Look what I found in a used record store

Another road trip over the weekend, this time to Ithaca, New York where I had a chance to stop in at Angry Mom Records, right across the street from the Ithaca Hemp Company on the downtown Ithaca Commons.  An interesting Saturday night that was highlighted by a fistfight between some white homeless kids in dreadlocks that ended with the arrival of a handful of police cars and ambulances.

The record store is in the basement of the Autumn Leaves used book store, another place I'd like to check out one of these days.  The fare includes a fairly large collection of vinyl 33s, 78s and also CDs along with some posters.  There were three guys working when I went in and they seemed to be spending most of their time snapping photos of albums for eBay ads and boxing up mail orders.  I suspect this is where they make most of their money since the only other visitors at the time besides me were a slightly shell-shocked old hippie and some kid who was dressed up in an 80s throwback outfit like Jon Cryer from Pretty in Pink.

The vinyl covers everything from early rock stuff like Herman's Hermits to jazz to folk to new releases (they had two copies of the Decemberist's 'Long Live the King' for example).  Ithaca is home to around 40,000 college students attending Cornell University, Ithaca College and Empire State College as well as quite a few hippies and street people so there is plenty of opportunity for Angry Mom to collect a wide range of music.  I could have easily spent a few hundred except for the small detail that I didn't have much cash on me 

Three more records this time, all vinyl and all in excellent condition.  These guys know what their vinyl is worth so there weren't a lot of bargains but the selection is good so there's that anyway.

The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood - s/t.  I've been going through the Manfred Mann's Earth Band discography doing reviews lately and there are two tracks from this album that band has covered - "Captain Bobby Stout" on their 1972 debut and "Martha's Madman" on the less impressive 1978 release 'Watch', so I thought it would be interesting to hear the entire album that included the originals.  The Brotherhood were a Wichita, Kansas band from the early 70s.  I graduated high school in a Wichita suburb and attended Wichita State University in the early 80s so these guys were before my time but I do remember Bobby Stout, who was a real police chief in Wichita and later director of the Wichita Crime Commission.  He was well-known for his aggressive though not dirty tactics in fighting crime during a particularly ugly period in Wichita that included the likes of the BTK serial killer, the Holiday Inn sniper (I was downtown that day and it was pretty scary) and the Herman Hill riot spawned when police tried to remove some guys handing out beers from the back of their pickups at a free concert in Herman Hill Park (two of my friends were arrested that day including one who was injured after being handcuffed to the ground by a cop while people and cars were fleeing all around him).  The metal band Manilla Road later wrote a song about the riot.  As an aside I attended high school with one of the early members of Manilla Road and part of their band played at our high school graduation party including an extremely long version of "Freebird".

Anyway this album consists mostly of an interesting blend of jazz, folk, blues and a little bluegrass that sounds a lot like a mix of the Grateful Dead and Chicago.  A decent album and I'm a little surprised the band didn't last longer although I believe all the members went on to have long music careers.  Jerry Hahn passed away several years ago but Lane Tietgen and Mike Finnigan are still playing today.

Tom Rapp - 'Sunforest'.  Rapp was the brains behind Pearls Before Swine; in fact, after the first couple of albums he pretty much was Pearls Before Swine so even though this is a solo album it, like most of Pearls later Nashville stuff, bears the name "Pearls Before Swine" on the album spine.  Like 'City of Gold' this one was recorded in Nashville and features a lot of country session musicians who also worked with the likes of Elvis, Neil Young, Graham Nash and many others.  The music is a lot like 'City', laconic, much of it acoustic, folksy but with a country tinge.  I especially liked the closing "Sunshine & Charles" which is sort of a trailer-trash love story.

Woody Guthrie - 'Bound for Glory'.  This one was a bit of a surprise.  This is an original Folkways Records release from 1958 that still has the typewritten liner notes by the late Millard Lampell (Almanac Singers) inside the sleeve.  If you ever run across an original Folkways record you should buy it, so I did.  This one includes the Guthrie classics "This Land is Your Land", "There's a Better World A-Comin" and "The Sinking of the Reuben James".  I'm pretty happy to have this in my collection.

I'm heading to Embassy Vinyl in Scranton, Pennsylvania next.  Stay tuned....

I was in Chicago this week, found a little place at a strip mall in Skokie called Disk Replay.  Looks to be part of a chain, or at least there are three or four of them listed in the phone book.  Mostly movie DVDs and games but also a good stock of used CDs.  Sadly no vinyl, but I found a few interesting pieces anyway:

I was in Chicago this week, found a little place at a strip mall in Skokie called Disk Replay.  Looks to be part of a chain, or at least there are three or four of them listed in the phone book.  Mostly movie DVDs and games but also a good stock of used CDs.  Sadly no vinyl, but I found a few interesting pieces anyway: