CHAPTER TWELVE

GEEKERY IN THE U.K.

There are domestic records, and there are imported records—except in England, where it’s the other way around (thank you, Bob & Doug McKenzie). Many of us who grew up as Beatles nuts remember those magic words that were in the upper-right-hand corner of every Beatles record: “Recorded in England.”

The Beatles turned me into a record geek, and they’ve reminded me over the years that I still am one. This became glaringly apparent when I went to my first and only Beatles convention in the early ’90s. I wasn’t there just to spend money or to gawk at pristine “butcher” covers and old Apple labels: I wanted to hang out with the truly diehard, to see those who were more devoted than I’ll ever be. The two friends I’d come with had similar agendas. Andrew was barely into his 20s and already an authority on ’60s pop; David was a musician who could play obscure Kinks and Beach Boys songs note-for-note. But we all prided ourselves on having things in proper perspective, never having gone too far over the top.

Here was where we were sure we’d find the people whose addiction would put ours to shame. People staring longingly at those scratched-up ’60s singles and beating a path for the bank machines? Too far gone, we thought smugly. We even saw a few people staring devotedly at four anonymous guys playing in a Beatles tribute band the way kids might look at one of their dad’s friends who turns up in a store wearing a Santa Claus suit. “Get a life,” we sneered under our breath, as somebody made off with the rare 1965 fan magazine that we’d come this close to getting for ourselves.

The real attraction for us was a question-and-answer session with Harry Nilsson, the legendary songwriter who was a favorite of the Beatles, a drinking partner of John Lennon’s, and the writer of many cult hits. Sadly, this turned out to be his last public appearance before his death in 1993. He looked heavier than we remembered, but it was enough to hear traces of Nilsson’s singing voice when he answered a question. He was a notoriously stage-frightened performer, and he never gave a full concert. Most of the questions concerned his drinking days during Lennon’s “lost weekend,” but we were more interested in asking about the stories behind some early, pre-stardom singles he’d made that we were always fond of. “God knows,” he responded. “I was probably just trying to get on the hit parade.” Yes, it seemed we were more interested in this particular artist’s music than the artist himself.

Our last stop was a Beatles trivia contest, which we thought would provide another opportunity to sneer at the truly devoted. But we were surprised at how easy the questions were, and more astounded that none of these other diehards knew the answers. The chart single released by a Beatle without the rest of the band? Well, that would be the Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance” … but everybody knew that, right? Song originally known as “Scrambled Eggs”? That, of course, was “Yesterday” … grade-school stuff, for sure. We were now beginning to get admiring looks from the shady folks in Beatles wigs that we’d been chuckling at.

At least we felt sure we’d he eliminated by the tiebreaker question: Name three Beatles’s songs that include a count from one to four. The first was easy: everybody knows that count of “One-two-three-FAH!” that begins “I Saw Her Standing There,” one of Paul’s most manic moments. For some reason the second popped into my mind as well: the count from one to seven, followed by “All good children go to heaven”—the lovely and spooky outro to “You Never Give Me Your Money.” But we were stuck for the third, and I absently muttered “One, two, three, four …” “ … Can I have a little more,” chimed in Dave. Of course: the counting lyric of “All Together Now.” Much to our embarrassment, we won. And we made our way sheepishly to the front of the room to pick up our prizes: color posters of original album covers.

Obviously in disgrace, we made our way to the exit door, all the while getting besieged by folks who acted as though we were surrogate Beatles ourselves. “So have you ever heard the Electric Oz Band single that John produced?” asked a gentleman in horn-rim glasses. “Never heard of it!” I stammered on the way out. (The correct answer would have been, “uh, yes.”) “Look, we’re all normal!” David said, just out of earshot. “We all have jobs, and we’ve all had relationships with women!” It was no avail: we were exposed as the biggest Beatles nerds in greater Los Angeles—for that weekend, anyhow.

 

 

September 1975. I’m three months out of high school, hitting London on a study-abroad program. For the first time in my life, I can do anything I please. My parents are a continent away, and nobody can stop me from seeking out sex, drugs or whatever I please. I’ve just turned eighteen and I’m totally free. I figure it took me forty-five minutes to find a good record store.

Beginning with my preteen Beatles fixation, I’d long assumed that the records that came from England were the most exotic ones. At home in the States, you could only get them from stores that were hip enough to have an “import” section, they had sleeker covers, thick plastic bags, and sold for a buck more than regular discs (this would have been a whopping $5.50 in those days). Before punk rock reared its head, the import bin was full of art-rock weirdness—Tangerine Dream, Mike Oldfield, Guru Guru, and Nektar, all with the obligatory sci-fi conceptual covers. You didn’t even need to hear the things—and I still haven’t heard a note of Guru Guru—just browsing them was an adventure. Was there really a country full of people who listened to this stuff? The twin offensives of synth-pop and MTV cured some of my Anglophilic tendencies in later years, but I’ll still seek out anything Paul Weller, Robyn Hitchcock or Andy Partridge had the slightest thing to do with.

