On Saturday, we were up way too early and in line with all the record collector champions for Record Store Day. At Park Avenue Records, sorta north of downtown Orlando, I was third in line, which was awesome. In line we met one Thomas Scott, a fellow designer, who specializes in rock posters and vinyl toys. Cool shit all around! Any guy with a Sonic Youth t-shirt on is cool in my book. He was lucky enough to snag a copy of the very limited Hold Steady pre-release! I missed it by one copy! So it goes. They are already up on fleaBay for 200 bucks, and my heart breaks. Hey, the thrill of the hunt is enough to keep me jazzed for some time. I’ll track down a copy. Just you wait.

This record collecting stuff has given me something to live for! After a stretch of years as a “late teens young adult” to “my first gray whiskers/having a glimpse of my mid 30s” period of buying CDs with each paycheck, I’ll be kicking myself for fucking years for going to the record store each week, looking at the record to check out the art, and then foolishly buying the disc. I don’t know, in the name of “efficient use of wall space” and “portability” and even “ease of moving when I’d pick up stakes,” and other assinine reasons for passing up the vinyl.

Dumb me. Lesson learned with each record that I pay seemingly double and up to quadruple for nowadays, as I complete my quest of “getting all the stuff I had on disc on vinyl.”

Which, if I might be so frank, has been fun as fuck.

The last three years of going to record store each week, rolling the dice on this and that, flipping through piles again, learning the vinyl ways of the Dale of the Dixons and Mark of the Phillips has been so great. Thank you rockers, labels, manufacturers and record stores.

So on Saturday, I just kind of bought a copy of every cool thing I “just had to have” that Record Store Day offered. I mean, and why not? So much cool shit, and so fucking limited. Fun shit.

And long live the snarky record store clerk, high atop their vinyl perch, calling the shots of who gets what, governing the spectrum of music shoppers…from the fidgety record nerds to the puzzled moms and even the quick buck eBayists. I love ya.

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AND ONE MORE THING: That Flaming Lips “Dark Side of the Moon” nightmare they put out, well, I got my copy, and it was the “clear” pressing! Hell yes. Dale got me a copy up here in Portland to, and it’s a “sea foam,” which, shit, is just as awesome. So, rumors abound, a chunk was pressed in “clear” and the rest in “sea foam.”

Read this on the Lips message board: “…apparently the factory ran out of seafoam green and the last 500 were made on clear vinyl.” Total nerd shit. Just happy to have my copy for the collection!

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WHAT I WATCHED ON THE PLANE RIDE DOWN TO ORLANDO: The Dungeon Masters. So uncomfortable. Highly recommended by the DDC. Oh yeah, Leigh found this one, for the record. Hey Sturgill, you gotta see this one!