Lost, Broken and Gone

former editors/friends have taken my best of the muppets cassette and my puppetry of the penis video - je ne suis pas amuse

Yes, that REALLY sucked. I cannot say enough good things about insurance comapnies and being anal about your collection as a result; I was able to replace 95% of the CDs and tapes thanks to a database I was keeping of my purchases. Of course, I didn't keep up with it and am now hopelessly behind in cataloging the damn things...

Most recently, I left my copy of Queen Latifah's _All Hail The Queen_ in a rental car. BALLS!

I somehow lost the actual CD of Go Kart Mozart's Instant Wigwam and Igloo Mixture and St. Etienne's Too Young To Die. Still have the jewel case. Both imports, of course. I think the St. Etienne record has even been deleted, God knows why. I wanna hear "Sailor Boy"! And "He's on the Phone"!

In a moment of idiotic drunken generosity, I gave my friend Howie the Edith Massey single "Big Girls Don't Cry"/"Hey Punks, Get Off the Grass". He didn't deserve it!

When I was in college, I'd always find the obvious canonical stuff missing from my collection. Iggy, Velvets, Roxy, etc. I've replaced it all.

And I think I left a box of records in the club I DJed at in New York when I moved to LA. See the Holy Grail thread. I'm a friggin' idiot.

November 1985. I had moved to another city and had taken my first out- of-town trip, a visit back home for a long holiday weekend. When I returned I found my place looted, most of my things gone -- including my entire record collection. I mean, who the hell steals records? Stereos, TVs, gramps' old pocket watch, even the dishes. But records?

I just know it was the fucking neighbors. And it would almost not have been so bad if I thought it had been someone who could have, you know, APPRECIATED my exquisite tastes. Instead, a bunch of white trash, inbread, double-digit mouthbreathers cleaned out everything I had. And O I lost so much great stuff, hundreds of titles, albums that'll never be released on CD, things I had hard enough time finding originally, etc. Even the stuff I didn't listen to anymore -- stuff I had long since dismissed -- it was still part of my "musical progression," y'know . . . for some reason I had to go through a LOT of Uriah Heep and Jethro Tull and Wishbone Ash before really getting a clear handle on things. [Apologies to Heep, Tull, and Ash fans]

Argh. Even after all this time, the agony lingers . . . But thanks for the outlet here. All of my friends are bored hearing me tell this story for the xxth time.

I was broken into about a year and a half ago. I came in, realised I had been burgled and desperately looked round the room. TV still there - good, the fuckers big n heavy anyway. Stereo system still there - thank sweet, merciful Zeus!! 'Puter still there - amazing! Video - gone. I was actually quite relieved that that was all I could see missing, as it coulda been a whole lot worse.
It was a whole lot worse.
A slim, vertical shelf unit which had once contained 80+ CDs was now empty. Shhhhit!. The missing CDs were mainly all of my earliest CD purchases from the 80s mixed in with stuff from here and there, but ALL albums by Smiths/Morrissey - gone. New Order - gone. MBV - gone. Pixies - gone. Stereolab - gone. Aphex Twin - gone. Orbital - gone. Boo Radleys - gone. Wedding Present - gone...
All kindsa shit. All gone. I still don't exactly know what's missing, only the other day I was searching for my copy of Bjorks 'Debut'. I couldn't find it anywhere. It's gone. And it still gives a kick when I go to find something and then realise I don't have it any more.
Still, slowly replacing most of the missing, though I don't like buying albums I've already bought.
I know who stole them as well, some bonehead smack addict my landlady let stay at the shared house where I live. "oh he's really nice Dave, you'll like him" she said. Stupid bint, it was as clear as day he was a fuckin' scally. We guess he stole the video 'on request' which is why he left the other electrical gumf, the CDs were probably just opportunism, just a spur-of-the-moment grab.
There wasn't enough evidence for the Police to nail the twunt. Haven't heard of him since thank God.

You know burglars must hate it when they realize they just scored a mess of obscure, hard-to-unload stuff. I mean, I seriously doubt if they're saying, "Oh good, I've been looking for this Serge Gainsbourg disc for ages!"

More like, "Why can't this sucker be heavy-duty into chart pop like normal people?"

Yeah exactly. I wonder how much he got - if anything - for my Telstar Ponies' 'Voices From The New Music' album or my Cindy Dall album... serves 'em right.

No CDs lost, destroyed, or stolen, but when I had tapes about five got broken. Most weren't missed because they were gifts-Sarah McLaughlin, Phantom of the Opera, etc.

