What is the oddest way you have acquired a record?

In the mid 1970s Columbia House sent me a copy of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony that I never ordered. It wasn't my automatic selection, since rock was my category. No invoice was attached.
I opened it and played it. It became my gateway to loving classical music.

 

As ballast for a record I bought online, the seller sent 2 other records.

 

Nirvana's ¨Never Mind¨ and B52's Party Mix from my bro-in-law's abandoned record collection (he never bothered to replace his sylus since the CD fever had set in) found a caring home.......at my place. The guy noticed their absence....20 years later !!

Only fair since the guy once used my stereo without my permission and forgot to take off the cloth I had over it for dust protection. I walked in the room the sec before the poor thing was about to catch fire.

 

Back in the early 80s, when I was around 11 or so, i was spending the day with my grandma and she had an appointment to get her hair down. I was somewhat reluctantly dragged along. Well, while she was getting her hair taken care of i noticed what looked like a rack of LPs towards the back of the shop. There were about 17 albums, all sealed, no price or anything. I don't remember them all but one was Ringo's Goodnight Vienna. There were 5 I was interested in. Since they were in such good shape and all at least 6 years old I had no idea what to expect price-wise. I shyly inquired to the hairdresser about the records. She said, "Oh honey, we've been trying to get rid of them forever. Just take what you want. How about a quarter apiece?"
I looked to my grandma since 11 yr old me had no access to money. She said get what you want. So that's the story of how I bought some oddball 70s albums in the 80s in the back of a hair salon.

 

For decades there was a bizarre sprawling retail emporium in Los Alamos, New Mexico called The Black Hole, a vaguely anti-nuclear enterprise that sold all manner of junk and surplus gear, the detritus of the endless billion-dollar weapons research programs up on the hill. Testing equipment, emergency sirens, defunct Cold War technical manuals, you name it — shelves upon shelves in a maze of rooms and nooks and crannies.

A few years ago it finally went belly-up and had a going out of business sale, and way in the back in a dim closetlike space I found a stash of crummy old vinyl LPs, but in the middle of this dreck was a sealed mid-70's RCA Red Seal pressing of the Dvorak American Quartet by the Guarneri Quartet. 75 cents. A beautiful mint recording I play often while musing on atomic apocalypse.

 

Nothing as weird as some of your stories, but an instructor for a training course I had to do for work learned I was into records and the next day came with all his Springsteen records he wanted to get rid of. Great day for me!

 

OK. My story:

The night before I got married, I was in a shopping mall with my wife, doing some last minute purchase of clothes -- a new tie, etc. -- for the ceremony.

We passed by a place where they were trying to lure people into buying time sharing. They invited us to attend a brief explanation of what they were selling and how it worked. Participants would get tickets for a raffle whose principal prize was a new car.

My wife said: Come on! Maybe we get lucky! It'll just take a few minutes!

I tried to persuade her that it was a bad idea and that we shouldn't be wasting our time but, of course, in we went.

We lost an hour, did not get the main prize (nobody ever did, I guess) but we left with a couple of CDs which I still have in my collection -- some Eastern European orchestra playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons and a set of instrumental tangos.

 

During high school ('73 to '75) I worked at an apartment complex doing whatever menial labor they had. There was a crew of 3 or 4 of us, and we had a pretty good time together.

One of our jobs was cleaning out apartments that people had vacated, sometimes having skipped out on the rent. We used to find all kinds of things that were like treasure to us as 15 to 17 year olds --- collections of girly magazines, pipes, bongs and the odd bag of weed, and records. Yes, as unbelievable as I found it even then, people would abandon their LPs. I still own quite a few I got this way, three that come immediately to mind:

Humble Pie (third album, with the black and white cover)
Uriah Heep - The Magician's Birthday
Ten Years After - Cricklewood Green

 

I won the following new (at the time) releases in a radio station trivia contest in the fall of 1974:

Van Morrison – Veedon Fleece
Maria Muldaur – Waitress in a Donut Shop
Manfred Mann's Earth Band – The Good Earth
Jethro Tull – War Child
Foghat – Rock and Roll Outlaws

Veedon Fleece is still my go-to Van. The rest are long gone.

 

My sister rented an apartment for a couple of years. One of the tenants left a couple of CDs when he returned to his native country -- A Backstreet Boys CD and Oasis' "Definitely Maybe". This would have been around 1995/96

A couple of years later, I bought this apartment from her and when she vacated the place, those CDs were still there. I didn't care much for them but kept them and after some years, gave these (and a couple of other CDs) away to my older daughter (who was a pre-teenager then and was living with her mother).

Time went by. My daughter grew up, moved to her own place. One day, in 2017, I was visiting her and she mentioned casually that she had some CDs she did not care for and asked me if I wanted any of those.

So I took the "Definitely Maybe" disc back home, played it, liked it and it's now in my collection.

 

My parents went out shopping for Christmas presents in 1989 and I'd asked them for the new Queen At The Beeb by Queen.

Come Christmas day, I opened a present that looked like a CD; of course, it was, but imagine my horror when I saw Queensryche written on the cover.......

 

Isn't that the way we all got our first copies of On Time?

