Probably one of my favorite psych LP covers of all time. And one of my best record finds of the year. A couple of weeks ago I was out and about and hit a local thrift store. Apparently I had gotten there just in time. They seemed to be doing a little housecleaning and had stuffed all of their vinyl in a shopping cart which was sitting off in a lonely little dirty corner of the store. On top of the stack I spied some old psych records - none were incredibly rare but excited me nonetheless to have found. Among them was If, Zephyr, Vanilla Fudge, It's A Beautiful Day, Spooky Tooth, The Plastic Ono Band, Fleetwood Mac (pre-Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham), Cream, Canned Heat and Various Artists - The Naked Carmen, whose back cover consisted of cigar bands with marijuana references. Granted, not all of these are psychedelic bands but for $1.00, you can't beat the price.
Competition today is fierce and finding anything at thrift stores has become a great challenge for me so any score, particularly of some of these bands, is rare at best. But I don't remember seeing 13th Floor Elevators "The Psychedelic Sounds of" LP among the stack. I came back a week later and there on the bottom of the stack was the record. The cover is in pretty good condition, the vinyl looks pretty beat but still very playable and enjoyable due to the lovely cracks and pops that emanate from the speakers mixed in with the Elevators' acid dropping sounds.
After doing a bit of reading, I did find that it is apparently a bit rare, at least according to the Goldmine Price Guide I have in my possession. Don't get me wrong, I do not put too much faith in price guides per se, but seeing that it apparently had a decently sizeable high price, it looks to be kinda hard to find these days. In any case, I'm glad to own it no matter its condition.
And my ol' buddy, Nathan Nothin', over at Nothin' Sez Somethin' has a blog you should always pay attention to, and especially right now as he's been posting some great old psych records. And of course I love reading his posts - pretty much anything he writes.So this post goes out to him. Maybe he gave me some good luck in finding some of these psych records, especially the 13th Floor Elevators.
And still to this day, I get a little twinge of regret for not grabbing The Seeds LP I saw in a stack at Goodwill about 5 years ago. The record was beat but the cover was still acceptable. It was only a dollar. What was I thinking?
Posts
