1990-91 NBA Hoops

The Michael Jordan 90s were an exciting time to be growing up a basketball fan - even a Warriors fan - and basketball card collecting swept through my class around the time we hit 10 years old. I had two regular haunts for buying cards in the late 90s, both of them in the Inner Sunset. The first went out of business not long after I started collecting there, and was soon replaced by the original Craigslist office. Prior to shuttering its doors, this shop had sold an up-to-date inventory that supplied me with nearly all the contemporary cards I owned. My other supplier was down the block, an odds and ends purveyor called the Oriental Art Gallery (profiled here). Unlike the competition it left behind, the Oriental Art Gallery was a cluttered, dimly-lit room with a smell characterized only slightly more by incense than by old merchandise. Untouched by time, sports and entertainment cards from the late 80s were sold as though they'd been released the week before. (See photo - as of 2016, they still are!) My favorite set was 1990-91 NBA Hoops: stately in gray arches on the face, with well-selected stats and biographical trivia on the reverse. The rosters, too, were fascinating to look back on even then, with Dream Teamers suiting up alongside the kind of lumbering relics who within a decade would have no place in the NBA.

At some point, I stopped collecting basketball cards, but the gray arches and soon obsolete team logos were never far from my mind. I recently decided to look into rebuying 1990-91 NBA Hoops and found the whole set on eBay for $8. With the help of the internet, I learned about the set's many variants and oddities. The most notable is #223: Sam Vincent, then playing for the Orlando Magic at the tail end of an unremarkable 7 year career. Hoops' first version of the Vincent card featured a photo taken during a home game against the Bulls, which happened to be the Valentine's Day, 1990 game in which Michael Jordan's jersey was stolen prior to tipoff; the first and only time Jordan wore #12 is immortalized on the obverse of the card. For unknown reasons, this first version of the Vincent card was discontinued and replaced with a generic photo of Vincent dribbling. Other formatting errors and variations are less substantial, and the different versions of each vary in rarity.

In addition to the core 440 cards in the set, Hoops produced an unnumbered All-Rookie Team card featuring David Robinson on the face receiving his Rookie of the Year award, along with four other standout rookies on the reverse: legends Vlade Divac and Tim Hardaway, plus Pooh Richardson and Sherman Douglas. The card was available only by a mail-in offer on the back of packs of cards. The offer expired on July 30, 1991. Two card variants exist - one with only pictures of the four additional rookies on the reverse, and one with abbreviated rookie year stats added for each of the five featured players. The latter is less common. Like all other cards in the set, either version of this one registers just a tick above valueless.

Two additional sets of oddities exist, as well. The first includes a variety of uncut strips or sheets of (typically unnumbered) cards given away at games as promotional items. One example was a Taco Bell promotion at the LA Forum, which paired several sets of 3-card strips with a mail-in sweepstakes coupon for Laker tickets or Taco Bell prizes. This contest ran from January 28 to February 28, 1991. The second was a series of 58 Announcer cards, produced in unknown quantities and distributed to the announcers themselves and friends of the company as favors. These are especially uncommon, and uniquely for the set, demand high prices when they do surface.

Acquiring these cards 15+ years after I first collected them has been very enjoyable. On a personal level, it's allowed me to revisit a wonderful facet of my childhood and some of the unusual aspects of San Francisco that are slowly (and sadly) fading away. The observational experience has been similar from the perspective of a lifelong basketball fan: it's a game, and a culture, that for better and for worse has irrevocably changed.

The 1990-91 NBA Hoops set can be seen here. (Images will be added sporadically as I complete the scans.)

The Beatles - "Live at the Hollywood Bowl"

The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl was always the black sheep of the band's core catalog, recorded live at an outdoor stadium at a time when recording equipment struggled to capture live music and pop artists - with one exception - didn't play stadiums. Reviews focused on the audience's continuous wall of screams, melodramatically describing the sound quality as bordering on unlistenable. In reality the Beatles' only sanctioned live album was an invaluable addition to the catalog, proudly (if roughly) showing off the tight, confident rock and roll band that John Lennon, even after the breakup, couldn't resist bragging about.

