I was surprised no ARSC List chatter this year. One man's opinion, I thought the list was very lame,
but there were some surprises in the store. Columbia/Legacy put out three Miles Davis albums in
mono, and I didn't see them on the RSD website list. I was happy to get those, the sound and
pressing qualities are excellent. The other interesting items I found were from Rough Guides -
Psychedelic Brazil and Latin Psychedellia. The LPs were great on their own, but the download codes
got all the tunes plus bonus albums in both cases.
At all the places I checked in the metro NYC are and upstate all the way to Rochester, very few
copies of The Last Waltz soundtrack. My local record store guy said he had tried three different
avenues with Warner Music to get copies, all to no avail. His demographic is in the bullseye for
that album, I was far from the only middle-aged guy grumbling that none were available. There were
also no copies of the Charlie Poole reissue album down here, but my friend in Rochester scored a
copy for me. Meanwhile, there were multiple copies of the Flaming Lips LP set that sat in the rack
unsold. Also the $15 (!!) Jimi Hendrix single (that's right, 15 clams for two songs, both of which
have been issued elsewhere).
Interested to hear what others saw/heard/bought.
-- Tom Fine
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