I'm Never Going To Make The Cover Of The Rolling Stone; How About You?

I'M NEVER GOING TO MAKE IT - HONESTLY, UNFORTUNATELY, IT JUST ISN'T IN THE CARDS!

I WILL NOT, IN THIS LIFETIME, MAKE THE COVER OF THE "ROLLING STONE" - WILL YOU?

     When I was ten years old, I had regrets about what I didn't do as a six year old. Same for every decade's overview since. I've never yet missed the dawning of a new decade of my life, without having mild regrets about something I didn't do five years or so earlier. Now at the brink of 60 today, I've jumped back four and a half decades, to when I was fifteen, and apparently, wasn't paying attention to the music scene, the way a lot of my mates were, and it shows like a honking big ketchup and mustard stain, on a white shirt, when inevitiably, I'm drawn into a conversation about music history, just because I happen to be lodging in a recording studio. Go figure!
    My family, of course, is deeply imbedded in the contemporary music industry, and I find myself quite ignorant, unintentionally of course, about what I actually lived through; and for a career historian, man, that sucks. Like someone who doesn't want anyone to know he or she can't read, I have been too embarrassed to admit to my shortfall of knowledge, about the music history our company represents, every day of the rolling year. When, by happenstance of music-talk, that happens all the time around me, I would love to enter the discussion if it wasn't for my glaring lack of anything significant to contribute. I feel the same when friends want to talk about their snowmobiles, motorcycles, or car engines, of which I have no intimate knowledge, that would entitle me the right and practicality, of contributing anything more than a nod, or shake of the head, and the occasional, "Oh yea," and the question, that sounds more like a statement, "Is that right?" Well, I've decided that recent opportunity was afforded me, for a good reason. God bless the chap who decided to sell off his treasures, because what he gave me, was the incentive to make some serious inroads to upgrade my education. Please read on!
     A few months ago, I wrote a stranger than usual blog that probably read, as if I had inhaled something hallusinagenic. The strongest scent here now, at our Gravenhurst shop, is the occasional wafting aroma of incense. Robert dislikes the smell of history, being my old books and wood furniture that may or may not, have been positioned beside the hearth at one time, in some pioneer cabin, or farmstead. Like so for the past century and a half. I find the smell of antiques intoxicating. I'd wear it as cologne if it was bottled. Robert likes the smell of vintage guitars, and the clearly identifiable aroma of "electrics" from a fine vintage sound system that Dylan, you never know, may have one day, a long time ago, played through, on some lowly lit club stage in New York. Back to that column, of which I am referring, that I wrote about, while inspired by music Robert was playing in the studio; alluring the beleagured old writer to re-visit the beatnik and hippy periods I lived through, but never really understood.
     Son Robert spins vintage records all day long, in the music studio portion of our Gravenhurst shop, opposite the Opera House. He has nurtured a profitable vintage vinyl enterprise, over the past decade, and at this time in collectable history, which is always hard to understand and prepare for, these old and dear records that snap, crackle and pop, are enjoying a resurgence some of us oldtimers can't figure out. In the antique and collectable trade, trends are like currents in a river, and at one point, can refresh and invigorate dealers, and then, as suddenly, become a dangerous undertow, and suck the most vulnerable into severe economic calamity. At present, vintage vinyl shops are opening across the province, at an unprecedented rate, and we heard this week, that seven shops specializing in vintage and re-issue vinyl, have opened in one small city in Southern Ontario. This saturation has been seen before, and it happened in the late 1980's and early 1990's, when there was a wild rush to get in on sports cards, from hockey, baseball, football, and basketball. In Ontario, the big deal was hockey, and it was incredible what nonsense was going on, with the proliferation of "card shops" opening up all over the place, and prices going through the roof, even for newly printed sports cards, which was, by itself, the harbinger of bad stuff ahead. Antique and collectable dealers, with any history behind them at all, as business survivors, knew well, that what was too good to be true, with high prices, would crash and burn sooner or later.
