Weekend Vinyl

I found the most insane album ever in my parents' record collection. Plus: Led Zeppelin, Cat Stevens, Carole King, and Saturday Night Fever.

This week we found a ton of highlights in the combined vinyl collection from my parents and my wife’s parents, and that’s starting to become kind of the norm. There have been some duds for sure, but for the most part I’ve been pretty impressed, and I’ve enjoyed the experience of true crate-digging for the first time.

But then… Then I found one of the most insane musical artifacts I’ve discovered in all my days. I haven’t been brave enough to ask which set of parents this gem came from, and I don’t know if I ever will. Read on for more…

Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin IV

This was Zeppelin’s highest-selling album for good reason. While I could recite the lyrics to pretty much every song on this album by the time I was 12, it still sounds just as impactful to me today. That’s in large part thanks to the ritual of listening to it on vinyl, which I’m quickly coming to appreciate as a large part of vinyl’s charm. The flip in the middle is part of it, I’ve realized; it gives you that few seconds to recover from “Stairway to Heaven” and then go through the buildup all over again on side 2, culminating with “When the Levee Breaks,” an absolutely thunderous banger. I was so excited to find this in the old collection - not an original pressing or anything, which in my mind is even better because I can play it to my heart’s content without caring if I wear down the grooves.

Carole King - Tapestry

Good songwriting is a hard thing to define, I think. Does it mean great, poetic lyrics? Catchy hooks? Interesting chord progressions? Imaginative melodies? Carole King checks every single one of these boxes, making this one kind of a no brainer for one of the best songwriting examples I’ve ever heard. Absolutely gobsmacking quality of songs in a very simple production package.

Yusuf / Cat Stevens - Tea For the Tillerman

Speaking of great songwriting. This album has a little bit of a Mr. Rogers feel to it, a wistful feeling like it’s something you’d hear in a childhood fever dream. It’s almost silly at times - it kind of reminds me of this guy I worked with named Stu, who my other coworker couldn’t stand. I told him my approach to dealing with Stu - “just imagine he’s stoned all the time, and his behavior makes a lot more sense.” Stu wasn’t stoned, just a slow-moving guy, but my coworker took my advice and suddenly was able to deal with good old Stu. This album is the same - if you imagine it was conceived and recorded in a smoke-filled tent somewhere, it gets a lot more enjoyable.

Saturday Night Fever

There’s not much to say here - this album is full of bangers. I didn’t know I enjoyed disco so much, but even speaking unironically, the Bee Gees and friends are at their absolute best here.

Last, but certainly not least, this week’s winner for most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read, made worse by knowing it came from either my parents or my wife’s parents:

How To Belly Dance For Your Husband - Little Egypt

You know, I don’t think I even have the mental capacity to process everything that’s going on here. Is this album offensive to multiple groups of people in some way? I’m sure. Is it even more terrifying that it came from one of my parents’ record collections? I’m not going there. Was Little India actually complicit in this, or was this the result of a marketer somewhere? No idea. But is it one of the most hilarious things I’ve come across in the past decade of my life?

To answer that, let’s turn to the “Special Instructions” booklet that came with the album. To my great relief, it doesn’t seem to have ever been opened before.

The instructions are absolute lunacy. I cried laughing as I read this aloud to my wife. We’ve both decided that it must have been the other person’s parents who gave us this monstrosity, and we’ve pretty much left it at that. There was no belly dancing by either party.

“The dictionary defines the belly as the front part of the body between the breast and the thighs. Speaking personally, they couldn’t have picked a better place to put it!” I just… I’ve never liked the phrase “I can’t” because it’s become so freaking over-used and it seems to apply to such inane things, but I freaking CAN’T handle this. It’s horrifying. It’s almost brilliant. Sure, at the time it was probably construed as good-natured and harmless cultural curiosity, but at the same time the instructions are so full of tired sexual and racial innuendoes and stereotypes that I don’t have the social awareness to decide how much offense to take, but the answer is probably not zero. It covers a topic I hoped never to contemplate in all my time on this planet. The 70’s were a different time, a time long gone, and it’s not often that I contemplate that fact and then think “good.”

But in fairness to Sonny Lester and his music, I had to at least give this thing a listen. So while I chopped veggies and simmered a pot of spaghetti sauce, I listened to the sounds of Sonny Lester and his orchestra as they provided the soundtrack to, as the “author” puts it, do “anything a plate of Jello can do.” I spared my wife from this listening experience. I will not comment on whether I belly danced for her at any point.

It was a surprisingly entertaining listen, to be honest, although most parts amounted to essentially big-band elevator music. Sonny Lester seems to have made his conducting career on many such oddball records, not least of which is entitled “How to Strip for your husband”. I think I’ll be leaving his back catalog undisturbed. You haev to wonder how much shit he got in whatever “orchestra” music circles he was a part of for selling out to do this skeevy nonsense.