Live at the Hollywood Bowl is the absolute realization of the material's potential [1]. Sourced from different tapes than the 1977 LP, these digitally manipulated recordings miraculously present a sound that wasn't available to anyone at the Hollywood Bowl, including - or especially - the Beatles. The spacing between instruments, vocals, and crowd noise is comparable to a modern-day equivalent. Giles Martin, in his first solo venture as the Beatles' producer, accomplished what his late father's 1977 liner notes lament having been technically impossible at the time. What has been released in that worthy album's place is the definitive aural document of Beatlemania, preserving the impact of the screams with, at last, less input from the screams themselves.

My Top 10 Albums of the 80s: (6) The Joshua Tree - U2

[This is the fifth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

U2 have always been searchers. Reviews of the band's albums, positive and negative alike, tend to touch on the sense of yearning that pervades the music. It's likely this very restlessness that lends the group its defining peculiarity: no band has ever put out so many great albums without producing any back-to-back. The Joshua Tree is the quintessential U2 album, not because it's definitively their best - Achtung Baby is at least as good - but because it features the band distilling this essence most successfully. The Unforgettable Fire sessions had expanded U2's palate, but most of the resulting music suffered from a lack of structure. Rattle and Hum, meanwhile, featured a bombast that lands on the album's anthemic highlights, but otherwise comes off as obnoxious. The Joshua Tree sharpens the atmospherics of its predecessor while withholding on self-indulgence just enough to almost never become unctuous [1]. Each band member gets a showcase: Bono sings to rafters on "Red Hill Mining Town," Adam Clayton's groove sets the album in motion on "Where the Streets Have No Name," and Larry Mullen Jr.'s thunderous drumming is the high point of "Bullet the Blue Sky." The Edge, meanwhile, dominates The Joshua Tree. The shimmering arpeggios of "Where the Streets Have No Name" were expressly designed to be the ultimate U2 riff, and the claim has stood the test of eight subsequent albums. He almost single-handedly provides the songs with their atmospheres, summoning dread on "Exit," rapture on "Trip Through Your Wires," and (naturally) yearning on "With or Without You" - a song prudently chosen as the lead single, and one that ultimately couldn't help but become the band's signature composition. It was perfectly in character for Bono to announce "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," but The Joshua Tree represents perhaps the only time that U2 ever did just that. Fortunately for everyone else, it wasn't long before they felt compelled to return once more to the drawing board.

When the Daisy, At Long Last, Opens Her Eyes

A previous post detailed my search for "When the Daisy Opens Her Eyes," an obscure recording by the once-famous violinist Albert Sandler used in the delightful 1973 documentary Metro-Land. Since November 2014, I had been regularly checking eBay for the record in question, and occasionally searching for more clues elsewhere on the internet. On March 10, I came across the website of the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), once operated by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council [1]. Their database included listings for several Albert Sandler recordings that had eluded me, including one disc (Columbia DX 961) comprising a medley of tunes by the composer of "Daisy," Haydn Wood. It was an encouraging discovery: though it fell short of naming the tune I was looking for, it was my first ever indication of which disc to chase. Soon after, I found an advertisement for the record in the Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times, published about 8 months after the recording session. So the record existed - it would just be a matter of finding it.

Five weeks of dead ends later, I received an email from a UK record dealer who had found a friend willing to part with his copy of "Selection of Haydn Wood's Songs." I still had no confirmation that this disc included the tune. However, having identified 136 Albert Sandler 78s that did not contain "When the Daisy Opens Her Eyes," I felt assured my time had come and made the purchase. Thankfully, I was right: Sandler included "Daisy" in his Haydn Wood medley, closing the circle on my Search for Metro-Land. The record's details are as follows:

Albert Sandler - Selection of Haydn Wood's Songs (Columbia DX 961)

Side 1 (Matrix CAX-8713-1)
Selection of Haydn Wood's Songs - Part 1: Fleurette, I Shall Never Forget/Silver Clouds/It Is Only a Tiny Garden/Love's Garden of Roses

Side 2 (Matrix CAX-8714-2)
Selection of Haydn Wood's Songs - Part 2: When the Daisy Opens Her Eyes/I Love Your Eyes of Grey/Roses of Picardy

Both selections recorded January 21, 1940. Columbia DX 961 was released in March 1940 and deleted from the catalog in March 1949.

