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39 minutes ago, JohnnyB said:

For Memorial Day, I love spinning this LP of Sousa Marches. I got it from a used bin for $1.99 in great shape:

The+Band+Of+The+Grenadier+Famous+Marches

Not surprising the record was in such pristine shape. 

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11 hours ago, RobB said:

Not surprising the record was in such pristine shape. 

Really??

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Edited by JohnnyB
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2 hours ago, RobB said:

Yes, really. 

The drum major in my HS marching band didn’t have much of a sense of humor, either. Musta been that tight-fitting shako...

Dude, what's your damage, anyway?

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12 hours ago, RobB said:

Yes, really. 

The drum major in my HS marching band didn’t have much of a sense of humor, either. Musta been that tight-fitting shako...

So that Johnny doesn't wet his pants completely, my harmless little jape was directed at the Sousa LP, not JB's idealized memories of his childhood and certainly not at his (or anyone's) honoring of Veterans, Memorial Day or anything concerning patriotism.

Y'know?: the reason the $1.99 lp was in such great shape is that no one played it much, nyuk-nyuk! Get it?

Jeez, ya make one wise-crack...

Edited by RobB
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On 5/26/2020 at 6:36 PM, RobB said:

So that Johnny doesn't wet his pants completely, my harmless little jape was directed at the Sousa LP, not JB's idealized memories of his childhood and certainly not at his (or anyone's) honoring of Veterans, Memorial Day or anything concerning patriotism.

Y'know?: the reason the $1.99 lp was in such great shape is that no one played it much, nyuk-nyuk! Get it?

Jeez, ya make one wise-crack...

In that case, I took it wrong. I interpreted it that you implied that the music itself was bad or corny, which was not the case. I need to be more cautious of my reactions. I had a couple of strokes last July and I'm still trying to work my way through it. In this case I got lost in the fog. Instead of "rolling with the punches," I had a "swing and a miss." Ten months after the incident, I still feel like I'm trying to fight my way through a fog.

One thing we have in common:

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I l-o-o-o-ve those Beatles mono remaster/repressings. I even bought an Audio Technica high output moving coil mono cartridge, and that delivered more fullness and dynamics. I have a few cartridges mounted to removable headshells making it easier to swap from stereo to mono, from moving magnet to moving coil, etc.

I bought the whole set of individual albums, which were delivered on my doorstep in Sept. 2014, right around the release date. I figured the individual albums would be easier to handle than fishing them out of a box set.

Speaking of ... A lot of my record collection is from nonprofit thrift shops and used record stores. I have found that very few if any people who buy mail order box sets--especially the ones from Time/Life and Readers Digest--play them at all. Once I was cruising a Goodwill and I found an entire bin of Time/Life's "Great Men of Music" series.This was a collection of the full set of 4-LP sets--14 slipcovers marked at $1 each! I snatched up every title they had--14 sets totaling 56 LPs--featuring Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Mahler, Ravel, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Copland, and others. I came to find that none of these box sets had been opened, let alone played, and Time/Life had reissued them from RCA Red Seal masters of the '50s/early '60s, which was state-of-the art at the time--open reel multi-channel tape running at 30 ips, making for great clarity and dynamics, featuring legendary conductors, orchestras, and soloists.

Thinking back over the Sousa marches, I realized they were probably played only about twice a year at best--on Memorial Day and July 4th.

Edited by JohnnyB
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I always stop at Goodwill to peruse their records but almost always walk away disappointed; just how many Davis Soul, Engelbert Humperdinck, Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass albums did they press, and why are they all at my Goodwill? I even played trumpet for years but enough is enough! Some of the vinyl that looked a little promising was in such bad shape I would not play them on my equipment. 

Anyway, the other day I found a near mint SOR: 20 STUDIES FOR GUITAR JOHN WILLIAMS record for a buck so I finally bought one there! I'll continue my quest.

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On 5/27/2020 at 8:05 AM, ZR said:

I always stop at Goodwill to peruse their records but almost always walk away disappointed; just how many Davis Soul, Engelbert Humperdinck, Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass albums did they press, and why are they all at my Goodwill? I even played trumpet for years but enough is enough! Some of the vinyl that looked a little promising was in such bad shape I would not play them on my equipment. 

Anyway, the other day I found a near mint SOR: 20 STUDIES FOR GUITAR JOHN WILLIAMS record for a buck so I finally bought one there! I'll continue my quest.

