Silently Thinking Out Loud – Page 3 – Thingery Previews Postviews & Music

Rainy Day Music -> Saintsteven -> Rainy Day Music

We are approaching our 20th anniversary of online retailing. Our Fearless Leader is becoming contemplative about that, if only because we are moving. It’s not a very big move by geographical standards – only 40 miles. It’s the third move we’ve made and back to the original town where our storefront operated. It’s not supposed to affect anything that the customers will notice.

In the process of making that move, we’re processing many boxes of archives. Some of the archives have been rendered into junk by rodents, water, nasty Japanese beetles that looked like sweet ladybugs (in 2005, the time of move #2), and other age factors, but what’s left makes us think about where we came from especially since we’re going back there. Most, if not all, of the twenty thousand transactions we’ve enjoyed recently don’t take place anywhere near Spencer, Iowa, so a lot of the local background has nothing to do with our visible Internet growth.

We still want to tell you about where we came from. The brick and mortar’s name was Rainy Day Music, which came out of my head after a month of trying to find it in 1987. Depending upon how anyone spins it, Rainy Day Music was a head shop or it was a music store and sometimes it was both but that sort of depended upon which of the principlals you preferred or followed. While I peddled my share of paraphernalia, my thing was music. Specifically record albums. 1987 wasn’t the best time to decide to do that since everybody who made records was going to quit doing that in about four years. Anyway, sometime after we launched our second store my partner, who was also my wife, and I had a little explosion. That was late in 1995. The store was my hobby; I had a Real Job distributing various wholesale groceries and what we now think of as convenience store items. It just so happened that we sold that Real Job at the same time the missus and I exploded. I took six months off and traveled and searched for my head and left the store. At the end of that six months my former wife informed me I could just steer the sinking boat or she’d close it. I “rejoined the firm” and she eventually departed. Three years later, after the city outlawed two thirds of our merchandise, I discovered eBay.

Perfect arrangement. Bigger pond in which to operate. First sale was a box of bluegrass records that nobody would look at in our “alternative” shop. Leaving out some fun facts, a little more than a year later, Internet sales outstripped counter sales.

No decision to make there, a guy can do that from his house. I did.

But we’ve overshot a little here on the history. I was going to tell you why I’m Saintstevensthingery and not Rainy Day Music and how Rainy Day still operates. When I discovered the Internet, it was in a hotel room. I knew instantly that I could do that eBay thing. But I had no computer, so the following Monday I went to the library, figured out enough about operating computers to register at eBay. One of the first steps in that process is “pick a name”. It didn’t occur to me that RainyDayMusic could be a name. I wasn’t accustomed to inventing words that way at the time. So I thought about it: what do I love? Well, there’s the Grateful Dead, and they have an iconic song that’s called “St. Stephen” and it has a line that goes “one man gathers what another man spills”. So, Saintsteven it was. That’s been modified a couple of times over the years but it’s still similar. That turned out to be a good choice, especially in the early days of Internet auctions when everybody was a newbie. In a marketplace built on trust, how can a guy whose name starts with “saint” be a bad guy?

So what about poor Rainy Day? Locally, that was a powerful brand, and um, we already owned it. Well, there was a time that we DIDN’T own it. Not only was there another Rainy Day Records in the state of Washington, but the Jayhawks eventually came along and used the entire phrase for an album that sold moderately well, and there went what we call Search Engine Optimization.

We’ve kept it around all this time though, and we like to think “The Raindrop” has achieved real authority in some circles. It DID sort of change color – it was not originally purple but it has grown to be, and it’s the same icon I’ve used since the month of August in 1987 that it took me to draw it.

So, maybe you’ve noticed in the news that records have been enjoying a revival for several years. I was in a local stereo shop (as I call them) not long ago when a guy said to the clerk “so I hear records are coming back”. The store guy said “well, some people will tell you that they never went away”. I intentionally didn’t check to see if he glanced my way when he said that.

Ain’t that ironic? Thirty-two years after I decided I’d like to mess with “licorice pizzas”, people want the damn things.

So, while the Saintsteven thing captured a lot of I.D.’s and URLs, and has done a lot of business and probably will continue to do so, about a year ago, Rainy Day came back into visibility on Facebook (where else?) in the form of its own page.

Our shopping cart on our own site will quickly inform you that you’re at the Home Of The Rainy Day Music Archive and the categories there are populated by Things that we sold in the first place. Much of the merchandise there actually did reside in the physical store at one time. Of course we add new stock, and over the years those listings are half of what they were, but there’s still a continuum there.

And what you can see is still the tip of the iceberg, and we have a lot of record albums in particular that have not been processed. We’re slow about that. We’re slow because we “machine grade”. That means that we record each album and examine its waveform for noise and flaws and problems. It takes about an hour and a half to do that, and if the grader is being strict, a lot of swell-looking record albums actually get rejected.

Because they have the data, we use Discogs to drill down to the pressing plant and similar identifying characteristics (label varieties) when possible as we identify and describe out stock we’re REALLY slow.

So that’s what you’ve got here: a seller with a lot of experience bending over backwards by providing audio samples of each track on a record album and (usually) providing every other little detail you might possibly wonder (like, how’s the inner sleeve?).

On the Facebook page, we preview this stuff, and as sales occur, we post our selling prices which we think is damn generous of us since most guys charge money for that kind of information.

All of that is different from our antiques auction business. It’s easy enough to post about both businesses, and people are certainly welcome to follow one or the other, but this is one of those watch-us-grow sorts of posts.

Or, we’re back. Again.

The Rainy Day Facebook Page

Computer Graded Record Albums?

and now a word from Our President:

I’ve graded records for a long time, ever since the brick and mortar days when they sat in bins. I’ve always thought that was one way to indicate their condition to the guy thinking about buying them. Obviously, if that shopper is flipping through the bins, he or she can inspect records themselves but mail order customers can’t do that, regardless of the platform where the mail order ad was shown.

This is about the record grading on this site (and at other platforms). Traditionally, someone describing a record could grade it visually, or play grade it (playing and listening). Both have their arguments, strengths, and potential pit falls.

