Had this dream the other night.
Someone handed me a small card. It had a simple black-and-white line drawing with an autograph. Eric Clapton’s autograph, perhaps? A crudely drawn riff on the “Slowhand” cover? A stick drawing, really, not close to what you see here.
(Clapton must have been lingering in my subconscious. I’d read he’d just turned 79. I’d also just read a biography of George Harrison, in which Clapton was a major figure.)
“Where did you get this?” I ask.
I’m directed to a tiny record shop. Seemed like it was in Milwaukee.
I show the card to the guy at the small counter.
“Where did you get this?” he asks.
“A friend gave it to me,” I say.
I pull out a chain made of bottle caps and paper clips with a small metal bar on top.
“Oh, maybe I should give you this, too,” I say.
I hang it on a hook at the top of the stairs to the basement. It seems to be a pass key of some kind. I have no idea where I got it.
To my left is Cousin Itt Girl. She’s a small thing with long bright green hair covering her face and reaching to the floor. She starts giving me the third-degree stink eye, inspecting my clothes, my look, my vibe, clearly disapproving. Behind her is long-haired, scraggly bearded Hippie Guy, watching her intently and nodding yes, probably stoned to the bejeezus.
I look around. All the walls are white, but there are no records on the wall. No record bins, either.
I ask the guy at the counter what kind of records they have. He says “outsider records” and do I have any?
“No,” I say, “I live in Green Bay. There are no outsider records there. A lot of country records but not that.”
I leave. It’s not my kind of place.
Dream or hallucination? Repressed animosity toward hipster swine?
Maybe I had too much to dream that night.
Once, some years ago, I had a dream of my own about visiting a record store and seeing a whole bunch of non-existent/imaginary albums. (I think I wrote about it on the old blog, ages ago.)
One of the non-existent albums was Eric Clapton singing Irish rebel songs. It had a somewhat blurry cover photo on which he looked drunk.
Another one was a KISS album called “Lost in the Tears,” which a friend later told me would have made a good title for a Paul Stanley solo album.
There was some Sex Pistols stuff too but I don’t remember anything about it except that it had the same ransom-note look as Never Mind the Bollocks. And all this stuff was, as I recall, in the same bin.
Thankfully I was spared any exposure to green-haired dream-hipsters.