy photo paper at 1440 dpi. I know it won't be as good as the original 11×17 print I gave Steve, but it would definitely be good enough to frame and hang.
Of course, that led me to thoughts of all the other things I've been meaning to have framed over the years, most of which are still firmly rolled in tubes in the hall closet and will probably never see the light of day. But who knows? I suppose anything is possible if I can ever dig myself out of the pile of debt that's that seems to be a required part of 20thcentury American life.
Trocadero was—of course—right where I'd left it two weeks ago. It's not exactly the kind of recording that people are going to come looking for. This time, however, I'd brought my "hot list" and thought I might try laying my hands on a few other things as well.
Not surprisingly, there were several pieces of vinyl I would've scooped up if funds had allowed: Kraftwerk's Man Machine and Computer World (I haven't seen either on vinyl at all since I sold my original copies, even though I recently replaced Man Machine with a CD copy) and Meco's Star Wars.
The find of Star Wars led me to a search for Boris Midney's Music from the Empire Strikes Back, an promo album I doubt ever saw the light of day and was originally given to me—again by Steve Golden—for my 22nd birthday in 1980. The memories of that day are as strong almost twenty years later as they were when they occurred. (It happened at work—Lewis & Roca Attorneys at Law—only a few short weeks before I went down to visit Tucson and met Kyle Tumlinson, setting me on the whole path which would eventually lead to Dennis, Lee, Bernie, Kekku, San Francisco, and the whole rest of this thing called my life.)
I'm really going to have to scan and print out that photo. Obviously Steve is trying to say hello today.
Anyhow, Boris Midney was not hiding in the soul/dance section as might be expected, but rather in soundtracks (duh!). I pulled it down, added it to Trocadero, Star Wars and Computer World and walked up to the counter.
As I noted earlier, The Record Man does have just about everything ever pressed. On the other hand, his prices are book-quoted, so it's no place to find bargains.
He wanted $9 for Empire, $12 for Star Wars, $12 for Computer World, and sixteen fucking dollars for Trocadero.
Since Trocadero wasn't even on the original Casablanca label, and I wasn't going to spend $40 for 4 records anyway, I put everything back except Empire. I told him I was looking for the Casablanca pressing of Trocadero and all he said was, "If I had that, it would be $18."
I'm certainly not going to pay eighteen dollars for a piece of vinyl I'm sure I could find at The Record Rack for $3, if I'm just willing to spend a day down there going through their unsorted back room.
And as a sideline, there's a picture of Boris Midney on the back of this album, looking amazingly like my mechanic friend Louie Tasista—who I haven't seen in months and months, so I just called to invite to him dinner. Sometimes life is just too damned strange.