     For example, I can remember during this period, attending antique shows in our region, and getting quite a kick out of finding numerous booths each show, exhibiting small but significant pockets of vintage sports cards, in a minor bid to benefit from what was going around that year, as a popular "in-demand" latest, biggest trend. Here's the thing. Dealers kept a minimum of exposure to sports cards for good reason. They wouldn't want to put thousands of dollars into something that was going to have, at best, a couple of bumper years, before adjusting to what could be a damning market correction. This involves the typical "jumping on the band wagon" momentum, that inspires folks who have thousands of cards, they've been hoarding since childhood, to put them on the market at roughly the same time. For example, having a rookie card of a popular, hall of fame quality player, like Wayne Gretzky, means a big asking price. If there are only a few on the market at any one time, and demand shows an upward trend, then it, like a house you wish to unload, heralds a good time to sell. If however, a seller waits too long, and every one else puts up parallel rookie cards, all in good condition, the market could go from having twenty of these cards, being offered for sale, online, or in collectable shops, to a thousand almost over night. Same if the number of houses for sale, was to triple in a neighborhood. It can flood the marketplace, and this usually always means price adjustment is necessary, to sell them successfully, even in part. The seller's market turns quickly to become a buyer's market. It would seem sensible thusly, as we in the profession know too well, to remove their items up for sale, at least temporarily, to see if the glut will clear away, and the prices will return to their high levels. Sometimes it can happen. Just not very often. Some card owners stayed too long, desperate to pull anything out of the existing inventories they could, before the collapse prevailed upon them. Thus, the market stayed flooded, until shops were shuttered, and collections had to be sold at auction. I purchased half the cards left, from one failed business, for pennies on the dollar. Andrew and Robert still own them, and one day, when they have kids, well, you never know. Maybe they'll be able to sell them to finance their kids' university education. Yes, it will take that long. We have thousands left, but we didn't get burned by the collapse. The investment was minimal to start with.
     The reason antique dealers used to have a selection of vintage and collectable sports cards in their booths, was a simple strategy, and is a trick always used by vendors to cover costs of attending shows. I talked to a lot of dealers in those days, asking them why they had the cards amongst primitive pine, and classic oak furniture, china and silver. "If we sell any of them, we use the money to buy our lunch or dinner." We dealers always look for quick ways, at limited-time sales venues, to make back money to offset costs of attending these events. If it's not sports cards being offered, it is something else that the dealers know, are popular enough, and priced low enough to sell efficiently, to raise those cost-reversing funds; to afford a nice sandwich, or hot plate of french fries. We had a small sports card display in our shop, in Bracebridge, at this time, and we offset rental costs of our location, by renting a room to a fellow who went full monty into the industry; that proved so successful, he moved into a bigger location after less than a year running it small scale. It was one of the casualties, when the bottom fell out of the market, and I purchased a portion of his leftover cards. We only ever dabbled in the field, so our exposure was moderate, which meant that instead of bankruptcy as a result, we simply packed them away in safe containers, and like many antique dealers, stored them away for another day. It didn't bring down the family business, because they are still investments for future harvesting. But there was no point, in our minds, of dumping them by the box-load, simply because demand had diminished to a trickle by the mid 1990's.
     In terms of vintage vinyl, something us baby boomers figured was a trend that was gone forever, the antique and collectable dealers amongst us, knew differently. We were selling vintage vinyl for big bucks, at the same time as we were selling old and new sports cards in the early 1990's. We didn't have thousands of records like Robert has today, stuffed in shop bins, but every month, we sold some records, that more than paid for our luncheons. While there is another boom going on today, there is still a very great danger, the good times might end suddenly, and I'll tell you why. As prices for vintage records continue to escalate, all over the planet (we sell online), those who have been hoarding their record collections since teenage-hood, or having acquired them by circumstance of inheritance, will decide to capitalize on the investment potential. And yes, with thousands jumping on the bandwagon, will over time, flood the market so badly, that there will be too much product available, and thus, the beginning of the transition to a buyer's market instead. Seeing as we have been buying and selling vintage vinyl for many years now, and having some experience in the ups and downs of trends, we are prepared for the eventuality a competitor might locate near by, or that demand will suddenly disappear. Like the sports card debacle, we bring in records we like, and having to keep them, if there was a bust, is no hardship whatsoever. The boys are still young, and will see the eventual rebound. The prices we ask today, are remarkably close to what was on the stickers ten years ago, at the same shop. We don't pay enormous prices for these records in the first place, so we can keep our prices at a sensible, affordable level. We're a family of antique dealers, and knowing how to be proportional in this regard, is part of our survival strategy, which for me, has meant forty years of tightly managing resources. For those without a good understanding of the quirks of the antique and collectable industry, God help them. The proliferation of vintage and new record shops will have its limits reached, sooner or later, but we won't be hurt regardless which direction it goes. Maybe it will go higher for awhile longer, before the adjustment period begins. It will decline, make no mistake, as a direct result of greed and speculation. It's what happened to sports cards, and a lot of folks got hurt badly, when the market they thought would last forever, fell open like a trap door, claiming a lot of innocents, who didn't see it coming. In our crazy profession, you expect good times always have to end; and it's why we're good at making transitions to keep ourselves in business. It is almost an art-form, to dance through these precarious adjustment periods, and not lose money.