Play grading is arguably a little better method: if you can tell somebody that you’ve listened to something, it carries a little more authority than if you can only tell them that you’ve looked at it. But play grading is really slow. Obviously somebody is constrained to sit and listen while the record plays, probably somewhat loudly (even if he or she doesn’t personally like it). If a typical record collection is maybe two hundred records, it would take a dealer a little over eight days of working without sleep or any other kind of pause to process that collection if he worked really fast.

I’ve begun to make digitized samples of my records and have been adding those to the catalog at a somewhat steady pace of a couple of them a day on a good day.

Something recently occurred to me while I was editing sound clips. In the waveform (a visual graph-like image of the recorded passage generated by a program), I can SEE clicks. And I can look through a waveform much faster than I can sit and listen to the recording because I can zoom it and fast forward it and reverse through it. And in one view, I can see an entire album, both sides, on one screen.

That means that if I use a hybrid method of playing the record and then examining its recorded digital print at a later time, I’m still constrained by the playing time of the albums, but I can also be doing other things while I record them and that’s a meaningful speed-up.

I can make Internet-ready samples of those clips with a few clicks, something already set in progress.

Here’s a very short waveform image:

You can see a pronounced spike in the bottom track at the right side: that’s a click. There’s also some noise on the left side of that track, as well as a little pop in the top track toward the left side.

There are really only two grades of records and the rest of the grades are cosmetic (visual, and subjective). Those two real criteria are: does the record click (or have other surface noise not inherent to the medium) or doesn’t it? I can tell in one glance into which category this one falls. That’s a vast improvement over listening to it for thirty to forty minutes, so after I take a couple of additional quick steps (identifying other passages like that, observing the cosmetics), I can go on to the next record.

Of course, there’s more to it than just grading the record, and even more if you’re maintaining a web site. So far, I’ve tried to supply copious photos of album covers, optimally four of five of each for an album, a couple more if it’s a double one. And the data like catalog number, year of release, the track list and so forth. There’s a little bit of time managing the database all this stuff goes into, and moving files to the site and managing them there, and all that other stuff. That’s generally considered to be not anybody’s problem but the merchant’s, so we’re not going to break that down here, but trust me, it’s “in there”.

Time is money. Anything that makes grading faster AND more useful has to be a no-brainer.

So that’s what’s going on over here in the record department. I think it’s pretty revolutionary. The last thing to think about might be the nomenclature: should I just mention in record templates that they’ve been “computer graded”, or should I invent a little twist on the regular notation? Let’s say it’s a VG+ record. Would it be ridiculously confusing to call that CVG+?

Art Cullen’s new book Storm Lake

A while back (a couple of years ago or so), I ran into Dolores Cullen at a local antique shop I haunt. I’m not sure why I did it, but I told her “Art ought to write a book. I love his writing”. I love writing in general, usually preferring fiction. Dolores responded, indicating to me that she’d heard the question before, “Do you think it should be essays or editorials?” I thought for a second and answered “both”.

Then he went and won that Pulitzer prize.

When I met Art, I didn’t know he was a newspaper guy and in fact, I didn’t know who he was. I was trying to keep my baby store alive after a series of setbacks-a bogus eviction from a spot by a guy who wanted to start a restaurant there, and a couple of other setbacks which would eventually include two break-ins that would finish the place off. It was a retail music store where I was trying to peddle record albums when there WEREN’T any record albums. He would visit me on Saturdays when I clerked my doomed second counter (the two stores were my hobby, not my “real job”). He wasn’t a big spender, which I now realize was because he had relatively empty pockets, but that was ok-I needed to care about sales because my partner was about ready to leave me and/or demand we close the store, but Art was a wonderful conversationalist and that was good enough for me. Good conversationalists are hard to find.

Eventually I discovered that he was a wild-eyed liberal newspaper guy. That was interesting to me because I liked to read some newspapers, mainly the Des Moines Register during the years that they ran Donald Kaul’s column and a newspaper in Spencer had given my son a job as a photographer (using my 35mm camera which I couldn’t seem to master) and my brother was a newspaper guy in Montana. In addition to being a newspaper guy, Art was a music fan and there’s no better kind of guy than that hanging at the counter of a music store of course.

At the time, I wasn’t from Storm Lake, so I wasn’t really cultivating social contacts or even reading Storm Lake news but I was happy to meet another music fan of his caliber. From my vantage point of two record stores, those were the only people I really met who held my interest.

Things evolved and happened, which could probably be a book of their own if I cared to step into the autobiographical or nonfiction world and I needed to take care of some “stuff” like a divorce, the collapse of that Storm Lake store, a near bankruptcy and the evaporation of my “real job”, as well as some personal adjustments I needed to make over my overusage of the world’s most dangerous drug, ethyl alcohol. All that took a few years. I eventually got back on my feet, and moved to Storm Lake, taking up residence with a woman who recently passed away and who should have inspired a book of her own, which is yet another tangent.

I grew up in Spencer, although I had spent a great deal of time in Storm Lake with grandparents and an eight year residence on Hickory Lane, where I was being assimilated into the family business as a third generation guy who might eventually ascend to piloting the ship if we just didn’t sell the place, which of course we eventually did do. In my lifetime, there was quite a Spencer-Storm Lake rivalry, due largely in part to a couple of really tall high school basketball players that Storm Lake had on their basketball team. The Spencer and Storm Lake factions of our business had a good-natured rivalry and until we combined those two branches at Spencer, I was happy to participate.

On the same day that Storm Lake’s Hygrade plant closed, we executed that consolidation and although I had a little trouble moving to Spencer due to insanely high interest rates, I did move to Royal in 1983, where housing was more affordable. With the exception of me stomping around Storm Lake handling sales duties as the Son Of A Bitch From The Home Office, that ended my Storm Lake affiliation for a while until I returned to launch music store number two.

Hygrade remained closed for a while, and IBP eventually came along and busted the union, and packing plants in Spencer and Estherville just vanished. Spencer wanted nothing more to do with that industry. Things began to change, and Storm Lake became what we call multi-cultural.

I like multi-cultural places; I’d always felt that I was suffocating in northwest Iowa and my only reprieve from that came with my four year stay in Iowa City from 1969 to 1973, where I damn near threw it all away chasing a raven-haired beauty in a bar. She was a waitress-we hadn’t changed that job description to server yet.

