When you see Whipped Cream & Other Delights by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass in a thrift store, you buy it. Just to have it. It’s like a membership card into the club of cheap-bin record hunters (all of us have it). This LP in your possession says that you’ve been there. You know the fluorescent lights. You know the dirt. You know the smell. You know the pain.
And I’m talking real thrift stores here, not used bookstores or used record stores. I’m talking about the place in the low-income section of town where you can buy a record, some dishes, a broken toy and someone’s old shoes all at once.
If you’ve only read about thrift store record-shopping, you might think that these places are wonderlands of one-dollar oddities. Christian ventriloquists. Satanic zither players. Private press schizophrenics. Drag queen comedians. Truckers with theremins. Lounge singers live on stage from the Twilight Zone.
Most of the time, you’d be wrong. Most of the time, all you find are Barbra Streisand, Boz Scaggs and dead bugs (personally, I’d rather buy the dead bugs). You might find something cool once or twice a year—a stash of old new wave imports, maybe, or some well-molested vintage bubblegum records, or perhaps a Cold War-era evangelical sermon about the end times—but most days, nothin’. The people who find outrageous rarities and unknown treasures in these places are pretty much lottery winners, bless ’em.
It takes a hardy soul to keep up the thrift store habit. I used to do it, but can’t anymore. My record-flipping hand was injured in a terrible Mitch Miller-related accident years ago and now I spend my Saturdays in the park feeding the birds. If you see me in a thrift store at all these days it’s because I need a suit or a coffee table. I don’t even glance at the records anymore. I avoid them like old co-workers.
As for Herb Alpert and his arrangements of the day’s hits and standards, the sleeve art is the obvious selling point here. It’s an instant eye-catcher. As Alpert plays his trumpet on bouncy versions of the likes of “Tangerine” and “Lemon Tree”, guys across the generations have surely played their own fleshy trumpets as they studied the cover model’s whipped cream-covered breasts and suggestive pose. Yes, to own a used copy of this LP is to own something that someone possibly masturbated to and even on.
That’s part of what makes it essential, though. When you’ve got this baby on your shelf, you’re not only a record collector, but you’re also a risk-taker and people admire that.
Never say that collecting vinyl isn’t dangerous.
