philipchevron wrote:[M]y first duty was to fact-check, I suppose, a test the book passes extremely well with just one minor error (The Pogues' first two albums were not, in fact, available only on import in the USA: delayed though the releases were, they did come out on Stiff/Enigma in the US (Red Roses) and MCA (Rum, Sodomy).
Given how difficult these were to find in the late 1980s in the USofA, they may as well have been considered "import only."
My first copies of RRFM and RSatL were imports, and the import-premium was paid for them. It took me YEARS to find a copy of Red Roses For Me from Enigma (which I DESPERATELY wanted at the time for the extra tracks and, somewhat less importantly, the silk-screened red rose on the CD face). In fact I had ended up going to all the local record shops in the South Bay Area (San Jose, Santa Cruz, and all the smaller towns in between and along the Peninsula) as placed requests with the record buyers, managers, and used-record assessors (they guys that would determine if a used CD or LP was worth buying off of someone) and then calling them every week to see if they had found a copy. After six months someone called me at work to say the Red Roses disc had come in, and was I still interested. I immediately told my employer that I had an emergency I had to deal with, drove to the record store, snapped up the disc, drove to Fry's Electronics (a superstore for computer nerds) and paid WAY too much for a CDR drive (this was around 1994 or so) and a few blank discs (when the media cost ~$10 per disc) and duplicated the original. The original has ever since then been safely tucked away and un-played.
And that's my story.