I recall the first record I saw that came from another country. In sixth grade a classmate had the Canadian version of “One” by Three Dog Night. For starters, it was more exotic because it was on RCA—and not even the standard RCA label, but a bright red variation that had the dog along the side instead of on top—rather than the pale-gray Dunhill label everybody else had. When I played it, I had another surprise. Instead of fading out like it did on the radio, it came to a cold ending with a long, sustained chord. (In retrospect, big deal: The Canadians had just used the slightly longer album version instead of the standard single version.) When I told my classmates about my amazing discovery, the universal, across-the-board response was “Huh?”—and I have yet to see any of them at record shows. For myself, I’d found the thrill of having something, even just a minor variation, that everybody else ain’t got.

The English record bins were full of items like that. I made my way to a store in Soho, making a point to find a store in Brighton just so I could quote the obvious Who line (though, after all this time, I haven’t got the heart). Whoever ran the store was playing an album by a folksinger with a distinctively weird howl in his voice (one of the earlier, less polished, Roy Harper albums), and the records in the bins were even more exotic than the imports at home. I’d heard “Autobahn” on the radio the previous summer, but who knew there existed a whole section of Kraftwerk albums? Or obscure art-rock bands named after Shakespeare’s heroines? (There must be one or two Cressida fans out there somewhere?) the records I found on my first U.K. trip remain some of my most prized possessions—not so much the Pink Floyd singles that I’ve long been sick of, but more outre finds like “Make a Daft Noise for Christmas” by the Goodies, a ridiculous holiday single that I scored at Woolworth’s in Inverness, Scotland, and am proud to stick on party tapes to this day. Sure, Elton John’s “Island Girl” was a hit then, too, but it’s been heard too many times to evoke anything. Cressida or the Goodies will always sound like England in 1975.

 

 

Even though the oddball records will always conjure England for me, I couldn’t find anyone in England who actually listened to them, except for one ethereal girl who said she went home and studied to Tangerine Dream—obviously someone after my own heart. Most of my U.K. classmates listened to the same commercial hits that everyone played in America. I would have loved to find out who my U.K. counterparts were, who were scouring the bins for those weird psychedelic records. And I’ve got one answer: Nick Salamon was.

Salamon is an automatic friend to anyone who’s drooled over eccentric British psychedelic records. As the one-man-band Bevis Frond, he’s made many such records himself, and he can do the music-geek thing with the best. Small example: on the just-released CD reissue of the early Bevis Frond album Triptych there is a track that was never released the first time around—because, the notes say, it was too obviously a Caravan ripoff. (Prog-rock again: Caravan made one of the great lost art-rock albums, In the Land of Grey & Pink.) And that’s part of his worldview in a nutshell: not only would he venture to rip off Caravan, he’d assume that significant numbers of people would notice if he did.

So far he’s managed to enjoy a stable domestic life, despite the fact that he owns four copies of the first Mad River album. He may not be a ’60s relic, but that album certainly is. Mad River was a psychedelic San Francisco band that was darker and doomier than the rest, and their album had a twelve-minute song, “The War Goes On,” that probably caused its share of freakouts at the time. It couldn’t have sold more than a couple thousand copies and, to repeat, Salamon owns four of them. “You ought to see Nick Salamon’s house,” says friend and occasional collaborator Stewart Lee, a novelist and stand up comic. “It’s like a storage facility in there.”

“God, it’s tragic, but I do have my moments of complete nerdism,” Salamon says. “I bought Mad River when it first came out, and then I found a copy in much nicer condition than mine—but I had to keep my original because it was the first copy I owned, and it’s got my name written on it. So that’s two copies on vinyl. Then I had to get the first CD on Edsel, because it was mastered at the right speed—the vinyl was mastered at the wrong speed, so their CD was slowed down to correct it. But that didn’t sound right, because I’d been hearing it at the wrong speed since 1968, so I had to buy another CD with the fast version.

“So now I’m here with four copies, when I know that one would have sufficed. And I’m there saying, ‘Why am I buying this? I’ve already got it!’ But I know I’m just a mark punter and I don’t really care,” he says, his English colloquialisms coming out as he shows his true colors. “I know that as soon as they invent another format, I’ll go out and buy another copy of the first H.P. Lovecraft record—there’s another one that I have three copies of, because the first CD was mastered off a not-very-good-condition record. But it drags on, doesn’t it? I’ve sold a lot of records, but the only ones I could bear to part with are the ones I didn’t really like in the first place. If I do like it, I’ll keep buying it again. So, yeah, I’ll be there in ten years buying a surround audio DVD of Savage Resurrection.” (Another obscure cult classic of psychedelia; from a California band whose one album includes a thing in E titled, uh, “Thing in E”.)

