Items found in record sleeves

Recently Mac brought up a topic on WFMU's e-mail list that spawned a flurry of great responses:

Did you ever find anything unusual in a used record you bought?

Here are some stories from WFMU DJs, please share yours in the comments section.

Mac:
I was just putting away some records and ya never know what you will find in the jackets. I have an AUTOGRAPHED copy of Ethel Merman's Disco Record and inside is a polaroid of her standing with some guy. Perhaps who she autographed it for?

Mike Lupica:
Shortly after buying my copy of Syd's "Barrett" double LP at the WFMU Record Fair, I discovered a crisp twenty dollar bill stuck inside of it.

Marty McSorley:
I found hand written lyrics to Prince's "I Would Die 4 U" on blue lined school paper. (But I found them in a copy of Thriller.) And there is just something about the handwriting that screams "look at me please, I sit next to you in 8th period math everyday. Why don't you notice me." I really love it it's been stapled to my wall through 4 moves.

John Allen:
I found a copy of Quicksilver Messenger Service "Happy Trails" with the R in Trails blacked on the front cover. I pulled out the record to check the condition, and several photos fell out. The pics were vintage 70's shots of women on women w/ toys, and guy on gal oral action.

Joe Belock:
I found a copy of a 7-inch (unrelated to the album I found it in), 6 years after I accused an ex-roomate of stealing said 7-inch. Whoops!

Fabio:
About 10 years ago I was going out to some garage sales in NJ with Donna, when we hit this one house with a bunch of sixties & seventies rock LPs. I pulled out a few things and as I was checking the condition of one Black Sabbath LP (Masters of Reality I think it was). I pull the record out and with the inner sleeve comes a perfectly flat and preserved pot leaf. I was amazed. I showed it to the guy and he was all embarrassed and apologized, but I thought it was hilarious. I asked him how long it had been in there and he said probably since he was in high school - at that point at least 25 years for him... He confiscated the leaf though!

Mike Lupica:
Inside my (used) copy of the first Celibate Rifles LP, I found a hand written note from their guitar player, which he'd clearly left for the first owner of the album after crashing with her on an early U.S. tour. It thanks her ("Judy", I think) for her hospitality, graciousness, and for introducing them to The Long Ryders and the Dream Syndicate. (I'm guessing Judy lived in L.A. and unloaded her LP collection on a trip to San Francisco, as I purchased the record at Amoeba Records some years ago.)

Marty McSorley:
I found a note in a copy of Crawlspace's Solitude 7" on about a 1/4 sheet of white paper torn at an angle. Side one reads (in hand writing that reminds me of my Colombian aunt complete those squigleys at the end of paragraphs.)

    I found . . .
    Taped to this
        paper is $20
     now I can get the
    necessary things
    -incense, bottled water etc.
    For Eddie's first visit to my apartment
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So the love flows
Though the insult and
wound back to him
tomorrow
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    Eddie
    Fire
    Eddie
    Love
    Eddie
    Peace
    Eddie
    Space
The most gorgeous beautiful man & most magnificent mindfuck-in the universe.

(and on the other flip side in writing almost as messy as mine)

Dig this shit $ means nothing to me, tho so fuckin' necessary in this fucked-up culture/society/mindfuck. If I can give away oz.s of 'shrooms to 'spacebuds + give $ to ACLU + Amnesty- well it hurts to Know that you struggle for this SHIT! + you Know this is LOVE never control. I want you to understand- ALWAYS

Comments

[Art]

My ex-girlfriend found a bag of weed inside Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense".

Someone used my copy of the Black Box "Ride on Time" 12" to kill a cockroach. The remnants are still on the back.

[Davo]

I found a sealed copy of grateful dead's Terrapin Station LP
with a half joints worth of weed INSIDE the shrinkwrap....
musta been packaged on the night shift???

[eastern_branch]

Stems and seeds were almost a regular thing to find ...

I once found a huge, complete, mummified pot leaf in the gatefold of a musty copy of The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band Part One.

I was picking through a pile of battered-but-interesting LPs sold to the shop I worked for by an elderly biker. Didn't get a chance to talk to him about his 60s/70s experiences, unfortunately.

[Andy Krunt]

Here's my personal favorite:

A copy of the Crumbsuckers Life of Dreams had a scholastic children's 45 of ghost stories, including the Erl-King. It was a better find than the Crumbsuckers record.

