I’m sitting in my upstairs record room, cradling a hot caffeinated life-support system and surveying what can only be described as a Category 5 Kaos Event. Boxes are everywhere. Some are stacked with purpose. Others appear to have arrived through spontaneous combustion. Archaeologists could spend decades excavating this room and still be puzzled by some of my organizational choices.
The timing, of course, is impeccable because in two weeks the roof gets replaced. I have a metal roof, and at the moment it remains a mystery whether the plywood underneath will need replacing. If it does, things could get interesting in a hurry. This room has vaulted ceilings with stained wood trim running along the sides and across the peaks at roughly five-foot intervals. And under that appears to be drywall. In other words, all sorts of decorative features designed specifically to complicate the life of an already stressed-out record collector.
My current strategy, if you can call it that, is to have the roofer take a look once they get up there and tell me whether the plywood has to go and what it will do to the drywall. If the answer is yes, I may need them to begin elsewhere while I scramble for a ladder and attempt to remove the interior wood trim before gravity and poor planning combine forces against me. If that happens I can just imagine what will happen to the drywall and there is no way I will be able to replace that myself. There are also a pair of beams on each side that I suspect are more decorative than structural, but I've been wrong before. Frequently. Spectacularly. They may need to cut around them, which is exactly the kind of sentence that raises my blood pressure.
What I envision is a tremendous amount of work being performed by a clumsy, largely untalented handyman, namely me. I've already purchased heavy plastic sheeting, and this weekend's opening act involves moving records and assorted treasures into the room next door, which mercifully lacks vaulted ceilings and the potential for roofing debris to rain down like confetti at a parade nobody wanted. I'm hopeful the mess will be minimal, but experience has taught me that home improvement projects operate under the same laws as record collecting: whatever you think will happen will be replaced by a stranger, more expensive plot twist.
To distract myself from this impending adventure in roof-based anxiety, I'm posting another wonderfully obscure record.
I've always thought I.R.S. was an interesting label. My introduction was through R.E.M., but I completely missed their earlier days when they were putting out pioneering new wave and punk releases from artists like the Buzzcocks and Henry Badowski. They were remarkably forward-thinking, bringing a lot of great UK music to American audiences long before it was fashionable. I even uploaded a 45 they released by the original Animals not too long ago (see Eric Burdon and the Animals).
I picked up both copies of today's single within the last year, and I'm fairly certain I've heard it before, probably on one of those I.R.S. compilation albums that quietly educated a generation of musical misfits. The label had a knack for slipping unusual and fascinating records into your life, and decades later I'm still discovering things they released. Which is fortunate because between the roof project and the box-filled chaos surrounding me, I need all the distractions I can get. If nothing else, when the roofers arrive, they may finally discover what lies beneath the stacks. Hopefully it's just more records and not the fossilized remains of unfinished projects from 1997.
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