Found treasure -- Saturday Night Fever

A post on mad (!) discoveries. A friend of mine was over for an early St. Patrick's day party, with a few others. Given the occasion, and the fact that he's leaving the D.C. area, I insisted he choose the next album. Good man that he is, Keith Hovis chose the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack that I found in my parents' basement.

Now, I've put in this on before. I played it during a party with fellow interns in Indianapolis, but it was mostly for the first track, 'Stayin' Alive' by the Bee Gees, classic that it is. But, as it turns out, this soundtrack is a double LP of A-MAZING. I've never seen the movie, but song for song, I think this one of the greatest soundtracks I've ever heard. You've got 'Stayin' Alive' as the first track and it ends with The Trammps' 'Disco Inferno.' What's in between is essentially a time capsule of the Saturday Night Fever era. In this case, that's a good thing!

Then I got to thinking: I would have never found the greatness that is this soundtrack without the original suggestion from on Keith. But once it was spinning, we were loving it. Between the great music, random dance breakouts -- mostly from Keith -- and the surprise of finding I'd had this great album all along, it was a good time. And it's a testament to the social element of this whole vinyl deal. Had this been a laptop or MP3 player, we would've played 'Saturday Night Fever' and left it at that. Or certainly somewhere between track one and track 17 it would've been changed. But because records force you to appreciate the whole album, well, there we were. A group of recent college grads, in the year 2010, listening to the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack at a St. Pat's party.

That's what it's all about.

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.