This Saturday, November 28th, the Austin Independent Business Alliance presents Austin Unchained, a day of celebrating independent businesses by shopping locally. You can participate simply by doing all your shopping at locally owned businesses on Saturday and throughout the holiday season.

Take the Austin Unchained challenge! Start with one day and unchain yourself by purchasing only from local retailers. No need to purchase additional items, just purchase what you normally would. If everyone in Austin bought their goods and services at locally owned merchants for just one day, it would not only preserve Austin’s local character but it would put $14 million into our local economy!

This is based on actual sales tax figures and illustrates the economic impact of shopping locally owned. Just imagine what $14 million a day would do for our local economy!

I do it because I have a lot of old records that are not available on CD or for download, so it’s my way of preserving them. Plus I now get to load em’ onto my trusty iPod or use elsewhere.

So you get a sense of what I’m talking about, here’s a song I digitized today. It’s a version of a song Nina Simone made famous, “My baby just cares for me.”

Anyone want to take a stab at who this is? 2 stalwarts in their fields…and that’s a hint.

I only made it there for 1 day, but joined by Rene “the rock” Carlin and Armando “let’s make a deal ” Rayo, we perused and scoured the racks of albums until our fingers bled….well almost.

I spent $47, procured 17 albums and 1, 12″ single, that I used to own, but alas, like so many others, been lost along the way. Here is what $47 buys you in the currency of vinyl.

The Johnny Cash Children’s Album

Griff & Lock – Eddie Lockjaw Davis & Johnny Griffin Quintet

Battle Royal, the Duke meets the Count – Duke Ellington and Count Basie (no cover, have to take pix)

Sing Along with Basie – Joe Williams, Dave Lambert, Jon Hendriks, Annie Ross plus the Basie Band

Crisco presents Loretta Lynn’s Country Classics – Loretta Lynn

I Ain’t no Bad Girl – Memphis Minnie

Blues Before Sunrise – Ray Charles & Solomon Burke

For the Good times and I Won’t Mention it Again – Ray Price  (no pix, have to take it myself)

The Divine Sarah Vaughan Sings with Margie Anderson – Sarah Vaughan

The King of Zydeco – Clifton Chenier

Oscar Peterson & Nelson Riddle

The Greatest!!  – Count Basie plays, Joe Williams sings standards

Stay Loose – Jimmy Smith Sings Again

Rock This Joint – Big Joe Williams ( no pix, will have to take it)

Ooops! – The Swinging Sounds of Bill Doggett and his Combo ( no pix, will have to take it)

Liberation – Bunny Wailer

Johnny Cash & Jerry Lee Lewis sing Hank Williams

and the 12″ single….Afrika Bambaataa & James Brown – Unity

Serge Gainsbourg – Gold (madman who became a national hero in France, sample his trademark musical debauchery)

Economics – Economics (Canadian bedroom pop, file under relaxing)

Les McCann & Eddie Harris – Swiss Movement (live from 68 Montreaux Jazz Festival, seminal soul jazz)

The OKeh Rhythm & Blues Story (classic, vintage history of R&B)

Beach House – Devotion (dreamy, haunting lo-fi)

The Birthday Party – Prayers on Fire (nick cave’s 1st band, when I feel like screaming, this is what I listen to, he just screams better than me)

13th Floor Elevators  – The Psychedelic World of the 13th Floor Elevators (Roky Erickson and his fellow travelers travel from 60′s Texas into inner/outer space)

Townes Van Zandt – Delta Blues Momma (Van Zandt’s lyrics and melodies were filled with a kind of haunting truth and beauty)

Ryuichi Sakamoto – Sweet Revenge (ex leader of Yellow Magic Orchestra lush, sophisticated pop)

That’s all for now. Support your local indie music stores!

When I found out about this story earlier this week, courtesy of Goldmine magazine, I definitely reached for all 3 of those superlatives.

A virtual treasure trove of vinyl, some 25,000 LP’s and thousands more 45′s, were unearthed from an Austin collectors home, Bob Nash, and will be available to buy at the next Austin record fair. Suffice it to say, the local news media ignored or probably were not even aware of this news, but for the geeks, shellacs and muso’s who move in this music town, the wires were abuzz with unbridled joy.

Bob Nash when asked why he had accumulated so many records and other “stuff”, said it was something to enjoy in his old age, but at 86 he’d run out of time, and apparently his family now needed the room.

The collection is a fascinating window into several different genres of popular music through the decades, and includes Paul Revere, MC5, Chet Baker, rare psychedelic, soul, garage, Fred Wesley and the JB’s, Lightening Hopkins, Anita O’Day, Thelonius Monk and so on.

I hope Bob is ok parting with his collection, and the memories they hold. But aside from it ending up in The Smithsonian or similar museum, I for one will cherish any purchases I make. I am sure other vinyl junkies will do their part to ensure his legacy lives, and is played on.

Oh, and for purely selfish reasons, you’ll have to find out when the next record fair is on your own…..

Leonard Cohen – Live in London (as close as you can get to seeing a living legend live)

Rare Chicago Blues 1962-68 – various (includes the seminal Hotel Lorraine Dr King tribute by Otis Spann)

Linton Kwesi Johnson – Bass Culture (lyrical, angry roots reggae from London circa 1980)

PJ Harvey & JohnParish – A woman A man walked by (the west country girl and collaborater sonic attack)

James Carr – The complete gold wax singles (think james brown, only James Carr pre-dates JB)

Lightening Hopkins – Early Recordings (early acoustic country blues captured)

London is the place for me -various (calypso/ska compilations from the 50′s, infectious!)

Howling Wolf -Moanin’ in the moonlight (his first 2 lps combined, magnificant stuff)

Massive Attack & The Mad Professor – No Protection (spaced out dub version of the Bristol gangs work)

Stephen Stills, Mike Bloomfield & Al Kooper – Super Sessions (68 blues, supergroup…dig that hair)

Ernest Tubb – The Ernest Tubb Story (essential honky tonk compilation from the Texas troubadour)

Marilyn Munroe/Yves Montand, Frankie Vaughan – Let’s make love soundtrack (can you spell cool?)

That’s all for now, support your local record stores, online or here in Austin get to

Waterloo

It was Noel Coward singing one of his own songs “I Like America”, from this 1956 LP.

Have another one lined up that is fiendishly hard…..Happy 2009!

1. Much of my collection is not available on cd or as a download (legal or not), so I see this as an obvious way to preserve it
2. I actually listen to a ton of it, and sure its nice to be able to listen to it where my turntables can’t go
3. I kind of enjoy the ritual of taking the trouble to go through side by side, track by track, digitizing it in real time. It relaxes me. Listening to it takes me back to when I first heard it, like flipping through my musical memories.

I use a ION turntable with USB straight into my laptop and use the software (audacity) provided, to capture the album, scrub out clicks, hiss and kind of major blemish.

Then manually go through and enter track breaks and names. Finally, copy the WAV files with tags onto m hard drive and then into iTunes.

Usually, the tags get lost (anyone any tip how to avoid this?), so I run through in iTunes info, update each track, and voila, c’est ca.

Will post a recent end product of my labor next time.