I've gotten some good classical guitar at thrift shops, including a couple of WIlliams albums, plus various members of the Romero family. I also have some Laurinda Almeido and Julian Bream as well.

I got my current turntable in March 2007, just as the return to vinyl was taking off. I had lost most of my record collection to a flood, so I hit the used record stores and thrift shops to rebuild my LP library on the cheap. On my first try, I hit a St. Vincent De Paul and got a lucky strike--an LP of Mozart woodwind suites recorded and pressed by Everest Records, whose claim to fame was no-compromise stereo recordings made on a 3-channel Westrex 35mm magnetic tape machine, though this particular album was in mono, but I was so excited I didn't notice. The original Everest label was only around from about 1958-1962. Many of these (esp. the 35mm magnetic film recordings) are rather expensive items, and are also available as remasters/represses. When I got it home it was too noisy to listen to. Then, in 2015 I got a mono cartridge (to play my Beatles Mono reissue series) and then started digging out some used mono LPs, including the Everest one. To my surprise, played with the mono cartridge, all these old mono LPs were totally noise-free, including the Everest LP and a Segovia box set, plus the Vince Guaraldi Trio and several other mono records whose music I liked, but had been too noisy to enjoy.

I also remembering the excitement of finding some chart-toppers such as the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack and some Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. Sliding them out of their sleeves were an easy reveal that these albums had been played to death--you could tell by the hazy glaze on the record surfaces. LPs in like-new condition have a jet-black, shiny gleam to them.

And you're so right about the stacks of middle-of-the-road albums such as Herb Alpert and B-list Italian crooners such as Jerry Vale, Vic Damone, and Perry Como. Recordings of these artists found their way into massive stacks in just about every thrift shop I hit. I never knew a Jerry Vale recording in my life, and wondered what market he reached, how & why they bought up his stuff, and why and when his fan base had had enough and dumped ALL of their collections at every thrift shop I visited.

One thing I found interesting was the first Tijuana Brass album. I bought it for the nostalgia:

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Observe the low-budget cover photo: He's sitting sideways in a straight chair, trumpet on the floor, a bota bag, tequila, salt shaker, kitchen knife, and a lime--about a $23 trip to the supermarket for the props, all background hidden by a huge photographer's backdrop of seamless paper. This album and its cover art was done on a shoestring. It turned out this album was recorded in Alpert's garage and I wouldn't be surprised if the cover photo was shot there too. The "Tijuana Brass" were a group of studio musicians led by Herb Alpert. Julius Wechter was the marimba player. When Alpert & Moss (A&M) started expanding, they formed a semi-comedy group, The Baja Marimba Band fronted by Julius Wechter. They also signed Brasil 66 led by pianist Sergio Mendes. Soon Mendes decided he needed his own studio and hired  Harrison Ford to build it for him in his back yard. The TJ Brass and Brasil 66 traded band members back and forth as needed for live shows and recording sessions.

Soon A&M signed The Carpenters and got the distribution rights from Island Records to repackage and distribute Cat Stevens in the U.S., and they were well on their way. By the late '70s they had signed The Police.

Edited by JohnnyB
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  • 2 weeks later...

Every once in awhile, I have a need for a Dire Straits fix. I just spun their self-titled debut (around 1977) back-to-back with 1985's Brothers in Arms:

 

In 1978 I was taking evening classes in computer logic and programming. "Sultans of Swing" was on the radio every time I drove to school.

The night classes paid off. Two years later I moved to Silicon Valley and became a career technical writer/editor for 25 years.  "Sultans of Swing" always takes me back to that life-altering time, and the introduction of Mark Knopfler and his mad finger skills on a Strat.

Brothers in Arms was  one of the first rock/pop albums recorded on a Sony 24-track digital tape machine. The transfer to vinyl sounds tremendous; it has all the detail and dynamics of digital, but smoothed out in the digital-to-analog transfer to vinyl. It's an incredibly good-sounding album, one I picked up at a used record store for 99 cents, way less than the reissues going for $20-50 at the time. The track, "Why Worry" has a sweetness and subtlety you don't often hear in mainstream pop/rock.

 

Edited by JohnnyB
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52 minutes ago, Steve Haynie said:

 

There were so many suggestive albums back then ('50s/ '60s):

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