It’s almost “winter” here in Sydney, and the weather has been rainy, cold and breezy for the past week. To be honest with you, I love this kind of weather when it comes in intermittent and small/brief doses, as the weather did where I grew up in California and as it NEVER DID BECAUSE GOD CAN IT RAIN AND BE GENERALLY AWFUL when I lived in New York. But I think it brought me down this week—way, way down—and I tried to take the weekend as an opportunity to push the reset button.
My friend Matt is a huge music head, and he and I share a brain, and we both adore disco music. He’s worked at MTV and Arista Records, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of music, Billboard charts and Carly Simon. He recently sent me a bunch of CDs with Carly music, because I finally acquiesced and asked for some; he’s been proselytizing about her for ages—so much so that we took a trip together to the Martha’s Vineyard hamlet of Menemsha during the summer of 2008 because a.) that’s where Carly once lived and b.) it’s the name of one of her songs. My GOD, I’ve lost the point of this story.
I have been wanting to visit Sydney’s premier record/collectables store, Red Eye Records, forever. So I put Carly on the headphones this morning, walked around in the rain letting her sing me to the edge of whatever, and walked there. Red Eye is the epitome of a record store, and it was just so perfect for my mood and my mission. The cute alterna-boy at the front desk glared at me upon entrance, just as I expect from an indie record-store clerk. I went upstairs to the used LPs/discount bins/metal merchandise(?) area, which was being manned by a dumpy girl wearing a doves t-shirt over a thermal who stood, looking bored. I flipped through the LPs and found one with two sessy-looking, feather-haired ladies in fringe-bottomed club dresses on the cover. The title: Sorry I’m A Lady / Yes Sir, I Can Boogie. It intrigued me! The label read $19.95 and said “1977 boogie disco LP” ummmmm hi, jackpot.
I’m giving this LP to Matt when I see him in New York next month, probably before we head for a five-day blowout (and plenty of disco dancing) on Fire Island. Anyou don’t really care about that, but anyway, it’s all the lead-up to a very long-winded story that involves me coming home to YouTube some Baccara and finding this, which is just awesome. It’s kind of me and Matt if I squint hard enough. And I think these bishes are actually singing this from the fern bar of my dreams, a little shack called Rita’s.
