Monday, May 10, 2004

The best of all possible Worlds

Random comments generated by Jon Dale's April '04 Worlds of Possibility archive:

1. Particularly good piece on Galaxie 500.

2. Dif Juz w/ Lee Perry: My own take on Scratch is that his work since setting fire to the Black Ark has been patchy at best, so maybe Jon shouldn't get too excited about the existence of some (possibly mythical) Perry/4AD cross-pollination. What I would like to hear is the stuff Perry supposedly did with Robert Palmer (late 70s?), which I recall reading about in a Palmer obit.

3. Archie and Jughead's American Records? Rings a serious bell. Either I've got a record somebody once bought from there and left the price tag on, or it used to advertise somewhere like "Roadrunner", or I went there on my only trip to Adelaide in 1983. Or it's not even in Adelaide. Or anywhere else in Australia. Or it's not even a record shop. My mind must be failing. Help!

4. Traces of a record's previous ownership: I bought my copy of the Heptones' Party Time in an opportunity shop in Clunes, a tiny, un-rediscovered (at least it was then) Victorian goldmining town. It still bore the price tag, which revealed that it had originally been bought from a record store in Key West, Florida. There may be a great short story buried in there somewhere, I wouldn't think that's a road well travelled. (At the same op shop I found a copy of Richard Thompson's Rock On, which I should have kept for myself but which instead, in a well-meaning act of patronage, I gave to my friend Darren, who is a major Fairport Convention fan but who had somehow managed not to know much at all about Thompson's career post-Fairports. Darren would probably have been more taken by its companion album Morris On, but that's another story.) I also have, in a box somewhere, an Iain Sinclair paperback (either "Downriver" or "Radon Daughters" I think) in which Rowland S Howard has signed his name. Go figure.

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