We are in a strange place, the likes of which we couldn’t have imagined back in the day. Every bit of music is available to us immediately, even if you want vinyl, Amazon will deliver it to you the next day. For the majority of our lives, you couldn’t have done that. I remember you could order records from HMV and certainly from independent retailers. They’d ring you up when it was in.
Sometimes though, a record was deleted and couldn’t be ordered. In those situations you had to trawl the secondhand shops until you found it.
This is the situation I found myself in. I had fixated on getting hold of a copy of Chicago at Carnegie Hall. It’s a four record box set. I love live records and quadruples were unheard of, so I had to have it. It had come out in 1971 and made #3 on the Billboard charts. But it hadn’t charted in the UK and by the late 70s when I was trying to get it, I couldn’t find it anywhere. CBS must have deleted it. I couldn’t order it from anyone. And because it hadn’t sold in the UK there weren't any second hand copies around.
Remember when you got the vinyl itch? That overpowering desire to get a record. And in my first year at college, as you might expect, I carried around a sheet of A4 with a list of albums I needed on and top of that list was the Chicago box set. You need a list if you’re a serious collector, there’s no way you can retain all the info. People laugh at you for being nerdy, but I didn’t care. I loved that list until it fell apart.
But I couldn’t find it anywhere. I was picking up rare albums all the time but this one evaded me, so much so that after about three years, I gave up. I left it off my list. It was so unattainable that there was no point.
And I went through the 80s and 90s - 20 years - still not seeing it, but not even trying anymore. It was like this until the early 2000’s when I wasn’t looking for it, I saw a copy for sale on eBay and the old itch was reawakened. The trouble is, in 2002, I had a rule: I didn’t buy records online. It seemed like cheating to me. You should hunt records down and trust in the random nature of it to be provident. And I do still feel like that, even though I do now buy records from Discogs. It isn’t anywhere near as satisfying as coming across something in a junk store.
Anyway, I couldn’t buy it online but I added it back on my list again. But it was still elusive. As you can imagine I was at car boots, in junk stores and record shops all the time but it still remained elusive until 2015. As usual, I was poking around charity shops. I lived in a rather desirable part of Edinburgh at the time. People travelled all across the city to go to the charity stores because such high quality goods were donated by the locals. I think it was a British Heart Association shop, where I had previously got The Strawbs. ‘Just a Collection of Antiques and Curios’. I was just thumbing through the usual dross, on my rounds around the six charity stores, not expecting to find anything worthwhile, I flicked past favourites like Paul Young’s No Parlez and Leo Sayer’s Just A Boy… and there it was. I didn’t even recognise it at first. I thought it was a classical music box set and I went right past it. I reached the end of the rack and flicked back to see if I’d missed anything and at that point it registered with me. £5 and it was mine in really good condition. I was numb and could hardly believe it. 36 years of searching and it was here at last.
I took it home and played it. It was/is superb. And now things get weird. I was on my laptop, writing one of my novels, listening to it, when Robert, my editor, who knew of my journey with this album, emailed me to tell me he’d picked up a copy of the album and had sent it from America for me! I was stunned within half an hour, the record I’d so long wanted had turned up twice!
So now I have a UK and a USA copy of the album on my shelves and I can finally cross it off my list. It just shows, keep looking, don’t give up, sometime, somewhere it will turn up. I looked for Blues Project albums on Bleeker Street in New York but didn’t find any despite the being recorded nearby, but I got them half a mile from where I lived. So you never know and that is what drives us all on. You just never know.