 

I used to work at a library around the time that most people started getting rid of their collections in bulk (25 years ago). We had an annual dollar sale but even then most of them went to the dumpster, so any time a new donation came in, we the hipster clerks and pages would raid them first. It was a perk for dealing with the 5.50/hour pay, and the bosses never cared.
One time about 8 full boxes came in and by the time I took the evening shift that sane day, a good chunk of the rare pre-punk and hard rock already was gone. However, as the 2 hipster types did get the rarest stuff, (think Ramones, Telwvision, Lou Reed and the Velvets, etc.) but they also previously owned a lot of it so some of it got to me. They also had no interest in 60s-70s rock and this collector had both stereo and mono copies of the entire Dylan, Beatles, Stones catalogs etc. I grabbed all of those as well. Condition varied but most were very nice. I would guess I got 90 records or so and still have most of them.
Also I once found an unpeeled mono torso banana album at a flea market for $20. Even more bizarre is the dealer knew what it was, but thought since the recird was in G+, that it deserved to be $20. Fine by me. My buddy also found a huge metal score weeks later at that same flea, $1 apiece, including a Leathur Too Fast For Love.
Also my buddy found a Pink Floyd Tower Piper in the trash. I also found a big stack of James Brown records sitting next to a garbage can in daylight. Certainly "funky" if you know what I mean.

 

That happened to me too, unfortunately.

I borrowed a cassette of "Supertramp live 88" many years ago from a friend who was very ill and never got a chance to return it to him. I still have it although I no longer have a tape cassette player.

 

Prisoners by Brookfield is on Reverbnation now:

Prisoners | Brookfield

 

You win the comedy post...lol. Mine is also spotless.

 

Explains......

 

With a little luck....some one can get the whole damned thing to work....out.

 

Ah Record Time, cool store, nice folks for the most part, Ray who worked there at the end is running Found Sound in Ferndale.
The Fig Dish record is ok, there are a few tracks I still listen to, but the bet thing is this angry toaster logo



If I ever get a tattoo, which will almost surely never happen, it will be this.

 

One night at home the doorbell rang, and it was a courier delivering me an unexpected package. He handed me a record mailer, but I had not ordered any records. The package had my name and address on it, so I opened it up to find a near mint (cover and disc) white label promo of the debut Led Zeppelin album.

It turns out that the album was sent to me by a kind fellow who is a member of another music forum that I frequent. He knew that I was a huge Zep fan, and managed to get my address from third forum member. I’m still blown away by his generosity.

 

When I was in 9th grade, I took a home economics class, that involved running a lunch time restaurant for the teachers. We had a small menu, a rotating set of specials and some baked goods. We took the orders, cooked for and served the teachers; there were a couple who ate there every day. I had a blast, mostly due to the teacher. She was very knowledgeable, good at demonstrating things and knew how to guide you along so you actually learned what you were doing. Great lady.

At the end of the term our junior high was closing to be merged with the other one in the district. The teacher needed to go through all of the equipment in the class room, inventory it and figure out what was going to the new school and what wasn't; she asked me and a few of the others from the restaurant class to give her hand for a few bucks. We spent several hours emptying all of the cabinets, organizing the stock based on where it was going. All the while other teachers and staff are coming and grabbing stuff from the discard group.

Most of the others had left except for one other guy. I was pulling out what seemed to be a endless amount of cookie sheets and other sheet pans, as I get to the back of the cabinet there is a bag from a local defunct Dept. Store called Federal's. I pull it out, look inside and there are 3 sealed Jimi Hendrix albums, "A.Y.E.", "Axis.." and "Smash Hits". I look back into the the cabinet and there is another Federals bag, I pull it out and there are 20 or so more sealed L.P.'s. Most of the Who catalog up to "Who's Next", the first 4 Zepplin's, a couple more Hendrix titles including the U.K. "Electric Ladyland", a couple of Uriah Heep albums, 2 or 3 Deep Purple's, the Groundhogs "Thank Christ For The Bomb" and some other one's I don't recall. The bags had a holiday motif and the receipt looked to be from Dec. 73. The total was 106. or 116.

We're sure we're gonna get the records as she has been giving away a bunch of stuff, but we've got to ask. Janitor comes in the room and tells us the teacher had to leave and she'll be back the next day to finish.
He see's the bag and asks "What's that? "Cookbooks and home ecc. stuff" my fellow casual laborer replies. We leave, the janitor locks up the room and we start verbally divvying up the haul and go home. Next morning we get there early, wait for her to show up with visions of classic rock records in our heads. I am very interested in the Groundhogs album. The janitor walks buy, with a smirk on his face and I know we are boned. She gets there, opens up the room and we can see that the bag of "Cookbooks and home ecc. stuff "is gone, however the first bag with the 3 Hendrix titles is still there. A couple more hours we're done, we ask her about the records, she says "I don't know why they'd be here, go ahead take'em". The other guy took "Smash Hits" and a neat Xmas themed tea pot for his granny. I got "A.Y.E.", "Axis.." and 2 cast iron skillets, one of which I still use.

I played football and the next fall during a kick return, I and a couple of other guys ran the opposing back out of bounds and into a pile that includes someone who is not a player. While getting up, I step, accidently, on the shin of the non player. I hear him yowl, look down and it is that same janitor, I didn't apologize.

 

One day as I returned home from school, there was a copy of John Lennon's "Imagine" 45 laying on my front lawn. Still in good condition, too.

 

Like the Wings vinyl that dropped through the floor boards, disc two of Eagles Complete Greatest Hits disappeared down a gap in my Victorian wooden floor, lost forever...or at least until a future owner decides to remodel the place.

 

When I joined my unit in Germany in '90 I helped clean out the new squadron bar. Bunch of LP's, all a bit the worse for wear. Though the fella in charge was going to bin them so I acquired The Rolling Stones Through The Past, Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2) from '69. Plays okay, just a bit crackly.

 

That definitely IS an odd way to get a record.

For that matter, it's an odd way to get potato chips! Maybe potato chips came in boxes too when I was a kid, but I sure don't remember it that way.