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Welcome to the first in a series of New Arrivals lists from you're
friendly neighborhood record nuts.
As always, there is too much new stuff to mention, but by blocking off
certain subject headers and points of interest and making some
subjective and deeply dorky choices about what a "neat record" is, we
hope you'll enjoy gazing upon the carrots as much as we love dangling
them before you.

PLEASE NOTE: The prices listed here are pre-discounted from the
sticker prices in consideration of our loyal customers (that's YOU,
buddy!)

without further ado...

TOM WAITS
(for no man)
about one in five people who walk down our alley want to know, "got
any Tom Waits records." So, for all of you with Waits-on-the-Brain,
we've got plenty for you here...

Closing Time (Asylum) VG+/VG $8 scuffy but very listenable copy of his first.
Heart of Saturday Night (Asylum) Ex/VG+ $18
Nighthawks at the Diner (Asylum) Ex/M- $25 2LP
Small Change (Asylum) VG+/VG+ $18
Blue Valentine (Asylum) VG+/VG+$21
Foriegn Affairs (Asylum) M-/M- $17 in shrink
Heart Attack & Vine (Asylum) M-/VG+ $17
Swordfishtrombones (Island) Ex/Ex $21 promo w/ timing strip
Rain Dogs (Island) VG+/Ex $19
Big Time (Island) Ex/Ex $21 zonked '88 live record

MORE ICONS OF BRAINY SONGSTERISM

Roberty Wyatt - Old Rottenhat (Rough Trade) Ex/VG+ $17
as new wave melancholy leftist balladry goes, this is the one to beat.

Yoko Ono - Fly (Apple) VG/VG $15
not the prettiest copy in the whole world (this one actually came out
at parties! what amazing parties they must have been), but a very
affordable copy of simply one of the Greatest Records Ever Made, an
overwhelmingly rich stew of direct meta-linguistic communication and
trip out heavy rock blastitude. Seven million stars.

John Cale - Fear (Island) VG/VG+ $12
sounding, by turns, like the relentlessness of anxiety has turned his
veins have turned to hot copper wire or that the comforts and
beatitudes of companionship and sensuality have turned the air around
him into fluffy, pink cotton candy (or both, as on the bleeding "You
Know More Than I Know"), this is Cale at his best. Also his hardest to
find. Why is it still here?!

Gram Parsons - Sleepless Nights (A&M) VG+/M- $15
three out-takes from the Grevious Angel sessions with Emmylou and 9
awesome tracks from a 1970 LA session with the Burritos that should
have been the follow-up to Burrito Delux. Among them are Gram's great
and totally straight readings of Merle Haggard's "Tonight the Bottle
Let Me Down" and "Sing Me Back Home." Essential stuff for Gram fans...

Gram Parsons - Grevious Angel (Warner Bros) Ex/VG+ $19
some light marks, but a very listenable copy of his indispensible,
last recordings, including the heart-shredding "$1000 Wedding."

Scott Walker - Scott, Scott 2; Scott 3 (4 Men With Beards) still
sealed $12 each.
the first three of his solo albums, spanning the years 1967-69,
reissued last year. The first two are lavish and brooding, haunted by
the twin spectres of Tim Hardin and Jacques Brel. The third, though,
is something else, an utterly alienated piece of music, spiritually
detached from the world around him and moving toward a very personal vision.

Caetano Veloso - Trans (Lilith / Vinyl Lovers) still sealed $16
reissue copy from last year of one of Veloso's best. From 1972, Transa
marries the inwardness and melancholy of the record he made the year
before while in political exile in London with the rebellious,
screaming, blazing, freak-flag-waving freedom of Araca Azul which
almost
immeadiately followed (and is said to have been the
most-returned-to-the-store record in the history of Brazilian music...
it's pretty "out"...)

BLOOZE & VOLK

v/a - Una Historia de la Musica de la Frontera: Texas-Mexican Border
Music, Vol 1, an Introduction, 1930-1960 (Folklyric) Ex/Ex $9
awesome awesome awesome collection produced and edited by Chris
Strachwitz (who was once described to me as "the only sane 78
collector"). If you like the Mississippi Records releases, this one
is for you, too.

v/a - Country Blues Classics, Vol 1 (Blues Classics) VG+/Ex$21
Peetie Wheatstraw / Kokomo Arnold (Blues Classics) VG/VG+ $17
v/a - Chicago Blues, the Early 50s (Blues Classics) VG+/VG+ $17
v/a - Texas Blues, the Early 50s (Blues Classics) Ex/M- $22
v/a - Juke Joint Blues (Blues Classics) VG/VG+ $15
four excellent collections compiled and annotated in the late 60s and
early 70s by founding father of vernacular music scholarship, Chris
Strachwitz and Paul Oliver. Great sound, amazing performances, stark
and poetic packaging and sensitive and serious notes, all of which in
combination give these the feeling of some secret and special being
shared, which indeed is precisely the point.... So so good...

