And the block parties where you could hang out with your friends until the Sun rose on Summer nights?
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And the block parties where you could hang out with your friends until the Sun rose on Summer nights?
We had an old amusement park called[marshall hall]back in the day[this was wayyyyyyyyyy before the superparks of today]it was in maryland and was small and cozy,kinda like coney island.
If I add in my cassettes, CDs etc. I have about 3,000 works of music in total. I never really got into CD's like I did vinyl. I rarely let even relatives borrow my albums. My brother would come over and tape some things and each year I would make my mom her cassettes of holiday music from various artists in my collection.
Well not exactly on my street, but in the backyard BBQ's and sometimes in the park. Now in parts of Detroit [[I've done this myself), people would put their record players right in the window sills and play their records during warm weather. I use to do that with my Marvin Gaye album "I Want You".
I know the kind you mean. We had that at Walbridge Park in Toledo. They tore all of the amusement rides out by the mid to late sixties but the part is still beautiful. It runs along the Maumee River where my brother and I use to climb the rock ledges and watch the big paddle boats.
OH OF COURSE,I HAVE FRIENDS IN THE HOOD AS WELL AS FRIENDS ON THE GOLD COAST[yes D.C.has one]ONE THING I'VE ALWAYS FELT GOOD ABOUT WAS LIVING IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE CITY GROWING UP[UPTOWN-DOWNTOWN-IN DA HOOD OUT OF DA HOOD]YOU LEARN THE CITY AND YOU LEARN PEOPLE...ONE OF THE SADDEST MISCONCEPTIONS MADE BY FOLKS WHO ARE FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO HAVE NEVER LIVED HAND TO MOUTH IS THE ALL FOLKS IN THE[GHETTO?]ARE NOT TRYING TO DO ANY BETTER,I'VE HAD SOME HEATED ARGUMENTS ABOUT THAT...I LIVE IN THE GHETTO,THE GHETTO DOESN'T LIVE IN ME,AND I REMEMBER AS A KID THAT WE[GHETTO]KIDS MOST TIMES HAD BETTER MANNERS THAN SOME OF THE UPPER CRUST KIDS BUT FOR THE MOST PART KIDS WERE KIDS AND WE GOT ALONG.
Exactly! My father got his job the year before I was born, my mother taught school, but my dad would take us to relatives that had it ROUGH! Sometimes we'd spend the night with them. We didn't care because we were kids and having fun. I had an Uncle that lived in Cabrini Green in Chicago in the sixties and we would go visit them. We had fun playing with all the kids. My grandmother use to say "you'll never know where you might have to live before you die" and "if a place was as bad as people say, then the people that live there couldn't"! These sayings stuck with me as I got older which is why I had friends in all kinds of living conditions good and bad. I have been to the roughest areas in America even the ones in D.C.!
HAAAAAAAA,MARV I LOVE TO RECALL THE TIMES THAT I WOULD BE ON MY WAY TO A PARTY AND TOOK A WRONG TURN[which wasn't deadly,but you could get beat up good]BUT BECAUSE I KNEW SOME OF THE KNUCKLE HEADS I WAS ABLE TO PASS THROUGH[of course I didn't make it a habit]WHEW!!
There was a city wide power outage in Memphis the day after my wife and I moved there in 1994. Having nothing else to do in the dark, we went for a ride in our new home. Well, there was a Kroger store that must have had a generator because the lights were on. We pulled up and man, it looked like a house party was going on. There was a project two blocks away and the store clearly had been neglected by the company. They still had stickers and stamped prices on everything!
The employees wore baseball caps and torn jeans. Our cashier was picking his hair when we checked out. And there were some rough looking folks everywhere. My wife, who grew up in a much tougher neighborhood than I did, was scared to death. Eyes were big as saucers. She grabbed my arm and pulled close enough that we could have shared my coat. I remember telling her that we would fade into the background if she stopped being obviously afraid. Thank God, nobody took offense to her and robbed us for the GP. LOL.
The first rule of not being punked is not to be a punk.
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa,jerry my brother i can relate to that,i've had to[tough talk]my way out of a few situations.