But it was a Spencer thing to do to point at Storm Lake and deride the town for going all to pot because suddenly it wasn’t homogeneous. That reminded me of how we had looked at Iowa City, although we also hated the place because of the large anti-war faction there. War is good for the economy you know.

My Spencer friends and many of the “old Storm Lake” people still do that. I usually cringe, but never was particularly vocal about my opposition to that kind of myopic thinking, because I was mostly into counter cultural stuff and the evil Left Coast scene.

We have to fast forward to now, when Art wrote his book, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper. I had stormed the residence of the woman with whom I eventually lived for thirteen years and she lived at “the outlet” of the lake where I would see Art go by on his bicycle (he turned around at the outlet and rode back to town from there) but I left him alone when I saw him because by that time I knew he was a busy newspaper guy and was probably accosted too frequently by people who both agreed and disagreed with him about politics in particular. I was in the “agree” camp, but it was of no importance-I have no political credentials. I knew him as a music aficionado. From time to time he insisted that I had to visit a little bar in Pomeroy, Byron’s, the Iowa Deadhead capital (I’m a Deadhead). I didn’t go there because I couldn’t. I was living with a woman I didn’t feel I could leave alone very long, again, a story worthy of its own book, although I don’t really want to write that book. I want to write Catch-22, even though Joseph Heller already did.

The book came out three days ago and I finished it last night. I’ve seen several remarks that it’s a fast read, and it is. Somehow, he has written a book full of history that’s accessible by people who hate history, based on their high school experience with that subject. But it’s a lot more than that-it’s about Big Agriculture, running a newspaper which of course must produce revenue but without compromising principles, and most importantly, how Storm Lake became multicultural and why that’s a good thing. Not enough music commentary in my opinion, but maybe that’s book number two and anyway, the music commentary is about another town, an oasis in a sea of “rednecks”.

Due to a recent chain of events, I could very well return to Spencer in the coming months, but I will return as a witness of some incredibly powerful social experimentation which in my opinion is wildly successful.

Iowa doesn’t have to be mind-numbingly all-the-same, and it probably never was. While we bemoan the impact of immigration that we actually can’t understand, WE are the immigrants. Cullen has been careful to point that out and he’s specific about how we’ve raped our land and become loathsome ourselves, although he stops short of actually saying that loathsome part.

If you live in northwest Iowa, you should probably read this book. For me, it defines where I am, and I’ve always wondered about that part, particularly because many of my friends from more “interesting” parts of the country have always asked me what in the hell am I doing here. I have always said I’m trapped, but today I feel more like I belong here. It’s a bigger book than that though. It works for anyone who is anywhere in Iowa and it also works for anyone in our country who’s more than slightly interested in why the heartland is important and vital.

The book probably works internationally as well. After my forced retirements from slinging wholesale groceries and retail music (because distribution conglomerates good with spreadsheets took over and Main Street is broken) I moved my economic activity to the internet where roughly a third of my business is international. I’m sensitive about the ugly American stereotype, although you rarely hear that phrase any more, and again, Cullen has not used those words. I care about what many so-called conservatives condemn as globalism.

I care about being represented by racists, and I care about politics dominated by money. I’ve had money and I can tell you that chasing the stuff is a grave mistake.

Buy the book. It’s insightful, often self-deprecating, and entertaining, even when it names weeds. I wish I’d read it years ago, before it even existed.

Lou And Friends Annual Fall Outdoor Sale That We’ve Never Had Before

You know those outdoor sales we’ve had in the past at Lou’s Antiques in Storm Lake? Ok, maybe you didn’t and it’s actually the purpose of this post to inform you.

We’ve had a few in summers past. They’re fun. It’s a multiparty thing with a handful of regular vendors, yours truly included, and Lou puts her whole store on sale. Lots of collectibles, antiques, usually some live plants, some jewelry, some crocks, that kind of thing.

The stuff I bring has been largely records but I may refocus that this year due to personal circumstances that are rapidly changing. More about that later probably, and there will still be some records, but this time I also have some nice items from an estate that hasn’t even really come onto the market yet.

Anyway, I can’t get the damned Facebook Events thing to cooperate. I can’t figure out how to set the time and the date. This is not unusual for me and Facebook.

But do I really care? No, I don’t think I do. I know how to post stuff in the Facebook “garage sale groups” and all that, but I also have this fancy-dancy website of my own for which I pay perfectly big bucks so I can gently spam my customers.

So.

To begin with, and more to follow, this year’s sale is late because stuff happened to several of us, and that date is now FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM. The address is 1403 E. Lakeshore Dr., Storm Lake.

Just getting this out there.

If It Were All About The Money, I’d Peddle Tumbleweed

I’m not much of an Elton John fan. It’s easy for me to flip any of his titles. Usually.

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Tumbleweed Connection though. That goes back to the day when it was relatively new and I had entered into a new pastime with my friend Steve Galloway (if you’re in Florida and know him, tell him I’d like to reconnect). On Tuesdays and Thursdays when my girlfriend had some college night class, Steve and I would get together and commandeer Paul Humpal’s decent stereo system while Paul was in a closet developing film, and we’d listen to records and play games and smoke little bits of pot (not necessarily in that order). The girlfriend and the law both agreed we shouldn’t be doing that, which made it more exciting.

It was handy that Paul had good records because Steve and I didn’t. I’m not sure I had even taken the few I had with me to college that year. I DID have a few two years later when I managed to rent the same room but at the time, I had a couple of Doors albums and a Simon And Garfunkel and whatever else the Columbia Record Club had sold me, not more than 20 albums all told probably.

We liked Tumbleweed Connection and kept it in rotation, which was one of my first forays outside of the stuff I had bought from the record club. My OTHER friend Steve, back in my home town, had a spectacular record collection so I had my listening requirements covered during the summer months that I went home between school years.

By the time the 1972-73 school years came along, I had Humpal’s room, no more disapproving girlfriend, a grade point that would carry me through a year’s worth of beer drinking (a new development) a little turntable I’d bought from Gambles, and I had figured out where the record stores were in Iowa City. But I had also discovered the Grateful Dead, and that’s what I bought. That’s still my passion even though they weren’t particularly known for even caring about making records.

