Record Store Day 2025

 Original We're Only in it For The Money album cover purchased July 1973

My mother Gail drove me, on my birthday (and on her lunch break), to Town in Country Music in Westwood, NJ (we lived three towns away in Montvale) to get a copy of We're Only In It For The Money by The Mothers of Invention. July 1973. I had turned 13.

In early March 1973, after school one day, my best friend Ron and I took our bikes to Valley Fair in Hillsdale, NJ to get the newly released Billion Dollar Babies by Alice Cooper. We arrived home at dusk. We were 12.

I got Patti Smith's first album Horses at Valley Fair also. It was the day before Thanksgiving 1975. My father had prepared a complete, traditional Thanksgiving dinner that we would drive to Alexandria, VA so my brother wouldn't be alone at Thanksgiving (and on his birthday) for his wife had just given birth to their second child and was in the hospital.  I got to listen to Horses (once) the night I got it. Its cover was like nothing I'd ever seen before. A stark, black & white photo of Patti Smith in a suit against a white wall.  Patti Smith in black letters, Horses in white letters on the upper right hand corner of the front cover.  It was printed on shiny card stock, the record label - Arista - was light blue, the vinyl was  heavy. While visiting my brother in Alexandria, we went out alone together to a Record Store (slash) Head Shop where I got a copy of Kevin Ayers' Bananamour. I was 15.

On Halloween 1975 I purchased Hot Tuna's First Pull Up Then Pull Down at a Record Store (slash) Head Shop in Laconia, NH.  We had gone there to visit my mom's uncle Jack who lived in Laconia in a high end trailer park with his wife Helen & two daughters June & Nancy. During our visit Jack and my father made fresh lobster, dropping the big, squirming beasts into a huge pot of boiling water whereupon they would let out a hiss. At above mentioned Record Store (slash) Head Shop I also purchased what was known as a Concert Kit - a transparent purple rectangular container that housed a hash pipe, a pipe cleaner, rolling papers and extra screens. First Pull Up Then Pull Down came with a faux signed postcard of Maurice, the Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna impresario, bathed in a red light. It is inscribed "Cordially, Maurice." The cover of the album is an exquisite drawing by guitarist Jorma Kaukonen's wife Margretta, a truly gifted artist who lived a rather sad, self destructive life (post sixties/seventies), dying alone in a Mission (SF) district SRO sometime in 1997 of liver cancer. I own a small original drawing that came from an old notebook of hers. It was inscribed to husband Jorma in January of 1967.  It is among a handful of treasures I own. I was told that Margretta often felt embarrassed by her art, I can understand that feeling myself for I have often felt that way myself about my own art.

Pitchfork Records in Concord, NH is a lot like the old Gotham Book Mart at 41 W 47th St. in NYC.  Something always gets revealed to you there. They have been around for 50 years.

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From the Then and Now Journal. Written as dictated by memory & not in chronological order.

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 Stained Glass Mandala/ Vacated Rudranada temple - Big Indian, NY 2013

 Stone Murti - Vacated Rudranada Temple - Bid Indian, NY - 2013.

 

 Room in Vacated Rudrananda Ashram - Big Indian, NY,   2012

 Rudrananda Murti/Shrine. Big Indian NY, April 2012.

 

 

Flashback Friday

Press photo of Allen Ginsberg, 1971. Unknown Photographer. From my personal archive.

From The Then & Now Journal

...Of course it all starts with The Beats (Jack Kerouac, William S.Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg...) who I'd been reading since I was 15 years old...

And there was the time I met Allen Ginsberg at William Paterson University in May of 1978, skipping school with friends to attend a reading he was giving there to honor his home town and  Paterson's Great Falls. We were the first and only people in the auditorium when he arrived. He generously came over to us to say hello, politely making small talk. He gave us each catalogs for the upcoming Summer Program at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado at Naropa (then) Institute.  I secretly hoped I'd be able to attend Naropa upon HS graduation in 1979. It seemed almost tailor made for me. But in my heart I knew it would never be. It was totally unrealistic for me to even harbor such a thought. Financially, and in every other way, this was a impossibility.  My parents would never be able to afford to send me to college - especially one in Boulder, Colorado offering such an exotic, to say the least, curriculum. My parents were not the kind of people who could do that, let alone guide me through that decision. It just wasn't who they were. My parents were working class people, hard working at that. They had both seen more than their share of struggle. The most they could do was guide me toward gainful employment, instill in me a sense of financial responsibility & a strong work ethic. They were plain,  realistic, elemental people. There was much in their combined character to be proud of, such as their innate sense of perseverance.