I remember I deliberately went to a New Year's Eve party I was invited to in Brooklyn years ago. I took my girlfriend and we went to the party up in this tiny apartment that had like a living room and a small kitchen. In the kitchen these two girls started fighting and one pulled a knife out of a pan of dressing LOL! A big ball of people rolled out into the living room knocking the Christmas tree over. There was no furniture in the room. I guess they moved it out for the party. I got us out of there and did not look back. LOL!!!!
Man, we had some similar experiences. I remember the day before New Year's Eve 1988, me and my then girlfriend from West Philly went to this restaurant, "Puglia's" in Little Italy in NYC. A buddy recommended it. We were there in the afternoon and no one else other that the staff was there. Not long after sat down to go over the menu Genie Gotti [[John Gotti's brother) came by and was looking at us through the front window, hehehehehehehehehe. In those days, everyone knew who they were and what they looked liked. My girlfriend's knee would not stop shaking. Mr. Gotti came in and over to our side of the restaurant [[the place was divided in two halves by a wall) and just said "how you folks doing?" I said fine thank you and youself? He said great and I remember wishing him a Happy New Year. My girlfriend never said a word until after he'd left. She says "Get me out of here NOW!" LOL!
My problem has always been that I was too dumb to be scared. LOL!
Scared or not, you can't look like you're scared. Some people will rob you just because they think you expect them to. When I'm in crowds, I don't look in guys' eyes or at girls' butts. If you do, go ahead and expect somebody to be rolling up, hand in his pocket, and asking "You gotta problem? What you lookin' at MF?!"
Jerry if I could only tell you. I will tell you this. I and the kids I came up with could not be intimidated. They just couldn't. A bully could never survive at my school or around my crowd, they'd destroy him. It's hard to explain but we all grew up knowing how to fight. Heck, fighting was our in and after school entertainment LOL! When I left home for college at 18, I went across country where I did not know one single person. I kid you not, I use to go to the roughest areas of whatever city I was in on purpose because older people where I worked always warned me not to. I went to East Cleveland, Camden, NJ, West and South Philly, Bed-Sty Brooklyn, the Bronx, Southside Chicago, Gary In, all over Detroit as it was home, Five Points in Denver, Baltimore, Boston and on and on and on. I got along just fine. No one really F'd with me except this group of kids in Chicago one time, but that is a long story. They backed off. LOL! Criminals would befriend me because I was not afraid or treated them disrespectfully.
haaaaaaaaaa..i always look at girl's butts[still do,hehe]my sweet mother always told me when outnumbered-a good run is better than a bad stand,and i always remembered that whenever i was outnumbered like ten to one and not in my hood,a lot of my cousins were gangsters too but in the days when i was on[two heels]and not[four wheels]as long as i got away it wasn't worth a turf war.
About 30 years ago, I was in a White Castle with a friend around midnight. My friend stepped back in line to let somebody get by and brushed into a Brother behind him. Dude said "Excuse you", and when my friend asked what he was talking about, he opened his coat to show a knife and said "I got something for both of y'all". We stared each other down and nothing came from it.
About 15 years ago, I fired a guy and he showed me a .22 that was in his pocket. That was scary as hell because it was just us two in the break room. Thank God I talked into walking to my desk because three of my guys knew something was up and stood behind him until he decided to leave.
Attachment 12948
Cabrini-Green wasn't all that bad in the late '50s [[when Curtis Mayfield, Jerry and Billy Butler, and Otis Leavill lived there, and the early '60s. It got pretty bad near the end of the '60s and into the '70s.
Attachment 12949
I used to do something like that, on trips across regions of USA, looking for records. I went to a lot of the most dangerous areas in the big and middle-sized cities, looking in thrift stores, junk stores, furniture stores and record shop bargain bins, and record wholesalers.
East St. Louis, East Cleveland, parts of Chicago's Southwest Side, West Memphis, Hunter's Point in San Francisco and West Oakland and Richmond, Watts and Willowbrook and South Central in L.A., South Milwaukee, Black Bottom in Detroit, South Bronx and parts of Harlem in NYC, Newark, parts of D.C. Harbor Area in Baltimore, areas in central Philadelphia, Buffalo all were pretty tough.
You absolutely had to look like you felt comfortable in those places [[ act like you belong there [[but it can't really be faked), and knew what you were doing and where you were going. Looking around already makes you a target.
There was a hood in s.e. D.c.[valley green]that was so rough the city just figured it was better to tear it down,so they did and put up single family homes.
