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So, what is with the odd collection of items in the above pic? All will be revealed on this week’s episode of…
TALES FROM THE BINS
Last Friday I made an appointment to drive down toward Charlotte and check out a record collection. On paper, it was a drive I probably shouldn’t have made. The person only had about 250 LPs and it sounded like pretty run-of-the-mill classic rock stuff, but we’ve been kind of low on inventory lately, the lady was very nice over email, and if I set the appointment early enough in the day, I could make a day out of it, driving the rest of the way to Charlotte to hit a couple of record shops and get some food. So, somewhat against my better judgment, I made the appointment and left bright and early Friday morning.
After driving for around two hours, I pulled in the driveway of a cute little rural house and knocked on the door. The woman let me in and she had kindly put out all the records so they were super accessible for me. The 45s were on a folding table for easy perusal, and the LPs were in white boxes on the floor with plenty of space to browse and maneuver. Of course I went for the LPs first, and as we chit-chatted I could see right away that I wasn’t going to be interested in these records. There were four boxes of LPs and the first box was almost entirely pre-Beatles pop music (which no one really buys anymore), and the jackets all had seam splits and heavy wear around the edges. As I went through the rest of the boxes, there were some 60s and 70s rock titles we could probably sell, but most of them weren’t in good enough condition. After flipping through all the albums, I decided to go ahead and give the lady my assessment, letting her know that I could probably find 10 or 15 usable LPs in her collection, but that I thought it would probably be better for her to keep the collection together and try to unload it herself in a lot via Facebook Marketplace or something similar.
She asked me some questions about how she should make the listing and I gave her suggestions and instructions. Then she gestured toward another box on the floor and said, “and I have no idea what I’m going to do with all this.” The box was full of reel-to-reel tapes, not the 7”-sized reels that most consumers used, but the smaller reels that I think were more typically used by radio stations. I started to give her my standard spiel about reel-to-reel tapes (the gist: it’s an extremely niche market I have little or no experience with) while I poked through the box to see if I could learn any more about the tapes. There was a wooden plaque in the box with the name Gordon Solie on it, and I blurted out something like “oh, wow… Gordon Solie.” And she said, “yeah, he was my dad.”
Once she realized I knew who her dad was, the stories started flowing. I remembered Gordon Solie from my brief fascination with wrestling when I was a young kid. We weren’t able to watch WWF events, so Hulk Hogan and Roddy Piper and that whole crew were a mystery to me, but they showed WCW matches on our local cable channel and I watched them all the time. The Four Horsemen, the Road Warriors, the Rock N Roll Express… that was my era. My parents even took my brother and I to a few matches in Norfolk and Hampton when we were kids. Solie’s daughter told me about how he started out in broadcasting and was an auto race announcer early in his career alongside calling wrestling matches. She told me about the wrestlers she got to meet when she was a kid and told me some of her dad’s many stories.
I was having a blast chit-chatting with her about all this stuff, and when she saw how interested I was, she dug up copies of two books about her dad she helped write. I read a good chunk of one this weekend and I’ve really enjoyed it. I love biographies that shed light on worlds I don’t know about, but I read so much about musicians who grew up in the 50s and 60s in the United States and the UK that I feel like I’m in a bit of a rut when it comes to those subjects. But Solie grew up in Minneapolis in the 30s and 40s and moved to Florida after that. His dream was to be a broadcaster and he was clearly a personable guy who put himself in the middle of a lot of little interesting worlds, like local broadcasting in the Tampa Bay area in the 50s, the emerging world of stock car racing, and of course professional wrestling. This is the world my grandparents grew up in, and I’ve really enjoyed how the book takes me there.
Of course, since nowadays punk rock is a much bigger part of my life than pro wrestling, when I hear Gordon Solie’s name, the first thing that pops into my head is the band Gordon Solie Motherfuckers, whom I love. I had to ask the lady, “do you know there’s a punk rock band named after your father?” She said yes, she was aware, and that she had written them to ask why they wanted to use her father’s name. I told her that I knew the guys in the band were wrestling fanatics and they were probably just big fans. I left it there. I could not bring myself to say the word “motherfuckers” in front of this sweet lady.
She was very concerned on my behalf that I had driven all the way from Raleigh and not bought her records, but I wasn’t too worried… I mostly just wanted to get out of town and I was stoked to meet her, hear some cool stories, and get two interesting books. But as we were chatting, I noticed a Beatles Mobile Fidelity box set sitting in the corner of the room. I asked what was up with that, and she said it was missing the white album, but that it was her father’s. Apparently father and daughter shared a love of the Beatles and he bought the box for them to enjoy together. I looked the box over, and it turned out it wasn’t missing a disc; she must have remembered wrong. After checking the condition of all the LPs, I told her what I thought it was worth and what I could pay her, and she was very excited to sell it to me. I know Dominic hates these expensive Beatles boxes (we’ve had them numerous times before) because they take a long time to sell and invite punishment from meticulous Beatles collector types, but picking this up made this lady’s day and meant that today’s trip wasn’t a financial write-off for us.
So yeah, anyone want to buy a really expensive Beatles box set once owned by Gordon Solie?