My son just named his new guinea pig “Sally,” and though I’m not a fan of rodent type critters, I think Sally is pretty cool. Also, guinea pigs make this really odd electronic kind of sound when their excited.

Some time ago I wrote about a Jean Dushon single on Atco Records “I’m Tired,” produced by Phil Specter. And with absolute over the top aplomb I ranted, raved and foamed like peroxide on a road rash about that track. “How,” I thought  “can it get any better than this?”  A discovery like this, out of the blue, only happens once in a lifetime to a lowly record store employee.

I went so far as to write that my aching back was miraculously healed by the Bo Diddlyesque drumbeat; it had to be the vibrations!

Well … I may have been wrong; I know this revelation may surprise you. I’m generally not one to exaggerate. Really. Anyway, my backache returned and eventually worsened, but did I lose hope? Almost … but no! I felt that somewhere down the line something greater, something deeper was going to breathe life back into me, an empty shell of a man. Carpe Diem! Corpus, Mens, Spiritus! E pluribus unum! Eureka! Ars longa vita brevis!

A few months back I discovered a 7 inch record from a somewhat obscure singer, Anna King … and this time I think I actually had a religious experience. My back wasn’t healed, but I swear to god I didn’t have an asthma attack for weeks. It’s as if my ears and lungs and bronchial tubes were touched by healing hands.

“Was that you Katherine Kuhlman?”

Long ago I discovered that the flip side is often the hot side, and "Sally" is the B-side to "Mama’s Got a Bag of Her Own", a kind of a dig at Anna King’s old boss. "Sally" is an impossibly soulful, medium tempo ballad with just a hint of a musical arrangement. To start with, there’s a little piano, a touch of a bass line, a kick drum and all the room in the world for the vocals. King first starts off a little breathy, a little hesitant, telling her dear friend Sally about her no good boyfriend.  But by the end the full band kicks in and the vocals just lay it on the line: Sally should just forget about that son of a bitch, because as Anna King plainly states, “I’m gonna steal him from you.”  And I thought they were pals! I just don’t have the words to explain the greatness of this cut. Find it, if it takes you a decade, it would still be worth your time. Think of it as a religious pilgrimage. I’m serious!

But while I sit at my desk wondering what I should write about next, the sound of jack hammers suddenly emanates from the house directly behind us. My neighbor is actually tearing up his entire cemented backyard and plans on putting in a garden! There you have it: gentrification!

Anyway, here is one last look, for now, at some of the art work on our boxes of used 7 inch records. I wish I had done some of this artwork myself but, just like the jackhammers, my only true talents are more in the nature of noise: my ability to make those kind of sounds 5 year olds forge and the aptitude to blather like the venerable old asshole chain smoking at a bus stop in Hollywood, nursing a cup of coffee from McDonalds, jawing about the flotsam and jetsam that has decimated some of the finer gutters in Los Angeles. “Strength through blather! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Strength through blather!”

But back to the subject at hand - art. Enjoy.

 

Charles Saatchi, with his brother, founded the international advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, but Charles' greater fame is as an art collector who has dominated the contemporary art market in Britain since the early 1980s. In fact, the the 1999 retrospective, “Young British Artists: The Saatchi Decade,” uses his name to define an entire contemporary art scene. Yeah, it would be cool to convince him to “invest” in our arty little 7 inch record boxes and help out us poor old ‘45 Room’ employees with our kid’s college funds, but word on the boulevard is he’s a recluse. In my book that’s just a fancy word for record geek. And that Mr. Saatchi is a compliment. I'll be waiting on your call!

Here we are, once again with more examples of the fine artwork rendered on our used 7 inch record boxes. Some of these formerly plain/primitive, white cardboard boxes are on the Amoeba Hollywood floor available for your perusal; others are, for now, hidden away in what we call The 45 Room, a paradise for geeky record romantics everywhere who might whisper in hushed tones: “Ahh! Vinyl Shangri-la!” But to those not familiar with supernatural powers of the little record with the big hole, The 45 Room might as well be simply called "that used 7 inch pricing room." O' to be so misunderstood! That is the life record collectors must endure, or if you must: record geeks.

The question I’m often asked: “Hey, Whitmore, if the 45 room is actually a Shangri-la, a heaven on earth so to speak, is there an afterlife, like a 7 inch heaven? And if there is a 7 inch heaven, is there a 7 inch god?”

I always answer with a glint in my eye and a friendly, bemused smirk, “You know, I’m not sure, but I’d like to think there is one somewhere out there in the dark surrounded by platters and acetates.”

Hopefully you’ll enjoy this further examination of Amoeba’s own home grown outsider art. And just like there is always another used gem of a record coming on down the pike, there’s always some new artwork gunning its engine, ready to lay some rubber down in Amoeba Hollywood.

The great Amoeba Hollywood enigma that is  “The 45 Room.”  Some simply refer to this veiled   room as the “used 7 inch pricing room,” but for others, sweaty with desire: “Vinyl Shangri-la.”

Does it really exist, and if so, where? What goes on in there? Who are they? Why is it invisible to non-believers?

Questions abound yet few answers come into the light under ampoule fluorescente compacte.

Inquirers try to penetrate this mysterious place of secret societies revolving/evolving from a dim tiny room, but to no avail.

There are so many myths. Startling tales and conspiracy theories abound, sounding not unlike the outlandish yarns associated with Area 51, Skull and Bones, the Bohemian Club or the Maury/Vashon Island incident of 1947 (look that puppy up!!) ….

One extraordinary 45 room rumor involves a holy modal ceremony around a stack of power-pop 45’s sacrificed at the feet of a giant forty-foot statue of Murry Wilson (aka Daddy Beach Boys). Can this be true? In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king ...

What about the reported appearance of “men in black” or "suits" canvassing, i.e. shopping, in the death metal area and the complex chain of events dating from last July 2, on what would have been Murry Wilson’s 90th birthday -- and my birthday no less -- once again, there are no coincidences…. Management promised those fellows were just from Accounting. Really? Since when do accountants afford such nice threads? There is more, trust me ... but reprisals loom ... but many answers are encrypted in the art work below, just use your Amoeba decoder rings.