Cash in the Trash: Lou Waxman Digs Up Andy Williams

What do you do with trash?  You recycle it.  So, pardon a bit of composting here.

There are layers beneath the two-dollar bins where records go to die.  Lou is reminded of Sam Kinison, as Lou often is, in the lead-in to his bit about homosexual necrophiliacs.  “Sam, you can go any lower; there is nothing worse than this?”  “Wait, we have just uncovered another layer!”  Below the two-dollar bin in the ecology of vinyl are Goodwill and yard sales.  When you get a bunch of vinyl junkies together in one place, like at a rehab center, the tall tales flow about the time you found a Beatles Butcher cover at a Goodwill or a Velvet Banana (the banana was never peeled, dude) at a yard sale.  Lou is confident that this type of shit happens.  It has never happened to Lou mind you, but it has from the days when Lou was a book collector.  

Gather round kiddo!  Once upon a time, Lou was wandering aimlessly in a town in West-Central Pennsylvania when he found an uncorrected advance proof copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for one dollar.  It caught Lou’s eye for sure, but his eyes started bugging out when he realized it was signed by Wallace.  Score!!  Infinite Jest is one of those books, like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which will be one of the last books Lou reads.  Lou will say, “Lord, you can take me after I finish this one last book,” but finishing that last book will take forever and never be completed.  It is like having a last meal of Grape Nuts cereal. You will never get to the bottom of the bowl.  

To Lou, Wallace’s greatest accomplishment as a writer was as an essayist, of which Wallace was a true master, particularly what he did to challenge the boundaries of the essay in a mainstream, glossy publication, like Premiere or Tennis.  Lou grants that Wallace is a genius, just not in the format you might be thinking of.  Long story short, Lou sold the book during a rough period in his life when he needed money, and he couldn’t sell any of his bodily fluids since they were all contaminated with booze and nicotine.  That left selling books.  Which was painful.  Lou got $100 for the signed Wallace.  Wallace was still alive when Lou made the deal.  Currently, high-end book dealers are asking well into the four figures for a copy.  That is a lot of blood, plasma, and semen.  Suicide drives up prices.  Talk about necrophilia.

Then, lo and behold, there is a level below the Goodwill and the yard sale, and that is the trash, the ultimate graveyard for vinyl.  The vinyl junkies claim to have found treasures even there.  In fact, the acetate of the Velvet sessions at Scepter were found in the trash.  Again, it happens.

For those who live here in Ellsworth, do you remember when the transfer station had an entire library section in the recyclables area?  Up against the wall were a cobbled together set of shelves and several dozen books.  Lou never saw any vinyl but there was a nice collection of books.  Lou loved going to the transfer station to take a look.  Sometimes he stopped by even if he had no trash or recyclables.  You never knew what might be there.  

You could write a long essay about the books that you find in the trash.  It would make an interesting study about the products of publishing industry, the reading audience, and that which both considered obsolete and disposable.  You could call it:  “Six Feet Under, Or, Books by the Yard:  The Ecology of Trash Literature”.

Here might be a sample section of that essay:

Reading Danielle Steel Is Like Eating Kool-Aid Out of the Packet

 

Free to Love by Ivana Trump; The Ghost by Danielle Steel; Before I Say Goodbye by Mary Higgins Clark; The Naked Faceby Sidney Sheldon.  Free to Love was in glorious hardcover as befitting its stature; the rest were lowly paperbacks.

Poor Ivana!!!  From the penthouse to the outhouse.  The sequel to her bestselling debut novel, For Love Alone Lucy Wilkins, Free to Love now wallows in the gutter where it belongs.  This book is the very definition of the trash novel.  Not worth the paper it is printed on, a blatant cash grab, and the product of a bloated, impotent, yet lecherous corporate publishing industry, Ivana’s masterpiece about the (divorce) trials and tribulations of Katrinka van Hollen, is the literary equivalent of a junk bond.  Katrinka?  Lou thinka the hell not.

