New York Dolls

Trash

New York Dolls – Trash

My daughter called me at work when she got home from school and said the house smelled like trash, strongly. I told her to check the potatoes in the pantry, look around (smell around) and open the windows. She checked, she looked, she smelled, opened the windows, but she couldn’t find the source. It is trash night so I thought maybe my husband had taken some stuff out of the fridge and put it in the trash before he left for work and then forgot to put it outside. There wasn’t much I could do about it while I was at my office though.

As soon as I walked in the house, I could smell it. It was bad and it got worse as you walked through the rooms. I couldn’t hang around though because I had to turn right back around and go pick up my daughter from her club meeting. I told my son to start looking around and walked out the door.

While I was driving, it occurred to me that there were some apples in one of those paper totes that were leftover from when I made some apple butter a couple of weeks ago. Once I got off the highway I texted my husband and told him to check the apples. One of them was bad and so he tossed it, but come on, they must all have been bad so I told him to trash them all.

I felt pretty good about having figured out the source of the trashy smell without even being in the house. When I got back home we started getting dinner underway. Even though I’m a vegetarian, my husband isn’t and every once in a while, he likes to make himself some fish. He was rummaging in the fridge, taking out the parsley he bought, the butter, lemon, but he couldn’t find the fish. We bought it this weekend and I remembered putting it in the grocery bag so I told him to move out of the way and let me look for it.

Guess where he found the fish? In the grocery bag. Still. It never made it into the fridge. Since Saturday evening it had been sitting there, just wrapped up in that brown paper they use at the butcher/fish counter but not refrigerated. Gross.

So was it the apples or the fish? A deadly combination of the two? May we never repeat the experience to find out. He went off to the store to get himself something else to eat and I opened the windows and burned some candles. I don’t notice the smell anymore so I hope that it clears out completely before my mother arrives for Thanksgiving.

Personality Crisis

New York Dolls – Personality Crisis

My local record store is a tiny cramped space, even if you’re the only customer in there. Today there were a couple of people in there when I arrived and more came when they left so it felt particularly tight. The guy who works there said there were several bins of records that they hadn’t had a chance to price yet, a big collection that they’d bought, but they were all for sale so feel free to dig through the milk crates.

While the owner does get in new records, re-issues as well as new releases, he mostly sells used stuff. New vinyl is generally too expensive for me so I stick to the used bins and hope that he has something different in stock. That new collection had some interesting records but most of them were in kind of iffy shape. Missing inner sleeves, worn out covers, some scratches on the vinyl. I passed on a number of albums that I might have thought about buying if they’d looked a little less worn out.

After flipping through seven or so dusty bins, in the last box of records, I found an original copy of the first New York Dolls album. The cover was coming apart at the seams, as was the inner sleeve, but the record itself was in good condition. Such a classic. My brother used to play it all the time when he was in high school. I think he probably still has his copy, and given how meticulous he has always been about his stuff, I’m sure it’s in excellent shape. I only have a tape that my brother made me with this album on one side and Lou Reed on the other. I decided it was worth taking a chance with this copy since I’ve never come across it (in recent years – oh if only someone would have told me to grab a bunch more records back in the day).

I paid a little more for it than I thought it was worth really, given the sorry state of the cover and sleeve, but the guy cleaned it for me and I brought it home and ordered everyone else in the house to sit still while I put the needle down. This song came screaming out through the speakers and I got a huge grin on my face. It sounded great. It looked great too, nice and flat. Not bad at all for a 42-year-old record.

Pills

New York Dolls – Pills (live)

I’m reading Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever and although I’m not old enough to have been aware of the music scene during those five years (I was 6-11 years old and we lived just outside New York City not in it), much of the book is familiar.

Thanks to my older brother exposing us to bands like the Ramones, the Velvet Underground (and solo Lou Reed), the New York Dolls, and my own memories of hazy, dirty, hot summers, and a city with huge crime and drug problems, I don’t have a hard time picturing the events he chronicles.

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