Over the past year, I’ve bonded a little with a patron at the library, where I spend too much time telling people not to lick the computer keyboards. I guess there’s three points that this patron and I ultimately connect on; we’ve both been art teachers, we both have LP collections, and we both agree that I’m a handsome devil. With this knowledge, she occasionally pays visits to drop off stacks of records for me. While many aren’t in the genres that I’m currently exploring (as many are opera or musical theatre), there are always a few strange gems mixed in. During her last visit, she left a smart little stack of folk albums - Joan Baez, the notable Allan Sherman folk-parody album ‘My Son, The Folk Singer’, and a whole collection of albums by The New Christy Minstrels and The Back Porch Majority, whom I’d never heard of before.

I was attracted despite my ignorance, and I had the distinct feeling that THIS genre of music, and these ‘large folk ensembles’, were exactly what the excellent mockumentary ‘A Mighty Wind’ was parodying. I explored deeper, because anything worth a good loving mock is worth learning more about, especially if it was alarmingly antiseptic and delightful as the album covers implied. These guys were gonna MAKE me delighted, whether I liked it or not - and the masochist in me was going to like it either way.

I consulted an older generation than myself, and the mere mention of ‘The New Christy Minstrels’ brought a few looks of disdain and fear. Indeed, their practice of forcing joy upon all who encountered them had left a few scars, carved into the skin of their victims like little smiles. ‘The Back Porch Majority’ wasn’t nearly as recognizable, and even the omniscient internet doesn’t offer up too much on their popularity - if it ever existed.

Both groups were organized (and sometimes performed in) by a man named Randy Sparks, and if The New Christy Minstrels were center stage, The Back Porch Majority were the opening act - something of a rehearsal space before moving on to The Minstrels, and many group members did transfer from one group to another. While the two groups were seen as competitors of one another, it seems that they traded members as sports teams might.

A number of things attracted me to the albums, beyond the ripe-for-parody musical genre. First off was the Jack Davis album cover on the Minstrels’ ‘Advance to the Rear’ album, thanks to Derek - but even MORE interesting to me was the progression of The Majority’s album covers.

The first 4 in the stack, and the first 4 sequentially released, are images of smiling, happy, waving youngsters, clearly excited about life and haircuts and soda pop and drive-ins and poofy dresses. Album number five, ‘The Willy Nilly Wonder of Illusion’ takes a sudden psychedelic turn, as a single male member of the band gets all grabby with three women at once, one of whom is making devil horns behind his head. Their bodies stretch strangely off of the album and into unknown spaces, though we can safely assume that they end up in a acid den somewhere. I mean, c’mon - the guy’s top button isn’t even buttoned! What kind of ne’er-do-wells have The Majority turned into? These are no longer ‘Riverboat Days’, and we’re suddenly covering Paul Simon songs about suicide.

I love it.

I wasn’t around to watch the music of the 1960s slowly devour a straight-laced society, and I never experienced the infectious plague of rock ‘n’ roll that destroyed our youth culture. By the time I came along, DEVO had already done their weird pseudo-sexual damage, and by the time I was conscious of it, Nirvana had already ripped holes in my jeans. From what I can tell, 1967’s ‘Willy Nilly’ was their last album, though given their rate of moral decay, one can only assume that their next musical output would be all about sacrificing goats and hailing their dark underlord. Play it backwards and the messages might even be offensive.

So, my theory goes like this :

If I could accidentally collect about 40 Christmas records over the past few years, I must have actively passed up at least a thousand. Perhaps they were duplicates, perhaps they were all fairly generic in their variety or instrumentation, but I’ve always just flipped right past them. Now, I’m the kind of collector that becomes inspired by anything that presents itself in quantity, so I don’t know why they never crossed my mind as ‘collectible’. Thanks again go to FaLaLaLaLa for showing me otherwise. I still think that my repulsion away from Christmas music is a gut reaction to my grandma’s insistence on playing what she calls ‘Japanese jazz’ during many holiday events. You know the music that they played on the Weather Channel in the early 90s? It’s like living inside of that. And praying for some kind of supertornado to just come on by and relieve you from your misery.

Given the amount of holiday music that’s been produced, a very small percentage of it actually finds radio play every year, be it on an FM station or piped into a mall. This means that there are thousands of Christmas songs that are just going unnoticed, forgotten, and ultimately unappreciated. And that idea is what inspires me to discover and collect. By the time I die, I’m going to compile the ultimate Christmas playlist. It will not be encyclopedic, but it’ll undoubtedly be a thousand times more interesting than what we traditionally hear. And it’ll absolutely involve some Twisted Sister. Did you know that Dee Snider wrote a Christmas song that was later recorded by an unwitting Celine Dion?

