As she was leaving the Art building on Thursday, our colleague Marc Raboy told Carrie to “take some time off, it’s a holiday weekend, you know.”
Sometimes, that’s all you need. We took yesterday off and had the luxury of sitting around and talking forever, and then going shopping around town. We started with Zone on St. Denis which was not as cool as we’d hoped. We then wandered down to cluster of vintage and furniture stores on Amherst, south of Ontario. They were amazing. Like museums of 60s and 70s fashion and design. Some of the stuff was quite beautiful and some of it was just plain weird, like the “videospheres” that looked like astronaut helmets. Unfortunately, they were all super overpriced. $55 for a rotary phone. Sorry! There’s tons of stores down there, though, so we got to explore a bit and walk around since it was so nice out. (NB non-locals: I could still see my breath).
The next stop was Henri-Henri, Canada’s largest men’s hat store! I’ve been wanting to go for months now and I was thrilled to get there. It’s pretty cool and I did score three hats for my oversized head (please check jokes at my expense at the door), but couldn’t quite bite for the $400 beaver felt one if though it fit just right and looked beautiful. It’s Canada. Beaver are a resource, you know.
Speaking of expensive things, on the way back, we stopped in at a Pawn Shop. As a home studio engineer and bassist, I always stick my head in pawn shops in case they have any cool old equipment or better yet have something good but don’t quite “know what they have.” As luck would have it, they had a device called the SWR Interstellar Overdrive (no relation to the Pink Floyd song), which is like a very low-wattage tube amplifier or a very complex and rich sounding distortion processor for bass, depending on how you look at it. it’s a rare, fancy and lovely sounding device. List on them new is something like $750 (US) and they routinely go for $350 (US) or so used on ebay. Between my broken French and his broken English, I managed to talk the guy down from $500 to $250 (Canadian) but I still wasn’t sure since I couldn’t test the thing out in the store. Today, I decided to go back and get the thing if the tubes lit up when I turned it on, since even if it’s broken at the price, I’d still break even if I had it fixed. And if it wasn’t broken, I would have the pawn shop score of a lifetime. Alas, the guy’s boss was there today. He was still about to sell it to me for $250 Canadian when his boss came over and said “no.” Their price today was $500 used, which is no bargain at all. I thanked them (in broken French) and left.
That’s the equivalent of a fish story for musicians. That Interstellar Overdrive is definitely the one that got away. If I’d just taken the plunge last night, I’d have the thing, AND the bragging rights to go with it.
At least when I saw the giant oversized stuffed cat-in-the-hat at a garage sale in Pittsburgh a few years ago for $5 (US, but like it matters!), I bought it. I’ve learned my lesson.
Yesterday concluded with a great home-cooked dinner and a bad movie on TV (Mr. 3000). I awoke this morning feeling rested and wrote four half-decent pages.