Furry Lewis - In His Prime, 1927-28 (Yazoo) Ex/M- $21 later color label press
Roosevelt Sykes - Country Piano Blues Piano Ace, 1929-32 (Yazoo)
Ex/Ex $21 red label orig
two great early Nick Perls-era Yazoo releases. Lewis is one of the
great Memphis players who collectively had such a harmonically sweet
style. For me, his enduring masterpiece compositionally will always
be the smart, funny "Turn Your Money Green" ("If the river was
whiskey, and I was a duck / I'd dive to the bottom, and lord, never
come up." "If you'll by my baby, I will turn your money green / I'll
show you more money than Rockefeller ever seen...") Sykes, who was
from the other side of the river, on the other hand, a less polished
player, broad and booming, and boozy as hell. This collection
includes self-explainatory titles like, "You So Dumb" and "All My
Money Gone Blues."

v/a - Virginia Traditions: Tidewater Blues (BRI) VG+/Ex $12
scarce 16-track collection of gospel and blues, compiled from both
field recordings and 78rpm discs spanning the 20s-70s and annotated by
DC-based musicologist Kip Lornell (author of a couple of scholarly
books on Virginian folk music) with an amazing 17-page booklet.

v/a - Instrumental Music from Southern Appalachia (Tradition) M-/M-
$7 in shrink
goofy, ugly, bargainy-looking orange cover, and not an uncommon
record, but WHAT AN AMAZING GROUP OF PERFORMANCES! Really great
guitar, dulicmer and harmonica performances recorded "in the field" in
Southern Virginia and Western North Carolina, but the real
mind-blowers here are the fiddle and fretless banjo performances by
the great Hobart Smith. Highly highly recommended if you like the
craggly Americana stuff...

v/a - Washboard Rhythm Bands, 1931-33, vol 2 (RCA / Teldec) VG+/M- $10
16 performances by the Washboard Rhythm Kings and the Washboard Rhythm
Boys (totally different bands), straddling the line between jazz and
blues called "hokum." Great stuff and scarce on microgroove. This one
is a particularly sexy and clean German pressing (with decidedly
German-sounding notes by one Gerard H.W. Behrens, which close with the
advice, "Just a recommendation: play this record when you are happy
and happy and relaxed because only then will you get something from
the music." Or as Slim Harpo might have put it, "make sure you've
wearing your Boogie Shoes.")

v/a - Alabama Harmonica Kings, 1927-30: Complete Recordings in
Chronological Order of Jaybird Coleman, Ollis Martin & George Bullet
Williams (Wolf) VG+/M- $15
oh. my. God. Fans of the American Primitive Vol on Revenant will know
Jaybird Coleman's mind-bending "I'm Gonna Cross the River of Jordan
Some O These Days." What you may not have heard is G. Bullet Williams
"Touch Me Light, Mama," one of the most outrageously macho and
ferocious recordings of the pre-war period, bar none (and I'm
including Charlie Patton in there.) It is a masterpiece beyond
comparison which has to be heard to be believed. And even if you're so
far down the pre-war blue rabbit hole that you already know that one,
unless you have this record, you certainly don't know Williams'
vituosic solo "Frisco Leaving Birmingham" of which BOTH takes (one of
them never having been issued at the time because it was just too
blown-out and frenzied for the sound engineers to handle when it was
recorded) are presented here. Admittedly, some of the sound quality
here is pretty, uh, raunchy, but under the noise, the performances are
monumental.

v/a - Rare and Hot!: Female vocals with Accomaniment, 1923-26
(Historical) VG/Ex $7
v/a - Those Cakewalkin Babies From Home, vol 1 (Saydisc Matchbox) Ex/M- $17
v/a - Sanctified Country Girls, 1927-31: Complete Recordings of Jessie
May Hill, Rev. Sister Mary Nelson Sister Cally Fancy (Wolf) Ex/M- $17
the voices of African-American women weren't recorded until 1918,
three decades after the record business began, but within just a few
years, the recordings of Mamie Smith and Sara Martin changed American
music forever. These three scarce LPs reissue material mostly from the
late 20s and present three separate views of the styles of black women
at the time. Rare and Hot! covers some of the more obscure of the
urbane hot jazz, Monette Moore, Hazel Meyers, and Lillian Goodner
singing songs of flirtation ("Strut Yo' Puddy"!) and heartache
("Lonesome for that Man of Mine"). Cakewalkin Babies gets into funkier
barrellhouse material, and Sanctified Country Girls goes deep into raw
gospel and stars the snarling sermons with song by the magnificent
Mary Nelson. Amazing stuff...

v/a - Folk Music of the United States: Songs of the Mormons and Songs
of the West From the Archive of American Folk Song (Library of
Congress) Ex/Ex $13
field recordings made 1941-47 in Utah, Missouri, Arkansas and
California. Fans of Lomax-style Americana will find some holy amber
waves and purple mountains in these as-real-as-it-gets performances
from the same psychic plane as Guthrie, etc.

