Book Report: Garage Sale Vinyl by Christopher Jones (2024)

Ah, gentle reader. When I saw ABC Books’ Facebook post about the author having a Thursday night book signing. When I bought a copy of Superstar 2020, I noted his book signings are generally on weeknights, and I learned it’s because he’s from around here but does not live in Springfield these days. As a matter of fact, when he lived in Springfield up until his early teens, he lived in a neighborhood not far from where my beautiful wife and her family would live in a decade later (and, yes, he does include a Brad Pitt story).

The book stems from a series of columns he wrote for an Internet site, basically reviews of old records that he finds at flea markets, garage sales, and other places–including a couple that he has ordered.

He leavens the columns with anecdotes of his life, from his time working in a record store to owning a record store to being a personal assistant on a couple of rock tours, his time in Springfield, his youth in Florida, and so on. He also tells (sometimes) about his purchase or acquisition experience of getting the records, a bit of history of the record’s production, and/or some approving critical appraisal of the tracks.

His tastes tend to run toward classic rock that he first heard new on vinyl when he was a kid: The Cars, Alice Cooper, The Beatles, and so on. Stuff I would have heard on album-oriented rock stations when the songs were but a decade old. He does have a Tony Bennett record, and I do own two records on his list of fifty (Sweet Talk by Boots Randolph and Heart Like a Wheel by Linda Ronstadt, both of which I purchased on May 4, 2019).

I expect our differing tastes in records we collect accumulate (in my case, anyway, as you know, gentle reader, I will buy a lot of things sound unheard for fifty cents, especially if it has a Pretty Woman on the Cover (PWoC)). First, we came up in different eras; although my sainted mother and my father had a few records, by the time I was buying albums, it was on cassette and not on vinyl. Although I did have a brief run on picking up Billy Joel, Pink Floyd, Tin Tin, and Marian Segal with Silver Jade records in college because they were cheap as older collectors moved from vinyl to CD, most of my experience with new music of my growing up would be on cassette. Many of the titles didn’t sell as many copies on vinyl, so they’re not available easily at garage sales, book sales, or even your cheap crates at antique malls or used media stores. And most of the titles he mentions in this book and the classic rockers of the 1970s and 1980s are the very ones that collectors in that Generation Jones and Generation X are snapping up.

SO: My collecting has been buying what’s available, cheep! And that’s been big bands and easy listening music that our grandparents (and some of our parents) would have bought in the 1940s through the 1960s. As I mentioned to the author, most people don’t remember that the charts were dominated by the easy listening artists in the 1960s–Herb Alpert and the had a string of giant records, sometimes several on the charts at the same time. So I’ve been able to find a lot of Andy Williams, Tony Bennett, Boots Randolph, Eydie Gorme, and even older Big Band acts for fifty cents a throw. I’ve also picked up some non-Miles Davis or Ella Fitzgerald jazz–a lot of Dave Brubeck (!), George Shearing, Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan, Diana Washington, and so on. AND! I’ve had the chance to pick up a number of international artists–the Brazilian records I bought in 2016, Mireille Mathieu, Özel Türkbaş, and so on. And when I come across a new artist that has several records available for fifty cents, I buy them all just in case I like the artist.

So, where was I? Oh, yes, this is an interesting book and a good read. I liked it, and although I might have found to enthusiasm a bit forced, I did meet the guy, and I think it’s probably how he really is.

Spread over a year’s worth of columns, the enthusiasm and calling a record a “stinger” would not have seemed quite so rote. But that’s maybe the only knock I could make against the book except noting a few typos.

So I’ll have to dig out that copy of Superstar sooner rather than later. I kinda know where it is in the book stacks which are just as disorganized as the record library which is fuller than it was in 2024.