58TH MEGA RECORD + CD FAIR | ‘S-HERTOGENBOSCH

Okay. So we’ve established that at almost 600 dealers, that – yes, this was an immense Record Show. After chasinvictoria and I reeled through the first hall, we decided to move to the smaller one first and make our way from, back to front. We started methodically walking along the farthest wall then moving to the next row over. Though I expected to see CDs as a minority here, given the size of the show, and the location in Europe, I was shocked by how few of the silver discs were in evidence.

Also, where there were CDs, more often than not, the organization was poor. There were scads of unsorted CDs; particularly for the used titles. After about 20 minutes of jumping from dealer to dealer, I quickly ascertaining if there was any reason to spend more than a minute in sizing them up, I finally found a dealer with a few boxes of new CDs. I saw two items I had to have that were actually on my Discogs want list. Neneh Cherry’s 2xCD edition of “Blank Project” on a Swedish label and the live 1984 concert I have on VHS from Blow Monkeys. Each one was shrinkwrapped and €7.00 each. I had no problem with paying that much and the dealer readily took my debit card for payment. More on that later.

We kept moving through the stock. I’d call the goods 80% 12″ records/LPs. 10% 7″ and 10% CD. When confronted by records, I did look for items that I would be interested in buying. But the truth is that 40+ year old New Wave and Post-Punk material was pretty thin on the ground. Like any store I visit these days, the big thing was either new LPs priced high, or vintage Classic Rock; priced stratospherically. But after another half hour, I managed to find a real treasure of the kind that I could only have found here: The obscure Nits orchestral album “Hjuvi – A Rhapsody In Time.” This was the second 1992 album by the band [the other was “Ting”] and something so under the radar that I didn’t even have a copy on my want list.

About a third the way through Hall 2, I managed to find an album that was on my want list. Right now, I can’t even remember what it was, but I do remember that the dealer didn’t take PIN Card payments, as they called them here. Chasinvictoria had exchanged currency and had Euros on hand and offered to buy the LP but I didn’t want him using up his cash for my benefit. Slightly deflated, I moved on.

One of the bittersweet things was that every now and then, I saw CDs that were rare birds, but were ones that I already had. Case in point, the dealer with an Anne Clark section. I have a few of her albums; the ones I deem necessary to have, but outside of the one time I bought mine 35+ years ago, these were nothing I’d ever seen out in the wilds. At least the dealer had CDs sorted by artist cards! And they had another golden oldie that I’ve never seen this copy of outside of Mr. Ware’s own Record Cell.

Icehouse fans of a certain stripe will remember that the “Big Wheel” album [a favorite of the early 90s] came in a limited edition from OZ that contained a Macintosh floppy disc that featured the electronic press kit for the album as created in Macromind Director [really dating myself here] by band member Simon Lloyd [as I recall]. Here’s the floppy disc as depicted on Discogs.

I’ve seen the disc. Mr. Ware loaned it to me and I copied the file to my Mac at the time. There was a scant bit of animation and a sound bite from the album along with press info/lyrics. It’s how you made a CD with an interactive element back in the day!

The shoppers in attendance were primarily old white guys, like myself. These days, the hipster vinyl wave in America sees many more women diving into the bins. I sometimes see fathers and their young daughters shopping, but the XX chromosomes were were still a minority here in the Old Country.

The occasional dealer had a little more than Classic Rock in their 12″ bins. A helpful “Punk/New Wave” title card caught my Monastic eye. The only gold I saw in that bin was the debut Tourists LP, as produced in 1979 by Conny Plank, but I have a copy, of course! In fact, this very record was the first import LP that the wet-behind-the-ears Monk bought in 1980 for the princely sum of $9.99.

Eventually, I found a dealer with lots of 12″ singles. A personal favorite format that tends to get short shrift in the last decade as the LP resurgence keeps taking up more retail space something’s got to give. And unfortunately, it’s the singles which are filled with rare mixes and B-sides; the stuff I live for! But the dealer I saw had five to eight boxes of 12″ singles and when I started looking I got the sort of feedback that keeps me searching through every box. By that time we had been there close to two hours and better yet, these were €1.00 boxes. Here’s what I pulled.

I buy every Blow Monkeys single in all formats, when I find them. Most of these were on my want list. The Animal Nightlife wasn’t but it’s a 2×12″ for €1.00 so why not? I was particularly happy to see two of the three Positive Noise 12″ers that I needed to complete my Positive Noise Reissue Project™ as well as one from Ross Middleton’s subsequent band Leisure Process. Of course, after spending a hefty half hour diving through the 12″ boxes, the dealer only accepted cash. This time I took chasinvictoria’s offfer and would PayPal him later. As I had forgotten to bring a record bag with me on the trip, I picked up a 3″ record shipping box from the pile in the middle of the event to carry everything, and if need be, ship the goods back to America.

