Tag Sale Finds : Armand Schaubroeck Steals

With tag sale season finally coming around again, I’m once again reaping the benefits handed to me by dead grandmas, kids going off to college and the recently destitute. It’s a marginally parasitic pursuit if you do it right, and it’ll leave your hands feeling grimy and questioning your own moral compass.

Well, not always – but that’s how I felt picking through a pile of garbage in a movable storage container on Westbrook Drive last weekend. It was pretty clear that someone had just raided an estate and threw everything that they could find into the giant crate – record players, lamps, suitcases, clothing, photo albums and the like. And when I say ‘threw’, I mean it in the most literal sense of the word. Prying one layer of junk from the next in order to see the hidden treasures was a necessity that many casual tag sale attendees declined to participate in. The back of the trailer was completely inaccessible. Me, I’m a junk lover and future home-renter. I’m remorseless.

I exited the crate with three LPs in my hands, and was pleased to snag them all for a buck (since one was a double LP set). Most of the offerings were the obligatory Herb Alpert stuff and classical junk that you can find pretty much anywhere, but I managed to find a few things that I’d never seen before. Seriously – from my own experiences at tag sales, I could very scientifically conclude that there were exactly 50 records ever made, with ten trillion copies of each record, and fifty percent of the mess was Herb Alpert. And if your family didn’t own the full collection, they’d find you and force it upon you. It’s always great to see something that you haven’t seen at the last ten houses.

The most curious item was ‘Armand Schaubroeck Steals Live at the Holiday Inn’, an LP from 1978 that looked incredibly, authentically punk rock and featured an image of a crazed-looking man on the cover. I really had no idea about the significance of the album, except for the liner notes indicating that he was an ex-con, and a few pictures indicating that he really loved holding a knife close to his face.

Further investigation revealed two interesting things. First, Schaubroeck’s albums don’t seem to have had any kind of official CD release and rarely sell for less than a healthy $25, with prices occasionally shooting up into the hundreds of dollars – usually for his ‘Shakin” LP, also released in 1978. There’s a surprising lack of clear information about Schaubroeck on the internet, but he quit music shortly after these albums to pursue music sales instead. The copy I found was open and the sleeve was worn, but the records themselves were musically pristine, free of any scratches or dust. My 25-cent purchase could probably net me $45 on a really good day, based on some quick price research.

The second interesting thing about Armand Schaubroeck is that he went on to own one of the most successful record stores in the US – the House of Guitars in Rochester, NY. Click through to the shop’s website to see a collector and audiophile’s paradise. Schaubroeck expanded upon his original shop by purchasing neighboring buildings and connecting them through an intricate series of hallways and tunnels, making the House of Guitars something of a curious, exciting labyrinth to walk through, with walls and ceilings lined by hundreds of musicians’ signatures and photographs. It’s certainly not the model of a clean, organized establishment, but it’s just as punk rock as the owner, and between selling instruments and albums, and opening at midnight on Mondays to give their shoppers first crack at new releases, it seems like an awesome place to visit. I’m already imagining the road trip.

The album itself? Not completely my thing. I don’t think I get it – as I usually don’t get into albums that require a whole side to finish a song – but that’s okay. It’s neat to experience an artist who’s regarded as something of a pioneer of independent recording and a paragon of music shop ownership – and clearly, something of a collector himself.