Records from the Last House in Cambridge...and Beyond

Seth and I were on a bike ride Saturday. We circled the Cambridge Reservoir at Fresh Pond, explored industrial Cambridge Highlands, then cut down a hilly street toward Arlington. I slowed down to check out a yard sale, said hello to the African-American mother and her three kids who were holding it, and kept rolling. Seth stopped behind me. "They have records," he said. I reluctantly went back, dropped my bike on the sidewalk, and walked down the driveway to the cardboard boxes filled with black columns of vinyl.

Holy shit. Someone really knew what they were buying back in the 60s and 70s. I spent nearly an hour on the ground going through piles of scratched-up, sleeveless records. I recognized a bunch of names from funk compilations, like The Beginning of the End and Stoned Soul Picnic, and I found some personal favorites and big-name standbys like Bohannon and Earth, Wind & Fire. I'm actually going to buy a record cleaning kit from radioshack.com and maybe get a real turntable from ebay. My only turntable remains the cardboard suitcase one I received for doing well on my first report card in 1986.

In terms of rarity (but not quality), this vinyl find might outdo my last biggest one, at a thrift store in Saint John, New Brunswick. It was a chilly October Saturday in 2004, and I was staying over the weekend during a two-week work trip. (I later found out I was pretty much the only salesperson at my company who did such things.) Some dude had just up and left for Halifax, the New York of the Maritimes. He'd sold his awesome vinyl collection to the store the day before. A kid had just gone through the bins and removed all the 80s rap. I feared the collection would have been decimated, but found tons of funk and soul, including a near-mint copy of Idris Muhammad's House of the Rising Sun and a ton of Kool & The Gang (but not their rare debut, which I foolishly passed up at an 80% discont in Lawrence, KS on the KC Siege). On the Saint John trip, I even scored some Average White Band for my then-almost-girlfriend, whom I remember missing a lot during the lonely weekend without cellphone service.

Onward, etc.