Yesterday was one of those "the universe giveth and the universe immediately demandeth payment" kind of days.
The good news? I spent the day digging and found a 45 I'd been forced to part with about 25 years ago when my wife went out on disability and bills had priority over vinyl dreams. I paid more than I wanted to, naturally, but still managed to get it for less than current market insanity, so I'll call that a win.
The bad news? On the way home, one of my tires decided it had reached an early retirement age and blew out on a busy freeway.
Now, despite owning this truck for years, I had never actually changed one of its tires. This led to an educational roadside seminar titled "How the Hell do I get the Spare Tire out from under the Truck?" After much crawling around, creative vocabulary, studying page 301 of my owners manual and several negotiations with gravity, I finally got the spare down.
Unfortunately, the tire appeared to weigh roughly the same as a small moon.
By the end of the ordeal my hands looked like I'd been wrestling barbed wire, my shoulders were filing formal complaints, and my old bones were questioning every life choice that led me to that shoulder of the freeway. But somehow I got the tire changed and made it home.
What makes this even weirder is that I bought a full set of expensive new tires for the Colorado back in May. In June, the right rear tire got impaled by a metal pipe and had to be replaced. Thankfully warranty softened the blow. Now, just a few months later, it's the exact same tire causing trouble again. Either that corner of the truck is cursed or it has developed a taste for roadside debris.
So yes, I reunited with a long-lost record yesterday as well as 88 other's that will grace my turntable. But apparently the crate-digging gods charged a flat tire, several layers of skin, and half my remaining youth as the admission fee.
Back to Halloweenie week. Who can resist a label that looks this cool and surf instrumentals that hit with all the subtlety of a rogue wave? Everything about this 45 screams Halloween. You've got a band called The Phantom Five, which immediately raises important questions. Were there actually four previous Phantoms? Did those "Phantoms" vanish before the photo shoot? Or were there five band members and they figured nobody was going to conduct a paranormal headcount on what happened to the previous Phantoms? I'm far too lazy to investigate, and frankly, the mystery is part of the charm.
The artwork alone looks like the band just finished a leisurely stroll through a graveyard, stopping only to admire how impossibly cool they are. In my mind they're all wearing sunglasses despite the fact that they're ghosts and it is probably midnight.
I picked this one up from my friend Jesse last year, proving once again that some records don't need a famous name, a hit single, or a Discogs essay the length of a doctoral thesis. Sometimes a killer label, a wonderfully ridiculous band name, and enough reverb to wake the dead are more than enough.
