Judy Collins - Greatest Hits

December 24, 2025

Lou has a friend he has known since the first grade. We have been together all through high school, visited each other in college, lived with and near each other for years thereafter. We have a history. Like the time Lou got drunk at a Spin Doctors’ concert and by the end of the night found himself in a holding tank for breaking and entering the Bronx Botanical Gardens. New York is a hard place to navigate at night. Just watch After Hours. After the Spin Doctors stunk it up, the crew Lou was hanging with went to watch The Bogmen play at a local bar. At the time, Lou was not a music fan and had had enough tunes. “Fuck this, Lou is going to White Castle!!” Somehow Lou made a detour into the Gardens. It would turn out that The Bogmen would become one of Lou’s favorite bands, maybe even a top ten band if you catch Lou in a nostalgic frame of mind. The Bogmen toured college towns all along the East Coast and formed a cult following which eventually resulted in a record deal with Arista. In 1995, they released Life Begins at 40Million. A banger, but they were best appreciated as a live band. Their closer, “Englewood”, which crescendoed with whirling dervish frontman, Billy Campion, is truly awesome live as was Yellar. Great band. They went nowhere nationally and remained a regional favorite for decades, breaking up and getting back together for benefits over the years. A classic story of label mismarketing. Their brief tour with KISS is something of a disastrous underground legend. Check The Bogmen out.

This is a long way of saying that there is a lot to talk about withthis longtime friend but nowadays, there is no rehashing old drinking stories. All the talk is about what records we have bought and are listening to. Lou’s friend has been buying LPs for years and has quite the collection. Lou should stop by and listen to it sometime. Well, we can always talk about it over the phone.

On the phone recently, Lou’s friend mentioned he was listening to and enjoying Judy Collins, the acclaimed folk singer. Lou scoffed. Come on. But Lou’s friend insisted and said he put the Judy Collins record on his wall next to a Crosby, Stills, and Nash album. One with “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” on it. A song written about Judy Collins by Stephen Stills. It is a break-up song. Collins could not resist Stacy Keach’s charms. You might know Keach as Mike Hammer. Lou knows him from Cheech and Chong. It just so happens that Vinyl Vogue has quite a fewJudy Collins records in the shop, so Lou picked up a greatest hits LP. Judy does have quite a pair of eyes. She is the Dolly Parton of eyes.

Lou does not have much to say about Judy Collins at all. She is not for him, but the fact that his friend had curated his collection on his wall to make connections between records and to tell stories between them got Lou thinking about the disorganized and haphazard grouping of his own records. In short, there is no organizing principle at all. No grouping by genre, nothing alphabetical, nothing chronological, nothing by label, not even by color. No organization at all. Lou’s LPs, all 747 of them are just leaning against walls and chairs in his bookhouse.

Lou’s rare book and research collection are much more organized. The books about books, music, art, drugs, and porn are all grouped together. Double stacked mind you but arranged together. Lou’s books by Beat Generation and related writers are on a bookshelf together alphabetically. All his rare mimeo and little magazine publications are on a separate shelf. You can’t find anything per se since many of these publications are basically zines and have no spines facing out. But they are all there in the same place. Lou also has archival boxes with more mimeo mags and ephemera. Years ago, Lou indexed those seven boxes or so. You can find things in there. Lou treats his books with respect.

The records not so much. Given that Lou has only 747 LPs he has a good idea of what is leaning against those walls and even some idea of where they are. So, if and when, his friend comes up to visit and wants to listen to the record store day release of the Bill Evans Trio in Norway in 1970, Lou will be able to pull it out and play it. But to speak plainly, the shit is all over the place. It is taking over the bookhouse to such an extent that Lou needs an annex for his records.

Now, it is not complete disarray. Lou has an excel spreadsheet listed by artist and title of all his LPs arranged in alphabetical order. So, like his friend, Lou can look over his holdings and make some observations. Lou’s wife has a small record collection, and it is mixed in with Lou’s records. A dangerous proposition for sure. Lou would never, ever do such an intermingling with his book collection, but Lou, as we see, is much more insouciant with his records. It turns out that there is more Duran Duran material in the record collection than any other artist. So, Lou’s wife has made a major stamp on the collection. One of the artists Lou has the most of is Bob Dylan(14 albums). Lou is far from a Dylanologist, but he knows a few of those obsessives in his life. As Lou has written previously, he is extremely impressionable when it comes to buying records. People Lou respects love Bob Dylan. So, Lou buys every Bob Dylan LP he sees. Same with Frank Zappa(nine albums). Lou does not particularly love Frank Zappa, but people Lou loves do. So, Zappa it is. And again, as mentioned before Lou can be swayed by a YouTuber with great passions. In fact, Lou just bought Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceansrecently. It is complete shit. Lou hated every minute of it. And there were quite a few minutes to hate. But somewhere in the piles leaning against the wall are Lou’s three Yes albums, along with his three Genesis albums, and four Jethro Tull albums. To be listened to once and never put on the turntable again.

Lou has a lot of the usual suspects: The Rolling Stones (12 albums), The Doors (all the studio albums with Jim Morrison), The Who (nine albums), Jimi Hendrix (16 albums; the most by any artist). Then there are Lou’s little quirks. He has twelve Fugs albums from his days of collecting Ed Sanders’ Fuck You Press. Lou has five Rory Gallagher albums and three by Taste. Lou loves himself some Rory Gallagher apparently. Who knew?

With a band like Led Zeppelin, Lou will break a hard rule. Generally, if Lou owns the CD, a format that Lou refuses to buy anymore, he will not buy it on vinyl. That is not true with Zep. Lou wants their catalog in vinyl and be damned if it creates a duplicate. So, Lou rebought Physical Graffiti. He will rebuyPresence and In Through the Out Door. Lou hates duplicates. So why does he have two copies of Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam. Oh, the indignity, Lou forgot he had it, so he re-bought the loathed Steely Dan again. Why? Those fucking YouTuberssay The Dan is the shit. They are shit alright. Note Lou did not listen to it twice.

Lou also does not upgrade LPs based on condition. The record simply must play. No skips. Surface noise is ok. Snap, crackle, pop. Lou is fine if there are marks or whatnot and that the album cover is split and a piece of junk. Lou has low standards. He is adamantly not a record collector. He just likes listening to records. Lou is adamantly a book collector. In that regard, condition matters and is a primary concern in all rare book purchases, as are editions, signatures, and other traditional hallmarks of collecting. Again, Lou likes hanging around and drinking with his record collection. It is Lou’s buddy. Lou is married to his book collection. He is devoted to it and loves and respects it.

Poor Judy Collins has also been disrespected here. Lou’s friend swears that Judy is a major-league fun listen. Lou doesn’t quite hear it that way, stunning blue eyes or not. Lou will stick with Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Lou never thought he would love Joni Mitchell, another muse to the Crosby, Stills and Nash boys, but he does. Lou has six Joni Mitchell records to prove it. And he has listened to them more than once. Lou thinks he’ll put Miles of Aisles on now.