     I've become fascinated with the music side of our present family business, begun more than a decade ago, by sons Andrew and Robert. Andrew is the vintage instrument guy, and Robert looks after the vintage vinyl. They do overlap when it comes to both disciplines, and music memorabilia. When Robert is grading his newly acquired records, he plays them on the studio stereo, in order to make his condition report for the benefit of customers. It also dictates the price, beyond the performer or group responsible for the music. Rob is hugely fussy, and I know he prices-down for even the slightest flaw, and the "snap, crackle and pop," I used to appreciate on my own records, brings the value down, the more prevalent it is to the audiophile record-seller. A twenty dollar record, according to book values and online sales attained, might only be worth a couple of bucks, if there is too much wear on the surface, creating too much distortion from the perfection of the original pressing. But mostly, for me anyway, hearing these records every day, and every hour the shop is open, has imprinted on me over the past three years, of our relatively new business arrangement; we operate the antique shop in the back portion of the building. I am treated daily to the experiences music facilitates, and the era-time-travel is amazing. If ever I wanted to go back to my own semi-hippy experience, Robert can put me back in time, by simply the choice of record he choses to spin. I didn't think about this happening, and it was quite unexpected, especially when I started seeing the influence, showing up in the copy of my blogs bit by bit.
     I am allowed to spend time in the studio to write my daily columns, but the house rule, is that I must not confound the record-man's work on the phonograph, or in the recording side of the same room, where he brings in performers to lay-down tracks for their CD's or demos as they're known. I'm starting to get the lingo as well, by being around musicians and music nostalgia collectors. But the music, man! It has been influencing me for three years, in editorial context, and I never really thought about it prior to writing the column, mentioned above, when I thought it appropriate, to delve back into my youth to revisit what I knew of the beatnik and hippy period, which I observed, but failed to fully appreciate; until I started this subtle music education, that kind of opened my mind to possibility.
     A couple of weeks ago, Andrew had a fellow come into the shop, who had some vintage 1970's "Rolling Stone" magazines, he wanted to sell. There were quite a few copies, of the 15 he purchased, that had feature articles and photographs about The Beatles, his favorite all-time band; which pretty much set the wheels in motion, that a purchase was coming down the pike. He would have a hard time, not showing his excitement for such a package of music magazines. You can easily contaminate a sale, by appearing too excited. You'd be surprised how fast the asking price can increase if the seller knows the dealer really, really wants what they have to sell.
The magazines are understandable tattered, yellowed, and a few have water stains. After he was finished browsing through them, he left them sitting on the couch in the studio, within arm's length of the blogger sitting beside. I didn't have the money to buy records as a kid, or the "Rolling Stone," magazines, that profiled the records and the artists responsible for the music that surrounded me. If I had fifty cents in my pocket, I would use it to go to the Norwood Theatre to meet chicks instead. Or buy fifty cents of blackballs at the corner store, which would last me a week.
     I became an untutored listener of music, but in my senior reckoning stage, I feel bad that most of this important period had been bypassed, without my actually learning more about those who were breaking trail, and establishing a new cultural order, by a sort of social re-birth, out of the dark ages, to new and exciting possibilities in life. I now realize, the liberation I thought I had experienced back then, was more like watered down whiskey. I understood the taste, but I really didn't benefit from the buzz, as I might have otherwise if it had been consumed straight. There was a famous and revered British poet, who once complained to an acquaintance, at the twilight of his life, how badly he felt, not knowing the proper names of the flora and fauna of the English countryside, he had been writing about for decades, only knowing them only in the general way of a child looking upon a pleasant scene. It's how I regard my shortfall of knowledge about music. My grandfather, for gosh sakes, was a concert master in Toronto, and I used to hear him play the violin in the parlor of their home, when we used to make our regular monthly visits.
     For example, most of the records I received, once our family did purchase a cabinet stereo, circa 1969, were the cheapest of the cheap variety pack records, that you could get at the five and dime for sometimes half the price of regular albums from record shops. Yes, I did have a lot of K-Tell records, and what that meant, is that I didn't covet the album, or get intimate with the pulse of the performers featured, but instead, became a close-minded listener, where only the music had any relevance. When I see record buyers today, in the shop, talking about specific albums they had as teenagers, I have a hard time relating to it personally, because my records were best categorized as "music all sorts," like those variety boxes of licorice. I didn't learn about the groups responsible for the music I was enjoying, and instead only appreciated the music on one level. K-Tell record covers weren't quite as compelling as those packages produced for the respective groups and artists. The songs on the early amalgamations didn't really make much sense, if one was interested in such things as continuity, and spirit essence, from the first song, to the end of "Side B." My parents didn't have a lot of money for such things, and neither did I, in those years of modest earning. So I accepted the gifts with gratitude, and listened to them until the groves were nearly worn off. To this day, I can only name the titles of a very few songs, and, as well, the names of groups escape me, which is terrible for someone so deep in the music culture, that puts me within three feet of a pile of vintage vinyl, a drum set, a half dozen guitars, and microphones suspended off chrome stands, just in case I want to record something.