Slightly tangentially - I was in Record and Tape Exchange, Notting Hill yesterday. A guy came in with a box full of around 100 CDs which he claimed his girlfriend had given him to sell. A quick glance into the box revealed that the top layer had a sort of 80's "indie collection" look about it - New Order, Smiths etc. Anyway, the guy behind the counter refused point blank to buy them and kept saying "Are you sure they're your girlfriend's"? Anyway it turned out that he'd been in the classical shop up the road and tried to palm them off in there - he had NO IDEA whether the CDs were pop, classical, or whatever! They'd immediately phoned the other shops asking them to watch out for this geezer.

Then it got ugly. Having been (politely) turned away he then came back in and jumped over the counter and grabbed the assistant who'd turned him down. Another assistant and myself managed to pull him off and pin him down while they called the old bill. Meantime two of the shop's security guards appeared and tried to take over. In the confusion the guy got free and ran out of the shop, making his escape in a G-reg white Golf.

When I lived in California I had a copy of "Barracuda", but I left my Heart in San Francisco.

Hm. But did he leave the discs behind? ;-)

No.

Would you believe I've been robbed twice?

First time, I had moved into this horrible Uptown Minneapolis house with a couple men in their 30s (I was 18)--one was basically retarded (really) and the other's excuse was that he was a complete fucking idiot. I'd been there less than two months when I came home and someone had ransacked the place--not much there, of course, but still half my CDs went missing. Oddly enough, my stereo, TV and several CDs were found scattered in the backyard, so I got away relatively OK. I moved back in with my mom immediately, though.

Second time I was 19 and about to move from my studio apartment in the Lynlake neighborhood to a multi-person household on nearby Nicollet Avenue. A guy I knew in high school offered to take the lease from me and spent a couple nights. One night I came home from work and everything in the apartment--computer, stereo, brand new TV my great-grandaunt had left me when she'd died seven months before, the works--was gone, the door swinging open. I saw him a few weeks later at a club and he came up to me as if nothing had happened. I had to leave because I would have killed him otherwise. (This happened several other times; it's been seven years but I have little doubt how I'd respond were I to disallow myself any control over my actions.)

On top of that, the house I moved into wound up including a woman who swiped several dozen of my CDs at various times and another female roommate's clothes before we finally kicked her out after two months.

My friend who stole a pile of my records last year to buy junk - I'd like to thank him once again - but I'd like even more to thank Real Groovy Records in Auckland for buying this obviously stolen pile of records off a guy they knew was a junkie "without noticing" that there was someone else's name (mine) writ inside the cover of every one - thanks to them too for not having any record of the transaction even though I know they always do keep one, saying that telling me anything about who'd sold 'em to them would be "breaching customer confidentiality", & telling me they couldn't do anything unless I took it to the police (which I could tell they just assumed I'd be loath to do)...gee it'd be a shame if that shop burned down.
Yeah but anyway eventually I got most of 'em back except a live Pere Ubu bootleg ("U-Men Xmas at Tri-State Mall" - really great), the Hermine Demoriane record w/ the picture of the back of her head (also really great), & "Malefactor,Ade" (the only good '80s Red Crayola album).

my Roy Budd compilation has gone missing from the case.

at sxsw this year, shared a motel room with a colleague doing a travel piece on austin, for which he was given a gratis hire car from the area's tourist board (ah, the perks of daily newspaper publishing). sed car had a CD player in it, and since m'pal had brought exactly zero cds with him, we listened to my selection of soul, hip-hop and grunge ephemera, held in one o' them 20cd wallet thingies, which i'd just invested in before the trip. ahhh, the pleasures of zooming around austin rockin' out to madder rose, or the forthcoming ken stringfellow LP, or that def jux sampler that had just come out, or the 1973 stevie wonder bootleg i'd painstakingly downloaded off of napster...

only i was staying a day later than m'friend, and we got stoned after going record shopping, and before he drove the car back to the airport to catch his flight home. so he dropped me off to the motel and zoomed off to the airport with all my CDs hidden under the passenger seat, i realised this that evening, having listened to all the CDs i'd bought that day, and succumbing to a cold dweat when i realised all those precious records were now sitting in a hertz rental car office somewhere.

to cut a long story short,i got to the airport the next day, three hours early, and begged the hertz people to search the car. luckily, a clumsy fender/pillar interface back at the motel early in our sojourn meant the car was in the shop, and not rented out to someone else. i got all my precious CDs back, and can sing nothing but sweet praise for the helpful people of hertz.

I had to come home from work today because I thought I'd left the front door open. I hadn't. My big fear the whole time was that somebody would come in and steal my record crate! (never mind the decks themselves, my computers, ipod, cameras, etc)