Record For a Record

Saw something today that I've never seen before. In all my years of digging through bins and flipping through stacks of records, I've never come across a used (or new) record with a $360 price tag on it ..... and it wasn't a box set, .... it was a single record. Not behind the counter or displayed on the wall. It was right there in the common bins with the $8 and $10 records. (I bet they felt slighted.) Even with my senior discount applied, which I'm pretty sure I would have remembered to ask for, $324 would be far greater than the previous most expensive vinyl platter that I've ever come across. 

My heart damn near stopped beating for a few seconds today.

I was like: "Ooooh Ooooh!! .... until I saw the numbers to the right of the dollar sign.

And this was a used bookstore not an official record store. Since they started selling records a year or two ago, I haven't seen this sort of thing. But I think their vinyl buyer has discovered Discogs in the past month and is cross-referencing all the dead wax etchings. 

I'd go blind after reading five or ten of those. 

And now hours removed from the scene, I'm not even sure who the musician was. (It may have been Pharoah Sanders. It may have been Sonny Rollins.) They had several offerings from giant names in jazz on one of the elite jazz labels, 'Prestige', that hadn't been occupying space there previously. 

They had a $100 John Fahey record that I actually considered before walking away. 

I'm sure that todays $360 price sticker would be nothing in the eyes of some of the certified and verified freaks in the vinyl community, but it was a shocker to me. 

Hell, I'm embarrassed to admit that I spent $36 on a record today. 

And what if I did fall for it, made the purchase, got home and discovered that I already had it on cd?

The last time I experienced this level of shock was when I found 'Trace' by Son Volt for a quick glance $9.60 and took it to the checkout counter and heard, "That will be ninety-six dollars please." 

I used to think that my days on earth would likely end when I absent mindedly walked out into the street one day while looking east and got hit by a bus coming from the west, but now I think that sudden vinyl record price sticker shock is a heavy contender.