3620. Hoagy Carmichael: From "Star Dust" to "Ole Buttermilk Sky"
3621. Bing Crosby: The Crooner: The Columbia Years 1928-1934
3622. Duke Ellington: The Blanton-Webster Band
3623. Keith Jarrett: Solo-Concerts
3624. Leadbelly: The Library of Congress Recordings
3625. The Nixon Interviews with David Frost
3626. The Sun Box
3627. The Motown Story
3628. The Birdland Story
3629. Collector's History of Classic Jazz
3630. CFCF Radio Golden Anniversary 1919-1969
3631. Dr. Demento Presents the Greatest Novelty Records of All Time
3632. American History in Ballad and Song Vol. 2
3633. First Commercially Successful Recordings
3634. A Treasury of Gregorian Chants
3635. Robert Stoltz: Im Zauberreich der Wiener Walzerkönige
3636. Johann Sebastian Bach: Suites
3637. Gioacchino Rossini: The Barber of Seville
3638. Das Schönste von Julia Migenes
3639. Henry "Red" Allen: Giants of Jazz
3640. Sidney Bechet: Giants of Jazz
3641. Bix Beiderbecke: Giants of Jazz
3642. Bunny Berigan: Giants of Jazz
3643. Duke Ellington: Giants of Jazz
3644. Benny Goodman: Giants of Jazz
3645. Billie Holiday: Giants of Jazz
3646. Jelly Roll Morton: Giants of Jazz
3647. Red Norvo: Giants of Jazz
3648. Bessie Smith: Giants of Jazz
3649. Jack Teagarden: Giants of Jazz
3650. Charlie Barnet: Big Bands
3651. Tommy Dorsey: Big Bands
3652. Harry James: Big Bands
3653. Artie Shaw: Big Bands
Mixworthy: "Transfusion," Nervous Norvus, #3631; "I Can't Get Started," Bunny
Berigan & His Orchestra, #3642.
I've got to go back and do a lot of cleaning up, but basically this is it--if I were
Jean-Luc Godard, I'd call this the "End of Vinyl" entry. One idea I got a while ago,
and which I'd still like to follow through on over the summer, is to finish with a
few photos of whatever currently resides where all my old record haunts were. I took
the preliminary step of spending an afternoon in the library last summer looking up
addresses in old Toronto phone books. I'd even like to get a few words with the two
people who run Around Again on Baldwin Street, the one used store that I know is
exactly where it was 25 years ago...The mixworthy list above sums up how frequently
I've listened to my box sets over the years: 75-100 LPs' worth of music, two songs.
Most have been played once in their entirety, none twice. The Sun Box is probably
the only one I paid full price for (around $20 at the time, I remember), and it's
also probably the first one I owned--if not that, one of the Elvis boxes listed
earlier. I bought The Blanton-Webster Band on a staff discount while working at
Sunrise, which wouldn't have been all that much below what it would have sold for
on the floor, and I bought it--bizarre; the details are lost to me--largely to help
a co-worker smooth over some botched transaction of his own. Everything else I got
on the cheap, some of it ridiculously so: the Bing Crosby and Keith Jarrett titles
were part of a big Boxing Day haul from a Brampton store that was charging $1 per
LP whatever the configuration, so they each cost three or four dollars. Thirty-seven
boxes (including the two Elvises and the Springsteen) out of 3600+ LPs amounts to 1%;
not sure if that'd be about normal for a collection my size or not, but they've never
been more than coffee-table afterthoughts for me, bought because they were cheap and
they were big and they were there. Any one of the Time-Life Giants of Jazz sets (a
relatively modest three LPs each) is more than I can process as a listener, so the
practical value of something like the Funhouse CD box mystifies me. Needing an mp3
player with 5,000 songs on file is another kind of overkill I don't understand. Some-
one else might say the same thing about keeping 3,653 pieces of dead software around
the house.