Or: Mind Over Matter, indeed

Mostly pictorial depiction of the excitement of consolidating two Public Storage Spaces to one, saving about $200 per month, and what to do with all that stuff?

Partial setlist, Zion I at Kappa Sig Parking lot, presented by SCON, via Soundhound, captured by Steve

When I was selling off the first load of about twenty boxes of cd’s and one of the last remaining record stores, Diego the clerk was tripping out over my having an early Zion I record. He suggested that I take it back from the sell pile and deal it myself on one of the trendy and newfangled online markets. He thought I could get $200 for this perhaps rare or out of print title (“they got screwed by their label”, he suggested). Well he checked it a minute later and yeah maybe someone would have paid me $20 online versus this store will offer it to lucky old school drop by customer for about $12 or so — they gave me $1 or maybe $2, which was par for the course or in actuality well above par.

But I thought it weird or synchronicity or sign of there actually being a Higher Power that at the Stanford CoHo a day or so later, there was a Zion I flyer about a show coming up. I reminded Steve that night that the thumping noise he was hearing was not the Nobel Prize winner celebrating with his wife but the concert he could not miss nearby. So Steve peeped it out and even captured via Soundhound this partial set list:
MORE TO COME, FO SURE

HIT EM
BIRDS EYE VIEW
SILLY PUDDY

(well, that could have been what he heard from the unit above….)

And the end of the day, or the week, I had sold off about 1000 cd’s, 200 books for a grand total of about $200 plus a small bookcase I took in trade, and two more cd’s, of the Fleshtones, because I had bought a recent book on them, and Vince Guaraldi “Peanuts” because of my recent jazz ponderings. I also donated another 100 cd’s to Friends of Palo Alto library and about 50 books. (I kinda wish I had bypassed the whole record store experience and donated everything, but I needed that extra bookcase for my additional “new” cc’s.

One of the bittersweet experiences was recycling about 200 tape cassettes of bands I had encountered during the heyday of Earthwise’s Cubberley Sessions and Palo Alto Soundcheck, 1994-2000, which I had dutifully kept alphabetized, boxed and stored, for 14 years, which cost me about $500 to $1,000 pro-rated, but I felt some kind of obligation to these bands and artists many of whom I met personally and knew or know. Steve caught this snapshot of me saying goodbye to each, one by one.

Saying au revoir to mediated versions of great bands and artists like Vaportrail, Laughingstock, Engorged with Blood and 200 of their cohorts, from back in the day, prospective performers at the Cubberley Sessions

Steve also shot these photos of the hip hop concert which literally brought the music to his doorstep and further inside:

This is the poster I noticed, first at CoHo:

If this is an odyssey in the classical sense, it is fairly pedestrian, back and forth from storage spaces to my apartment, to the record store, more emotionally than physically draining (especially since Steve Cohen did more than his share of the literal “heavy-lifting”, he a former member of both the 175 and 200 Pound Bench Press club, at Gunn High, and a prospective discount member of Muscle Beach), because it really was hard to say “good bye” to a lot of this good music. We did enjoy the excellent service we got at PS Storage by Peggy Madden, who is from Deerborn, Michigan and a former Ford employee before going full-Cali more than a few years back, she said. We also got excellent service from her co-workers James, Margaret and Shawn. (They asked me to do a review for social media but I draw the line here at WordPress — I received no compensation for my efforts other than this smile:

).

That photo is part of the text, in the parenthesis, followed by a close parens, although it does look like the emoticon for a smile. Funny how that works out. 🙂 :p

Here’s a couple snapshots boxes of cd’s followed by two of the workers at the store. I won’t use her name here, but I was intrigued by the book buyer who said she is working on her novel; I mentioned to her Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, and also asked her if she had read Louise Erdrich.

Silly pudding:

Describing Animals and other demo tapes I dutifully stored for 15 or more years; I kept all the cover letters, press photos and one-sheets.

My stuff about to get me stiffed more or less at last-man-standing retailer; I wish I had just taken it all to the library, to donate, for their monthly bazaar.

William Hooker, one dollar, Beth Lisick 25 cents; so it goes

God bless Kelsi Arnold, of San Jose — temped to see if that number still works

I saved for years and now have parted with numerous back issues of Pollstar rosters, current versions of which are probably still pretty useful to managers and promoters

I played a large scale version of Rock, Rot or Rule

This guy chatted me up while scanning the barcodes of my cds; he had an interesting notion of remixing a 1970s jazz piano dude I like