The things we put inside record jackets

When I was fifteen or sixteen I worked in a now-demolished grocery store as a cart herd.  I took to the challenges of that work with youthful vigor that winter, setting myself up for a lifetime of winter cycling and other absurdly Minnesotan pursuits.

It was a unionized job and I was required to take fifteen minute breaks.  Because I’d been outside smoking cigarettes all evening, I didn’t want to take my break with the stock-boys whose jobs I was to covet.  I would take my breaks with the old biddies who stocked greeting cards, magazines and mylar balloons.  As I became familiar they took to regaling me with stories of failed romances and travels, highlighting longer stories of failed lives.  I probably could have learned a lot from their often explicit candor, but most of it must have been lost on me as years later I entered college entirely unable to understand women.

I did read a lot of magazines.  If one were torn or damaged in any way, Florence brought it to a card table near the terrifying, obsolete cardboard “crusher”, a machine that must have been covered with discarded boxes and plastic wrap during each and every OSHA inspection.  I read a mid-winter Rolling Stone at that table, seeing this review:

You are looking at the very same thing I saw all those years ago – I tore it out of that torn Rolling Stone and the next day bought San Francisco.  Lorraine Ali warned that the album did not “signal the second coming of Van Morrison or even the Replacements,” but that warning made me buy the album, and for some reason I’ve long forgotten it was the one time I saved a review.

I love it when we find things inside records but I’ve never been somebody who actually does that.  I guess there’s nowhere else I’mgoing to put a record review from a magazine I’d never bought in my life.  A few records I’ve received as gifts still have the cards tucked inside, and occasionally I come across the tracklisting for a mix tape I probably once spent an evening searching for without success, but by and large I don’t put things inside records.

We’ve posted a few of the things that have been found inside records (So far the last 12 months have only yielded one joint).  One was these pencil drawings of the Beatles from a copy of Revolver.

American Music Club’s San Francisco?  Its a pretty good album – 3 1/2 stars seems reasonable.   I liked it enough to buy a couple more of American Music Club’s albums, eventually discovering their 1991 Alias Records release Everclear, a legitimate classic.  That year Rolling Stone singled it out as one of the top 5 albums, for whatever those kind of Mickey Mouse lists are worth.  I hear anybody can get on ‘em.

The worst review of a record I ever read was of something by Souixsie and the Banshees. As I recall, the entire review read, “Presumably the actual end of the world will be worse than this.”  This was in a real magazine, not somebody’s fanzine.  I didn’t buy a copy of the record which I could use to save a copy of the review.

Not long ago a collection we purchased produced a clipping from The Minneapolis Star that dismisses Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors as a disappointment and likely commercial failure.  I guess there’s no shortage of dumb bastards out there reviewing records, then and now.  If you’d like to see it the Minneapolis Star review is hanging on the wall in the record shop.

Another collection included two copies of the great soundtrack to Forbidden Planet, one of which was warped.  Before tossing the warped copy {Of course I planned to save the sweet jacket!) I noticed something inside – It was the box from a (Certainly awesome) wind-up “Planet Robot” toy.

I suppose its only reasonable to offer a sample from the album given a lukewarm welcome by Rolling Stone‘s Ali.  Here’s the single, “Wish the World Away”:

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Its actually a record I’ve grown to appreciate more and more over the years (Unlike their major label debut, Mercury, most of which stinks no matter how many spins it gets). The group broke up after San Francisco and I guess reunited some time later and recorded a belated follow-up album on Merge. Mark Eitzel’s a wonderful songwriter and the kind of vocalist one really develops an ear for, but Lord are his songs gloomy.