     Getting back to the "Rolling Stone" magazines Andrew purchased, I made a point that day, and for the next week, of consuming each one, in a slow, patient review, to regain my youth as related to music of my teenage rebellion. Which was a quarter strength compared to most of the rebellions my mates experienced. I had a great week going through the magazines, and reading a goodly majority of the articles. Along with Robert's enticing selection of music, to suit the period of the early 70's, it was quite a sensory adventure, added-to, by the burning of incense around me. I'm so glad the person, who had saved the magazines from his own teenage years, thought enough to bring them to us, on the chance we'd buy them. I've been drinking all this stuff in, and frankly, it makes me sick, to know just how much I missed from that period, that by golly, we all should know and understand. These musicians shaped our social / cultural futures, whether we liked their music or not. And over the next week or more, I'd like to relay some of the information that I found remarkable, tucked into the editorial content, of these really neat back issues, of one of the most popular magazines in the world. You know, I'm sorry I won't ever be one of the musicians featured on the cover of the "Rolling Stone," but there's still chance for Andrew and Robert, steadily finding their way up, in the dog-eat-dog music profession. Maybe, like the song by "Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show," about the great joy, being on the "Cover of the Rolling Stone," one of them will let me drive their limousine, when they attain those entertainment heights, sort of like Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner.
     If you're a baby boomer like me, who took the music for granted, as just something to neat to listen to, and never opted for the "Beat" scene's musical poetry, became addicted to the philosophies of Bob Dylan, slipped into the social order of "hippies", "yippies," or "punk rockers," then hang in there with this re-born music fanatic, as I review these vintage copies of "Rolling Stone," beginning this week. The first issue I plan to delve into, is the one I pulled out of the box first. The November 26th, 1970, issue number 71, Rolling Stone, with features on "Three New Beatle LP's," and the story entitled, "In Love With Meher Baba," by Peter Townsend. In 1970 I was too busy playing hockey and baseball, and trying to get a passing grade at high school, to worry too much about the intricacies, politics and protests of the music business. My rebellion was to let my hair grow and complain about the war in Vietnam. I had no idea what marijuana even smelled like, and when they talked about the concert at Woodstock, I thought it had been held in Woodstock, Ontario. Naive? Yup.
     On the cover is a picture of "Mike Curb," above the story, "Mike Curb and Richard Nixon Battle Dopers." The article opens, "Los Angeles - In what appears to be one sick grandstand stunt, MGM Records new president, Mike Curb, has announced the dropping of 18 acts, who, he claims 'advocate and exploit drugs'." The sidebar of the story, begins, "As if broadcasters aren't giving enough time to drug-abuse messages and warnings already, 70 of them got called into the White House, late last month, for a little chat with the nation's top drug-fighters, including the president himself." And, "After all was said and done, the broadcasting chiefs - invited from all over the country, gathered in Nixon's office, where they were treated to a little off-the-cuff talk. Nixon kept on saying he had no intention of telling the radio executives what to air, but that he hoped they would search their own consciences and, understanding  radio's influence on youth, perhaps co-operate in the drug fight. He would 'appreciate it,' he said." It was also noted by the magazine front-pager, that "The day-long conference, called by Attorney-General John Mitchell, came only a month after vice President Spiro Agnew's Las Vegas attack on rock and roll's dope lyrics, and featured a skit by members of Daytop, New York drug rehabilitation center, along with speeches by FCC Chairman, Dean Burch, the director of the Armed Forces Office of Information, and the Deputy Director of the Narcotics Bureau among them."
    In the meantime, I've still got a lot of catching-up to do, in this most recent bid to rehabilitate myself, to what it was all about back then, in the breaking-away, liberating days of the early 1970's. Please join me, for some of that essence of uncut whiskey, I was writing about earlier, and let's taste it all over again, Nixon, censorship and all that stuff.
    I'm looking forward to the trip. No, not via LSD. This one is a safe trip. All you have to do is read along, and let your memory of those halcyon days out of the gilded cage. Unless of course, like some I knew, who were stoned for an entire decade; "Hey man, we got so deep into Hendrix, we didn't come to, until Flock of Seagulls." Hey, stuff happens. Join me tomorrow for another glimpse back in music history, via the Rolling Stone.