In honor of the first WXNA Record Fair on Sunday, March 23 at Eastside Bowl, March 17-23, 2025 is Crate Digger’s Week on WXNA! Today we hear from WXNA’s Cher Fan #1 with an epic of a quest for a Holy Grail that brought multiple results, and from DJ Lauren Bufferd with a tragic tale of a once and (hopefully) future find!
Cher – Stars
Laura Pochodylo – Runout Numbers
I am celebrating Crate Digger’s Week by remembering the time I realized there is no better rush than finding what you were looking for in a dusty crate.
Over twenty years ago when I first started collecting records as a childhood Cher fan, I wanted to complete my collection of her solo LPs. 1975’s Stars loomed large in my mind. Not available on CD, and this was pre-streaming, pre-Discogs, and I was not savvy enough to navigate eBay. I had to find it, and the middle-aged Cher fans who populated the fan forums I frequented (love them, but should not have been taking vinyl collecting advice from them) recommended rare and international vinyl marketplace EIL.
Seemed reasonable, due to having no reference point. Saved some dough. Paid something like $65 for a Colombian bootleg version of the album. To me, this was the rarest album in the world and that’s simply what the market demanded for it. No big deal that the audio quality was questionable and the sleeve was hand typed in Spanish. These seemed like normal hurdles to clear on the way to my White Whale.
Two weeks after anxiously awaiting its international shipment, I went to my local store on 9 Mile in Ferndale, Michigan and found a virtually unplayed promo copy of the same album in the 99 cent bin.
And that’s how I learned to love the thrill of the hunt! It isn’t about instant gratification until it is— a long hunt until that moment when the perfect record finds you out in the wild and it feels like it was waiting for you. See you at the big dig at WXNA’s Record Fair!
Jan Steele / John Cage – Voices and Instruments
Lauren Bufferd- Different Every Time
I am not a record collector. I’ve known plenty of them and I know the difference between them and me. I’ve always liked music and enjoyed owning the physical media — 45s, LPs, cassettes, and then CDs. I never was much a streamer, just like I never could use a Kindle. I like the physical, but I try not to be too attached. But I will always remember the one that got away.
I went to college in the late 1970s and was interested in the same music everyone else was — Joni Mitchell, the Band, Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Fairport Convention. I’d seen Patti Smith on SNL and was entranced, and I was just beginning to get into jazz. I had moved on from the swing bands that my parents liked to John Coltrane and Miles Davis, but new friends at college opened a whole new world of music to me — Ornette Coleman,
Ivor Cutler, Art Ensemble of Chicago, and progressive bands like Soft Machine, Henry Cow, and Hatfield and the North.
I’m not sure how the Jan Steele/ John Cage – Voices and Instruments album came my way. It was on Brian Eno’s Obscure label and had been issued in 1976. I don’t remember much about the A side — Jan Steele was a British composer and pianist. I’m sure I listened but nothing really stuck. But the B side — the Cage side — that stuck. Two piano solos and three spoken word pieces with lyrics adapted from James Joyce and e.e. cummings. I still remember every song and I could sing every word to you now. Carla Bley sang “Forever and Sunsmell” adapted from cummings’ poem, “No. 26” (from the collection, 50 Poems). Cage had written the piece for the dancer Jean Erdman. Robert Wyatt sang “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs” (adapted from James Joyce’s novel, Finnigan’s Wake) and “Experience No. 2” which was an adaptation of cummings’ “it is at moments after i have dreamed.” I was obsessed with those pieces and with Richard Bernas’ percussion accompaniment. I can hear them in my head as I write.
I think I must have bought the record in New York in one of our trips down to the city or maybe the Harvard Coop in Cambridge when home for the summer. I don’t remember, but I sure remember when I lost it.
A friend of a friend asked to borrow it during our senior year. My college was small — there couldn’t have been more than 90 people in my graduating class. I figured it would be easy to get it back, and even though I didn’t know the guy well, (Yeah, it was a guy, and his name is written in infamy in my heart.) we knew enough people in common, so I’d have some leverage if he didn’t return it right away. But I think I sensed when I gave it to him, I’d never get it back — I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, and I can see that record leaving in my hands. I know exactly where on campus we were standing and what the weather was like. And sure enough, despite my increasingly panicked reminders, I never did get that album back. We were seniors, suddenly, we were graduating and leaving school. Our paths never crossed again.
Over 40 years later I still think about that album. “Experiences No. 2” was included on Robert Wyatt’s Different Every Time, the 2-CD greatest hits compilation that came out on Domino (another great label and a super introduction to Wyatt’s work). In 1994, Joey Ramone covered “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs” for the Caged/Uncaged – A Rock/Experimental Homage To John Cage album on Cramps Records.
I don’t have a turntable anymore but there are still some records I buy when I see them — I can’t resist a Caedmon spoken word album or a Folkways LP. I love the covers so much. If I see a Black Saint or a Delmar CD that I don’t have, I buy it because I know it’s going to be good — those are GREAT jazz labels. Voices and Instruments is available streaming in all the usual places, and I could download it from Bandcamp. I know I can buy the LP on Discogs or eBay, it’s easy. But I still look for the physical record when I’m in a record store digging through crates. Let me know if you see it.
Watch this space for more Crate Digger’s stories this weekend, and see you at the WXNA Record Fair on Sunday at Eastside Bowl!
