USA Trip, Part 10 - Boston (Again)

After flying back from LA, we spent two days in New York City. I popped into Generation Records and Limited To One, but neither had anything that I 'needed'. So even though I was there, not buying anything means that they don't feature on here. Sorry dudes.

After New York we had one final day back in the city where the adventure began - Boston. We spent the day walking about and seeing more sights, and in the evening went for food with some familiar faces:

Even though this should have been a cool end to the trip, when the time came around we were totally shattered and struggled to keep our eyes open, so had to leave pretty early in the evening. After food the other dudes went to see Pat Flynn's band Clear play a show with Remission just around the corner, but there's no way I could have stayed awake long enough to have got through that.

Brian was kind enough to give us a lift back to our hotel, and before he left us there was time for one final record deal to go down. This had been arranged for a few weeks, and was mainly to help me avoid any shipping risks, as the records involved were slightly more valuable than the average 7"s that I'd picked up on this trip.

Brian was in the process of packing stuff up in order to move to the UK, and had decided to sell some records. I figured it was the right time to fill a couple of holes in my early Rev collecton, so we did a deal and I ended up paying him cash in his car. Kinda like a sketchy street deal.

First is a first press of the Warzone 'LESC' 7". I was never hugely fussed about picking one of these up, but in the end just wanted one so that I could get my Warzone 7" collection one step closer to a 'complete'... whatever that means.

The first press has no Rev logo, and the graffiti logo on the b-side label.

It's not really that much to look at, but is a pretty cool piece of Rev history.

The second 7" I used to not give a shit about, as technically it's an error variant rather than an actual intending pressing. But over time I just came round to the idea that it would be cool to have. Pity I didn't decide that ten years or more ago for price reasons, but hey, never mind.

So this is the Gorilla Biscuits 7" with Warzone b-side label. Nobody knows how many exist, and what's cool is that Rev didn't even know that these existed for many years. My memory is slightly hazy on this, but I think it was in fact Lecky over in the UK who made Rev aware that this existed. They didn't even have one, so he traded them his copy. When I was at RevHQ I saw that they indeed had one copy in the vault. My guess at this is simply that the plant got confused and put the wrong labels on some copies, although whether this was at the start of the press (and they then realised their mistake) or the end of the press (when they ran out of the labels they were supposed to be using) we will never know. But what is interesting about this one is that quite a few copies ended up in the UK, as a few people I know over here have one and bought it when it came out. As a friend of mine used to say, 'it's a nice one to have, mate'.

I was also pleasantly surprised to be gifted a release show copy of the Fiddlehead 'Springtime And Blind' LP. This was sold a week earlier, at which point I was enjoying the California Sunshine. I actually pre-ordered a copy of this LP months ago and still don't have it yet, so it was cool to get this version as my first copy.

As with a lot of release show records, the cover is an extra piece of card folded over the regular sleeve.

Numbered out of 40 copies, I got number 10.

This was a pretty cool gift, especially when I noticed one sell on eBay a couple of weeks later for $150!

The next day we got up and flew home. I then entered three weeks of total exhaustion and depression. But when I came out of it and started writing these posts, it reminded me of what a great trip I had. Trip of a lifetime for sure. And as for the records... in total I ended up bringing home 84 of the bloody thing (54 7"s, 1 10", 29 LPs). This was probably at least 50 more than I had expected. But hey, I got some cool items and some great deals, and only slightly overspent my budget, so it worked out pretty well in the end.

It has also just occurred to me that even though my number of posts on this blog is much lower than every other year, at least the total number of records featured is still up at normal levels. These posts were hard work so I'm glad they're now done.