So, I’ve gotten a good start on my Ultimate Christmas Mix - and given the assortment of records I’ve found in the garage, I’ve also started on The Worst Christmas Mix Ever That Makes Babies Cry.

My personal favorite, for the cover alone, is ‘Home For Christmas : A Joyous Evening of Yuletide Songs’, released in 1964. The joyousness is doubtful, as it appears that this record hasn’t seen a needle more than once, whereas my copy of Led Zeppelin’s ‘IV’ is scratched to heck and back, denoting the true measure of joy derived from any album. The cover depicts a family joylessly singing along to the piano playing of a bespectacled girl, whose pigtail strangely and rigidly extends out from her head. They stand in a line, mouths agape, clearly gathered together for some kind of highly invasive tonsil inspection form the Ghost of Christmas Whatever. The only one even kinda smiling is ol’ Grandma, and she’s only smiling because the baby is about to goose the dog. The gentleman in blue wears a ‘P’ on his chest, which surely stands for ‘Pretty Awesome Guy’. Merry Christmas.

Of note is ‘Good King Wenceslas‘, which has the ‘father’ character belting it out in a crazy, unnatural baritone as if it were some kind of Klingon battle hymn - causing me to giggle uncontrollably, especially at the verse ‘BRING ME FLESH AND BRING ME WINE!’ A finer Klingon there never was!

A close second is Engelbert Humperdinck’s ‘Christmas Tyme’. He doesn’t have to spell thyngs ryght, he’s the Humperdinck! He can spell it wrong fyve different tymes on the record sleeve, but are you gonna argue with that surly lothario on the cover? I didn’t think so. It’s a cover that begs the question, ‘Is this the best photo you could get?’ The answer is ‘yes, Mr. Humperdinck had a very busy schedule of swoonifying women that day.’

The most interesting record of the bunch is ‘A Music Box Christmas’. which is a recording of a collection of 19th century music boxes, all from the collection of Rita Ford - so within this collection of Christmas records of mine, one of the records themselves is a document of a collection. The liner notes (which are always exhaustive, bombastic, and a fun read in themselves) details the general history of music boxes, the authors of the songs contained therein, and talks about the photograph record rendering the interchangeable discs of a music box obsolete, a theme that’s still repeating itself 30 years later as we constantly change musical formats.

And finally, the only full-length Christmas record I ever intentionally bought, ‘Hi-Fi Organ and Chimes and Christmastime’, purchased solely on the virtue of the word ‘hi-fi’. That, and for ten cents.

If you have a favorite holiday album of any era, comment down below, and check out the collection I’ve amassed so far - and enjoy some holiday tunes!

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer from ‘Hi-Fi Organ and Chimes’ LP
Rudolph by Engelbert Humperdinck
Rudolph by The Boston Pops
Rudolph by Gene Autry
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The rights surrounding digital property are a hotly contested, widely debated subject that’s recently infiltrated all of our lives, even if we wouldn’t even touch a computer for fear that the demons running on the little wheels inside might be released. You should be so lucky to work at the desk in a library - that’s one of the more realistic things you’ll hear during the course of a day.

We’re enduring writers’-strike-compelled reruns on the television because of digital property rights, the RIAA monopoly is pretty much punching people in the groin across the world should they suspect them of even the most remote form of music piracy. What does a rabid, excited music collector like me DO about all of this?

I can’t say that fear has gotten the better of me, but I actually abstain from almost all questionable music downloads. As a completist, I find it much more advantageous to legally download an entire album at consistent quality from a single source. That way, you don’t have to deal with possible viruses, fluctuating bitrates, frustratingly cut-off songs and odd blips. When I listen to an album, I want the full aural experience as intended by the artist, even if I don’t have the cover art at hand to read along with. I have, however, developed a three-pronged approach to legally enhance my digital music collection to its fullest potential.- not counting ripping my own CDs and music borrowed from friends. Many recording artists actually advocate this approach - Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and geekcore rapper MC Chris among them - to combat corruptions within the stagnant recording industry and negligible financial returns to the artists themselves.

First, I’ve joined LaLa.com. LaLa is an internet database of sorts in which users catalogue the entirety of their physical music collections on CD, as well as which albums they’d like to have in their collection. The database then anonymously pairs up these people, orchestrates a trade, provides the envelopes and outgoing shipping for the CD in question, and then arranges for a return trade to be made, though not usually from the same user. Within their trading system, everyone gets a fair return, and you receive just as many CDs as you send out - and all you pay is a dollar or so per trade for incoming shipping costs.

