Inefficient Circles

Looks like 45s are back on the menu, boys

Two weekends ago, when Jon and I went an hour east of home to Genoa for their semiannual town yard sale, fate intervened in the form of a train parked on the tracks on the county road the GPS picked for us. Having done community theater out that way years ago, I knew the main route and was surprised it hadn’t sent us that way in the first place. We turned around and I headed for OH-51, otherwise known as Woodville Road.

We made a quick U-turn to stop at a barn sale that wound up being the highlight of a very good day. These folks had a little bit of everything you’d hope for from a rural stop – lots of old radios, vintage tools, pristine 1960s and 1970s Scientific American magazines, antique dishes, bygone tourist tchotchkes, toys from grandchildren long since grown. This wasn’t two picnic tables full of baby clothes and checkout lane paperbacks, it was the real deal.

And the prices couldn’t be beat! We walked past five boxes of 45’s and I commented to Jon that you’d never catch me buying those evil little platters. I recounted how for every collectible title you find in such a box, there’d be a hundred old beat-to-hell Paul Anka and Kenny Rogers singles worth pennies. I laughed about the old men, untouchables even in the weird world of record shows, who haul unsorted, unsleeved crates of such shabby driftwood to sell five for a buck, and the even odder guys who spend all day curating a three-dollar stack of them.

And then, like the morons who couldn’t resist peeking at the Ark of the Covenant, I took a look inside.

First of all, the boxes were $5 each and held a good hundred or so records apiece. Like I said, these folks were pricing stuff to move. I picked up a random handful, noting that they were in better condition than the usual scuffed-up flea market and thrift store 45s you see out in the wild. Then I glanced at the label – and I stress, this is the first one I looked at – and I saw the record you see at the top of this dispatch.

“Kim Evans and the Country Express”? Are you shitting me? A product of Moseka Studios in Fostoria, Ohio, less than an hour away? Literally the first label I lay eyes on out of 500+ records is a private-label single from a forgotten band that probably played Swiss steak dinners at Elks Lodges and three-set Friday nights at the shittiest honky-tonks you can imagine in 1970s Ohio?

Son of a bitch. Give me all five boxes. And I’ll take the faux-leatherette-encased Ramada Inn deck of playing cards while I’m at it.

As we were pulling away, Jon said “I’ve never in my life seen anyone give a minute-long speech about how they were not gonna stick their face into the hornet’s nest, and then immediately stick their face in the hornet’s nest.”

I already have lots of 45s in my basement. Not as many as the record show guys, and I don’t drag them out, but I’ve listed a bunch for sale online. Most of them are worth a buck. My hope was that people would buy stacks of them, but that hasn’t really been the case. Every now and then, one sells, and someone pays $6 to ship a one-dollar Osmonds or Marty Stuart single to their home.

I assume they own a jukebox. A bunch of the ones I already owned came from a wholesaler years ago, and actually had the paper tags for jukeboxes with them. In my naivete back then, I thought that made them collector’s items – again, not the case.

The ones in picture sleeves look neat and bring back waves of nostalgia, but like cassette singles (you remember “cassingles,” right?) they’re mostly worthless too. I just shipped a copy of ZZ Top’s lesser 80s hit “Stages” on a pic sleeve 45 late last week. Cost before shipping: $1.10.

Of course there are exceptions. When I got home I pulled random handful of 25 out of the closest box and took them upstairs. 22 of them were selling on Discogs for less than a dollar. Someone sold Kim Evans and the Country Express for $5 a while back. There’s a five-buck record from Hank Thompson. And there’s a Porter Wagoner single (“Bringing Home the Bacon” b/w “Angel Made of Ice”) that seems to go for $25 – the price I paid for the whole lot.

I’d already been making plans to set up some boxes of $1 CDs and cassettes, sort of a bizarro-world mirror image of my existing show stock, to take to flea markets a few times a year. If a place is close to home and the rent is cheap, I’m hoping I can blow out a few hundred bottom-of-the-barrel pieces at a time and clear space on the shelves for better stuff. This stuff isn’t listed online, organized by genre, or anything else. It’s bargain boxes for the hardened dollar-bin digger, the end of the line for scratch-and-dent discs and overstocked titles.

Why not throw a few hundred 45s into that mix? One day next week I’m gonna go through all five boxes and pull the ones worth more than, say, four dollars. Everything else goes right back in the boxes and will wind up on a flea market table. 4 for $3, mix and match formats, everything’s 50 cents for the last hour or two. If I net myself forty decent singles out of it, the whole project will be worth it. And if the flea market sale works, I’ll restock the $1 boxes with a bunch of the stuff already in my basement.

It’s not like I don’t have a nostalgic connection to 45s. My first musical memory was of a red record player with a little handle and my mom’s old collection. I played songs like Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” and Tom Jones’s “The Man Who Knows Too Much” (if I recall it was the B-side to a schmaltzy ballad called “Without Love”) until my parents asked me to stop. The record label graphics fascinated me. I was haunted for most of my adult life by a satirical psychedelic pop song by the Montanas called “Difference of Opinion” because I misremembered the title as “Declaration of Independence” (note the record label and you’ll see why).

One or two times in recent years, I’ve resolved to plow through the unlisted 45s I already owned, and I’ve set aside an hour or two in the morning to do nothing but spin singles and drink my coffee. I gotta tell you, it’s a habit I wish I could make stick – even familiar tunes take on a new depth when you’ve made the effort to swap out a record every three minutes and the song is more than just a convenient backdrop for doing something else. It’s a mindful and positive start to a day dealing music, and a lot of fun.

I don’t think this is gonna make me a full-blown 45 guy, but it’s definitely gonna broaden my horizons a little. Make me a promise, though – if you see me hauling home five boxes of cassingles any time soon, kick me right in the ass and make me take them to Goodwill.