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* "between the parted pages and were pressed...."

My intention initially when I sat down to write this entry was to discuss the quandaries and pitfalls of storage, owing in part to a troubled laptop hard-drive, as well as the increasing awareness of gigabytes flowing over with bulky music files and the couple thousand photos & videos we took with our digital camera on our recent Canadian trip. A computer-savvy friend noted that though he'd recently bought additional external-drives to house his music and photo files, he'd found that he nevertheless quite quickly filled his internal HD back up again. I fear this is a never-ending battle.

Add to that our desire to pare down physical CDs in preparation for a cross-country move, and, well, the question of "where do you put all this stuff" has been weighing a bit heavy on the mind recently.

But an item that was among the things unearthed when going thru another batch of boxes put me in a somewhat more nostalgic frame-of-mind about the whole process. Last night my wife handed me a small envelope which I'd marked, eons ago, "1993 receipts -- Webb songs." In it are dozens of cash-register receipts from record stores all over the country that I visited during a nearly yearlong phase of collecting albums (a few CDs but mostly old LPs) which featured at least one song written by Jimmy Webb.

Some have detailed information, some don't. Most are at least marked with the store name and city they came from. Here's one from the late Tower Records store in Seattle's University District, where apparently I purchased Johnny Rivers' Changes/Rewind double-disc, Art Garfunkel's Watermark, and a Nick Cave record with "By The Time I Get To Phoenix" on it. Here are a couple of handwritten receipts from Seattle's long-departed Park Avenue Records, where I got LPs by the Four Tops, Judy Collins, Roberta Flack, the Supremes, Percy Faith, Richard Harris, and the 5th Dimension (a couple of whose Webb-heavy albums, Up, Up And Away and The Magic Garden, are being reissued this month as a twofer on Collectors' Choice, by the way). Here's a handful of slips from Bop Street in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood -- a vinyl specialist that, against all odds, has not only survived but grown considerably in the intervening years, even as the record-shop biz has deteriorated.

At some point I started searching beyond Seattle and found plenty more Webb songs in stores much farther afield. In Nashville, I spent 30 bucks at Great Escape and 60-plus at Phonoluxe (with any luck, at least one of those is still around). A visit to Georgia resulted in purchases at Fantasyland in Atlanta and the storied Wuxtry in Athens (where, as I recall, leaving the store that day, I encountered three folks loitering on the sidewalk, who I eventually realized were Michael Stipe, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love). There are receipts from stores in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, many years before I relocated there (the first time). And it appears I spent over $100 on a jaunt to Portland checking out several different stores there.

The end result is documented in a file on my hard-drive which lists more than 700 Jimmy Webb covers that are in my possession. The physical proof rests in a bookcase across the room, four shelves full of LPs that all contain at least one song written by Webb. And, oh yes, with the imminent move, here we are back at the storage dilemma again.

Somehow, though, I just gotta hang on to those records. As the envelope reminds me, it was far too much trouble gathering them all to give 'em up now....

adios,
peter

Posted by peter on August 11, 2007 11:09 AM | Permalink