When it comes to record collecting, I think I have the disease somewhat in check. I try not to keep stuff around that I'm not going to listen to, and I regularly weed out a pile of neglected titles to take down to the shop. Also, I always end up giving away those things I picked up cheap to sell on eBay someday. (I'd bet I've had ten different copies of the Bongos' Drums Along the Hudson on my shelf over the years.)

Nevertheless, I have my shortcomings. I do like to own songs that I truly love on 45. I frequently interrupt my wife's post-work cat-bonding with phone calls asking "Hey, could you go to the shelf and see if I have a Searchers' Greatest Hits?" Most significantly, there remain in the drawers and racks titles that I picked up because I was impressed by the first thirty seconds or so during a cursory scan at work.

I was asking some friends for recommendations about 60s pop stuff which hadn't been slotted into one of the collector genres (psych, fuzz, freakbeat, etc.) for some comps I was making. Stewart Mason fired back with a list of suggestions, including some I'd overlooked, and a few I'd never heard, some of which you will see here in the next few days. One of the tracks he recommended was "Dear Delilah" by Grapefruit. "Hey," I thought, "I have that." I wasn't sure why I had it though; most of the late 60s pop psych LPs you commonly find in used record stores (I'm thinking the Candymen on ABC, the Colours on Dot, stuff like that) seem to me to contain a maximum of two decent tracks surroundy by a bunch of novelty-esque filler.

I put Around Grapefruit on a couple of days ago while I was doing some light housekeeping to see if it was as good as I remembered the first 30 seconds of it being. My goodness, it's fabulous! The first track, the one featured here, would be on the A-list of any Rubble volume and immediately went onto my current car mix CD-R. The rest was strong as well, especially Stewart's pick, the heavily phased "Dear Delilah." The rest is typical British Pop of the era, not as "heavy" as the Koobas or the Open Mind, but not exactly wimpy either. In '69 they did an LP for RCA; I get the impression that it delves into the British Blooze sound.

What is the moral of the story? The sensible person might say "The moral is that you should occasionally take time to appreciate what you have instead of constantly acquiring more stuff." The record collector might respond with "Yeah, but if you just amass a bunch of stuff, you'll occasionally discover something great that you didn't even know you have." The sensible person might reply with "When was the last time you mowed your yard? You could use the exercise." And so on. One day at a time, Sweet Jesus.