[endwar]

I have several, which are kind of along the lines other have, but variations. For instance i once picked up an LP of Ukranian folk music with $57 in crisp fives and ones in some insurance company envelope. I got a copy of The Box Tops _The Letter_ with handwritten lyrics on several small sheets of paper. I picked up a copy of the Nelson Slater 1975 album _Wild Angel_ at a local yard sale that had a three page letter written in 2001 from rhythm guitarist Johnny B (Brengelman)giving a few anecdotes about playing on the album, which was produced by Lou Reed (Slater was one of Reed's colleagues at Syracuse in the early 1960s). And i bought a copy of the boxed set of the complete piano music of G. I. Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann as performed by de Hartmann on Triangle that included a two-page opus of doggerel that was very carefully typed out on stationery and addressed to the Gurdjieff and de Hartmann estates, complete with wite-out or paste-ups for the few errors, with each of the two pages carefully glued and centered onto a larger black page, which was in turn glued and centered on a full 8.5"x11" sheet of blue paper, and the entire two pages enclosed in an old-school sheet protector.

This is in addition to the usual things such as concert programs (e.g. a Penn State performance of Carl Orff's _Carmina Burana_ stuck in a Columbia Records recording of the work (also with the original inserts and an obi-style strip (this was a US pressing)), or the middle school assembly program in a copy of Hot Pursuit's _Communicate_ LP).

I forgot to mention what may the king of insert LPs, at least prior to Sexual Milkshake's _Sing Along in Hebrew_ and Negativland's _A Big 10-8 Place_ (still available without the extras), which is the spoken word LP _When the Bomb Falls_ (a how-to narrative about survival in nuclear war), the copy of which i picked up at the Penn State AAUW booksale had at least half a dozen civil defense booklets and leaflets, including a number that were of local origin, suggesting either that the previous owner was using the jacket to file all his material on the topic or that local retailers/distributors were stuffing the jackets with material, as the one copy i read about someone else having online mentioned all the pamphlets (Oh, it was WFMU -- surprise!: see blog entry from May 22, 2007).

I've also made a point of adding useful info i get to various albums, such as posters recovered from record store freebie bins, lyrics obtained from one place or another, articles cut out of magazines or printed off from the web (most recently the hilarious account of the recording of the One album for Grunt records ; earlier it was stuff like hypothetical tracklists for the _Faust Tapes_). Which is all kind of off-topic, at least until i sell the album.

-- special de-URLed version

[Dec H]

In my now lost vinyl collecting days I used to be particularly partial to acetates - falling upon them was made easier due to their distinctive odour. About 15 years ago, in one of London's Music & Video Exchange 10p shops, with that smell in the vicinity, I finally honed in on a nursery rhymes seven inch picture sleeve to find a slightly warped (sadly) acetate of the Small Faces 'Tin Soldier' inside. Still smiled all the way home, though.

[Clutch69]

I bought a copy of Volume IV by Black Sabbath and it was with the gatefold, right in the middle was a chunk of weed no telling how many years old, or maybe days, me and my buddy Sean smoked it and listened to the album.

[Clutch69]

I bought a copy of Volume IV by Black Sabbath and it was with the gatefold, right in the middle was a chunk of weed no telling how many years old, or maybe days, me and my buddy Sean smoked it and listened to the album.

[Clutch69]

I bought a copy of Volume IV by Black Sabbath and it was with the gatefold, right in the middle was a chunk of weed no telling how many years old, or maybe days, me and my buddy Sean smoked it and listened to the album.

[Clutch69]

I bought a copy of Volume IV by Black Sabbath and it was with the gatefold, right in the middle was a chunk of weed no telling how many years old, or maybe days, me and my buddy Sean smoked it and listened to the album.

[Clutch69]

I bought a copy of Volume IV by Black Sabbath and it was with the gatefold, right in the middle was a chunk of weed no telling how many years old, or maybe days, me and my buddy Sean smoked it and listened to the album.

[Clutch69]

I bought a copy of Volume IV by Black Sabbath and it was with the gatefold, right in the middle was a chunk of weed no telling how many years old, or maybe days, me and my buddy Sean smoked it and listened to the album.

[jim]

In an ancient copy of Elvis' Golden Records Vol. 1 that I picked up at Jerry's Records in Pittsburgh, I found a bunch of pages written by someone's probation officer. The juvenile delinquent being described in these pages sounded like the guy the shangri las must have been singing about. Included in his report were his list of offences(He went from stealing 45s at the age of 8, to stealing cars at 15, to attempted robbery of a convenience store and assault of a police officer at 18), a description of his appearance(black leather boots, tight tapered jeans, leather jacket, slicked up hair), a list of his friends( all of whom have nicknames like dino and slick), and on and on. Ultimately it paints this picture of a guy whose existence leaves me believing that everything i've ever seen in the movies is true.

[tom lester]

Milk, Mydol, Rolling papers, Carton of cigarettes, Captin Crunch. This is a shopping list I found in a Pink Floyd LP...