Flea To Be, You And Me
I come from swap meet stock. My dad wheeled and dealed in motorcycle parts, and he’d take milk crates full of what looked like random junk to most people and set it up on tables or tarps at biker get-togethers where people scoured the place for that hard-to-find piece to get their Sportster back on the road, or just ate hot dogs or chili and drank beer and milled around taking in the spectacle.
One of the things we’ve been able to talk about, now that politics has dug that familiar trench between us on so many other topics, is the similarities between my forays to the record shows and his swap meet days. When I had a run of shows where I was coming home with more product than I left with, thanks to other dealers throwing in the towel and liquidating their tables on the spot, he told me about he used to take extra cash for just that purpose, space back home be damned in both our cases.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and planning as far as how I’m running my record business, what the endgame is, where all this shit is supposed to live, and how much sense it makes to buy low and sell-slightly-less-low when you don’t have a warehouse or a storefront. I’ve made decisions, formulated constantly shifting plans, and the thread is always more with less. Smarter not harder. For God’s sake, someone’s going to stage an intervention when they see your garage. That sort of thing.
But two of the guys who sell old 45s at the shows (a class of people who deserve their own reality show, if not a large-group case study of some kind) have me down as an easy mark. One show, they had about 600 CDs marked at $2 each, and about an hour before closing time one of them stood on his chair and yelled “$100 for the whole CD table, who wants it?”
I didn’t exactly run to their booth, but I didn’t stroll, either.
Yesterday was a summer show – not a great turnout, not much to write home about after the first two hours of sales, decent enough but not too far over the “why did we drag all this in here?” threshold. About the same time of day, my 45 buddy (set up right behind me this time) nodded at his two CD boxes. Close to 200 more titles. “Fifty?” he asked.
No, not me, not today, not any more. I don’t do that. I’m taking steps. I’ve got a program. I just bought a bunch of high-end stuff. I’ve got a ton of bills coming up. The van’s full as it is.
Every fifteen or twenty minutes after that, in one of the increasing lulls in business: “come on…. Fifty…. Did you look at them? Did you count them?” I held firm.
The front door being a logjam of dealers with terrible parking skills, I opted to pull up to the side entrance and carry my boxes out, all thirty of them, still full of records and CDs, one trip at a time, down the aisle and a small flight of steps. I’m not getting my walk in today, I figured. This is a decent workout. My 45 buddies did the same, loading a pickup truck with their cases and cases and cases and cases of smudgy doo-wop and weird garage rock finds.
We finished at the same time. I’m sure you know where this is going.
“Last chance man. Forty. Come on.”
Less than a quarter per disc. Still more Barenaked Ladies CDs. Do I see Air Supply in there? If I see more than three Billy Joels, I’m peeling out of this parking lot without a word.
I come from swap meet stock. I gotta refill the boxes for the next one. “Fine. Cram ‘em back here, under the $5 country bin but not on top of the good records.”
This world fascinates me and props on the title of this one, Marlo Thomas thanks you for remembering.