Years passed. I moved, a career happened. Kids came along. I had bought a house, had money coming out of my ears, and forty miles away, a good record store to shop once a month. Rolling Stone Magazine and a local friend told me what I HAD to have. It never occurred to me to acquire some of the stuff I’d heard in Humpal’s room. My collection grew, not to the mammoth size of some of my friends’, but hey, I’m sort of conservative (that’ll come as a surprise to my political acquaintances, but I’ve always maintained that nobody’s one dimensional).

Eventually, the decent record store forty miles away closed and I accidentally revived it. I suppose if you own a record store, you might squirrel away a lot of stuff, but not me so much, because, hey, I’m conservative. Yeah, I bought some new stuff but I had bills to pay (more than I realized-I didn’t do my own bookkeeping) and most of the used stuff I bought went back out the door again.

The record store had a nice run, but out of its fourteen years, records existed for basically four of them. There was an avalanche of used records to buy since almost everybody bit into the industry myth that CDs were cooler, but toward the end, those got sort of hard to flip. That dragged me to the Internet, which was just fine with me, since I’d always liked computer stuff and usually had a mild regret that I’d dumped an education in programming to chase down that college degree in beer drinking.

I’ve sold some records on the Internet and honed my grading and identification skills. Elton sold millions of records but of course many of them acquired little problems at the hands of clumsy people with cheap turntables, and naturally a high percentage of those were not the original pressings-they were reissues.

There’s a bit of a trick selling records on the Internet since they made millions of them and out of every million, nine hundred thousand wound up in either charity stores or garage sales, where they were priced at a dollar or a quarter, respectively. From there, for a long time, they were fed directly to eBay at the hands of eBay jockeys who had no clue about supply and demand and only knew whatever they knew about pricing from books that were about eighty percent wrong.

If you wanted Elton’s Tumbleweed, there it was-scads of ’em, usually with no identification, and grading was always “looks pretty good” (which is not a grade) and pricing was based on some reality which has always eluded me. So I’ve been slow about acquiring stuff I wish I would have bought in the first place at the first time.

I buy some accumulations, and bought two last year, somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand records. They were not well cared-for accumulations and cleaning them up, identifying the pressings and recording samples of them (I do that) has been slow going and mainly a matter of which stack is in the way at the moment.

Today I came across a Tumbleweed Connection. Right, I thought, I don’t even have to look, I know what’s in that cover. But I did look and it was a decent early pressing (if not original, I haven’t gotten that far yet) with the booklet, the correct UNI inner sleeve and a beautifully preserved textured gatefold cover.

I slapped it on the turntable. It meets my personal standards. If it’s not “near mint”, which it probably isn’t, it doesn’t make any noises that make me jump up and charge over to the turntable to find out WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?

Oh, good, a copy I can sell for a premium. But hey, wait a minute, what about all that fun we had in Humpal’s room? Surely, somewhere along the line, I HAVE acquired a copy of this one, haven’t I? Answer was: yes, I have one and while it has the booklet, it’s in the wrong inner sleeve, a slightly beat cover and a later pressing that’s been through the wringer. I suppose when I saw that copy I also thought “hey what about Humpal’s room”?, and put it in my stack thinking it would work as a placeholder until I found a better copy, perhaps one without a booklet, and I’d eventually make a nice Frankenstein copy.

Now we’ve got a no-brainer. I’m not flipping this record. I’m out whatever it’s worth, and when I sell myself something like that it doesn’t even make me rich because I don’t pay me, but it connects me with a memory.

That’s record collecting in its purest form.

LP Restoration Project Spooky Tooth / Last Puff 1970

This record came from a stack of LPs without covers, which had been lost to basement moisture (I’d say flooding), and it was covered with dirt and all kinds of nasty stuff including parts of the paper cover.

It was restored by me using several methods and these files have been enhanced by a little noise removal, and possibly a click removal or two (I can’t remember). Anyway, that’s why you should be damn careful about stuff you’re throwing away.

The cover is a repurposed cover from some other album.

September 1, 2016

We make calendars to keep things straight and things go wherever they want to anyway. We have to know what day it is, what year it is. What they were once. And those days and those years go wherever they want to anyway. Why do we need to know what day it is? Isn’t the day the one we’re in? Is it something we AREN’T in? Why do we need to know what year it is? Is it the first one, is it the last one? Do those in the middle matter?

The calendars containing the days and the years turn on us, and they apply pressure. Time is money is how they put that.

We build math to keep the money straight. We keep track of our profits and losses. But by the minute they change. We need those minutes, yet things and money might be disappearing or accumulating every one of them and we can’t control that.

We think we can-I went to college to learn about soap and time and money and management, and got a strange transcript. I did learn the stuff, my professors should be assured of that if they care, but it’s like something my friend Rick McNeal told me one day when he was explaining how come he dropped out of being a brilliant nuclear physicist or something exactly close to that.

Rick wanted to know WHY there are colors. We were floating above the floor of my room on Dubuque Street and studying a chillum and McDonald’s Export A mixed 50/50 with ganja brought to us directly by little airplanes and stolen credit cards. I had already flunked everything important in my major at the College Of Business and I kind of wondered why there were colors too. They said I should not put rock and roll music in radio commercials and that my tapes didn’t play anyway.

The Super Bowl had become important enough in advertising world that we were compelled to study reels of Super Bowl commercials, and boy, were they ever optimized. They thought Super Bowl rates were high then.

But I digress. You know I like the band The Grateful Dead. We study them closely analyzing concert tapes from some 1800+ performances, except for when the tapes are missing. That takes a long time. They did over 500 songs. One of them though, “Black Peter”, takes a look at the calendar thing:

See here how everything
lead up to this day
and it’s just like
any other day
that’s ever been
Sun goin up
and then the
sun it goin down
Shine through my window and
my friends they come around
come around
come around

See anything in there about days, weeks, years, soap, profits, losses?

The Grateful Dead And Aretha Franklin Fare Thee Well Chicago And Sioux City Shows

How I spent my summer vacation 7/6/15 (after it’s over). Somebody scheduled the Grateful Dead Fare Thee Well Chicago #2 night at the same time as Aretha Franklin at Saturday In The Park at Sioux City. There were some notable moments in Sioux City (although not from Aretha as far as I’m concerned) but let’s just gloss over those. Try to catch the North Mississippi All Stars someplace sometime.

