"My" music

My daughter and I were in this huge vintage store down in Portland, wandering through room after room of mostly old clothes.  There were about ten or twelve places where records were for sale, in crates and boxes and on shelves.  Sometimes they were shoved into the back corner of a stall, and sometimes they were front and center.  It's always interesting to me what people try to sell their stuff for, in different contexts.  Like garage sales, for example - when I go to a garage sale and there's a big shelf of paperback books there, they better be a quarter each, or three for a dollar or something like that.  But a dollar?  Two dollars?  That just means that at the end of your garage sale you have pretty much the same stack of books you started with.  On the other hand, when I go to a good used book store, I'd feel just fine paying three or four dollars for a book I really want.  I think the reason for that is that in a book store I'm paying extra for them to have a large enough variety to have something that I want, whereas at a garage sale I'm only, at best, hoping to find something interesting or weird, but I don't imagine I'd find any of the books/authors I'm actively collecting.

Anyway, back to records.  In a big vintage store where clothing is the primary focus, I'd expect records to be selling at a bit below what I'd find in a record store, because the likelihood of finding exactly what I'm looking for is so low.

However, there are moments when being a cheapskate goes out the window.  Like when I found The Damned Phantasmagoria for ten bucks.  This album was a central component of my teen years, and more important to me than many other albums of that time, because it was uniquely mine.  Between my brother and my cousin, I was the youngest.  We'd all hang out together and listen to music, make mix tapes, make lists of songs and bands and albums, all that.  We'd save our money and go in to Spokane and go to Hastings to look for music on cassette.  We joined Columbia House music club and got 15 free albums.

My brother and cousin were kind of a gateway for me to great music.  Through them I discovered R.E.M., U2, Sonic Youth, Midnight Oil, and more.  But I was hungry for something that felt like it was "my" music instead of always "their" music.  That's when I discovered Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, and The Damned.  Those three bands became the center of my music collecting, and I searched out various intersections of punk, new wave, and goth of the 80s.

Phantasmagoria was an album I listened to three times per week or more while I was in high school. Objectively speaking, it's not a great album.  But that doesn't matter, because for me at that time it was a great album, and I loved how it made me feel when I listened to it.

5 Albums At The Center Of My High School Universe

1. The Damned, Phantasmagoria
2. Bauhaus, The Sky's Gone Out
3. Bauhaus, Burning From The Inside
4. Love and Rockets, Express
5. Peter Murphy, Deep

So I'd pretty much pay whatever for those albums on vinyl and force my daughter to listen to them, I think that's what I'm saying here.