Mister Good Times by Norman Jay

Author:Norman Jay
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780349700649
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

chapter twenty-four: buying records

The most fantastic aspect of being in New York was something that kept me going back year after year: it was, of course, buying records. Coming from London, where black culture among young people was largely Caribbean, it was fantastic for this soulboy to be in a place where what he loved was the default setting. Sometimes I used to get so excited about music and records that I felt the New Yorkers didn’t fully appreciate what they had!

Everything crystallised for me in that moment I arrived. While I was enjoying meeting and greeting my relatives, a big part of me was thinking, ‘Right, I’ve put my bag down, now I want to get out of here, get into Manhattan and buy some records!’ When I did get to go out, I didn’t even make it as far as the subway because everybody’s got records for sale, regardless of what their business was. Literally. I go into a barbershop round the corner from my aunt, he’s got records for sale! The pizza place across the road, they’re selling records! The stall on the sidewalk selling umbrellas and jeans and stuff, he’s got records there! And of course they’re all American releases, some stuff was new, some stuff was old and some stuff I didn’t even know, but I knew the labels or the producer or the artist, and they’re just being sold out of boxes on their counters! In London I’d have to travel seven miles from Acton up to Contempo to get what I wanted; here are what to me are pre-release singles everywhere, there’s albums, in their shrink-wrapped cellophane everywhere. It’s like I’ve died and gone to heaven!

I was never just a clubber – musically I was a boffin, a collector, so now I’m like a kid in a sweetshop! Where do I start? Aaaaarrggh!! Again, sensorial overload! The end of the 1970s was an absolutely brilliant time for black American music and there was so much of it being made, so there was always such a lot of choice, which was why so many places sold records. I can still vividly remember those moments when I discovered those shops and I was so over-stimulated, I didn’t know what I was looking for! But at an exchange rate of two dollars sixty-eight cents to the pound, I could afford to take a few chances! ‘Dollar ninety-nine for this album? Yeah. I’ll take it!’ . . . ‘Fifty cents each for these singles? Great, I’ll have that and I’ll have that.’ Then as I had loads of uncles and aunts, and it was my first trip, everybody kept giving me cash! Fifty dollars here, a hundred dollars there, pressing these bills into my hand with, ‘Enjoy your trip, nephew!’ . . . ‘Here, nephew, hold this!’ I was loaded and I became a standing joke, because every day I used to come back with bags of records and they used to tease me relentlessly about it.

Some

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