Their rules explicitly sending anything but a genuinely produced CD, and also forbid ‘rip and ship’ - making a copy of a CD and then immediately sending it out again in order to obtain a new CD… but it’s certainly a legal venue to test out new music, and the ‘digital property’ laws are not explicit enough to define what you can do with your own property, even if you end up deciding not to keep it. I know that I have boxes of CDs that I bought on a whim and have only found displeasure with, and this is a perfect way to get rid of ‘em and replace them with stuff I actually want, with minimal effort. Also, not being embarrassed while you’re trading in your Celine Dion CDs to the cute chick behind the counter at your local Rhino Records in a bonus.

Of course, there’s also straightforward downloading, which is an amazing, beautiful thing if you’re on a cable modem. If you’re on ol’ 56k dial-up, it’s more like a personal hell. I subscribe to eMusic.com, which is a great service, and has a Mac compatible downloading program that organizes your music into folders for you. They specialize in lots of smaller label, indie stuff, but lack in a lot of major label releases and older albums. That’s okay, ‘cause I’m more of an indie guy - but every so often, I get a hankering to catch up on some musical relic I’d missed up until now and am left sorely disappointed.

Of course, getting 100 songs a month for 20 bucks is a pretty solid deal - twenty cents a for a legally-downloaded song that you can re-download at any point in the future is a great deal. The entire Magic Marker Records catalogue is on there, as well as some live performances by Tom Maxwell, Travis Morrison and Elysian Fields that can’t be found anywhere else (even if they lack these artists’ full length albums). Their download speeds are also super-fast and consistent.

This past weekend, I was searching for a copy of ‘Old and In the Way’ for my mother, but every search I made came up with that dreaded ‘out of print’ status. Even used copies of the CD were roughly 60 bucks, so unwilling to pay the steep price, I perused LaLa and eMusic, and even the dreaded, restrictive iTunes, all to no avail. Finally, I found the complete album, legally downloadable, from MP3Fiesta.com.

Songs from MP3Fiesta cost roughly ten cents each, with a minimum purchase of 20 bucks’ worth. While these songs are not downloadable forever, they’re made available to your account for a period of 48 hours, during which you must download them one by one to your computer. It lacks the smooth interface of eMusic, but the price is half that of eMusic, and the catalogue is more extensive and familiar. I’ve found a majority of positive reviews of the site, though my experience with it is limited - it delivered exactly what I needed when I needed it, when no one else could. I think that qualifies as a success, and it fills in the last possible aspects of my musical desires.

I’m not, however, a fan of iTunes. While their revenue sharing and promotion are potentially more beneficial to the artists in question, I’m not fond of the idea of paying a dollar for a song that I don’t have unlimited access to. Yes, if you have a song that you bought from iTunes, you can only use it on a few of your personal devices - and you need to enter a password any time you choose to transfer it. It just seems overly complicated to need to organize my music collection by how many RIGHTS I have to listen to the music itself. I love you, Apple, but that’s just bad technology.

All this music and it doesn’t take up any physical space. And who has space when you can’t even find room for a dozen Iron Man busts amid your clutter?

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Usually when we’ve been record shopping, I’d always skipped right over the boxed-sets of LPs and compilation disks. I’ve always written them off as worthless, pre-packaged and regurgitated stuff that could be bought elsewhere. They’ve been shilled on TV and in the backs of magazines, which led me to discredit them even more. Sets like this were also produced in such numbers that they’re less rare, and it would be unlikely to find anything particularly innovative recorded on them. So, why my change of heart?

First, I’m not talking about famous-artist box sets — these are usually made by the musician or group’s producer and label and reissued with the highest quality. I’m sure some fell short, but these are generally seen as premiere presentation of an artist’s greatest work. These, generally, do appeal to a collector. I’m also not talking about those discount-rack “best of” albums, CDs, and tapes produced by somebody other than an artist’s regular label (K-Tel is an example anyone over 25 should remember). With these disks, some independent producer paid for reproduction rights and produced an album as cheaply as possible, most likely by skimping on the reproduction quality and recording media. These, generally, do not appeal to a collector, unless somehow a rare cut happened to end up on the disk.

The compilations I’ve overlooked are what I consider contextual compilations. Rather than a collection of a single artist’s works, or a sampler of a particular label or genre, these sets were pulled together with a topic or subject in mind. For example, simple compilations like Billboard Top Hits of every year in history give a content of the music inside, relating it to its peers. You might not realize that The Devil Went Down To Georgia and Heart Of Glass shared the airwaves, so listening to these tunes within a yearly context adds some understanding to the music.