Mississippi Fred McDowell - I Do Not Play No Rock'n'Roll (Capitol)
M-/VG+ $12 later press in shrink.
Bukka White - Blues Masters, Vol 4 (Blue Horizon) M-/Ex $15
two great 60s LPs by great masters of acoustic Delta blues. McDowell
digs deep in a nine-minute (!) version of "Everybody's Down On Me."
Half of White's record is taken up but an attempt to have him play
with a full band, which feels a little like a concession to
contemporary taste but is fully redeemed by a wrenching performance of
the grief-filled lament "Decoration Day."

v/a - Early Blue Grass (RCA Vintage Series) VG/VG+ $10
14 amazing rural country recordings of the 30s and 40s, as much
"hillbilly" as "bluegrass."

v/a - Jackson Blue Boys (And Two From New Orleans): Sixteen Classics
of Blues, Jazz, Hokum and Minstrely, 1928-40 (Policy Wheel) VG+/M-
$25
a serious grail record for fans of country blues, this tiny press LP
of the early 70s (in plain sleeve with text paste-ons on the front and
rear panels) present a personal vision of insanely rare, raw
performances by little-known performers like the Mississippi
Blacksakes, Willie Lofton, Alec Johnson, Arthur Petties, etc... every
track a jewel and seriously rare.

IN (AND "FAR OUT") OF "THE TRADITION"

Mike Seeger - Music From the True Vine (Mercury) VG+/Ex $12
a scarce and suprisingly raw trad solo performances by the the
recently departed musicologist and Americana-head, performing on
guitar, autoharp, fiddle, and dulcimer, with one too-brief and
hypnogogia-inducing jew's harp performance.

Robbie Basho - The Art of the Acoustic Steel String Guitar 6 & 12
(Windham Hill/Lost Lake) VG+/VG+ $15
rhapsodic romances, ragas, pavans and moods of yearning and sweet ache
by the eccentric picker. Basho was a Maryland native who moved to
Cali, like his peer John Fahey (who issued his first several LPs), but
dealt with his considerable demons, unlike Fahey, with more romantic
orientalism and while wearing ruffly sleeves and what Fahey described
as a pair of "fruity boots." Highly influential, of course, on the
whole Rose/Six Organs/Glenn Jones-continuum of guitarists.

Harry Tausig - Fate is Only Once (Tompkins Square) M-/M- $10
reissue from last year of a privately-pressed 1965 solo guitar LP by
an obscure Fahey-associate, whose style draws heavily from time spent
with Rev. Gary Wilson and Elizabeth Cotton.

Holy Modal Rounders - Last Round (Adelphi) Ex/Ex $13
little-seen 1978 stoner-folk piece... haven't dropped the needle on
this one yet.

Roy Harper - Lifemask (Chrysalis) M-/M- $16
astounding 1973 follow-up to his masterpiece Stormcock, including the
blasted "Highway Blues" and the snarling, side-long "Lord's Prayer."
Harper is sadly under-recognized, particularly in the US, and his
records and CDs don't turn up much, but he was easily as serious a
writer as Dylan, and this is one of his best. Highest recommendation.


FANCY STUFF

Bo Diddley - s/t (Chess) VG+/Ex $130
silver-and-black label original of one of the foundational and
evergreen rock and roll records. Jacket shows a 2" split at the
middle of the top seam and a small amount of very faint dampstain on
the rear panel. An exceptional copy overall.

Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers (Rolling Stones) still sealed $120
still sealed original copy with zipper (halfway down - hubba hubba!)
and tracklist lips-and-tongue sticker on the ass.

Led Zeppelin - II (Atlantic) still sealed $65
still sealed SD19127 catalog number (2nd press) with track list
sticker on rear panel. stunning.

Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here (Columbia) M-/M- $55 flawless, in
original opaque blue shrink with sticker and postcard.
Pink Floyd - Obscured By Clouds (Harvest) M-/M- $25 flawless in
shrink with sticker.

Nirvana - Come as You Are (Geffen) VG+ $35 French picture disc 12"
Nirvana - In Bloom (Geffen) Ex/Ex $35 UK picture disc 12"

Bob Dylan - Freewheelin (Columbia) VG+/VG+ $40 mono two-eye original. nice!

Black Sabbath - s/t (Warner Bros) M-/M- $37 flawless and radiant green
label original in shrink. whoa...

Flaming Groovies - Shake Some Action (Sire) still sealed $45
Flaming Groovies - Now! (Sire) still sealed $35
'76 & '78 originals, still sealed.

UNCLASSIFIABLE SWEET POTATO OF THE WEEK

Bo Diddley - Where It All Began (Chess) VG/VG+ $7 original press in
die-cut sleeve
post-hippie era, Bo courts the youth vote with some stoney rave-ups
including a great version of "Take it All Off" and "Bad Trip" which
manages to be both campy and badass. But the real monster on here is
the insane, ecstatic, 5-and-a-half minute, one-chord pounder
"Bo-Diddley-Itis," a veritable party-on-record. You will. love. this.
record. And a serious bargain!

In the next two weeks: new jewels in reggae, jazz, punk & new wave,
some incredibly clean classic rock including some very serious Stones
collectibles, and international!

yours truly,
Alan Guru, Tracy, Jenny Tikimasala & Noonish Nagoski