I don't fancy myself a record collector, mostly because I am not I suppose. This, in the sense that I don't care about having an original press of an obscure LP that I can easily buy for a tenth of the price as a reissue, nor do I care about what color of vinyl any specific copy that I have, may be. Black is fine, and I am the sort of person that prefers the "no frills" approach in most areas of life, anyway. Besides, it's cheaper,... and yes, I would know. An extra 15-40 cents of profit per sale, flushed into the toilet of fetishism.
And so it's mind boggling to me, how hard it can periodically be, to buy a plain old new LP, just a few weeks or month after it is released. I can admit to the fact that I had a chance to pick one of these up, and that I chose not to at the time. On a short and unprofitable southern California tour, one must budget their record buying funds appropriately when there's still another shop our two in the next day, and there's already a large stack of random and obscured finds chipping away at the designated cash and becoming hard to balance against my side with just my right hand. That would be fine, I knew, it's brand new, and will be in at least a couple of shops in my own town - I'd buy it when I got home.
Obviously this was not the case: suffering the same fate as Grouper's "Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill", Yellow Swan's "Going Places" was impossible to find after leaving Amoeba in late February, as only a limited amount made it from the European-based Type Records over to the states and it wasn't enough to satisfy the demand generated by a prolific and appreciated United States-based unit.
I tried to order from a couple of online mail-order spots, but it was out of stock from both by the time I heard back. No one locally could order it for me: Revolver and Forced Exposure had both run out, and random phone calls to shops in other parts of that country that I thought might carry it were turning up nothing, or that's to say: "Yeah, that thing's really good. We only got two copies in and the sold the same week". Ebay? only a couple, and for entirely too much money. On a couple of other sites, people trying to sucker "the consumer" into paying $80 for one.
How could such a highly acclaimed, brand new record, be so hard to purchase so shortly after it's release? I don't really ask how, because it all makes plenty of sense, it's a rhetorical complaint, that's all. And in the defense of "availability", it's actually still incredibly easy to purchase the CD version, but I don't think I need to explain that doing so is not really something I had allowed as an option.
Six months later, I fly to Atlanta for the last time. I had been visiting Teta once a month or so for about a year, and since her year long position at a job was wrapping up, this was a one-way flight. We'd drive back across the country together, taking a few days of relaxation at my grandparent's home, on a lake in eastern Tennessee, eating at a few exceptionally good places on the way through the south (Woodlands in Nashville, the best Indian lunch buffet I've had - for example), and inevitably: with many short frantic detours into each cities decent record shops.
I think it was actually between Memphis and Oklahoma City when I realized that I was going to find this. One year earlier, we had traveled on the same path, only heading east. Oklahoma City was the first city (when east-bound) that had shops I was interested in: Guestroom - a large and comprehensive store that is truly special and unreasonably well-stocked and diverse, the kind of legitimate sub-cultural cross-sections that rarely are seen outside of "major" cities. And Size: a smaller shop that shared some personnel with a venue next door over, and obviously took great pride in carrying what they chose to, which to be fair, felt like a more condensed and specific version of what the other store in town was doing.
I remembered specifically, that Size Records, one year earlier, had new copies of a lot of things that had come out in the year or two before, but had since been sucked into obscurity in almost any other purchase situation in the country. We pulled up, and I swore that this was it, I was going to find this pesky thing. It was going to be sitting in there waiting for me.
$19.99, less expensive than any place else that had ever been selling it. A sticker that the shop had stuck to the poly-sleeve let you know that it was "Yellow Swans" and that it came w/ a bonus CD, another - that there's only 500 copies (which should translate into "buy this now), and then the icing on the cake: a four paragraph description, spelling out exactly why this was such an exciting and sure to be important LP to take home as your own.
This store had done everything it could possibly do to make this thing seem as incredible and valid as it is, and while every other shop or mailorder in the country couldn't hold on to their's for more than a week or two, my eventual copy had been calmly waiting for me in this misc Y section, dressed for the occasion of convincing an unsure consumer. Your loss, Oklahoma City.
After spending much longer than expected in an insane flea-market turned "junk shop that used to be a flea market but everything that is still in there is cooperatively sold by two guys", we ended up calling it quits (as far as driving), a little sooner than expected, finding us at the Camelot outside of Amarillo, TX, which I am convinced was once a nursing home or small institution of sorts (judging from the odd layout and fact that you can only get in from hallways inside the building). I don't find the idea of that as very strange, certainly not uncomfortable, regardless. Focus should definitely be put on the stucco additions to the building, which effective gave it the look of some horrible southwestern castle. That is, after all, the deciding factor in us staying there, and if there was a CD player or turntable available, I might have had my first dosage of this inside that fortress.
Crossing into New Mexico: we have to pee.
