CHIRP: The Chicago Independent Radio Project

Tony Tschetter-Breed writes

A vinyl story: how I found, and almost lost, the Flying Lizards

Collecting vinyl is an addiction. You’re on vacation, you walk past a record store: you have to go in. I was always searching for some pretty obscure stuff, and you never knew where it might turn up. Is it really practical to buy a record I’d have to carry back from Montreal to Providence to Chicago? Who cares! It’s the Flying Lizards! This is not an every day find! I may never see this again.

One thing about getting the record was that I got to hear something beyond just their cover of “Money”. To be sure, it’s a great cover — still heard as transitional music in news stories on TV and radio, whenever the topic is money. It turns out, the full album is a good bit deeper and more varied, which is good, because 40 minutes of “Money” would be a bit much. It begins with their aggressively shrill version of Kurt Weill’s “Mandalay Song”, almost daring you to turn off the stereo. Perseverance is rewarded with track two, the lovely “Herstory”. The song has a slow sexy groove, soft female vocal, and sardonic lyrics about sexism: “You can still make money by singing sweet songs of love” (a song that made it onto many a mix tape I made in college). At the end of side 1, and the beginning of side 2, we get their covers of Summertime Blues and Money, featuring that familiar, flat, accented singspiel. The end of the album heads into more atmospheric instrumentals with pieces like “Events during Flood”. What a lot of ground for one album to cover! What a find!

So I told my friends. One friend wanted to make a copy for himself on CD. This was maybe 15 years ago, before CD burners came with every computer; his was going to take it to someone who would do it for a fee. I left the album with him in Providence (I had made myself a tape copy anyway), and headed back to Chicago. And then I kind of forgot about it for a while, and he did too. So when he decided to leave town, and unload most of his possessions before doing it, my record went out with his collection.

I found out about this after it had happened; hell, there goes my find. Fortunately, he had let a friend go through his vinyl and pull out anything of value. This friend found and pulled the Flying Lizards, and months later, when he found out it was mine, he gave it back to me. I think his name was Damian. I still have this album, thanks to Damian. I can listen to it, and I can play “Herstory” on the radio now and share it with the people of Chicago.

There are two lessons to this story: always go into that record store (or record fair), and never trust your friends.