Now, about that Grateful Dead reunion at Soldier Field, which is where I personally saw them last, although that was in 1994, and I didn’t attend in 1995. Still, that’s where I left off. So did everybody. They came back because Bob in particular seemed to think it would be necessary due to the fact that it’s 50 years after the band pretty much started.

They played two nights in Santa Clara last weekend, and I wrote about those on my Facebook page and I’m pretty sure I felt enthusiastic about those two nights. If you were me, you sort of had to be. There was some noise on the Internet about Phil doing too much singing and some other stuff, most of which I also mentioned on my Facebook page. I don’t mind Phil’s singing-he’s been at it for a long time now and I think he’s getting better, but I am also extremely reluctant to criticize his style or delivery because he is, ah, A FOUNDING MEMBER OF THE BAND who always did do some singing. It is not up to me how they divide that up (the singing thing).

There are folks who wonder why they seem to do Drums/Space every night. It is probably somewhat politically incorrect of me to mention it, but there are probably other people who don’t like hearing that little extra track in every show when Phil does his Donor Rap either.

Sometimes they goof up some words or some little timing thing or maybe the keyboards are somehow mixed too low (they were in the YouTube video, but not-so-much in the audience recordings I have, and anyway, they seem to have fixed that for the last four shows). I thought sometimes it was funny that the cameras didn’t follow the guitar that was soloing. Surely, they didn’t have somebody in the production chain who wasn’t particularly familiar with who was playing what, did they?

Let’s slip over to Sioux City for a moment here. I met several interesting people and had several interesting conversations, but during the break between somebody and somebody, a kid accosted me with “hey, were you in the Sixties”? I told him I was familiar with the era. He then proceeded to ask me if I’d ever seen Janis Joplin. Well, no, but I did catch Big Brother & The Holding Co. at some surprise performance in Iowa City. Janis had become Kathi McDonald. The kid wanted to know if I’d ever heard the Jefferson Airplane. Well, heard, of course. Saw ’em once when they were Jefferson Starship but even they thought they sucked that night (Grace apologized, it was the last night of a tour which had been in Europe and her voice was shot).

Then the kid said it: “I hate the Grateful Dead”. That’s a funny thing to tell me on the Fourth Of July at a musical event while we’re talking about loving bands from San Francisco. I was unable to decipher whatever it was that the kid was trying to use as his explanation for that, but I countered with “did you notice that little Quicksilver Messenger Service” lick in that last band’s one song?”. The kid didn’t get it. It was a line from Who Do You Love that I was mentioning. The one that goes like “who do you love”?

The kid didn’t hear it. I’m not positive that I did either, but I’m pretty sure, although I’ve already forgotten the band’s name. I had already lost my patience with the kid. I knew the answer when I asked him “have you ever BEEN to a Grateful Dead show?”. He was clearly under 20 and the band stopped suddenly 20 years ago. Don’t do the math and you come up with the same answer. Of course he hadn’t, and he replied “oh you woulda had to have been there huh?”.

Oh, I don’t know. It certainly helps. I told him “don’t worry about it, not even THEY liked their records”. I wasn’t wearing any Dead related anything, by the way. I saw two t-shirts all day-one on the guitar player for the BB King tribute and one green shirt on a random guy that had a Steal Your Face on it. So the kid couldn’t have been sure whether *I* had ever been to a Dead show. He had no idea they were playing in Chicago, nor was he going to.

Eventually it gets to be time to see Aretha Franklin. I am skeptical. It gets to be PAST time. This event has a well-defined closing time and they’re on schedule. With 40 minutes to go (including encore time) it’s gonna be over and she’s not there. FINALLY her orchestra annoys guys like me with some stuff and they announce Aretha like she’s in Las Vegas someplace.

She came out and did some stuff until thirteen minutes after ten and seems to be done. The orchestra stretches out the time with another number or two and Aretha reappears for what has to be RESPECT and does one of those long gospel raps about whatever health scare she had recently. Other reviewers will no doubt say otherwise, but I believe that is all you need to know.

Back to Chicago. Thanks to the magic of Video On Demand I can watch the Saturday Night show (#4), but it takes me a little while because I have to crash and et. cetera. Of course I checked the setlist, but it was impossible NOT to guess at least the closer and the encore. A lot of the middle of the list was stuff that if I HAD to miss it, I was willing to miss it and watch this nice video later.

They rarely get it completely right of course and you learn that, if you put ’em too high on the pedestal.

Sunday filled up instantly here with that video followed by the Sunday (last) show. I had already been struck by this, but I have never heard five Grateful Dead shows in a row like these last ones in which I could understand all the words. It doesn’t hurt to take 40 years to study the lyrics, but none the less, both of the “new” singers-Trey and Bruce, enunciate quite well, and it’s unusual that I can’t understand Phil or Bob. So it sounds nice.

But it’s not just nice. It’s really really good, with no goofy technical stuff and a band that has had a while to think about the set list. No tuning, just a well-run set after set. The sound is almost perfect, the lights coordinate well, the band is REALLY professional. They nailed stuff they never got right in the first place. They updated stuff from the first album that they DIDN’T cook on the road for decades.

Since those seven guys had only technically played five shows for the world by the time they got done, it was good enough to be something that was just getting started.

Even Weir assures us now “more stuff will happen”.

I guess, for me, it provides a closure I’m not sure I was looking for. The Grateful Dead once drove their record label crazy by churning out weird stuff; they didn’t like playing in a studio in the first place. It used to be unheard-of for somebody to leak a set list like they’ve been doing lately, mostly because the band didn’t HAVE one unless they maybe called those from a huddle at the line of scrimmage. They never HAD a night that didn’t have some little delays for something-or-other (ok, maybe they have, but I never saw one). Or forgotten lyrics, not there weren’t a couple here, or trouble just playing together, or a surly crowd to please. But they just don’t turn in technically next-to-perfect shows like that, even if they think they’re “taping” (grin, they were always “taping”).

So as we go forward, my biggest realization is in that small point: was this just all a money grab?

Are you kidding? NOBODY delivers three nights like those last Chicago shows who is merely selling something. Those guys were still perfecting “The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)”. No, it was not all a money grab. There were grabbers, no doubt about it, but they weren’t standing on the stage.