Quite simply, this stuff ends up at the dump because it serves a basic purpose and it is disposable.  Like toilet paper.  Growing up Lou was surrounded by this trash; Lou’s mother had a massive library of all the classics.  Danielle Steel’s Message from Nam (even when she tried to get away from Daddy, Steel was always trash), Shirley Conran’s Lace (Phobe Cates’ Lili Lace is second only to Linda Barrett in terms of naughty girls.  The main difference?  Lili may have said “Which one of you bitches is my mother?”, but Linda got nude.  The Cars never sounded so good. Check out the cast in the TV version of Lace:  Bess Armstrong, Angela Lansbury (a true whore of the stage and screen, she would do anything for a paycheck), Brooke Adams, Anthony Higgins, Pussy Galore, and the cherry on top Herbert Lom of The Pink Panther as a gay headmaster.  Cue frantic eye-twitching now.); Scruples by Judith Krantz (Krantz did Ivana Trump proud; Krantz’s books were a fuckin’ ATM machine.  The paperback rights for Princess Daisy sold for a then-record $3.2 million dollars.  Krantz is a corporation, literally.).  Lou’s mother also had all the mystery and thriller trash as well.  The Deadly Sin series by Lawrence Sanders, the post-Ian Fleming James Bond novels by John Gardner; Eric Van Lustbader, Clive Cussler, and Dick Francis.  She had them all.

Lou’s mother was a bit of a fitness fanatic.  Tennis four times a week; daily bicycle rides, various stretching exercises.  But that was not always the case.  For years Lou’s mother consumed tons and tons of the literary Funjuns.  Pure junk food.  Quite possibly, Lou turned into a literary snob and all-around windbag out of rebellion against the books that were all around the house.  God knows Lou did not play hooky from school.  Probably should have.  Lou could have used a break. Currently Lou’s mother swears she would never lower herself to read a Danielle Steel book but back in the day she bought them all, and all in hardcover.  Hardcover??  She could not possibly wait until the much cheaper paperback came out to dig her nose into the latest recycled heap of shit dear old Danielle plopped out.  It was an addiction really.  Like those people who cannot stop eating bags and bags of Doritos.  As a kid Lou was seriously worried that his mother’s brain would get flabby from lack of use, and she would suffer a stroke.

In New York, they attempted to legislate out of existence the 55-gallon drums of Coke sold at 7-Elevens.  They should initiate similar legislation on these 700+ page monstrosities of pure sugar and empty calories.  There should only be trash novellas or short stories in an attempt to protect love and adventure starved readers from their own IQ-threatening desires.  In a sense, these books already exist and they sprout up like mushrooms in shit at the dump library.  They are called Best Sellers from the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books.  For those poor old birds out there, who cannot possibly stomach already processed literature, the folks at the Digest chew it over for you and spit it in your mouth.  Bon appétit!!!

Lou found the vinyl equivalent of these books at The Vogue.  Andy Williams Million Seller Songs.  Andy Williams is the king of the trash heap.  He is there with Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand, Mitch Miller, Herb Alpert.  The list goes on.  There is a lot of trash out there.  The whole story is in the title of the album:  Million Seller.  For a record to appear so often in the lower levels of the vinyl ecology, it had at one time to be purchased in high quantities.  Andy Williams was massively popular, until he wasn’t.  Tastes change.  The truly tasteless becomes cult.  Like The Kingsmen.  Or The Trashmen.  The bland, like Andy Williams, becomes just trash.  And usually in trashed condition.  This Andy Williams record doesn’t look toobad.  As Sally Struthers would say, “Won’t you please help?  Just a dollar a day can help a record in need.”  Brother, can you spare a buck?

Suggest Sites and Sounds:

Lace is Class:  Lace(1984) DvD Which one of you bitches is my mother?

Cash in the Trash:  Records I have found in the Trash!

Record Buy the Yard:  The Thrill of the Hunt: Chasing Vinyl Records at Yard Sales | Vinyl Finds at Antique Store

Cash in the Trash:  The Book Edition:  I FOUND A $500 BOOK IN THE TRASH 😱Crazy Find

Andy Williams at the Thrift Store:  Vinyl Finds #14 Lots of Andy Williams - YouTube

 

— Lou Waxman