Do you have a music related ‘holy grail’?

… something you’ve sought for years in hopes of coming across.

2022 will go down as the year that Bip decided it was time to stop collecting stuff after 40 years. But I always had a running list of vinyl records I had hoped to find without acquiescing to discogs. What a feeling I’d get when I’d find one of them in a used bin!

Likewise certain books; Mario Panciera’s “45 Revolutions” would likely be my example of something I never came across and is just way too pricey online for me.

How about you? Understood this may only apply to those with the collecting virus…

Mostly (but not all) all radio-related:

Duran Duran's "lost" album
Katy Perry's 1st album as Katy Hudson
Madonna's Breakfast Club stuff
John Peel's first & last broadcasts
MRR (Maxium Rock n Roll) episode #1
Yo La Tengo "pledge week" episodes on WFMU
Aircheck of the AT40 w/ the long destination dedication about the little kid's puppy who died (outtake immortalized by Negativland)

Which Peel broadcasts are those? I've found one of his earliest BBC shows, from fall 1967, on YouTube, and one of his last shows before his death, from September 2004.

SOMEBODY out there must have Bill Gazzari's ads that constantly ran on LA radio during the '80s for his hair-metal haven Gazzari's Nightclub on the Sunset Strip. Been looking for years:


"All my bands have the foxiest guys. If they're not foxy, they don't play!"


Said in his gruff, old-man voice.

An original copy of Ready Steady Who

I'd love to see an official release of Japan's original version of "Some Kind of Fool," which was intended for the band's Gentlemen Take Polaroids album. A dissatisfied David Sylvian replaced the track with "Burning Bridges" (an excellent composition, by the way), finally releasing "Fool" (with then-new vocals) on his 2000 compilation Everything and Nothing. A poor-quality recording of the Japan track can be found at YouTube.

[www.youtube.com]

Sylvian's 2000 version is great, but I still long for the elusive 1980 original.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/20/2022 10:26AM by Middle C.

My holy grails tend to be modest in terms of musical importance, and I've been lucky to find a bunch of them in the past few years, thanks to Discogs. When it comes to older records, I'm perfectly happy with reissues.

That said, if I came across a copy of Bad Religion's Into the Unknown (or the box set from a few years ago of which it was a part, which would probably be cheaper than an original copy at this point) at a price that wouldn't affect my mortgage, I'd be seriously tempted.

This falls more into the Imaginary Albums category, but I remember dreaming, sometime in the early Nineties, that I was shopping for vinyl records at a by-then-long-gone Record Bar I frequented as a teen. In this dream, I was still a teenager and there were no compact discs. To my utter astonishment, I came across a trio of lost Gary Numan Beggars Banquet albums issued in the time between Gazza’s I, Assassin and his first Numa platter, Berserker. (It was as if, mercifully, 1983’s Warriors had never existed.) I woke up before I could buy and listen to the discs, but I recall that at least one of the album covers was purple (the dream’s reflection of my passion for Dance, which I've written at ridiculous length about elsewhere on this forum), and that the various track listings, together with Numan’s pictures (his outfits on those covers, if memory serves, crossed the Telekon boiler suit with his early Eighties noir look) suggested a delectable combination of the discs he released between 1980 and ’82. I was disappointed with Numan’s work from ’83 on--though some of his later compositions were and are quite good--and I still wonder what those mysterious records sounded like.

This, incidentally, is the only album-related dream that I remember having. I’m a serious bibliophile, and once or twice a year I’ll dream that I’m in some imaginary used bookstore (a composite of the many such places I’ve visited through the decades), searching for equally imaginary books by some of my literary heroes: Gore Vidal, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, J.G. Ballard, etc. The bookstore is always the same one, and I know exactly where it’s located—on a street corner near the university I attended decades ago.

Love your post, middle c. I’ve had similar dreams… and it scares me what the mind is capable of. Imagine opening an undiscovered book in a dream and reading through the pages… could your mind have written the lost Gore Vidal masterpiece?

I know in dreams I’ve turned on the radio and heard the hot new (non-existent) Madonna song. Did my mind write, produce and perform that song… on a whim?

I once dreamed a video for a non-existant Eddy Grant song. I seem to recall it not being too bad.

On another occasion, I dreamed a musical about spiked punch, sung by my high school classmates.

Technically, that means you wrote that song, Brad.