Download by clicking the arrow button beneath the Soundcloud logo.

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Finding the record suggested answers to a number of questions. The dealer addressed the disc's scarcity, reasonably surmising that compositions by Wood (whose most popular song was published in 1916) would have viewed as hopelessly old-fashioned by 1940 and sold very few copies. Furthermore, the use of "Daisy" as merely part of a subtitle explained why I had found so little information on the song. For one thing, Albert Sandler's records had never been explicitly linked to the "Daisy" title on the internet: the internet ostensibly contains 3 prior references [2] to the Albert Sandler record "Selection of Haydn Wood's Songs," none of which list the subtitle. For another, even in general, "Daisy" is more often referenced as a part of Haydn Wood medleys than it is standing alone. One such fascinating artifact – part of the Australian Library of Congress' digital holdings – is a copy of sheet music bearing the same title as my record, copyrighted 1920. In keeping with "Daisy's" obscurity (apparently even at the time), it is not advertised on the front cover, but is included on page 10. It would seem likely that this arrangement of Wood's music actually served as the basis for Sandler's: though 6 of the sheet music's 13 songs were excised (almost certainly for time [3]), the remaining 7 are all found on the record, in order. At least one bit of evidence suggests the medley, truncated or otherwise, remained part of his repertoire after recording it: he performed it as the last program of the day for BBC Radio at 11:30pm on February 28, 1943.

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My quest for "When the Daisy Opens Her Eyes" has been the most obscure pursuit of a life already full of them. The year and a half between first seeing Metro-Land and completing the search for "Daisy" included the hardest 18 months of medical school and multiple other unforeseen challenges - sporadically interspersed with new information on a man I was unlikely to ever have heard about. It's been a pleasure to discover the gems populating his enormous discography. In this transitional period, it's also been touching to uncover the details of a life that it's felt time is on the verge of passing by. I decided to use what I've been able cobble together as the basis of a short biodiscography, which I've published online here. I hope it'll serve in a modest way to preserve his memory, and provide some interest to anyone else that should stumble upon Albert Sandler as haphazardly as I did.

Prince, 1958-2016

It was September or October 2006, about a month into my first year at Berkeley, when I saw a new copy of Purple Rain for $5.99 in the discount bin at Rasputin Music. At that point, I knew Prince as a symbol (literally), a revered musical icon, and a Chapelle's Show character, but had never actually listened to his music. I had gotten off to a rocky start to college, and my growing music collection played a substantial role in helping me through. I dug into every corner of the Beatles' back catalog; I continued to wear out the copy of The Eraser I'd bought the previous summer; and after only one or two months I had already spun St. Elsewhere more times than I could count. As I bought music, I'd always intended to listen to Prince, and this particular afternoon seemed as good a time as any.

Sometime towards the end of college – by which time I'd acquired most of the rest of Prince's discography and bought Purple Rain and its otherworldly accompanying poster on LP – I decided to average out that $5.99 over the number of plays or hours I got out of that tinny, mid-80s pressing CD. Though the index card bearing my arithmetic has long since disappeared, by whichever metric I used we were talking about fractions of fractions of a cent per unit. Among the storied peaks of the many discographies I acquainted myself with at the outset of college, Purple Rain resonated with confident, inexhaustible vitality. Today, it's my pick for the best album of the 80s, and certainly one of my 10 favorites ever made – yet it's not without competitors for the title of best album in his catalog.