I hope they reconsider that “never again” part, but if they don’t, I saw a perfect show; we all did.

Smoke: 1644 Words About It I Know You’ll Hate

This may seem a little out of place in a blog about online sales. It probably IS a little out of place, although trust me, smoke odor is a major issue among some online buyers. They aren’t wrong, because buyers of anything are never wrong.

Please don’t judge or pontificate yet. You will be afforded time for that at the end, unlike the time that smokers are NOT afforded to defend themselves. People who don’t like smoke have made their preference abundantly clear everywhere, and in fact, they’ve won the war. Smoking is uncool and banished everywhere.

I like smoke of all kinds: tobacco smoke, cannabis smoke, wood smoke, incense smoke, smoked cheese, smoked meats, smoked “whatever”. Fresh smoke, that is. I can accept the fact that stale smoke is a little, well, stinky. We make hundreds, maybe thousands of products to address that little problem, some of them toxic themselves.

I like to watch smoke. It has a mystical quality.

A little background-for a couple of decades I was a tobacco wholesaler, third generation in my family. Tobacco wasn’t always from the Devil. It was one of the things that made the discovery of the New World cool, an original industry. When I took up tobacco smoking in the early 70s, it was a rite of passage and a peer pressure thing. Lots of people did it. It was acceptable, although I suppose you could make the argument that it was a manufactured acceptable. You can see that in advertising in old magazines.

I had a retail store (often called a headshop) which offered smoking paraphernalia and incense among other things. I insisted upon burning incense constantly in that store which was USUALLY well-received by the clientele, although once in a while somebody would fall down on the floor when they entered due to some reaction they had to that. When I began to ship sales from that store to remote customers, their reaction to the absorbed incense odor was USUALLY favorable except for one guy in Florida who apparently thought incense was from the Devil. Since he was the only customer among thousands who felt that way, I feel pretty safe dismissing his opinion.

Gradually, tobacco smoking fell out of favor (although millions still do it). There were health issues. Everyone developed allergies to tobacco smoke. It became ok to rudely wave your arms around in the air near smokers and insist that they move away, even outdoors (I speak from experience).

Cannabis smoke sort of went through an opposite evolution. When us future yuppies discovered that one in college and in the military and at parties in the early 70s, it was essential to hide the odor from the git-go, largely because it was illegal behavior. There were no contentions that it was a health issue although it has undergone a reverse evolution and become a PRO-health thing. The usual procedure was to stuff a towel under door between the room and the hallway and/or use some kind of air freshener and/or incense to mask or confuse the issue. While I’m not trying to advocate using the stuff here, its use has become much more open and I have to admit that when I’m at musical events and the lights go down and that “cloud” appears, I personally find it somewhat pleasant in an olfactory way. I can’t say I’ve ever experienced the “second-hand” high some people will refer to.

Wood smoke, like campfire smoke, as far as I know, is ok. I don’t see or hear many diatribes against it.

As tobacco smoking gradually became unacceptable (despite the millions who still do it), zealots (yeah, I know that’s an emotionally charged word) eventually got it banned from everywhere, with the exception of privately owned automobiles, houses, and (usually) outdoors, although I have been in outdoor places where the activity is also losing the battle. I have no question that “they” will not rest until it is ALSO banned in places where they can’t even detect it. It’s just an unforgivable sin. A certain kind of unrighteousness.

Now, if you’re called out for smoking, it seems to be license for the caller-outer (apologies for manufacturing words) to be rude. There’s the ubiquitous arm-waving, and the claims of allergies, and open contempt that isn’t usually tolerated among otherwise polite people.

We recently had a woman in our house shrieking so loudly about the smoke seconds after she walked in that she woke me up from a deep sleep in the room upstairs. That’s in OUR house where it’s begrudgingly ok until somebody can figure out how to stop us. And the offending smoker had only been at it for a few minutes.

Since it hasn’t been quite possible to ban smoking from all of outdoors, that’s where the smokers are. It IS possible to ban it even outdoors on certain properties, and I have been known to hike to the edge of somebody’s property to do it in order to avoid their interference. A couple of those hikes have been rather long, if the property was large. The thing is: as us smokers huddle in our designated area, or maybe better referred to as being outside of the controlled area, we socialize. A typical conversation, at least where I live, starts with “gee, it’s cold out here, isn’t it?” But the conversation usually evolves into whatever fits into the time it takes to “hot-box” a cigarette. That can be about twice as long if you smoke what I do, which are classified as little cigars, which evade the ridiculous taxes heaped upon the traditional brands because they don’t have the chemicals added to the tobacco or the papers which make “regular” cigarettes burn themselves even if no one is smoking them. Those chemicals, by the way, comprise a large part of the odor Nobody Likes. Those taxes are often called “sin tax”, something designed to make logical people stop doing something that someone else doesn’t like.

Those little conversations are usually quite cordial. Little civilities in a world that now doesn’t usually promote exchanging little civilities. That’s because we have an instant commonality-we’re perceived lepers, banished from regular society until we “put that damn thing out”.

We disapprove of all kinds of “sin”. But we usually provide a place for committing the sin (yeah, I’m talking about drinking, but I’m not willing to defend my stance on that here). Not for inhaling smoke. I THINK it’s ok to do it in private smoking clubs, but I’m not sure. We don’t have those where I live. It’s no longer ok to do it in bars, for example, even though a certain percentage of people in there are going to cause all kinds of societal havoc from doing what they’re doing.

Why is that?

Well, besides the argument that I usually encounter-everyone is now allergic or will be killed by the second-hand smoke, it’s the odor. I don’t particularly like many kinds of odors designed to be pleasurable to people (perfumes, colognes), or necessary (packing plants) or odor from lakes filled with run-off fertilizers or from garbage, but they’re not usually illegal. A few corporate farmers are subject to this, and they know what I’m talking about when I refer to illegal odors, but other than those guys, nobody specifies that some odors are not allowed ANYWHERE.

I don’t come into your house and shriek and wave my arms around if I don’t like your pet odor.

Why is it all right to be rude to tobacco smokers? Because they’re stupid and should know better, and all forms of manners are just waived when they’re detected? We shovel millions and millions of dollars into Federal and state treasuries. Why ISN’T there a designated public place for our behavior? We haven’t been eradicated-we’re just hiding. We’re not a small population even though the righteous would like us to be.