The people who’ve met Salamon over the years aren’t exactly shocked to find out that he’s a record collector, especially if they already know he’s a musician. “New acquaintances might be a bit taken aback to see my collection. But because I have longish hair and don’t have a regular job, I’m seen as the old hippie geek anyhow. So it’s expected that I should have a pile of tatty vinyl.” This he does—about six thousand albums and singles, some of which he purchased as long ago as 1968. And if that’s a relatively small collection, keep in mind that he’s absorbed and gotten rid of a few times that number over the years.

If a fire were to hit his house, he insists that he wouldn’t immediately start saving records. He’s got a wife, kid and a couple of cats who get priority. After that, however, the vintage 45s would likely be the next thing to be rescued. “Those British psychedelic singles are my favorites, and they’re really hard to find now. And it has to be the originals instead of the reissues because … Oh God, because they’re nicer. They’re the real thing, and that means there’s something special about them. The point is that when they were put out, they weren’t released as collectible artifacts. They were released as a current band doing what it did, and putting its single in the shop. People would say, ‘Oh, I’ll buy that single, Dad,’ and they’d take the little record home and put it on their little turntable. For the band it was, ‘Look, this is what we do, here it is.’ I like that they were done with that in mind, not with any thought of the collector value. If you find it on a reissue, it comes in a package with a lot of words, some bogus description of how it will blow your mind. Not that I don’t like a nice archival thing, but it just wasn’t done for the same reason as the original—it’s not a band putting forward its work, it’s a company finding a niche in the market. So you might as well be asking why someone would want an original painting and not a print. It looks the same, but it ain’t the same.”

This outburst comes after he’s spent most of an hour insisting that he doesn’t really collect. But we’ve touched a nerve, and the truth comes out. “You regulate what you take in. It’s like drinking too much—I do like a drink now and then, but I don’t get pissed all the time. Same way with music: I listen all the time but I don’t sit there with my eyes spinning, having had an overdose of Ultimate Spinach.” (Hippie-ish band from Boston, made three albums that were truly over-the-top, achieving a lysergic silliness that would be well-nigh impossible today, at least without irony. To find out if you’re truly into this kind of music, their “Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess” would make a fine acid test, pun intended.) “Their first two albums were really good in a cheesy kind of way,” he says, detecting a bit of disbelief from his interviewer.

Salamon’s the first to admit that fans of his own music probably share his mindset. No slouch as a songwriter or guitarist, he’s one of indie rock’s most prolific figures. Most Bevis Frond albums are eighty-minute epics, often done with nobody else’s help. In the youth and fashion-obsessed world of modern rock, he’s an anomaly. Having rounded fifty and never lost his fascination with ’60s music, he’s seen less as a throwback than as a genuine psychedelic figure of the present day. Though he can write a spiffy pop song when the mood strikes, the real payoff of a Bevis Frond show comes when he dashes one of his trademark ten-minute guitar solos, letting the spirit of those long-forgotten ’60s bands come out to play.

Being an artist and a collector have gone hand in hand, since he picked up a guitar as a preteen and gave his grade-school audience a version of Brian Hyland’s “Ginny Come Lately”—a song that was never a mainstream hit in any country. “Creating music and listening to it, to me they’re not different things, and one doesn’t get in the way of the other. Every time I hear something I like I go off and write my own version of it, which I hope winds up sounding like me. For me it’s like relaxation. I come home, put my feet up and write a song. I could write three songs a day for the rest of my life, and I probably will.”

He’s also an anomaly among record collectors, since he’s apparently never sacrificed anything—other than a few quid for Mad River reissues—to feed his lifestyle. He hasn’t had to worry about carting his collection around, since he’s had the same London residence for the past twenty-two years. He’s had the same best friends for even longer: he and two friends still have pieces of a record collection that they pooled in the ’60s. “There was my mate Kevin and my mate Mick, two guys I’m still in touch with; in fact, I just went to Kev’s fiftieth birthday party. In the ’60s we used to pool our money together every week, buy an album between us, then go round to somebody’s house and decide who wanted what. That way we could pool ten shillings each and have something new every week from a store in Church Street Market where albums cost one pound ten shillings.”

While he’s acquired and shed a few collections since then, those formative purchases remain prized possessions. “I started buying records in 1958, when I was five. I grew up in the center of London, where there were always stores that sold televisions and radios, then you’d go to the back of the shop where the record collection was. I was nine when the Beatles came out, but before that I was buying American stuff—the Chantays, the Surfaris, the Crickets. All the stuff that was really influential when I started, I’ve never gotten rid of. That Johnny Duncan & the Bluegrass Boys EP I bought in 1958—still got that. And my copy of With the Beatles, the one with my name written in a childish hand on the back. Those are the important artifacts, because it’s the same for all of us—those were the really formative years. You’re a teenager, you’re growing up, so those are more than just ephemeral things. And I can still play all of mine, because I’m a bit of an archivist. I grew up with my mum and I knew I had to take care of my stuff, because if I lost it I’d never have it again.”

