Kiss

I like hearing the random conversations of people. I have a little mp3 recorder, and I had it with me, but I never have it on at the right time. So I miss a few gems that are amusing as well as typical. Sometimes they're typical and sometimes they once were typical. The snippet I heard today is definitely from a dying genre of snippets, which is the old music critic who doesn't like all this new fangled stuff.

I went to a thrift store -- different town from where I live -- and I noticed they had a bin of LPs in a different place than they used to. But I couldn't immediately look at them because there was an old guy going through them. And anyway my main interest is looking at the CDs, since, to me LPs are secondary these days, and they don't usually have any especially good ones, and there's not usually any hurry because very few people are looking for them, at least for the exact same ones that I'm likely to buy. So let the old guy look.

I did my thing, went through the CDs, went through the books, then came back toward the cash register. The old guy was with the checkout lady, and he must be a regular, because something he said indicated that he'd found some others he liked. He was friendly. Then he started commenting on the other LPs he left behind that they were just "noise." He used that word and exacerbated his criticism, repeating it in a harsher way. But he had found some good ones!

Then I heard him say -- this snippet is very close to an actual quote -- that "a few years ago there was a group that painted their face and..." (Essentially recorded a lot of noise, with their image being everything and the content nothing worth having.) The checkout lady immediately said, "Kiss," which he then remembered as being correct. He started saying something about having his old turntable and sticking with the good music they used to have, etc.

But I was going through the albums by now and Kiss wasn't in there, nor was there much in the way of rock records at all. There was the usual array of religious albums, both the famous and the locally produced. There was some Ray Anthony, some albums from that era, which seems to me like that might be up the guy's alley. And other than that I don't remember any, just average, typical stuff like you always see in LP bins. I think there literally was a copy of Herb Alpert's "Whipped Cream" album. I say literally because it's really not an official thrift store LP bin without that album! That's a good album, but usually the copies they have at thrift stores are junked out.

As it turned out -- no big surprise -- there wasn't anything in the bin for me.

OK, what did the guy find that was so great? I didn't see what was in his stack. But he had maybe up to six or seven LPs, or five, and the top one was one of the "Sing Along With Mitch Miller" albums, the yellow one that I believe has a fold out cover. I've seen it over the years quite a few times. It's hard to believe this old guy with his old record player wouldn't already have that one! Or maybe he wore it out.