Time Life are probably one of the highest-profile producers of compilations and box-sets that I’d formerly overlooked — however, Rhino also does a good job, and a number of other companies have put extra work into these compilations, making them worthwhile. Rhino’s New Wave Hits Of The ’80s is an excellent example of a set whose values is more than the sum of its parts. Rhino put a lot of effort into both the music featured on the discs and the additional info found in the liner notes, to give the listener a greater perspective on the genre as a whole.

The Cruisin’ The Fifties and Sixties series are an excellent example of context outside of the music itself. Like the Billboard compilations, the focus of the Cruisin’ series is a particular year at a time. However, the producers of Cruisin’ wanted to present the music in the context of the history of rock-and-roll radio by recruiting actual DJs from large radio markets of the time, some retired, and getting them to perform their show in the studio. While this reduces or affects the songs running time, as it would if you were to record a song right off the radio, the actual value is in the presentation of the music.

On a different track, there are also multimedia compilations designed for individuals and educational institutions to learn history through books, audio, and sometimes video. If you’re a fan of library sales, you’ve probably brushed right past these without a thought. Like Cruisin’, these assemble period music within an explanation of their purpose at the time. Queue’s Apple Pie Music is a multimedia CD designed for educators, and Time Life’s The Life History of the United States is a 12-book-and-album set, are two examples I own — the latter were purchased just yesterday, but just the albums. These 12 records are meant to compliment the information found in the books, but from a music collector standpoint have the benefit of historical context for a variety of music, from pre-colonization to the 1950s. One site of each album is called “documents”, a half-hour breakless track in the style of a radio program, combining an voice-over explaining each segment, with a variety of dramatic performances of letters, speeches, and literary works, interspersed in later albums with actual period recordings. On the reverse are several musical works from the period, many of them being secular music rather than classical works. Putting together popular tunes with historical works gives a greater dimension, such as realizing that the early blues and Teddy Roosevelt were contemporaries, for example.

The next time I’m thumbing through the record bin and come across an inch-thick box of LPs, I won’t write them off as yet another set of Bizet — I might find something a bit more, something with context along with the content, something to learn from and experience. To enjoy music is to understand it, and taking more from it than a tune and some lyrics adds to my experience. Those same songs might exist on a hundred other records, but the become something different when assembled with a purpose.

I don’t really have any strict criteria for when I go out album hunting, as just about everything I see appeals to some part of my aesthetic sensibilities. This, as a rule, isn’t a great way to go hunting. When you enjoy everything, you empty out your wallet pretty quickly, and you run out of space just as fast. If I were an actual hunter, there’d be a lot more endangered species. I’d absolutely have to have every squirrel I could catch, because one might be a rare variant.

I need to learn to be more selective, but some things unfailingly catch my eye while I’d digging through the record bins. Pictures of robots or outer space themes. Anything with a smiling, clearly traditionally garbed German man on the cover holding either a large stein or an accordion. Jazz and spoken word-slash-instructional records. Things in curvy languages that I can’t read. The exquisitely ugly. And, finally, cleavage.

The medium of the album cover is nothing like it once was, and by ‘once was’, I mean ‘well before my time’. Album covers have become much smaller, and thereby not nearly as fun and displayable they once were. I spent some of my earlier years hunting down Jethro Tull albums just so I might tack them to the wall and proudly display my love. Creative experimentation is gone, and instead we oft get the ugly mug of the generic performer plastered all over the thing. Sure, there are a bevy of suggestive modern album covers, but unless you’re going indie, most major labels shy away from actual nudity. Even when they don’t, it hardly compares to the large-scale, 70’s-era sensuality of the sexy album cover. I’ve often seen such albums put into their own sections at large flea markets for those who collect them for their covers specifically.

The hunt for sexy album covers isn’t a delicate pursuit when your mom is your best tag sale companion and your young niece is usually tagging along. It’s not as if I’m slipping pornography under my long, dark coat and slipping quietly away with it - I enjoy the covers purely for their camp value, but try explaining that to your mom’s bemused, raised eyebrow. It’s not as if I’m in such dire need of moldy old LPs to know what a woman looks like. I have a high-speed internet connection, mom. For real.

The list of erotic and sensual album covers hits a peak in the 1970s, begins to get creepy in the 1980s, and all but trails off in the 1990s and beyond, but the good ol’ internet (bastion of all things sinful and delicious) has list after list of these covers, 90% of them being headless female torsos in various states of contortion or just-barely-coveredness. My collection is mild by comparison, but there’s two undeniably great things about each of these covers….

The typography and the glossy paper. Top notch.

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