Prince passed away this morning. In the sense that his health in some way necessitated an emergency plane landing last week, it's not surprising, even for someone as young as 57. And yet the idea remains a shock – perhaps because his transcendent otherness was so immaculately cultivated that it suggested he might, in fact, actually be impervious to such Earthly concerns as death. From his star-making turn dressed in a purple jumpsuit atop a motorcycle, Prince somehow grew more eccentric as he aged, including such highlights as waging war on the internet and fully embracing his extramusical celebrity. Even as he receded from the experimental forefront of popular music, he remained one of its few truly fascinating figures. He announced his memoirs a month ago, and for the first time in my adulthood (with one obvious exception), I remember being genuinely curious to read a musician's full take on their own life. In every aspect of his person, he was one of a kind, and the world is less rich for having lost him.

Astral Weeks - Van Morrison

Previous posts have outlined my fondness for remastered albums, and the way that a properly executed remastered release can contribute to newfound appreciation for the music it comprises. Entering 2015, my once daunting list of hoped-for remasters had dwindled to a precious few, with Prince and Van Morrison settling as vaguely surprising bedfellows atop the pile. Yet as far removed from one another as they - by nearly any metric - would seem to be, both Prince and Morrison share a history of aversion towards acknowledging past glories, fear of the future, and animosity towards record labels (in both cases, oddly, the reputedly artist-friendly Warner Bros.)  that made them ideal candidates to resist the long-overdue revisiting of their rich and expansive back catalogs. In February 2015, after years of rumors, it was finally confirmed that an expanded, anniversary edition of Purple Rain would be released before the end of the year. Meanwhile, as special editions of Moondance and other Morrison classics were announced and released, Astral Weeks - his most universally acclaimed album - remained uniquely (and bizarrely) untouched. So naturally, in late October, 2015, it was a newly burnished Astral Weeks that was unceremoniously dropped onto the market, while Purple Rain remained trapped in late-80s CD pressing purgatory with no end in sight.

Astral Weeks is a special album, one for which, by now, musical critics have reserved the most superlative of their superlatives for decades. And indeed, there's no good way to escape that trap: Astral Weeks is genuinely unique. It's unprecedented in popular music, untouched by the countless imitators spawned in its wake, and inexplicably, totally different from any other studio album produced by an artist who's recorded 35 of them. Morrison sings of love, death, and rebirth as though he was experiencing all three simultaneously, in studio. The jazzy arrangements have the same air as all the greatest albums in the medium from which they derive: so perfectly conceived and executed as to feel more like a happy accident than a master plan. The effect is like a Monet landscape, vibrant and all-encompassing precisely by way of its vagueness. The music evokes the quiet voices that ramble unobtrusively beneath the everyday noise in your head; it sounds like taking a walk with the moon shining just so, and has a way of bringing clarity and calm into any environment. This serenity is responsible for the magic trick Astral Weeks pulls off anew with every listen: making it seem as though Van Morrison - armed with his guitar, his voice, and newfound release from an insufferable contract with Bang Records - waltzed into Century Sound Studios and created the entire album in a sitting, unpremeditated.

To its credit, Warner Bros. payed off the interminable wait for an Astral Weeks update with a perfectly executed remastered album: pristine sound, nice liner notes, and enough bonus material to provide context without watering down the original contents. A languid early take of "Madame George" leans heavily on vibraphones; "Ballerina" stretches a full minute beyond its 7 minute final runtime. The new edition also reveals Astral Weeks - like almost every masterpiece - to have been made successful every bit as much by careful deliberation as by the feeling of spontaneity for which it's become famous. The first take of "Beside You" finds Morrison singing with a hesitancy compared to the final version, almost as though not yet fully tapped in to his own composition. "Slim Slow Slider," meanwhile, appears in an extended version revealing the sudden ending of the original album to have been an prudent edit by producer Lewis Merenstein. Tampering with the impression that Van Morrison appeared in studio in a trance and banged out all 8 tracks in perfect succession may not be to all tastes, but the survival of this effect through editing may make the accomplishment more impressive. One would have to imagine a suitable set of hands could similarly augment the already exalted legacy of Purple Rain; whether such a set of hands exist, unfortunately, only time can tell.