Attachment 12955
I used to takes trips across Canada in one direction and back across USA in the other, looking for records. I paid mostly 5 to 25¢ per 45 avg, and 50¢ to $1 for avg LP. That's how I amassed my large collection. I traded off a lot of my Canadian collection.
Sounds like you did pretty good,robb you da man!!
Man, I miss going shopping at the bargain bin record shops. We had several here when I was younger. Marv, I recall you saying that you went to some of my old haunts in threads a couple of years ago. There were shops on the OSU campus that would get cut outs, radio station promotional copies, and records that students from all over the country would sell for extra cash. I'd buy records that almost nobody ever knew about and some of those unknown albums had great songs on them. Thanks to the politics and money involved in radio promotion, a great song was not guaranteed to be heard any other way. It's probably the same today.
Hey jerry,great minds think alike,i too buy the unknown albums and just like you say some have very good songs buried on em,i go to the thrift stores when i can and find some good stuff at times for $1.00 and most are in mint condition,like the three[main ingredient]albums i found recently..thrift store forever!!
Man, they had some great stuff at the record stores up and down High Street in the 80s! I bought some classic Motown albums in good to VG condition that were half the price asked for in Goldmine! Was there a store called "School Kids Records" in Columbus or it may have been in Ann Arbor.
JAI, the Sunday morning flea markets on the lower east side of Manhattan are where you can find anything in almost minutes. I found 12" that I had looked for years for and did not want to special order from overseas. I found them in boxes people just dump right on the ground at the flea markets. They are just parking lots used for several hours on Sun. mornings in NYC.
Yeah, School Kids, Moe's, and Singin' Dog were the main three on High Street. Singin' Dog was my joint. On pay day, I would buy 2-5 records every week from them and one or two from a chain called Record & Tape Outlet. My first album was "Candy" by Con Funk Shun, which cost $3.25 at RTO. LOL. You're lucky to get a compressed format download for that these days.
Ah ha! My memory has not failed me yet. School Kids and the others, I would just piledge when I had time away from work. I would be in different cities for training in those days. I'd spend about a week in each. In the 80s I was mostly collecting albums from the 60s and some early 70s. I started collecting the top R&B albums from the 50s later on. I remember how cheap albums use to be brand new. I remember when Peaches in Toledo raised their sticker prices to $5.00 and some change. I knew then, I had to get a job LOL!
"Candy" by Con Funk Shun was one of my favorite albums my senior year in High School. I bought more albums from that year than any other. I organized my albums by year and artist in a notebook that I would update each year.
Some of the best used record stores in America were in the smaller cities in Pennsylvania like Lancaster, Harrisburg, Allentown and then those in Philly. The Princeton Record Exchange in Jersey was also tops! Detroit's were scattered all over the place.
I used to be able to afford to take chances. I bought great albums by Kiddo, Ozone, and the Skwares at shops like that. I never saw them stocked at the chain stores. If I saw anything produced by Reggie Andrews and Ndugu Chancler, I'd buy it. They used to produce the Dazz Band but they also did some under the radar outfits and more often than not, I liked those bands as well. I wonder if Soulful Detroit member Ndugu is the same guy?
I remember buying an album by a group called Zinc and another by Cashmere that were probably rare outside of Philly and each has one of my favorite songs is on it. I play them and memories flood back in. I have dozens of records like that [[and probably more that were completely forgettable; that's the risk you take when you buy records for a dollar or less).
I remember Ndugu Chancler. Have you ever bought an album solely based on the liking the cover? I bought this album by the Cars in college because of the cover. I use to see it in everybody's dorm room. LOL
We use to watch this local Detroit dance show called "The Scene". They would play records you didn't hear on the radio and a lot of techno funk music. Here's an example of a cut I heard on the show during the dance out closing segment wayyyy back in 1980. I liked it and went on a search for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlQiGjpXkrA
Cool cover marv,the only store that i can stay in all day is the record store,here in maryland we have[memory lane records]and they have everything starting at three dollars,like the time i was leaving and as i turned to go out i looked down and there was[neverending impressions]i had only been looking that it for oh[25yrs]i almost passed out,and in mint condition,there is a special thrift store warehouse near me that has hundreds of lp's and 45's from[50 cents]talk about a kid in a candy store.