After an hour or two, my personal device was on deathly low battery charge, so photographic evidence was no longer possible. So it’s going to be less visual going forward with this post. It was soon time for a break and we went to a cafe set up in the hall and got a bite to eat. We had barely scratched the surface after almost three hours and would need to step up the pace after the meal break. But the fast scan was a must as the type of goods I was looking for were scarcely in evidence. The show was filled with more bootleg items than I’ve ever seen since the record show nadir of the 90s when that segment threatened to take over the record show experience. Not just titles, but elaborate bootleg boxes were plentiful. I noticed chasinvictoria picking up some of the Bowie boxes, reflexively, on occasion, only to discover they were boots.

And the show had an awful lot of Metal in the stalls. I’d almost think that Beatles and Metal were 30% of the entire show. This made scanning some dealers as we careened through the corridors of mostly wax very quick work indeed. Then I saw a dealer with neatly organized Metal CD. I’ve been having a wild hair to dip into Judas Priest ca. ’79-81 lately and these discs were nowhere in my city when I looked. I had imagined that the big bookstores that have the biggest [used] CD selections left in Asheville might have what I wanted for $5.00-7.00 each but I was way off base. At one dealer here I had a new CD of “British Steel” in my hands for €10.00 shrink wrapped, but something in me said “I did NOT travel to Europe to buy Judas Priest CDs, new, for what would be $11.00!!” And then I snapped out of it and moved on.

The preponderance of Metal and Beatles made the occasional dealer finding their exclusive niche all the more endearing. There was one Bowie dealer who had neatly carded Bowie 7″ singles; scads of them, with granularity such as to make the mind reel. You want a plethora of French/German/Fill-in-the-blank Bowie 7″ singles to peruse? They were all there in a large selection; impeccably organized with separators! I wish even a fifth of the dealers had that seller’s OCD! Once more, I saw chasinvictoria drifting into the Bowie orbit that’s his default stance but who could blame him?

One of the things I had been hoping to see here was manifest a little while later, when I came across a dealer with a lot of Prince material on CD. I have seen “The Black Album” for as little as $25 here in Discogs, and hoped that at a show of this size, a CD would surely show up and it did! Better yet, the CD was priced at a as-low-as-I’ve-ever-seen-it €14.00! And then I was able to clean house on a huge swath of 90s Prince/TAFKAP titles for €3.00-€4.00 each. These albums weren’t things I could only get in Europe, but the prices were very right. The most was the 3xCD “Emancipation” for €5.00. By this time I was ready to hit the ATM for some Euros, so I got €40 worth to pay for these goods.

We had moved into the larger hall by then and were stepping up the already fast pace. It was after 2:00 p.m. and the show closed at 5:00. There was even more Metal in evidence in this hall so we were scanning at ever faster rates. I saw one dealer with unsorted boxes of €1.00 CDs and when I bothered to look, I got some positive feedback! Here’s what I grabbed from them.

I had a CD of “Broken English” but at €1.00 you buy it again! That’s how great I think that album is! The Rupert Hine I think I had but at that price I wasn’t going to chance missing “The Deep End,” a disc I’ve never seen out. Last year I bought a Hazel O’Connor 12″ to finally hear that artist and this time her debut album was there for the right price. I remembered seeing CSS opening up for Ladytron the first time I saw that band, so I would check out their debut album. And then I saw the want list item, the second, fantastic David Johansen album “In Style.” I bought a dollar LP of this in the late 90s in Cleveland when LPs were all $1.00 and found it to be a fantastic disc. I’ve been pining for a CD ever since, and even though this was a Culture Factory pressing [typically brickwalled] the price was right.

We sped through the rest of the show and it was pretty frictionless by that point. It was shortly after 4:00 p.m. that we concluded that there was nothing more to keep us here, so we exited the show and headed for the shuttle pickup to take us to the train station. In my mind I had thought that I could cap things at the $400.00 level commensurate with the 2014 Amoeba Records Tour but I got out of that show for about $81.00. What would be an above average month of music purchases for me these days as my music collecting fervor is waning. Which was appropriate, I suppose.

On the train back to Amsterdam’s Centraal Station, I mentioned to chasinvictortia that the time for record shows had passed us by. Where the sales were simply wasn’t congruent with our old man tastes. I mentioned that if we had come to one of these MegaShows in 1988-90, at the height of the CD frenzy, we would have been in for $500 or more. Heck, that was a common amount to spend back then at the much smaller shows in Tamps we’d go to! As it was, I’d spent almost half of what I spent at the show simply buying my train and show tickets! While there were enough things not to make me angry I had bothered [as I often am when going to local record stores] it wasn’t ultimately worth the effort. I wish I’d followed my first instinct to spend the time with my other friends and wife that day in Amsterdam, but hindsight is often 20-20.

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