Record Store Day 2024?

Yeah Jim, Jerry Douglas is a monster musician. I went to the taping of Dolly Parton on the Tonight Show at the time of the release of her first Bluegrass album, The Grass Is Blue (Sugar Hill Records, 1999). I was sitting in the balcony, directly above the little stage Dolly and her band performed on. Alison Krauss and her band Union Station (of which Jerry is a member) provided Dolly with musical accompaniment, and sounded absolutely fantastic!

I saw Jerry and his band live here in Portland a while back, and though they were stunning---all being virtuoso musicians, I prefer my Bluegrass Traditional, not Progressive. Traditional focuses on the song and the singing, Progressive being mostly instrumental, with a lot of soloing (Deadheads should check them out!). Too Jazz-influenced for my liking.

@wolf_garcia: J.S. Bach is my favorite composer, Baroque my favorite Classical period, Bluegrass my favorite Pop genre these days. Have you also heard the Goat Rodeo album? It’s Thile, Meyer, and Ma, along with Stuart Duncan on Fiddle. A 2-LP set on Sony Records.

Another of my favorite Bluegrass albums is Wires & Wood by The Johnny Staats Project. Johnny is an excellent mandolin player (and a decent singer), and on this album he is provided musical accompaniment by a who’s who of Bluegrass musicians and singers: John Cohan on upright bass, Tim O’Brien, Sam Bush, and Tammy Rogers on fiddle, Scott Vestal on banjo, Jim Hurst on guitar, and Jerry Douglas on dobro (one of my very favorite guitarists), along with Kathy Mattea, Jon Randall, and Sara Evans on harmony vocals. A perfect album! Released in 2000 on CD only.

Jim, I enjoy knowing that Jerry had been playing acoustic (guitar and banjo) around the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto only a coupla years before I started playing at that school’s frat parties in ’68. Those frat boys know how to party, and have the money to do it.

I saw The Dead live in the Summer of ’67, performing on a flatbed truck in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park (along with The Airplane and Country Joe & The Fish). At that time they sounded like a Garage/Biker Band, and a real good one. They didn’t yet display the effects of LSD in their music (extended improvisation), sounding more like they were drinking and taking little white pills. 😉 And you would never know Jerry had been playing acoustic music only a few years earlier. It wasn’t until the Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty albums (both released in 1970) that their music reflected Jerry’s acoustic roots.

In ’68 Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album came out (actually in December of ’67), as did The Band’s Music From Big Pink, The Byrds Notorious Byrd Brothers and Sweetheart Of The Rodeo (two albums in one year, six months apart!), The Beau Brummel’s Bradley’s Barn, Dillard & Clark’s The Fantastic Expedition Of, The Everly Brothers’ Roots album, Buffalo Springfield’s Last Time Around, and Neil Young’s s/t debut. Those albums led the charge against the prevailing winds in Rock music: Psychedelia and Blues-based music (Cream, Hendrix, etc.), and showed the way forward. At least amongst my peers and I. And The Grateful Dead, if only temporarily.

@slaw: And a good opinion it is Steve! Thanks @aheydorn, you make excellent points.

@tomic601: Jim, I recently picked up a copy of the Old & In The Way LP. I bought it when it was released in ’75, but didn’t consider it good enough to keep. The recorded sound quality was certainly top notch, however. When I saw it on the wall at one of my favorite local used LP shops at a bargain price I decided to give it another chance, 49 years later. 😁

I know Garcia loves Bluegrass and Hillbilly music, but I just don’t think he’s very good at playing or singing it. Okay, I admit my standards are rather high, but David Grisman alone is worth owing the album for. I have a bunch of David’s albums, some including the playing of upright bass by a guy who was in the same San Jose cover band as I, though at different times.

In ’71 Todd Phillips was exiting the band just as I was entering, to concentrate on learning to play mandolin. He went up to Marin to take lessons from Grisman, who told him that there were plenty of real good mandolin players, but a dearth of upright players. Todd took David’s advice and learned upright, good enough to work with the cream-of-the Bluegrass crop, including Tony Rice (not to mention Grisman himself). Damn!

I jammed with Todd in San Jose in the early-2010’s, so I know what his bass should sound like when reproduced. Demo material!

Music Millennium has copies of some of this year’s titles still available, and even some from Black Friday RSD 2023. MM has store-wide sales throughout the year, so one can wait and buy then at 15-20% off retail.

Let me anticipate a post from those who will accuse me of having financial ties to Music Millennium. I don’t, other than having bought records at the shop since discovering it’s existence in 1976. In 1977 I bought a copy of the Sex Pistols album at MM (the UK pressing with a blank back cover) for ten bucks or so, and the album now sells (in Near Mint condition) for $300-$400.

How much are your downloads worth? 😉

Rather than initiating a new thread, I believe I’ll post this video of Mazzy reporting from the Austin Record Show here. I assume this video will result in people who think LP’s in general---and "collectible" ones in particular---are nonsense expressing their disapproval.

Mazzy, by the way, characterized the $79.99 price for the Sweetheart Of The Rodeo 2-LP set as "obscene", but bought it anyway. Kinda like buyers of ultra-high priced hi-fi equipment.

@slaw: I too missed out on the Chris Isaak 2-LP set in Millennium Music (by the time I was in the store it had already sold out.). I bought my copy online the day after RSD, from The In Groove in Phoenix Arizona. This 2-LP set is already out-of-print, a sure design of a future collector's item.

@tomic601: At least this year it wasn’t raining in Portland!

Yep, the prices have certainly crept up, higher each year. Here are the prices for my titles:

- The Bottle Rockets: $48.99.

- Gene Clark: $49.99

- Lowell George: $36.99

- Chris Isaak: $38.99.

- Tommy McLain: $25.99

- The Ramones: $26.99

- Mavis Staples: $40.99

- Television: $32.99

- Sister Rosetta Tharpe: $50.99

- and the Sweetheart set, as I said $79.99. But as Norman Maslov said in his YouTube video on RSD 2024, that's cheaper than tickets to the show were.

Many of the titles were double-LP sets, but still.....There were other titles I was interested in, but not enough to pay the price required to acquire them. At least Oregon has no sales tax. 😉