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Ah Ha!! Chris, the yellow book. THE yellow book! Like a yellow pages of records.
Oh how I remember flicking through that a few times - if you asked nicely!
Lots and lots of soundtrack LPs that I didnt know existed and that I couldnt afford on pocket money and car cleaning wages!! !
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Ah Ha!! Chris, the yellow book. THE yellow book! Like a yellow pages of records.
Oh how I remember flicking through that a few times - if you asked nicely!
Lots and lots of soundtrack LPs that I didnt know existed and that I couldnt afford on pocket money and car cleaning wages!! !
Bill, so you read the Yellow Book as well?
Maybe we should start a "We've read the Little Yellow Book Club"
Great wasn't it, I seem to remember that it came out every month, so I'd take my hard earned wages into the shop on a Saturday afternoon and pour over the Films and Shows section to see what new Morricone etc had been released. Then go back a week later to pick up the LP/LP's. The people who ran the shop had never heard of Ennio Morricone until I went there, I soon enlightened them and they became great fans of his music.
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Posted: |
Jan 12, 2012 - 9:14 PM
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By: |
RonBurbella
(Member)
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We had a Woolworth's in Bayonne, New Jersey, where I grew up, and BOY-O-BOY were those budget bins a treasure trove for a budding film score with a high school/college student's budget.
I picked up all of those pictured above and one more item that I never realized till years later was worth quite a bit...the Beatles Butcher Block cover with the paste-over cover. I still have it.
And then the A&P began with the cutouts...bunches of GOD'S LITTLE ACRE, THE VIKINGS (Gatefold) and the like, and then the Great Eastern and Two Guys chains had bins and bins, often having huge dumps of MONO albums when stereo became the standard in 1968.
Then the 69-cent shops in Manhattan in the early 1970s caused a near riot among soundtrack collectors: RAINTREE COUNTY (2LP), THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, and super-rare titles would be sprinkled among mostly junk pop titles. You went nuts searching through a lot of junk and then suddenly out would pop a lollapalooza soundtrack title.
You had to inquire from each store what day of the week that the truck with new stock would arrive and plan to be there to get first dibs.
It was a tense time when you were flipping through the bins pulling out soundtrack after soundtrack and then realized the guy across from you was doing the same. It was a race to the death! I developed very dextrous fingers doing this. I once had someone time me flipping through LPs: about 2,000 a minute. And I wouldn't miss much.
The other Bayonne haunt that I remember as a kid was a Mom-and-Pop Hi-Fi and Appliance store. Victoria Appliance had about 5,000,000 polka records, plus a mix of pop, classical, comedy,and miscellaneous LPs - nothing! And then I looked up at the racks on the wall in the darker recesses of the back of the store near to the ceiling and nearly fainted - dozens of soundtracks IN STEREO that were hard to find in stereo. ONE EYED JACKS, SAYONARA, PEYTON PLACE, HEMINGWAY'S ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN, RAINTREE COUNTY (1LP), and a ton of Decca monos by Victor Young, the RCA THIEF OF BAGDAD/JUNGLE BOOK, and on and on. Naturally, when nobody was looking, and since I didn't have quite enough cash for ALL of them, I took them down from the wall, turned them around backwards and stuck then in the back of the spoken word and Spanish LPs, camouflaged by the face of Senator Everett Dirksen and some Tito Puente LPs and the like till I could return a week later with more cash. Even with my masterful subterfuge, some inconsiderate competitor did somehow manage to sift through those hidden caches and buy some of my hidden treasures before I got back.
Once I could drive, I spent my weekends (and my cash) in old TV/Hi-Fi shops ("Hey, Mister, ya' got any old records?") They inevitably had walls full of them in the damp, dusty basement, light bulb hanging from the ceiling, (A-choo!!),rather than taking up valuable floor space in the retail area. They were usually fifty-cents to a dollar each - and every town had one. Two collectors from New York would ride the train to New Jersey and stop at each town's record store and do this.
I went to college in Jersey City and Medical School in Newark, so it was easy to hop on the PATH train to New York City for less than a dollar. I got to know all of the out-of-print soundtrack shops in Greenwich Village and in the mid-town Broadway area and out into Brooklyn and Long Island. They got to know me and let me go in "the back room" where all the good stuff was and look around to my heart's content. Jim Dayton and many others found me many rare LPs in the day. It was pricey, but then I had a good part time job and could afford the expensive stuff once-in-awhile. Public transportation could really get you around. But if you hit a mother lode, lugging all that stuff back to New Jersey was a real sweaty chore. Footlight Records came later.
Around this time, I began making personal contacts with other collectors to trade soundtracks. I met our veteran member Jim Wnyorski this way. I drove out to Sea Cliff, Long Island, to his house to trade soundtrack LPs with him. He had a house full of comics and pulp magazines, quite more than I had ever seen in one place then. We had a loose network of a few dozen collectors in the greater New York-New Jersey area who kept in touch from time to time. It wasn't as easy then as it is now.
Did someone say flea markets? I would comb the flea market want ads in the Friday/Saturday papers, circle in red an ad that said "records," and plot an efficient map to get in as many as I could. Gas was cheap then (29-cents a gallon) - and you got a free drinking glass with a fill-up! My biggest find was a retired record distributor in Chatham, NJ. Good old Pete was a distributor for Decca and RCA...I had come THAT CLOSE (missed by one month) to a copy of THE CAINE MUTINY, an opportunity that wouldn't present itself again for long time.
And then came mailorder. I'll never forget Rose Records in Chicago, with Dennis Petersen in the soundtrack department. What $1.88 bargains! A-1 Record Finders and Brian Burney. Music Man Murray.
What fun we had then, and on a shoestring budget.
Sorry to take up so much space, but zooba's post released a flood of old memories and it all just "came out."
Ron Burbella
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A pivotal moment in my record-buying life was in 1967 when I was perusing the cutouts in a dime store and found for $1.67 each: The Ipcress File, The Chase (the British pressing!), The Knack, and John Barry Conducts His Greatest Movie Hits. Prior to this I was hooked on the Bond scores and other spy scores of the era, but hearing The Chase and The Knack, plus the various themes on JB Conducts opened up my listening. There was a department store chain in St. Louis called Famous Barr that had a rather stuffy record selection and an old lady ran it who didn't much like my teenage self, but she would grudgingly order for me out of the Schwann catalog. This is how I got my copies of Deadfall and the Quiller Memorandum.
In that era cutouts were everywhere. I found Alex North's Africa for .33 and In the Heat of the Night and Behold a Pale Horse and Four in the Morning very cheap. There was a record shop in the neighborhood that had a lot of Mainstream and Dot albums for a dollar, so I picked up Sebastian, The Wrong Box, Juliet of the Spirits, No Way to Treat a Lady, Will Penny, and so on.
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Zoob McCartney
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