Icebox Records

I bought two old mag­a­zines that both had a great affect on my life. I pur­chased them at Speak­ing Vol­umes, a great record/book/art store here in ol’ Burlin’ton. I went there ini­tially to get an old Play­boy but found a copy of an old Rolling Stone I’ve been think­ing about lately.

The Play­boy. Sep­tem­ber 1971. I wasn’t alive yet, but Olsen was. Some­how when I was 23 this issue fell into my hands. The cen­ter­fold is Crys­tal Smith, who is stun­ning in both her beauty and her taste in Amer­i­can Flag bell bot­tom pants. Among her favorite films at the time are M*A*S*H and Butch Cas­sidy and The Sun­dance Kid. So, there’s that. When­ever my old band Bag Of Panties would play I would always put this cen­ter­fold up. There’s no bush, so it seems sort of inno­cent. And cool. If a gig was going bad or if I just needed some inspi­ra­tion to play bet­ter than I was, I’d just look at Crys­tal. I know I’m way too young for her, but…Then there’s an inter­view with Jules Feif­fer, a weird “sur­re­al­is­tic nudes” pic­to­r­ial, movie reviews of Two Lane Black­top and Who Is Harry Keller­man and Why Is He Say­ing Those Ter­ri­ble Things About Me? (which I’ve sam­pled many times), a neg­a­tive review of McCartney’s “Ram” (lame, but fun to read) and the ads. My god, the ads. Appar­ently in the early 70s the kind of man that read Play­boy was into leisure suits, Hush Pup­pies, and new­fan­gled stereo equip­ment. TONS of ads offer­ing new turnta­bles, reel-to-reels, portable 8-track play­ers, etc. There’s also a Dat­sun ad in there that I once used to design a ticket for a Wide Wail CD release party. Any­way, the cen­ter­fold is get­ting cus­tom mounted and framed tomorrow.

The Rolling Stone issue which just hap­pened to be there also changed my life. It’s the Best Albums Of The Last Twenty Years issue, August, 1987. When I was 14, the upstairs col­lege stu­dent neigh­bor (C.K. Walls) gave me this issue. All I lis­tened to at the time was metal and The Bea­t­les. It’s an infor­ma­tive issue that explains very well why each album is great and why you should have it. It also has impres­sive repro­duc­tions of the album cov­ers which is what drew me in ini­tially. Through this issue I found The Sex Pis­tols, The Vel­vet Under­ground, Tele­vi­sion, Otis Red­ding, New York Dolls, R.E.M., Todd Rund­gren, The fuck­ing STOOGES…they turned my fee­ble lit­tle mind on to great shit. I spent years find­ing these albums. Look­ing through it today I real­ized I don’t own 6 of them. Some­day I will.