Taj Mahal - Recycled Blues and Other Related Stuff
I've been having some excellent luck record-hunting lately. Too excellent for my wallet but I do it anyway. This record is positively fantastic. It's really vibrant and full of life and energy. It also features a set of very young Pointer Sisters doing backing vocals on a couple of songs. I'm not sure it's eadily available in any form but vinyl so I'm going to need to rip it to something more durable (FLAC comes to mind). Software recommendations are gratefully accepted. Actually, I have a whole stack of old records that I'd like to preserve digitally and that I suspect are hard to find otherwise (like a 1966 re-release of Rare Blues of the Twenties, Vol.2). If I can manage to rip it I'll post a sample.
Comments
that looks like a great addition to a collection. i've just recently started up a wax collection of my own (again). i got Miles Davis' Bitches Brew in the mail today...love love love it. expecting Kind of Blue soon and hoping to win a bid on Blue Train, but that's a hard one to get affordably.
sorry for the rambling...your post just caught my eye.
There's a Goodwill up here that has somepretty good stufffrom time to time. The fun thing about shopping for wax at Goodwill is that you find somepretty weird-looking shit and often I find myself saying "yeah, it's worth a buck to me to find out what the hell that is." It doesn;t feel like a real trip unless I recoil in horror at least once while browsing the selection. Recently I made such agasp at an El DeBarge album (don't try to pretend you don't remember him). I commented to my friend about it and a guy turns around and starts talking about how cool "El" was. How he was friends with "El's" sister and they'd all leave the bar together and "El" would sing as they walked down the street. I wish I could have recorded his whole little story. The hunting is half the fun. If I start buying online I'm not sure I'll be able to stop :)
I picked up a portable vestax (takes a few C batteries) for less than a hundred bucks... its perfect for record hunting and also ripping into laptop. But I have to admit, I hate records now. Even CDs are too cumbersome for my modern jetset lifestyle!
I found this direct-drive turntable at the Pike Place Rummage sale. It's made by a company called Modular Component Systems for JC Penney but as far as I can tell, from comparing it to my friend Karl's Technics of the same era, I think it's a rebranded Technics. I like record hunting for the randomness of it. Lately it's led to listening to a *lot* more blues and Jazz. I also just like records - they're fun if not ideal for many situations. I find it a little sexier to put on a record with a glas of wine than to pull up WinAmp or the like. It's also cheap, compared to CDs and I find it more fun than downloading music. That said, I'd like to rip and preserve the more rare stuff.