On Basements

For the start of the blog, I thought the start of my collecting would be the logical place to begin.

It may not be some movie-worthy, religious epiphany experience, but this whole record-collecting thing started in my parents' basement in Cottage Grove, Minn. (Now I'm blogging about it, although I'd like to note, not from my parents' basement.)

One day, I found myself digging through some old boxes, and lo and behold, I find some absolute gems that have become to exist among my favorite records. The top of that list? Carole King's Tapestry, which, of course, holds classics such as "I Feel the Earth Move" and "Smackwater Jack." Another good find was The Lovin' Spoonful's greatest hits which includes "Daydream" and other great tracks.

Of course, as any crate digger knows, you take the good with the bad when you look in unlikely places (watch for future post about hole-in-the-wall variety store I found in Indiana). Sometimes you find treasure, sometimes trash. I don't recall exactly what kind of non-gem records my parents had, but I know I took just about a quarter of their collection, and among the ones I took were some very early Billy Joel, the Rocky III soundtrack and a Kenny Rogers record. Terrible? Certainly not. But that selection won't win you any crate-digging cred.

The point is, it was an early lesson to me about the joys of the vinyl hunt. Never refuse to go looking at a place with records, no matter how unimpressive it may be. And it may seem like a huge waste of time. But that's exactly what's great about this. What's better than looking through various Pat Benatar or Barbara Streisand records and finding a mint-condition Carole King? To me, that's a big part of the joy of record collecting and makes the worth both the time and money invested.