It was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. Emma and I had taken Friday off for a trip to Palm Springs, so as far as I was concerned the weekend had already contained two full days with no record shopping at all. I hadn’t yet fully explored all of the shops in the Eagle Rock area, and Emma wasn’t with me the only time I visited Gimme Gimme, so we had our first destination.

Gimme Gimme had a ton of amazing stuff, but it was all market price or above. I almost decided today would be the day we’d finally pay retail for Plastic Beach, but in the end I opted to wait for a sale or a nice secondhand copy. With the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who coming up, we almost pulled the trigger on a $15 copy of Doctor Who’s 25th anniversary record, but decided that we didn’t really care all that much about incidental music from the series. A fun novelty, sure, but that would have been it.

What we couldn’t put down was this copy of ‘Oh, No! It’s Rubato.” If a weird record is sufficiently interesting, cheap, and unique enough, I’m almost contractually obligated to buy it as a crate digger. This one appeared to feature Devo covers crafted by an androgynous German. Also the record was mastered in 2001. 2001! Who was making vinyl back then? What manner of insanity would we find inside?

Emma and I are big enough Devo fans that we’ve seen them live a couple of times, so we knew all the songs being covered despite the fact that they are all purely modern classical piano arrangements. I wouldn’t say they’re great, but they’re certainly interesting – the essence of the melodies did translate. I tried to learn more about the Rubato on the cover, and he/she appears to be an alternate identity for Terre Thaemlitz, a trans woman who does all kinds of music, usually with a theme of identity politics somehow involved.

After Gimme Gimme, we stopped off at Galco’s, the European grocer down the street that specializes in bizarre and offbeat sodas from around the world. We got a couple of interesting ones (Huckleberry Hippo for me) and headed off to Mount Analog, a place I had never been before.

Mount Analog was hard to find – the sign doesn’t even have a name on it – and the inside resembles a dark gastropub or a really hip gift shop more than a record store. At first glance, I expected a super trendy hipster shop with $40 copies of shoegaze records and not much else.

To be fair, there actually were plenty of $40 shoegaze records, but only ones that were actually worth the price. I recognized maybe 15% of the artists featured in the place – tons of indie/EDM/psych I had never heard of – but the records that I did know were priced very fairly. Most new stuff was $15-$18 and the used stuff was all very rare. There wasn’t a single Poco record in the place – everything was perfectly cultivated.

I spent about twenty minutes deciding whether or not to spend $22 on the 1999 reissue of Odyssey and Oracle. Ultimately, I decided to just hold off and get a sealed 2013 reissue if I can’t track down an original. Emma opted to spend $15 on a new, sealed copy of Bauhaus’s Mask, which seemed appropriate considering the gothiness of the venue.

This weekend, Emma and I woke up late and decided to hit up a yard sale in Canyon Country that claimed to have mountains of vinyl. Nice drive with possibly a few late day yard sale scores? Sign me up!

When we got there, the only yard sale going on was across the street from the address in question. It was about 11:30 and an easy hundred degrees, so we figured we had missed out. The people across the street told us there was a ton of vinyl out earlier, though, and said we should knock on their door. So we did.

The seller’s wife answered and told us that all of the records were in the garage. She said that her husband would be back any second and we could start digging. We were only about two records in when he got home, confused about people looking through his stuff. “People usually make an appointment,” he said.

“I’m so sorry!” I replied. “I didn’t realize you could make an appointment. I thought it was a yard sale and your wife let us in.”

Apparently, he gets collections in all the time and has people, mostly big collectors and dealers, over to look through his stuff. I tried to get an idea of his pricing, but we waved me off. “Some of it’s crap, and some if it is a few hundred bucks.” Good to know, I thought.

Emma loves the Blue Oyster Cult, so it wasn’t a shock to me that she was excited to pull their first LP off the pile. We have a Greatest Hits with some of these songs, but this is one we were missing. I’m not a big metal fan, but it’s undeniable that this is a killer record – this band has something for everyone, really, and their early stuff is probably their best.

Cameron Crowe is one of my personal heroes, and Almost Famous is one of my top ten favorite films. One of the best parts of all Cameron Crowe films, naturally, is the soundtrack – he ‘gets’ music more than almost any other filmmaker. When I was in High School, I downloaded the Almost Famous soundtrack off Napster and then supplemented it with all the other songs from the movie that were left off. It was multiple CDs long. That said, there was no way I was leaving behind a Cameron Crowe crafted soundtrack on vinyl, especially not one as great as this.

Apparently, it was a good day for debut LPs. I don’t get why Jethro Tull called their first album “This Was” – save that shit for a greatest hits collection! – but they did it anyway. I don’t know any of these tracks, and it may not be a great record, but I’d rather hear a great early period record than something put out later just to fulfill a recording contract, you know? At this point in the dig, the seller was coming out every few minutes to check on us. I asked again if he wanted us to come back another time, but he said it was okay to stay. He kept making comments that lead me to believe he didn’t really want much to do with people who weren’t spending $100+ on records, though, so I wasn’t sure we were going to reach any sort of deal. I honestly figured it was unlikely that we would.

