Latest Two Used Records...

A few weekends ago I managed to hit the downtown Heritage Antiques parking lot flea market. They hold something like this each spring and fall. I have always found good deals here and in the past I've had some very profitable days when I had a booth selling the cigar box guitars I made. The Heritage Antiques people have been good to me. On a quick walk through this day there were plenty of well organized good records to be found and I limited mice elf to only two and I think I was drawn to these through a cosmic connection. 

In the front you see Al Hirt's "Our Man in New Orleans." It's a 1963 release and this seems to be a rerelease from 1976. Al was a New Orleans fixture, playing trumpet on Bourbon St. and at one time being apart owner of the Saints and performing a few Super Bowl halftime shows. This is a recording of all the traditional jazz favorites but it's in kind of a big band style. Amazingly enough you can still buy this on cd or as an mp3 but used records by the big man are a rich vein of cheap record collecting. They made millions, they sound good, are easy to find and usually the previous owner took good care of them. 

On the cover Al is pictured in front of Jean Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop on the corner of Bourbon and St. Phillip. It might be the oldest building in the French Quarter. It's reported to be the most haunted structure in the Quarter and in the 1940s was a place for the bohemian community which included Noel Coward and Tennessee to hang. By the time I first spotted the place in the early 1980s it looked like a joint where a tourist might pay too much for a drink so that day I located my operation a few blocks over to a dark, quiet, mostly empty watering hole whose name long escapes me. I did not see any bohemians there but I did not want to be bothered.   

The other record is Parliament's Motor Booty Affair. It's a George Clinton project from 1978. This record had two Number #1 Billboard singles come off of it. Bootsy Collins who (linked is part of the show we saw) we saw at Riot Fest a few years ago and his brother Catfish play on the record. The cut out paper doll stand up characters, art work by Overton Loyd are all still intact. I wish I had been into this kind of music when it came out but my shell like ears lumped it in with disco. The disco joints in east Texas usually required nice pants for entry in the late 1970s and as I had had a bad experience with nice pants in the third grade or something the scene was a turn off. This music is really what they call funk and it's good. Later I would learn more about it in New Orleans    

Maybe That's the cosmic connection is that Al is from New Orleans, like on the album cover I only stood outside Jean Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, I learned more about funk there and some years ago we did see George Clinton play live in New Orleans. I swear I wrote a blog post, and everything and had some photos of  had photos of Diaper Man who was still alive at the time. 

Good thing there are records, lots of them and if someone turned up that blog post I would invite you to a quiet bar afew blocks over from somewhere.