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Proving My Iron: a Buried Treasure Experiment

I didn't take this picture.I never got around to writing up the official Buried Treasure entry for my first trip to Red Scroll Records on N. Colony St. in Wallingford, CT (it seems like everything in Wallingford is on N. Colony). The standouts in my mind now — and I’ll allow this is perhaps because I’m staring directly at that section on my CD rack — are an original issue of Saint VitusV on Roadrunner that may or may not be a European import, the Brownhouse release of Welcome to the Western Lodge by Masters of Reality and Acid King‘s Zoroaster. They also had a $15 copy of Dozer‘s In the Tail of a Comet, which I almost bought on principle even though I already owned it. There were many others.

It’s my wife’s family on the shore of the Long Island Sound in Connecticut, which is why I leave the valley so often on weekends and head up there, and in between my sister-in-law’s house and my grandmother-in-law’s house — wouldn’t you know it, just a short detour away — is Red Scroll Records. It was two Saturdays ago, maybe. Whenever the Clutch show wasn’t and not this past weekend. Come to think of it, it might have been a Tuesday. El Duderino, if you're not into the whole brevity thing.“Is this a weekday? What day is this?”

Regardless, the stipulation from The Patient Mrs. was that I had no longer than 13 minutes to do my shopping. Red Scroll Records is not especially large, but 13 minutes isn’t enough to properly peruse even the barest of used sections. Something is better than nothing. I issued myself the challenge: if I could find one CD in 13 minutes, I’d buy it.

So what the hell is challenging about that?

The kicker is it was just one CD. No matter what I found in those 13 minutes, I’d only walk out of there with one disc in my hands. Even if it was volumes 1&2 and 3&4 of The Desert Sessions, I’d have to pick one (though if it had been those two particular examples, I’d have just failed the test and bought both). One album in 13 minutes. I walked into the store, nodded and grunted hello to the dude behind the counter and shoved my way past some punker kids dorking out over the vinyl to get to the used CDs. Off to the races.

Just another void generation.Time went quick, quicker even than I thought it would. I was barely through ‘d’ making my way along alphabetically when eight minutes had passed. No time for the rest, just hit the major letters — ‘m,’ ‘s,’ ‘t’-‘z.’ Right by the ‘m’ section, though, something caught my eye. The discs are all sideways in the Red Scroll used section, so you’re reading spines. I found Iron Man‘s Generation Void on Gutter Records from 1999, and grabbed it before I even knew what I’d done. I did a quick glance in both the used and new ‘t’ hoping for a miracle in the form of the self-titled Trouble record, but finding nothing of the sort, I checked out as fast as I could and left. One minute to spare. Like the first time I’d been, I wanted to buy one of their nifty zombie-fied t-shirts, but I figured it would take Thrash attacktoo long and I’d rather have the Iron Man record anyway.

I was gone and off to grandma’s listening to Al Morris‘ riffs before I knew it, riding down Rt. 15 jamming out “King of Kings,” “As the Gods Have Spoken,” and of course, the power ballad “Winds of Change” that is in no way a Scorpions cover (now that’s balls). Not sure if I got the best disc in the store and I’d probably need another two hours to figure that out, but for 13 minutes, I didn’t do so bad. Experiment: success.

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