Original_To:  BITNET%"allmusic@auvm"
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Date:         Mon, 14 Dec 1992 16:26:00 EST
From:         MCINTYRE@MSUPA.BITNET
Subject:      the beauty parlor's filled with sailors...

...the circus is in town.  Or at least the record convention was yesterday.
What surprised me the most was the lack of vendors selling new releases.
At past shows, Tower Records would drive up from Ann Arbor with their
cut-out bin as well as some imports.  This time there was only one guy
selling new CDs and his prices were pretty steep, but I did succumb, mainly
because he accepted Visa.  He had Curved Air's _Phantasmagoria_ as a
Japanese import.  Yeah, I could probably wait and find it elsewhere for
less than $25, but I asked myself "how long have you been looking for
this?"  and bought it.  A pleasent surprise was finding a German Bonnie
Tyler EP that had the three songs Jim Steinman wrote for her.

A real surprise was this one guy with several hundred bootleg CDs with
real nice packaging: color covers and a lot of the concert recordings
gave the date and place of the concert.  Alas, they were expensive,
usually $20 - $25 cash only, which did limit me.  I picked up two
discs that were labelled Velvet Underground.  One is the Doug Yule
version of the band in Amsterdam 1971.  Mo Tucker is the only original
member still around, but I'm enough of a Velvets fanatic that I wanted
it.  I almost bought a vinyl boot of that show years ago but instead I
bought _Velvet Underground 1966_ which turned out to be a boot I already
had in a different cover.  The other Velvet boot is from three different
sources.  There's four songs from the 1972 Paris "re-union" with Lou Reed,
John Cale, and Nico.  There's a couple songs from a 1969 show and six
songs from the recent re-union at the Paris exhibition.  At least the back
cover says there are six songs from that;  I've been told that only "Heroin"
was performed at the exhibition, so I don't know.  I haven't heard them
yet so I don't know.  What I did hear was the boot of Kraftwerk's 1991-1992
European tour.  They were supposed to play the US;  I even had tickets for
the Ann Arbor show.  Then the US tour was cancelled so they could extend
the European tour.  So I was looking forward to hearing what I had missed.
The bootleg turned out to be two discs, 55 and 61 minutes, so I think I
got the whole show.  And it sounds great!  It's an audience tape, but it's
the best bootleg recording I've ever heard.  Definately worth the $25.

I also picked up some videotapes: Peter Hammill on the Black Box tour,
Tangerine Dream in Athens 1983 (which proved defective, I hope the guy
comes back to the next show), and the Velvet Underground, a British and
an Italian TV show.  It's obvious on the Velvet's tape that I'm many
generations removed from the original (more so on the Italian) but I'm
just grateful to have these shows at all.  The British show just uses
songs off the albums, but the Italian show has some live footage of
the Exploding Plastic Inevitable.  Sigh, I should not have spent that
much money, but with such positive reinforcement for blowing the budget,
fiscal responsibility proves impossible.

John McIntyre
Physics - Astronomy Dept
Michigan State University