2024 was a watershed year for us. There were so many huge events that distorted the fabric of the year. Most of 2023 was spent preparing for our first excursion into the UK and the second in Europe since 1999. We were in saver mode much of last year; most of my free time was spent in selling off collections online to fund our travel nest egg. I have to say the work was pretty successful. We would be going to Europe and the UK with a pretty comfortable cushion. The fact of the matter was that we returned home with money we didn’t spend! So it forms the seed money for our next travel nest egg.

EXPANSIVE TRAVEL

And having taken trips to Amsterdam, Wales, Paris, and Liverpool, we can only say that we loved it! We’ve resolved to do it again…soon! The crux of the trip was down to seeing The Nits 50th Anniversary show in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Better still, our friends chasinvictoria, Gavin, and Chris were also in and met us there. We manage to have visits with chasinvictoria every handful of years in spite of his living in Victoria, BC. He gets around, but Gavin and Chris were only friends online with naught but video calls over the last decade. I’d planned on visiting them in March of 2020 to see the Human 17 concert in London, but that was scuttled by Covid-19.

It was utterly delightful visiting with them live and in person. Our meetup in Amsterdam was fun and The Nits concert was anticipated for so many decades that we could hardly believe it was happening, but it did. And that was spellbinding. Something from the very apex of the musical checklist of life duly crossed off with pleasure. Then we topped that by traveling to the UK and staying with them for a week in the green fields of Wales. Just the sort of decompress needed after the highly urban Amsterdam environment. To say nothing of their supafine company!

Having long musical discussions with Gavin in what I refer to as “binary mode” the first night or two was a lot of fun after being friends for a decade apart. And Chris was a perfect host with an ideal blend of intelligence, wit, and empathy. They treated us better than family during our stay in the UK and we can’t wait for our next meeting up.

We then traveled from Liverpool to Paris to see Pina Bausch’s Tanz Theatre Wuppertal perform in the City of Light. We’ve wanted to see that dance company perform for over a decade and one had tickets for Chicago…in the spring of 2020. You see the pattern, unfortunately? But all of Paris was even better than we anticipated and we flew home with the thought that we can’t wait for the text time we take such a trip as we’d only scratched the surface in the city.

MUSIC BUYING EXPERIENCES

Since we were traveling to The Netherlands at the week where one of the staggeringly huge, legendary Record Shows was being held in a city near Amsterdam the day after the Nits50 show, chasinvictoria and I planned to attend it. It was only an hour’s train ride away and both of us were former Goldmine Magazine subscribers in the 90s where the two page ad spreads for such shows were almost beyond our ken. Sadly, the expenditure of time and money to attend was not truly worth the investment.

As in the American southeast where I live, music buying trends have also passed me by in Europe! Worldwide, the hipster vinyl record revival is trampling me over and with 90% of the show being records, it gets worse. A huge portion of those records were either The Beatles or Metal acts. Stuck in two and a half aircraft hangars worth of music and I only spent €80! If not for the two dealers where I found €1.00 bins of European 12″ singles form the 80s and CDs, I would have spent €60 on about nine CDs. A thin gruel of Monk-bait indeed. I regret not staying in Amsterdam that day with my wife and Gavin and Chris.

But music shopping in Europe actually mirrored my experience locally! These days it actually make me depressed to shop for music. My tastes are so marginalized in the marketplace that I simply never see anything I’m passionate about in the wilds. The days of running across a want list item [and there are thousands of such releases] is a rare thing, indeed. Any time I spend in the pursuit of music in stores near me anymore is time wasted. So I feel as if the act of collecting music must be on the wane for me.

I’m happy with the notion of spending less money on music but the fact remains that a third of my incoming titles this year were down to visits abroad [Amsterdam/Wales] and to my old haunts in Orlando. For my money the hour spent in one shop in Porthmadog, Wales [Cob Records] easily exceeded the spoils of a whole day spent in the ultimately tiring “biggest record show in the world.”

And if a day spent at that show yielded virtually none [I did get a cheap copy of Prince’s “Black Album”] of the high ticket wants on my list, then a trip to the store in Orlando, Florida that I had not visited in 23 years [Park Ave. CDs] was astonishing in that it showed that if you actually have stock in the store that I would want to buy, a trip to a music store can still be a slightly thrilling experience for me. Ultimately, this tells me that the problem isn’t in me. It’s with the stores nearby that I attempt to shop at! So how did the numbers shape up for 2024 after all of the titles coming in were sorted and summed?

Next: …Lists and Details