Robert Baird

Seems to me most musicheads always have a reserve of bands, solo artists, string quartets, jazz soloists that they know but haven’t really seen or connected with. You know `em but you don’t.

Just prior to the morning hour at which most liquor stores open, Don Byron and I are sitting outdoors at a sidewalk cafe on a steamy Park Avenue South (Technology Gulch)when a scene breaks out on the sidewalk. Byron (head turns and he murmurs): "Oh my god." A stringy–haired, smelly, obviously intoxicated woman staggers after a younger, taller man who's also worse for wear, and hollers in a drunken growl: "I got my own phone now. Yes it is. It works you used it." Byron (laughing): "It's the metropolitan wino scene. You know what I mean? You know the scene in Firenze, now here it is in New York. It has all the elements: the dirty clothes, the ruddy skin, the formaldehyde lips."

Country music is almost extinct.

Stereophile contributing editor John Swenson and I had the good fortune to stumble upon an LP collection the store had purchased and put out in the “new arrivals” section.