Posted By Guest Writer js: 

Where I differ, I think, from Justin and from Geoff, and what always makes me feel vaguely ashamed when I’m talking about music with them, is that I’m not a real collector. I mean, I collect albums, and I am forever slowly expanding the number of songs and sides I have at my fingertips, but I really couldn’t care less about two things that are inherent to record collecting: value and rarity.

I’m not saying that I’m pure of commercial considerations or that I don’t want hard-to-find things, but both of those are sort of secondary. The blunt fact is that there is too much music out there for me to ever worry too much about stockpiling things for cash or for posterity, or even to lord over other music collectors.

This weekend, I picked up a handful of New Wave albums that I had never really thought about owning, and passed on something that I’d been looking for for a while, and basically subverted any inner record collecting instincts that I had.

I picked up Toni Basil’s first album (Devo plays half the backing tracks!), another copy of the Cars first album (mine has scratches and skips), ABC’s Lexicon of Love (their best by far), Blondie’s Plastic Letters (I only owned it digitally), B-52s Whammy (which I haven’t listened to yet), some Tony Orlando gig called The Flirts, and Squeeze’s The Squeeze is On which kind of sucks.

And I passed on The Wild Tchoupitoulas’s self-titled album.

The Wild Tchoupitoulas album shows why I’m not a collector. I had been curious about it for years, after getting a Souljazz New Orleans sampler that included a pretty nice second-line (which is what the Mardi Gras Indians, of which the Wild Tchoupitoulas are one “tribe,” are) tune. It was a full-on percussion stomp, with polyrhythms and call-and-response vocals and it was a hell of a lot of fun. Neville Brothers and the Meters collaborating with a bunch of faux-savages. So, ever since then, I’ve looked for the full album. I’ve seen it on eBay for $50 to $70 (though I always imagine that those are fake bids when I see an album spiral up like that). And yesterday I saw it at a local record shop.

It was a little warped, and a little scratched up, but was $22.50, and I’d likely never see that album again. My best bet would be to either stumble upon it when downloading music, or forget it existed. So I grabbed it up and did a couple of needle-drops at the listening station.

It… It just wasn’t very good. It was a bunch of smooth, relaxed grooves, but instead of The Meters who did Gris Gris with Dr. John, instead of the Struttin’ Meters, it was the “Witchita Lineman” smooth Meters. There was no depth to the production, and the vocals were all inept “Indians” with the Neville Brothers crooning like velure.

If I were a record collector, I would have bought it. But I just couldn’t.

Instead, I bought a bunch of New Wave detritus for $2 an album and loved it. I listened to most of them today, and they were fucking excellent. No one is ever going to want to buy that Flirts album off of me, although (as my girlfriend Amy informed me), “(Don’t Put Another Dime in That) Jukebox” was a radio hit. But it’s a damn fine album. I didn’t know that I was looking for it, but it fills a perfect niche between The Go-Gos and Adult., and I couldn’t be happier.