(Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

Last Saturday was “Record Store Day” and we drove to Ottawa to see what was available in the record stores of our nation’s capital.  It reminded me of the interesting music I’ve picked up in my travels: each record has its own story, above and beyond the actual music.

The photo at the top of this post is one of my favourite finds.   For some unknown reason, the Soviet record label Melodiya decided to release a 4-track EP (7″, 33 rpm) containing seemingly random tracks from Paul and Linda McCartney’s 1971 “Ram” album.  When I was “crate-digging” in a Tallinn, Estonia used record store, I found this pressing from Riga (now in Latvia, but then part of the U.S.S.R.).  While I can’t speak Russian, I know the sounds of the Cyrillic alphabet and was able to phonetically confirm that this was in fact a release from the former Beatle.  I picked up some fascinating Soviet LPs there too…but I’ll keep the focus on 7″ records today, as they are easier to pick up while traveling.

Speaking of the Soviet era, I picked up some fascinating 45s in Prague last September.  Some were just Czechoslovakian pressings of hits by Western artists but the Dean Reed 45 pictured above was something I would never find in Canada.

Dean Reed went nowhere in the U.S.A. as a singer and traveled the world in search of fame and revolution.  He ended up based in East Germany, where he was proudly paraded by the authorities as a genuine American rock star and revolutionary.  He did, in fact, enjoy immense popularity in the Eastern Bloc…at least for a while.  His ersatz-Elvis recordings sound rather hokey now but there wasn’t much else available.  Alas, he drowned under mysterious circumstances outside of East Berlin in the mid-1980s.  If you’re interested in his bizarre story, there is a book (“Comrade Rockstar”, by Reggie Nadelson) about Reed and it has long been rumoured that Tom Hanks would make a movie about this forgotten musician.

Karel Gott also found success in the Eastern Bloc during the 1970s but, unlike Dean Reed, still enjoys some popularity today.  Like many people who lived during that difficult time, he made certain compromises in order to  preserve his career in a totalitarian state.  The above single does not feature the Beatles, but the A-side is a Czech-language tribute to the Fab Four (although it sounds nothing like them).   I found this single in the same grim record store that yielded the Dean Reed record.  Both were very cheap: I suspect it is because they come from a time that many people would like to forget.

Johnny Clegg is one of my favourite musicians.  Best known in North America for contributing “Scatterlings of Africa” to the Rain Man soundtrack, he bravely led racially-integrated bands during the Apartheid era in South Africa and continues to release genre-crossing and thought-provoking records today.   I wrote about Johnny last year in this post.  Alas, it doesn’t appear that he is very popular in Finland:  I found the above French pressing of his “Asimbonanga” single in the bargain bin of a Helsinki record store.

I never imagined that the above single could exist.  The Rutles were a Beatles parody band created by some Monty Python alumni and eventually were the subject of the brilliant rockumentary “All You Need is Cash”.  The soundtrack is also outstanding and highly recommended for Beatles fans.  The parody was so well-received in England that I found this single in a London record shop last November.  It was an unexpected souvenir of the same trip that took me to Abbey Road and various other Beatles landmarks.

Coming up next week:  I’m on the road again!  Using some accumulated Air Miles, I’m visiting a place that I somehow overlooked during my year of extended travel.  Stay tuned for the big reveal!