So after roaming like zombies through the aisles of this abnormally large gas station / grocery store / garbage shop, I dug out "Going Places" from the box of things I had grabbed on the trip so far, and took out the CD to listen to while we drove, never starting in the parking lot: I liked to start listening to something new, in this sort of situation, when I am already moving at a normal pace on the freeway.
So the disc sat inside the dashboard of Teta's car for about an hour, doing nothing, waiting, wondering why it's long overdue owner was preventing it from performing it's singular job duty. Why? Stuck inside a small printed cardboard sleeve, shrink-wrapped against it's LP counterpart for half of a year after being sent over halfway across the world. What was the hold-up now?
Getting back onto the 40, it was obvious that something was wrong: traffic, which had been moving fine when we made our urination stop, was now seeming to cease, although we could see the beginning area of congestion, and assumed it might have been construction, and the near-stopped current due to the inability of two lanes to just yield. (the left lane was coned off, after-all).
20 minutes of crawling, we could have made more progress by walking. We'd move up a car length or two, then stop for awhile. Maybe "they" were searching every single car because someone had just kidnapped a baby from the very gas station we were just at, and they were combing with as much potentially inappropriate detail as possible. Who knows?
Cars start cutting across the median, heading back east on the 40. Why? ...when cars started driving in the coned of lane, backwards on our side, we knew something was not right. No police though, no emergency vehicles. So we attempted to tough it out, even though it appeared that a growing number of cars were using the access / frontage route 200 feet parallel to the 40.
I sit annoyed, complaining to myself that there seems to be no order to what was going on, and debating if waiting, like I assumed I should be, was the right thing to do or not. This of course, causing Teta to be more anxious than she already was - sitting in the passenger seat of an Accord that had gone about 1/2 mile in 1/2 an hour, this ultimately providing me with enough of a reason to just follow suit with some of the rogue vehicles, of which there seemed to be more and more of.
A few minutes later, we were in close proximity of the gas station / super market, only this time we were driving up and exiting on the freeway entrance ramp, and as we turned onto the frontage road, we were indeed "Going Places".
"Foil", the first track on the disc, while initially starting off in one of Yellow Swans more overblown-shoegaze moments, quickly descends into an atmospheric and swirling soundtrack, with the most simple aspects of percussive texture: both in the periodic fluttering in the subdued low-end drone, and the consistent bounce of what sounds like a small bell, alternating from left to write in conjunction with some of the most truly musical and accessible sound I've heard Yellow Swans offer, almost like portions of an ambient Eno record, but sped up so that the larger patterns are much more easy to see and become less of patterns and more of visual melodies.
But is this really about being wordy and trying to describe a "noise" record, or is it about the way that 16 minutes into this track, as things start to build and culminate into the more harsh feelings of the first minute or so, we pass, 200 feet away on the access route, the source of the delay, which was not at all a delay, but a complete cease in movement(?). An eighteen wheeler smashed like it had fallen down a cliff, but sprawled sideways across the entire westbound 40, preventing anything from being able to proceed, or even to be able to go around it, without making a U-turn and taking the same instinctual detour that we finally had taken ourselves.
No police, still, but a couple of ambulances had just arrived to the scene, 45 minutes after this thing had flipped on it's side. If someone had died, with was due to the length of time it took of anyone to get there, and the hours and hours or delay in traffic heading west, the same. How it could take so long for any sort of emergency services to arrive was perplexing, as was the absence of a motorcycle cop, theoretically driving down the stretch of freeway from the accident to the previous exit and telling them to turn around, closing the 40 and setting up a simple detour, after doing so. But what do I know about how to handle an emergency situation such as this? Maybe "letting things sit for awhile (to see if it will work itself out" is standard in New Mexico.
This scenario was not really moving. Maybe it should have been, but it didn't feel more exciting than finding Teta the best banana that I could at that previous stop, nor did it feel more exciting than walking into the stucco castle hotel, and finding not one, but two ceramic leopards in the front lobby, identical to the one that Teta had picked up for her mom and the flea-junk store a few hundred miles earlier, and certainly not as much as finding the Yellow Swans record that had been alluding me, and was now playing and sounding so beautifully perfect at the moment: confirming that even though it was just the first 20 minutes of this thing, I was undoubtedly going to love and be obsessed with the entire thing, and a few weeks later, sitting here at home, after realizing the contents of the LP are actually independent of what is on the "bonus" CD that came with the LP, and spending a solid couple of hours listening through the entire package from start to finish, I can confirm that I was right in my assumption, and that I didn't have any idea to what extent at the time.
A few years ago, I was staying over at Brian Miller's home in LA after playing a show the day before, and I recall him referring to Yellow Swans' "At All Ends" as a masterpiece. I agree with that sentiment, and think even more so about "Going Places", and I really hope that everyone else that has a history of loving what these guys did (for the better part of a decade), can eventually be able to sit in their rooms from 2:30-4:30am on some random night, typing out a bunch of gibberish while listening to a copy of their own.
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