OK, I can actually anticipate the answers-I’ve heard them. There’s the burden of caring for us while we kill ourselves, the terrible nuisance of our litter, the fires we start (really?), cleaning up the stuff we discolor, and yada yada ad infinitum. But you don’t catch us trying to obliterate your fast food joints filled with people intent upon killing themselves, or trying to ban THAT litter (although some cities might be trying-I don’t happen to live in such an enlightened place), or objecting to the public expense of trying to put out the fires in the houses people burn down with their space heaters.

Maybe it’s not such a bad world though. Right after we get done agreeing with the other stranger that “yes, it IS cold out here”, a downright pleasurable social exchange generally ensues: “where are you from, what do you do, how about the news today?”: little conversations that used to spontaneously happen everywhere. It’s a social thing that just doesn’t happen anymore because strangers don’t generally stand in the same place longer than a few seconds and because strangers don’t generally even speak unless they bang their shopping carts into one another which will often result in “excuse me”, or at least it does in the rural midwest where I live. We can’t type into our telephones while we’re holding that “cancer stick” (well, I can, but the accomplished lip dangle is also frowned-upon and anyway, I don’t have one of those telephones).

So, come to think of it, I guess I’ll “settle”. I’ll go stand outside until THAT’S illegal and then I’ll stay inside until you put a camera in there and make me stop and I’ll talk to the other guys who are doing the same thing about the persecution which we endure in common.

You may now judge, I’m done. Be as rude as you like, but know that us smokers USUALLY don’t talk like that about you.

Audacity Waveform for Emerson Lake Palmer / Works side 1

Notes From Saturday In The Park, Sioux City, 7/5/14

I’m a senior citizen:
I never think to ask, but I got a discount for the shuttle bus from the Tyson event center to the venue because I’m a senior citizen. The woman who took my money said she just had a sense for that sort of thing.

Tobacco is getting really hard to smoke:
Anywhere, even outdoors. I was caught five minutes after arrival. Thanks to the guys manning the Coke truck for letting me smoke there.

You can’t be a 60 year old hippie unless you are a 60 year old hippie:
Over time, the ranks have thinned at events like this. There were guys older than me, guys who might have been hippier than me, but not many. We now nod knowingly to each other without introductions.

People really like my Gypsy Rose dashiki:
As in previous years, numerous strangers liked my shirt. I didn’t see another one. These are still readily available from Gypsy Rose. They’re the only way to go on sweltering days.

Rainy Day Music made a lasting impression:
It might have been only one guy, but he went out of his way to say he loved Rainy Day when it operated. There were three of us veterans of that era in our group.

Boss Hog Beef Brisket is really good:
If you’re in Sioux City, go there, get that.

Grateful Dead are fading:
I only saw three Dead t-shirts at the event. There was nobody associated with them performing, but that’s still a really low number.

Bottled water is difficult math:
I don’t buy water. I know where to get it for nothing. But not at sweltering events where everything is controlled. I bought a 20 ounce bottle for three dollars and a 24 ounce bottle for two dollars. I am still baffled by that math.

Bands:

Wild Feathers:
Just guitars, harmonies, and good writing. These guys are going places. Buy the album. Available on LP.

Ziggy Marley:
Longest hair in the business, dreads well past his knees. Great sound, flawless delivery, oddly the crowd behaved, probably because it wasn’t dark yet.

Bonnie Raitt:
Wonderfully humble (“I used to think I was really hot until right now”), don’t buy the records, catch her live. The most telling thing about Bonnie’s stunning performance was that her soundboard was analog-the other bands’ were digital. Yes, she did do Angel From Montgomery.

Avett Brothers:
High energy lunatics. All over the place, but weirdly most effective when they did a gospel number. These guys can’t possibly keep it up for thirty years and it’s difficult to understand how the fiddle player and the cello player keep strings on their instruments. At one point the guy running the lights lit the trees beside the stage. Lots of fog.

Fifteen Years at eBay

Today is my fifteenth anniversary at eBay. I had discovered the site in a hotel room using something called Lodgenet (which I think was Webtv for hotels). I knew right away I had to get involved.

I used to run little classified ads in Linn’s Stamp News and enjoyed the trading I did in collectible stamps there, but THIS let a guy use pictures and more words and reach a “worldwide” audience.

Of course, I didn’t have a digital camera, so the pictures were out, and I had to rely on just text, but that’s another story.

After the hotel stay, the following Monday I hightailed it over to the Spencer Public Library since I didn’t have a computer, and used theirs to register. Dewey The Cat, later to be the subject of a New York Times best selling book, watched me do that.

Pick a user name, the thing said. I’m a fan of a band called the Grateful Dead and they had a song called St. Stephen which has a line that goes “one man gathers what another man spills”. I thought that probably fit nicely, so I chose “saintsteven”, a play on my name and that song. It took. I was later to lose the name and had to adopt a variation, but that’s yet another story.

For the first few weeks or maybe months, I was a buyer. I had a little indie record store and I discovered right away that I could buy low at eBay and sell high at the store. The record business is like that, full of folklore about what’s rare and what isn’t. Some titles that sold well in Spencer were plentiful on the internet at low prices. Mason Proffit’s album Wanted comes to mind. It was a hot number in Iowa due to their appearance once at the Wadena Rock Festival, but not particularly difficult to run down at seven or eight dollars at eBay, and it regularly commanded twenty-five in my bins.

One day it occurred to me that *I* could do this stuff. I had records that were picked over and unsold, and I listed a box of bluegrass records at some low price because I couldn’t get a nickel for them in my outlaw hard rock store. Wham! Seventy-some dollars, as I recall. I photographed that guy’s check, minus his contact info and framed it. First Internet dollar.

Since I couldn’t use photos, I had to rely on crafty text, and I didn’t mind that challenge one bit. It became my daily routine to do several write-ups at my store, close it for a few minutes and run over to the library to post the new listings. Stuff sold. You could sell anything there, even though eBay was already four years old. The novelty was powerful.

Eventually the library figured it out, thanks to a newspaper article about the guy who augmented his store sales with this Internet stuff. Dewey The Cat’s author sidled up to me one day while I was posting and said “we couldn’t help but notice that nice article about you in the newspaper”.