My real discovery, however, is that he could well have been the guy servicing those remote English record bins that I used to browse. Before he began making records, he worked as a dealer. And being just a little obsessed meant that he could sell choice items to people who were a whole lot obsessed. “I didn’t like my job and I did like records, so I made a point of combining the two. I went to a few record conventions and was looking at the prices, thinking, ‘Jesus, I can pick this stuff up for next to nothing.’ If you’ve been buying records all your life, you tend to know what’s sought after and what isn’t. I specialized in psychedelia, which was what I was fondest of and what I knew the most about. If you’ve been into something for the best part of your life, you tend to know a bit about it. And in the early ’80s that was pretty much an untapped area. Everybody was into rock ’n’ roll and punk, but nobody was touching psychedelic or progressive rock. So I could buy albums with a Vertigo swirl [the dizzying design on a fondly-remembered ’70s label] for a quid and sell them off for seven. I’d go around to all the shops I knew in southeast England—Friday I’d be in Nottingham and Saturday I’d be in Southampton. Much to my amazement I made about three times as much selling records as I could working. Halcyon days, mate.”

Only trouble was that he wound up taking home nearly as many discs as he sold. “You know how it is—you see a nice record going for a pound and you think, ‘Oh, that’s nice. I’ll take that.’ So I went through a period of getting everything, but I was always torn. After six months I’d realize that I didn’t like something that much after all. You start to wonder if you really need an album by the Bakerloo Blues Line [a British R&B band who never caught on]. So I wound up cutting my collection down pretty drastically. But let’s face it, records and music have been with me since I was a little boy, and they’ll be with me when I’m an old man.”

Did we just hear him say he wasn’t a real collector? Well, up to a point. “I’ve always felt there’s more to life than records. I do love them, but I like other things in life as well. I think there are people who are into music above anything else, and I think they need to get out more.”

Or maybe we can just visit our friends’ houses, because sometimes it seems that there’s only one record collection, and everyone who collects winds up sharing the same items. Case in point: Stewart Lee is a good ten years younger, and doesn’t make his living in the music business. He didn’t start collecting until the ’80s, and it was new wave and ska singles that initially looped him in. Two-Tone records was going strong at the time, so Lee was buying those Specials and Selecter singles when he was ten. So he grew up in a slightly different era with different reference points—but you visit his house and you’ll still find some of the same psychedelic/art-rock records that I used to chase down, for all I know, maybe some of the same copies. just goes to show, that sometimes all roads lead to Faust. Or to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, a late-’60s outfit beloved by a majority of diehard collectors, and by hardly anybody else.

“There’s got to be a shared sensibility among people who are curious, that you find that the same things are valuable,” he notes. “You listen to that much music, you ultimately reach the point where you know what the good stuff is. Someone who collects records all their lives will end up being a Bob Dylan fan—I mean, there’s something objectively great about Bob Dylan, and it always comes down to that.” But the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band? “The point with that is, it was the first psychedelic record I ever heard—‘The Spell of Incense.’ Andy Kershaw played it on the radio in 1983. That got me into ’60s music, one of the ultimate destinations of the record collector. Only trouble was that when the single finally turned up, it was only two minutes thirty seconds, edited down from the six glorious minutes on the album. I could spend a lifetime hunting that kind of thing, and I don’t care if it’s the original single or a reissue—long as I get to hear it.”

Only trouble is that you can’t be rational and still be a collector. Look hard enough at your own collection and you’re guaranteed to find some things that nobody in their right mind would own. Lee himself gets hit by this revelation as we’re talking. “Do I really need a boxed set of Pete Seeger’s American folk songs for children? You can hang on to things for sentimental value, but I’m here looking at things that I didn’t even like fifteen years ago. The worst part is that there’s really a notion here that you’re putting on some kind of display of your good taste: Look at me, I’m a bit eccentric! I have Pete Seeger’s folk songs, and you can’t pin me down! I’ve seen what happens when collectors go around to each other’s houses, and there’s a territorial sizing up. Okay, so I’m staring at my collection and I see the last Quicksilver Messenger Service album. Why have I got that? It’s really bad.”

Indeed, that Quicksilver album—made when the core members of the band had largely scattered—is probably a blot on an otherwise solid collection. It’s definitely too bad that Lee’s wife couldn’t have brought in a record of real depth and quality—something like “Make a Daft Noise for Christmas.”