Some provenance:
Rainy Day Music, Spencer, Iowa, was established in November of 1987 at the same location as the former Merrie Melody, an Iowa store of not enough reknown today. According to the file card I still have, we accepted the first Vulcan LP into our inventory March 25, 1988.
My further records are a little incomplete as we switched our inventory over to computers in 1991 and a lot of our sales and inventory data wasn’t preserved when those computers wore out.
I estimate my entire career sales at well under 25 copies of this record, but I am unsure of how many my predecessor Terry sold (he’s still around, I should ask him shouldn’t I?).
As far as that goes, Lyle’s still easy to find, and maybe I should ask HIM………
Anyway, the years passed, we stashed a few copies and one day in 2001 Lyle asked me to but a bootlegged copy of his record from a distributor in Germany over the Internet. That copy was twenty-five dollars, which inspired me to price the real McCoy at twenty-five dollars in my bins.
That copy went to Lyle at a price somewhat lower, as he needed one to give someone as a gift and he didn’t have any more copies of his own record.
Enter the modern era: My first eBay sale for a hundred dollars openly taunted bootleggers and dared them to obtain this nice fresh verifiable unplayed source material for their purposes and it didn’t take long before that deal was closed.
The two hundred dollar listing a year later didn’t take long either, and the three hundred dollar listing a year after that only waivered a little while.
I haven’t listed any since then.
Are you a former Rainy Day Music faithful? (probably not-it has been, after all, more than eight years after the store closed)……
If you are, perhaps you have been wondering what happened to the records; I know I have. If I can just disregard all of the things that actually made me any money and just concentrate on things I thought were interesting, it would be the records.
No, not all records. But a lot of them.
As I’ve evolved or devolved, depending upon your perspective, up until now I just haven’t found a good way to present the records as I’d like to.
It looks as if I’ve found all the tweaks and switches and whatever to present them at the present-day shopping cart however, so Us Guys are now happy to announce we’re open for former business (with four listings at the time of this post) at this url:
Of course, records were among my original business at eBay, and I’ve been there for 11 years now, so the selection is a little, um, picked over, but not-to-worry, I remember how I got ‘em (smile).
So we’ll begin with everything-in-the-world I’ve still got, complete with former store tags and whatnot and see how long it might take just to accomplish that.
Two things made this possible: a shopping cart that would calculate Media Mail or Priority for US destinations, and First Class or Priority for International destinations and do a halfway good job of adding up the weight of the box (I’m not quite done testing that yet), AND the absence of host site fees (like eBay’s) that inevitably add a dollar or more to every sale. If your original love is two-dollar cut-outs, that fee stuff is kind of a killer.
So, “as time permits”, let’s pretend it’s 1987 again, and we’ll start over.
Furthur10-07-30_GOTV_AKG481_LaPorte_16bit_Set2_T07.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object).
(If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will)
Furthur10-07-30_GOTV_AKG481_LaPorte_16bit_Set2_T03.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object).
This is one helluva good “Althea”. That’s all I’m gonna say, because I’m listening.