Holy crap is this album great. Do you have Creedence’s Greatest Hits? If so, you have most of this album already – more than half the songs on here became huge ratio hits. I used to tell people I didn’t really like Creedence, but what I really meant was that I was sick to death of them on classic rock radio. When I was a kid, I pretty much listened to nothing but the local classic rock station, so I heard “Proud Mary” about nine thousand times before I ever heard the 11 minute version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Listening to the songs in context, I honestly love all of them. I hadn’t heard some of the deeper cuts all before, and they’re all awesome. This record looked in pretty rough shape – the cover is coming off and the vinyl was scuffed – so I bought it as a long shot/upside play. Turns out, the thing sounds awesome. Who knew?

It was 100 degrees outside, but at least 120 in the garage. Vinyl was piled up high on the floors and a few tables – the stacks were sixty plus records tall. I couldn’t believe that someone who claimed to be a dealer with hundred dollar records would store any of his stock in such conditions – ring wear and warping seemed pretty likely to me.

I was especially shocked to rescue this copy of X’s Los Angeles from the bottom of a particularly large stack. This is a very rare punk record and one of the very best. We already had a scratched-up copy of this missing the outer sleeve, but this one looked great. From what little Discogs research I did, it’s a $30-$40 album too. Whether that’s true or not, it’s certainly well worth owning.

Do you know what these three Stevie Wonder albums – Songs in the Key of Life, Innervisions, and Fulfillingness’ First Finale – have in common? That’s right – all three won Album of the Year at the Grammys! 1974, 1975, and 1977 represent. Historically, The Grammys have been pretty awful at actually picking the best albums of the year, but this still seems like a pretty good starting point for getting in to Stevie Wonder.

That’s the thing about classic rock radio – it tends to ignore R&B. So while I was learning about The Beatles and Zeppelin as a kid, I still know next to nothing about Stevie Wonder. Historical white-washing perhaps? Or simply an issue of genres getting more defined over time? I don’t know, but this music is great. I’ve heard many of these songs once or twice before, but blasting them on vinyl really shows the depth of some of these grooves. Great pick-ups.

Stevie Wonder albums tend to be cheap, even now, but there’s something to be said for finding clean copies. I’ve passed over these a dozen times in record shops, but I grabbed ’em this time because the vinyl in in great shape.

From the earthtones of the 1970s to the bright colors of the 1980s, this was Cyndi Lauper’s first and biggest album. Mint condition. Tons of fun. What more can you want?

After finding this record, I stumbled upon a bin of records that were actually standing upright. One of them was a mint copy of Exile on Main Street. As I examined the vinyl, the seller popped back out. “That’s signed,” he told me. “On the back.” Sure enough, it was indeed signed by Mick Jagger.

“Wow,” I said. “Uh, how much are you asking for it?”

“Well, I haven’t had it authenticated yet, but I couldn’t ask less than $500. I could probably get $2000 or more if it was real.”

Yeah, I put that thing down like a hot potato. Which it was, considering it was baking in a 120 degree garage.

This is one of the more common Led Zeppelin albums, but it’s their only studio release we didn’t have a copy of. Granted, some of our Zeppelin records are beat to hell, but this technically completes the set. The sleeve is a bit damaged on the bottom, but the vinyl looks pristine. Can’t wait to play it.

I’m not a Kiss fan in the way that, say, Chuck Klosterman is, but I do know that if you’re going to have one Kiss record in your collection, (we have three) this is the one to get. What I didn’t know (or, more accurately, didn’t remember) is that this is a 2-LP set. The second record is missing. Womp womp.

What isn’t missing? The original temporary tattoos from 1977! Some of these are copies of the bandmembers’ actual tattoos, which is pretty neat.

Harmonicats! Bought this one for the cats. I mean, I’ll listen to it, but it’s scratched up and really I just think it’s hilarious. Who gave musical instruments to those cats?

At this point, we brought our albums up to the seller. In addition to what we had pulled, we also had a copy of Fresh Cream and The Beatles’ Let it Be with a ripped sleeve bottom. The vinyl was mint, though.

I asked the seller to price everything out for me, but he told me to make an offer on the stack. I balked, because there were only two possible outcomes here – either I’d offer too much and spend money I didn’t want to, or I’d offer too little, insult him, and risk walking out with nothing. After his $500 signed Exile on Main Street, I didn’t know what to say.

He did finally tell us that the Fresh Cream and the Let it Be were the two ‘key’ records in the stack. He wanted $25 for Fresh Cream and said that the Let it Be would go for “$20 on a bad day, $100+ on a good day” considering it had the Parlophone label. I don’t know much about Beatles records, but I looked this up online after the fact…and still don’t know whether I passed on a great deal or not. One Parlophone Let it Be went for over $1000 on eBay recently. Another closed below $20. Condition? Different versions? I wish I had taken a picture so I could figure it out later.

At any rate, once the seller figured out that we weren’t really dealers trying to shark him – I think he had problems with that in the past – but honest collectors, he offered up a price of $30 for our stack. I shook his hand and we ended up having a pretty warm conversation in the end. He told us to keep a look out for his listing, as he gets in new stuff all the time. Considering it looks like the X album will make up most of the value of our dig, I’m happy to come back again and buy more records from him.

Our last find of the weekend. On our way back to the valley, we stopped by our favorite thrift store to browse for other stuff. Emma took a quick look in the record bins, and found this – the opera that was featured in one of her favorite movies, Moonrise Kingdom. For $1, we picked it up and are exited to give the whole thing a listen.