Be bold.
Be brave.
Be frugal.
Good advice for troubled economic times is also good advice for the Cambridge Day Record Store Day Walk.
If you’re one of the beautiful initiates who will be touring our local record stores on Saturday to join friends, neighbors and fellow crate diggers in celebration of the internationally recognized Record Store Day, know that you’re also exercising a particularly New England virtue: thrift.
I have all the proof I need in arm’s reach with a shelf of vinyl as tall as Kristaps Porziņģis that keeps me company as I write these words. The collection is a product of decades of record hunting. It was assembled on the back of two passions. A love of music, of course. But also a great appreciation for a good bargain. How many of these albums were discovered in the $5, $3 and $1 bins? Too many to count.
Here are some general tips on finding great value, whether you’re hunting vinyl, CDs or tapes.
First, the sine qua non, the store must have a used section. All the locations highlighted on our Record Store Day Walk buy and sell used records except one (have a look at the list of stores at the info page and take a wild guess which). All the best crate digging happens in the used section. If you can fill out your shopping cart with a few steals there, you’ll feel a lot better about opening up the wallet for a recent release or reissue from the new section.
Second, buy low. Is that too obvious? The reputational value of artists and albums, and their related resale value, rise and fall like shares in a normal (read: not Trumpian) stock market. No-brainer blue chip artists from Bob Dylan to Madonna all slip into the void of irrelevance periodically. Record stores respond by dropping them into the bargain bins. Be ready to pounce, because when the Massive Music Marketing Machine decides you should care about their music again, you will, and there will only be pricey reissues for sale.
Third, take chances. With used records, your misses are small losses and your hits are big wins.
If you’re addicted to big name artists, you might luck into a bargain with their lesser known studio albums or live albums. People especially seem scared off by live albums. Not sure why. The ones worth reselling are expertly recorded sessions that show your favorite artists in their best light, delivering the music with a kind of personality and warmth that is mostly unattainable in a studio setting. My favorite Joni Mitchell record is a live album recorded at the Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles in 1974. Great sound, great crowd work, and she’s dropping stone cold Joni wisdom throughout the set.
Take a leap of faith with lesser known artists. Like a good wine shop or bookshop, record stores are repositories of taste, and connoisseurship is built into the collection. Rebel against the monstrous algorithms that make our musical tastes homogenous. Trust the erudition of the inventory buyer to discover entirely new strata of rock, jazz and pop to enjoy. Ever heard of the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Buffy Sainte-Marie or O.C. Smith? I hadn’t until I fished them out of the bargain bin. Now they’re on my regular playlist.
I’ll be out there Saturday, digging through the crates, looking for my next O.C. Smith. I can’t afford much extravagance in these blessed times of economic peril, but I can afford that. I hope you’ll join me. And if you’re looking for extra savings, pick up a specially marked issue (look for the Hump Nights stamp!) of The Week by Cambridge Day at Planet Records, Cheapo Records, Vinyl Index or Big Dig Records, good for reduced admission to the $10 punk show at Cambridge Community Center after the walk.
Hit this
Friday and Saturday: Dark Spring Boston (Sonia/Middle East, Cambridge)
Whence the darkness? Somewhere in the fertile overlap of the Venn diagram of postpunk, goth,\ and clubby new wave, Dark Spring Boston sows its seed. Gross! The booking outfit (and way of life) has been manifesting as both annual fests and assorted one-off shows for years. The ambience shares some energy with Somergloom, but you can trust there will be more synths pulsing and pounding and pullulating on top of a drum machine. Because at the end of the day – [takes massive drag off a clove cigarette] – we all just want to dance.
Saturday: Jade Dust, Pushback, P.V., Homeworld (Cambridge Community Center, Cambridge)
RIP Al Barile of SSD. The local punk legend passed away on Sunday. The guitarist was instrumental in establishing the bona fides of the Boston hardcore scene in the ’80s. Underground music has since blossomed and branched out in a million different directions. But the fact that four punk acts are putting on a show at a community center in Cambridge on Saturday for a measly $10 is a good reminder that the roots of the local scene that Barile helped establish still go deep. Doors at 5, show at 6, bring a specially marked issue of The Week for reduced admission to this capper at the end of the Cambridge Day Record Store Day Walk.
Sunday: Paul Karsen, Zazu Noir, Led The Collective, Fuego (The Jungle, Somerville)
Heartbreak rules everything around me. The co-presenter is a label (Heartbreak Records), a media outlet (Heartbreak News) and puts on the occasional showcase. That’s a full plate. The bill at the former police car garage spotlights rapper and label staple Paul Karsen, along with other local hip-hop talents. Karsen’s latest release “Yoye” flips the dial between lyrical braggadocio and hip-hop theater. I don’t think his song “Get The Paper” is about Cambridge Day, but you never know.
Live: The Natalie Dietrich Boston return show
The vibes were good.
The vibraphone was even better.
That’s right, a real groaner to start this live review. But it fits, because the atmosphere at Natalie Dietrich’s afternoon of music at The Lilypad was laidback, congenial, and more like a room of old friends trading inside jokes than anything like a stiff recital. Since the show marked a kind of musical reunion of the vibraphonist with her old pals at Berklee College of Music, the afternoon was all of the above.
Dietrich led a quartet through the set with her vibraphone. The instrument, if you’ve never seen one up close, belongs to the percussion family and consists of a long series of variously sized metal bars struck with mallets to produce a sound with punch and oblong character. She held as many as four mallets at once, splayed between her fingers to strike multiple bars simultaneously. And no square inch of the surface area of the vibraphone was out of bounds: Dietrich beat the top, the sides, and the underbelly of the instrument to squeeze out conventional and unconventional sounds alike.
Hiro Honshuku joined her on flute, Oscar Stagnaro on electric bass and Mark Walker on drums. The quartet collaborated on Dietrich originals as well as invigorating interpretations of standards such as Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which you never knew needed a vibraphone until you hear it played.
The real head turner of the show, though, was an odd instrument resembling an electronic flute, which Honshuku later identified as a NuRAD. Created by Johan Berglund, a self-described “genius developer,” the NuRAD translates breath and vibrato inputs into digital music outputs. To be honest, most notes sounded like a dying cat. But a dying cat that had lived a rich and rewarding life. Retails for about $1,700. Available in the colors of Purple Reign, Radioactive Green and Honshuku’s choice, Profondo Rosso.
Michael Gutierrez is an author, educator, activist and editor-in-chief at Hump Day News.
A stronger
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