My second day of selling old albums on my stoop was not as lucrative as the first (see note below) perhaps because the wild hipsters of Brooklyn don’t get up on Sunday until after noon and when they do, they’re more concerned with laundry, hangovers and other homely matters than buying old wax from old dudes like me. One young man actually bought my old copy of Highway 61 Revisited (and if that jacket could talk, what incoherencies it would utter!) saying it was for his father’s birthday. Big spender. 

Though some of these records had some sentimental value (there was my copy of Beatles For Sale, probably the first LP I bought with my own money) their actual value was somewhat negligible. Most collectors want things in mint condition and most of mine were more like the Spearmint gum you’d been chewing all day and stuck on your bedpost at night. These were records I had walked on and partied on decades ago and I had memorized the scratches and pops on the more popular ones. Doesn’t your copy of London Calling skip at the beginning of “Clampdown” from the nick some drunken clown (probably you) put there going back for an encore performance?

But one of the neighbors I hadn’t met, a guitarist named Sean who lives across the street, threw a scare into me when he walked solemnly up the steps with a handful of records and asked, “Are you sure you want to sell all these? I don’t know if you’ve looked on eBay but collectors would pay a lot of money for this stuff.” He proffered a copy  of Miles’ Kind of Blue and a best of Buddy Holly collection. Well the Miles was a Columbia reissue from the eighties and the Holly was a bad remastering of the more obvious hits with no “Modern Don Juan” on it. 

“But Buddy Holly is an American icon!” he said. I should mention that Sean is about thirty years younger than me, which makes him about 100 years younger than Holly. But their glasses were very similar. 

I was concerned enough, though, that after packing the rest of my records away for the day, I Googled the Holly reissue and found someone had tried to sell the selfsame album on eBay for $19 and finally ended up shipping it to somebody in Malaysia for $14. For nine dollars less, I’d rather keep it right here in the USA, where Annie’s still working on the midnight shift.