I thanked her, thinking that was nice, when she mentioned “But you can’t do that here. Our computers are not for commercial use”. I promised not to do that anymore, trying to figure out a go-around, and the next day when I popped in to check my email, they made it obvious they intended to enforce that rule by peering over my shoulder while I was computing.

I HAD acquired a Webtv unit by that time, or rather, my girlfriend had, but I had to travel forty miles to use it.

Miraculously, Bruce from the Beehive appeared at my counter one day and GAVE me an obsolete computer that was good enough to list via a tool called MisterLister (and a dial up connection), and I could drive the 40 miles and start that stuff in the evening, which I felt was the optimum time to start and end auctions.

That went on for a long time, although he eventually did want that computer back so he could give it to a grand kid. I broke down and rented one, continuing to use the dial up. I probably had a thousand “feed backs” already by that time.

This version is going to leave out a lot of fun details, because I want to compare THAT eBay to today’s eBay.

It was the wild, wild west. Almost anything went. Feedback might have been the backbone of the system, but it wasn’t the stick and carrot that it is today. The unexpected part for me was the community aspect. It wasn’t efficient for me to use the chat boards and the discussion boards while I had a half hour at the library and it took me a while to discover that community. But one Saturday night I saw Alicia Keys (September 29, 2001) and I thought she was pretty good, so I made my first post on the Music Board. It didn’t take long for one of the regulars there to tell me Alica Keys was terrible. That fascinated me and I vowed to not let him get away with that. Eventually we became fast friends, ultimately meeting at West Bend where he and his wife were traveling on a vacation that included lots of visits to rock places (the geologic kind, not the music kind).

But back to then versus now. There was no PayPal. There WAS the ubiquitous feedback, but it wasn’t as detailed as it is today and it was really ONLY for the buyer to assess a seller (and vice versa), not a weapon for The Venue to control sellers’ behavior.

There were no Buy It Nows, no Stores. And for me, no pictures, although I did eventually figure out how to get my film digitized (thank you Seattle Filmworks), so if you could write cleverly, it was a powerful tool. I specialized in thorough descriptions with a large pinch of irreverence, often making light fun of the Thing I was selling.

It worked. I was in heaven. I sold records, CD’s, other commercial stuff I could replace through the store’s vendors and even sticks and rocks and found objects, and even the styrofoam packing peanuts some of my shipments were packed in.

Eventually, by 2001, my online sales outstripped my counter sales. I made that fateful decision: pack up the store and take it all home, which I did early in 2002.

From that point, things became a little less fun. Kind of serious, in fact, since the mortgage payment and grocery bill now relied strictly on those sales and my supply of record collections that USED to walk through the door weekly dried up.

Still, it worked, and I racked up around a thousand feed backs a year.

Things loped along until 2008. Then something terrible happened. Management at eBay changed. I had sold my house and moved three years prior to that because the bank was getting a little uptight about me and my late payments, and I had also launched my own site at the same time. Good thing too, because the new management (hired from Bain & Co), hated the “flea market”.

I have never figured out how he got the stockholders to embrace that concept, but he did. They began tightening down the screws. I had created an eBay Store, with some 750 items, mostly because they made it incredibly attractive to do that, but it didn’t take very long for them to create a buyer-vs-seller dichotomy. New rules upon rules became rampant, fee structures bounced around wildly, and by 2010, The Purge was in full swing. Whatever seemed broken to insiders at eBay was the sellers’ faults. I found myself violating rule after rule that I had never heard of, even though I never did (even to this day) anger any buyers badly enough to draw a “negative”. Well, yes, there WERE a couple of negatives, but they were from kooks and kids and I managed to get them removed.

By the Fall of 2010, it had become intolerable and I closed the store, moved it to my own site and never regretted that. I did continue to list, even to this day, because I had a partner feeding me antiques to sell and paying me a commission for those sales that I didn’t care to give up. But I stopped enjoying it-it had become a “business”, the thing I was trying to avoid. I was trying to have a good time.

It’s been love/hate since then. Even though us sellers are the scourge of the site, somehow endangering the executives’ multimillion dollar deals, I’ve continued, but these days I have to drag myself to the keyboard to do it. I’m not crazy; I don’t want to walk away from the money, which in reality is so far below poverty level that I qualify for all kinds of government assistance I don’t actually use.

It looks a LITTLE like they might lighten up a bit this year. Now those of us who sell “collectibles” have a new deal, and now we have SOME protection against rogue feed back which increased dramatically when sellers could only leave buyers one kind (good). I have long wondered why sellers can leave any feed back at all, and I’ll bet money by next January that they won’t be able to. That’s fine, it’s a pain to meticulously go in there and leave every trading partner the same thing. I’ve used canned feed back for years and years now, since it’s meaningless when it’s from seller.

eBay seemed so obsessed with becoming Amazon Junior that I’ve flirted with Amazon for several years now, cutting out the middleman. Amazon has never hard-assed me at all, except I can’t sell toys during Christmas time because I don’t have enough of a track record.

But my real love is my own site, saintstevensthingery.com. Too bad I’m not a better code writer, it’s not real flashy, but it does some business. And it doesn’t concentrate on commodity junk like both eBay and Amazon do. Personally more fulfilling.

I owe eBay a lot, mostly from eye-opening. It’s a bigger world out there than I had ever imagined. If Mason Proffit’s album never WAS particularly hard-to-find, it’s also true that Things mundane to American me are quite highly sought by International buyers. Today, since I’m actually retired, the money thing is not very important anymore, but the citizen-of-the-world thing is priceless.

I’ll probably continue at eBay, at least as long as my partner in antiques wants to, but at least for this horse, the carrot and stick technique just isn’t going to work anymore.

I didn’t even thoroughly read the August update, where they start punishing people for “defects” that drive buyers from THEIR site. Their site was not built by committees and lawyers, it was built by guys like me. They can have what it has become. I thought I ran away from that once anyway, when I bailed from the brick-and-mortar and the landlord.

Like Neil Young said in his album Greendale,

Got to get past
The negative thing
The lawyers and business
You get what you bring
No one’s sorry
You did it yourself
It’s time to relax now
And then give it hell