Harrie's loods

Tuesday, 14 August 2007

During our vacations I don’t visit record shops, and I don’t miss that. Last week I was on a camping near Venhuizen, where no record store could be found in miles anyway. We went there because our dear friends Harrie & Jonika were throwing a wedding party, and because the weather promised to be good we stayed in the neighbourhood for a week.
Harrie runs a record store in Amsterdam, but he has a large storing place (called a “loods” in Dutch) at a farm not far from where he lives, in Venhuizen. He told me he had just bought 1800 LP’s that were once owned by Hanny Michaelis. She was the former wife of the Dutch writer Gerard Reeve. She died recently and Harrie had bought her record collection. He was not very happy with it ( ”nothing but crap records and all in bad shape” ) and I asked if I could help sorting out the records. I had not much to do anyway and I had never seen his storage place. Harrie is always good company and I love to hear his stories.
The 1800 LP’s had to be divided in three piles: records that were given away to the local charity shop (1000), records that his wife Jonika was going to sell on the Noordermarkt for 1 to 7 euro (750), records that Harrie was going to sell in his shop (47) and records that Harrie was going to put up on e-Bay (3). Much of the records were classical, which is beyond my scope, but I was surprised to see how much great records were labelled as valueless. I have forgotten what Harrie paid for all those 1800 LP’s, but the profit margin is very small. ( ’’I do it for that one lucky find, that I can sell for a few hundred euro on e-bay.” ) There was no such LP among the 1800 that I let run through my fingers that day. ( “But last week I bought a similar collection and among that was a violin concerto that did 2200 euro on e-Bay in a lesser condition than the copy that I got.” )
Of course I good I could pick any record that I wanted, but I am not interested in ordinary pop music or classical music. But for this Soundtrack I picked a CD from the trashcan ( “can’t sell that shit, it has water damage” ), called 06 Sexlijn Hits.
There is nothing erotic about this CD or any other CD in this genre. I collect this because it is the lowest of the lowest, and I am fascinated by what people produce to make some money. This is a product of the early nineties, when telephone sex-lines where the hottest thing. But despite the title only one song on this CD is about telephone sex, and it is one of the worst songs too. The others are not much better: cover versions of songs from similar CD’s and LP’s, and uninspired rip-offs, played by not very inspired studio musicians.
Here is a song that is slightly better than the 13 other songs, Lik me by Tineke.

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I once got a whole box with original master tapes of one such 06-company. If you called a certain number you got to hear an erotic story, and you had to pay heavily for it of course. These stories where quite hopeless and there were read by women who apparently had little or no interest in literature nor sex. I tried to select the best stories for a compilation tape (this was before CD’s), but I could not force myself to listen through all the tapes. I gave the box away and kept only one or two tapes. I remember that on one tape there was a story in several episodes, about a guy who had sex with alien women, all with extra breasts and other special features for sexual pleasure. I make it sound far more interesting than it actually is, but if anybody is interested, I will try if I can find those tapes and put them up this Soundtrack one day.

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