Illegal Foreign Object

I am a crate digger by nature — I love wandering into a new secondhand shop and finding treasure. I hit a few of these shops in Texas last month and found a dozen items that’ll find their way onto an Etsy page or Craigslist the next time I’m stateside. My crate diggin’ extends way beyond music, but that was most certainly where it all began for me.

My Dad and I had a trading card and comic book shop in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It was open for about four years, and as I’ve previously mentioned, one of my many responsibilities included hustling autographs at old Arlington Stadium. Two years into our time at the shop, James Cavender, the owner of Cavender’s Boot City and the strip mall we called home, offered us a corner space roughly five times bigger than our first location for the same rent. He wanted the strip mall to look busier so he could get the other empty spaces rented, and James and Dad had a handshake deal that Cavender would keep our smaller location vacant so we’d have a space to move back should he rent the larger storefront. We readily accepted and began brainstorming ways to fill the much larger space.

A few months prior, an older Canadian gentleman (with the whitest legs I’ve ever seen) named Tom Walsh wandered into the shop. He was looking for deals, and Dad took a liking to him immediately. Tom began working at the shop one day per week — Dad paid him in meals and discounts. Truthfully, I think Tom just liked being out of the house, and he is responsible for showing me and my dad the joys of garage saling. After a few weekends of driving around with Tom, Dad and I decided that garage saling was the perfect way to fill the massive storefront.

We went saling every weekend, waking at six in the morning to beat as many people as possible to the punch. One of the things I began looking for were records and cassettes. This was 1991 — long before hipsters decided to call LPs “vinyl” and jack the prices up 4000%. I paid between a nickel and a quarter a piece for LPs, then turned around in the store and sold them for one dollar (unless I spotted something special — like the Beatles’ Yesterday And Today “meat” cover). Digging through milk crates loaded with old records is how I learned to pick out winners. When I moved back to Texas from Costa Rica in 2003, my eye for unrecognized value paid a lot of rent during the years of struggling to get our heads back above water.

I still enjoy digging for music, but the process is different now. These days, I do most of my digging through online entities like Bandcamp, Spotify, and SoundCloud. Admittedly, it all feels far less organic, and there’s nothing romantic (or monetarily enticing) about staring at a phone or laptop screen, but finding a band that lights up my heart still feels just as good.

This year, I dove back into the metal genre with fervor and gusto. Somewhere around the death of Pantera, I just kind of moved on from heavy metal. It had all descended into parody, or maybe I’d just lost my ear for it, but whatever the cause, I just didn’t feel it anymore. 2023, however, has been a different sort of year for me. There were plenty of changes, eye-opening, mind-expanding moments, and enough growth to put Lexington Steele to shame. With these changes came a renewed sense of self, and a desire to embrace what I love. This led to me falling in love with metal music all over again (and, boy, did I ever pick a great year to fall head over heels).

Jazz and country, two genres I’d also written off as “greatness of the past”, also planted flags on my heart with multiple releases. Offerings from the gods of hip-hop, punk rock, shoegaze, power pop, and myriad subgenres of subgenres also moved my metaphorical needle.

Great music is out there. You won’t find most of it on the radio (or, maybe you will — love whatever you want to love). In my case, I had to get back to digging. If you’re into it, check back tomorrow, and let’s see where this road takes us.

Happy New Year, folks.