My parents' generation wasn't one where a college education was a given expectation. Far from it, Post War America was about work.  The sentiment of college as a given would come later with the baby boom and the sixties. At my high school it was assumed every graduating student would go on to college. It was a combined school district of three towns that leaned most heavily toward the wealthier (Woodcliff Lake, Upper Montvale) student body. It was as if the standards were created for and by them alone, thus you were treated accordingly.  To be honest,  at age 18 in 1979 I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself.

Upon graduating high school my parents gave me two choices. Either continue being a Maintenance Man at Mercedes Benz's National Corporate Headquarters (where I had worked nights after school since October 1978 & was offered a full time job by my boss Larry, an alcoholic Elvis Presley look alike) or go to work at The Burroughs Corporation where my mother was a Credit & Billing Clerk and where they manufactured typewriter ribbons & accessories. The choice was a no brainer. Burroughs was closer to home, paid better and I could join the union. Case closed. If I couldn't go to Colorado to study with the Beats, I'd  at least work for one of their namesakes.

John Lennon's Working Class Hero

*The Then and Now Journal is a collection of memories, stories, & vignettes about my life prior to moving to NH (and retiring from monetary based work) in June 2023 (Then). Now consists of drawings and sketches of my present day location, and is totally wordless.

 

 

Remembering Bardor Tulku Rinpoche May 1, 1949 - April 1, 2021

 

 

 My Self. Mount Tamalpais, CA.  July 1999

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*******

TDS, EDS ? Try 1800-UAR-FCKD

From...The Black Books (2023)

 

William S. Burroughs - The Western Lands

 

 

 

 

 

"Need A Ride?"

"Nah...I'm just walkin'..."

"We saw ya walkin'  an' thought maybe ya needed a ride..."

"...Shit...I'm originally from New Jersey, this'd never happen there..."

"Well...yer in New Hampshire now, an' we help each other out!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Home run!

 

" Free Speech in America, it's back!"

 

 

RIP David Johanson Jan. 9, 1950- Feb. 28,2025

I loved David Johansens' first album when it came out in 1978. I played it constantly,  along with Patti Smith's Easter, bookends - the best releases of that year. Especially this song - great guitar (the album's production put the guitars up front), great lyrics and castanets for extra flare. David was the great "shouter"  of Rock n' Roll. No one had ever really done that before. Maybe Joey Ramone but he got it from David. I saw him twice only.  The first time was Friday Feb. 16, 1979 at The Indochinese Refugee Benefit Concert at The Palladium on 14th Street (NYC). The Second show. The bill had Todd Rundgren, Blue Oyster Cult, Rick Derringer, Patti Smith and David on it. All performing compact sets. The gig started at midnight pronto. It was freezing cold out with lots of frozen snow mounds all over the streets of NYC. Needless to say the late start gave us (I went with three other guys from High School) a lot of time to, how shall we say, imbibe - which we did. By midnight my eyes were out on stalks and I was extremely psychedelicized. We all were (tripping our balls off). David got it all going - I can recall his set was pure energy, consisting of nothing but songs from this album, which made me happy. He was a highlight! Blue Oyster Cult was just plain scary, Patti Smith was just fuckin' weird singing the Tomorrow song from the then hit musical Annie and Todd Rundgren was church, coming on at three in the morning. We got out just as the sky was changing - black night to dawn's grey light. We even took a wrong turn off the FDR on the way home and ended up in Queens just as the sun was coming up. I remember "orange" - orange detour signs, orange traffic cones & a cold, faded orange sunrise resembling Velveeta cheese. Somehow we got back onto the FDR near the GW Bridge. When I got home my father and mother were already up having coffee. They were cool, they knew it was an all nighter plus it was a Saturday so I didn't have to go to school or work.  I had great parents, I really did.

The next time I saw him was at the Poetry Project Benefit in June 1984 at The Ritz on 11th Street. He did another compact set, but he had more of a selection of material, a little more varied in tone. Todd Rundgren played that gig too. I was on the guest list!

David Johansen was a good showman, clearly in love with his art. It was just a couple weeks ago that I learned of his illness and felt bad for him. But also grateful - he lived a good life, he always seemed positive & he always looked like he was having a ball. He was known to have a spiritual side leaning toward Buddhism. He died on Losar - Tibetan New Year - completion. Listen, enjoy. I wish you were there.

https://www.loudersound.com/news/david-johansen-new-york-dolls-dead-rip

Part of the Patti Smith segment  (Gloria)  From The Indochinese Refugee gig can be found here:

https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/patti-smith/listen-to-patti-smith-hit-new-york-with-a-commandi

 

Flashback Friday

Birds n' Barbed Wire. 1984. Approx. 9" X 12" Graphite & oil paint on paper.