A Little Entertainment

I landed at Newark a little after 5 this morning and thanks to the surprisingly effective NJ Transit was sitting down for breakfast at the Market Diner by about quarter to 7. Not bad timing considering the walk from Penn Station. Midtown early on a Saturday was a new experience for me, and it was pretty eerie actually. Went across the street to meet Cate and we headed to Northampton.

The first iPod wasn't introduced until 2001, so it would be more than a little unfair to expect that the stereo in the Ranger would have any provision for connecting one. Luckily, CD players were pretty standard equipment by then, so I've got one of those. Also luckily, Northampton, MA has a great record store in Turn it Up. It's in a basement with a low ceiling, and down a surprisingly unsafe flight of stairs. In a nutshell, my kind of place. Whenever I'm in town, I always make a pilgrimage. In addition to well-priced used CD's, they have a solid selection of vinyl, but that wasn't going to do me much good on a road trip so I focused on the CD bins. There's also an outpost of Newbury Comics here, where I generally find something I can't live without.

When I stopped by a couple months ago after buying the Ranger, I stocked up and left a pile at my mom's house in preparation, but realized that I probably didn't have enough tunes to get all the way across the country. Since there's big parts of the country where radio choices consist of Rush Limbaugh and Christian stations, another trip was in order today while I was at Ivan's. Here's the result:

It's a pretty eclectic collection, and according to my very rough calculations, about 100 hours of music, which should be sufficient to get us all the way to California. With any luck, the bulk of it won't be terrible, but there are some titles here that fall into the somewhat experimental category for me. As in "I think someone I trust likes these guys. I guess I'll check 'em out." Or "Hmm, I remember liking that song. I wonder what the rest of their catalog sounds like." 

On a related note I'd welcome any record shop recommendations along the route. A long time ago I spent a lot of time at The Record Archive in Rochester, but I don't think we'll have time during our brief stop there.