Crate Digging At The Audio Shrine Part One

This is part one of two posts.

One of my retirement activities is being involved with the Arizona Audio Visual Club (AAVC). I have met some great people who share my audiophile and musichead interests. One of those great people is Greg, a retired plumber, who has built a fantastic man cave in a shed in his backyard in Sun City, AZ. The AAVC fondly calls it Greg’s Audio Shrine. The Audio Shrine is set up for Dolby Atmos (surround) and two-channel audio.

Greg recently invited me over for a listening session and generously invited me to crate dig through the crates he had of LPs (or, as the kids say, vinyls) that he no longer wanted. I was happy to dig and take about two dozen albums off his hands.

Before crate digging, we listened to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in Dolby Atmos. It was phenomenal. Then we moved on to two-channel audio, and I DJed the records I had brought. Both the Atmos and the two-channel setups sounded excellent. Greg’s Audio Shrine is one of the best audiophile setups I have experienced.

This blog will summarize the PVC (polyvinyl chloride) gems I found at Greg’s Audio Shrine. Several of the titles are albums I have in my Minneapolis collection—it is great to have a copy of them as part of the Desert 🌵 Sessions . Once I started listening to the LPs, I was grateful for their excellent condition.

This is one of my favorite albums from the early 1980s. It was produced by Elvis Costello and has one of my top 100 singles, “Tempted,” sung by new band member Paul Carrack.

I was so into this album that I went to a concert back in the day just because Squire was the warm-up act. I stayed for the headliner too (some British band named Queen-they were good).

This album and a couple of its singles, “Two Tickets to Paradise” and “Baby Hold On,” were massive when I was in high school. It is a sentimental favorite of mine. I never owned it, as the singles were omnipresent on the radio back in the day—I saved my music buying dollars for things that were not on the radio.

I was a big fan of R.E.M.‘s debut (Murmer from 1983) but then lost track of them until their fifth, Document (1987). It turns out I was more familiar with Reckoning than I realized, as I recognized the two singles: “So. Central Rain (I’m Sorry)” and “(Don’t Go Back To) Rockville.” Has any other band had so many parenthetical song titles?

I am even more unfamiliar with this album than Reckoning. Although as jangly as its two predecessors, it has a slightly different sound: darker and murkier. It also has new instrumentation: sax and banjo. I will be digging deeper into the album.

Although this is Prince’s third album, it is the first album he became PRINCE! His first two albums were good but were conventional R&B for the time. Dirty Mind rewrote the rules to create Prince music: horn parts from a synth, the look, the X-rated lyrics, etc.

This album wasn’t a commercial flop but was a long way from the top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll). It was critically panned. I have always liked the album. I don’t get why it would be twelve more years before Bonnie would grab the brass ring with Nick of Time. Her albums before Nick of Time, like this one, were good.

This is one of the greatest debut albums. Kris Kristofferson wrote in the liner notes: “Twenty-four years old and writes like he’s two-hundred and twenty.” There are so many classic songs: “Illegal Smile,” “Hello In There,” “Sam Stone,” and “Angel From Montgomery.” Produced with a delicate touch by Arif Mardin.

I have no history with this album or with Joe Pass. I know Joe Pass as one of the great jazz guitarists, but I have minimal experience with him. I have several jazz albums on the Pablo label—they are all excellent. And so it was without reservation that I pulled this album from the crate. This album is solo guitar (a hollow body Gibson ES-175), with Joe mostly playing standards. According to Wikipedia, Viruoso is considered Joe’s best album and one of the best jazz guitar albums. It certainly sounds great to me.

Pablo Records was a jazz record company and label founded by Norman Granz (founder of Verve, Clef, and Jazz at the Philharmonic) in 1973. Granz was acknowledged as the most successful impresario in jazz history. Pablo initially featured recordings by acts that Granz managed: Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and Joe Pass. Pablo’s albums are well-recorded and nicely packaged. I have never been burned by a Pablo recording.

I am a pretty minor Talking Heads fan, but it was impossible to be a musichead in the late 70s and 80s without appreciating the Talking Heads. The Talking Heads were an adventurous band that dabbled in punk, New Wave, funk, Afrobeat, etc. Little Creatures is almost Americana – before that term was even used. It was critically acclaimed and is the band’s best-selling studio album (more than two million copies sold in the U.S.). The songs “And She Was” and “Road to Nowhere” were hits for the band. As wonderfully odd as they were, it is incredible they had mainstream success.

When I was a kid, Glen Campbell was huge. He started his music career as a member of The Wrecking Crew and leveraged his guitar chops to become a pop star. He had hit singles (selling over 45 million records), was an actor, and had a TV variety show. He had a solid two-decade run.

The Southern Nights LP peaked at number one on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart, and the single “Southern Nights” (an Allen Toussaint song) reached number one on both the Billboard Hot 100 (a pop chart) and Hot Country Songs charts. The album has brilliant and kitschy moments – but that was Glen Campbell.

This concludes part one – I still have a dozen more LPs to audition – stay tuned.