When in Rome, you do as the Romans. When in Cali, you get your ass to Amoeba Music. An Amoeba haul is a special thing. It had been five years — half a decade! — since the last time I set foot in Amoeba‘s San Francisco store, right on Haight Street, more or less the birthplace of American counterculture, or at very least where it moved to from the Midwest because it was okay to be weird there. It is a shop we must remember we are fortunate to still have in existence. Places like Sound Garden in Baltimore, Vintage Vinyl in my beloved Garden State, and the three Amoebas in San Fran, Berkeley and L.A. are treasures. Landmarks. Their preservation may not be government-sanctioned, but they’re no less essential as living monuments of our age.

I’d gotten in after two in the morning. My flight from Boston to SFO was delayed… by five and a half hours. Something about a flat tire on the plane that then wound up requiring an entirely different aircraft altogether. Oh, we sat, and sat. Supposed to be a 5PM flight, took off just after 10:30. What a shitter, but at least it took off at all. I slept about 20 minutes on the plane — remember, with the time zone shift, a 2AM West Coast arrival is still 5AM to my very red East Coast eyes — and then crashed at the hotel, woke up this morning and spent the bulk of they day shaking hands at the convention that brought me out here, trading business cards and the like. All the while, lurking at the back of my mind was Amoeba Music, its call resonating like a dogwhistle nobody else around me could hear. I could’ve cried when I got out of the cab and it was there, just like I remembered.

Seems likely there was more vinyl around than five years ago, though I wouldn’t commit to that 100 percent, not really remembering one way or the other, but in any case, I still found plenty in the CD racks; the notion of traveling with LPs, the general expenditure and desire to actually listen to the music keeping me to the more compressed format, and no regrets. Here’s what I grabbed, alphabetically:

Acid King, Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere
Black Rainbows, Carmina Diabolo
Electric Wizard, Time to Die
Horsehunter, Caged in Flesh
Monolord, Vaenir
Parliament, Motor Booty Affair
Stoneburner, Caged in Flesh
SubRosa, More Constant than the Gods
Swans, To be Kind
Tekhton, Alluvial
Wino & Conny Ochs, Latitudes
Wovenhand, Refractory Obdurate

Of those, it turns out the Black Rainbows was a double. I suspected as much, but I spotted it at the front of the clearance section and it was a dollar, so I figured even if I had it, another wouldn’t hurt. Getting stuff like the Acid King and Monolord was nigh on mandatory, the former because it’s San Francisco and that album is incredible and the latter because it’s a RidingEasy Records release and while I’m pretty sure that label is headquartered south of here, you don’t find that stuff every day on the Eastern Seaboard.

Conversely, I was looking for a bunch of stuff from Tee Pee — Mirror Queen, The Atomic Bitchwax, Death Alley — that was seemingly nowhere to be found, and I wondered if geographic distance between myself and the NY-based label didn’t have something to do with it. The rule is you take what you can get, and I was happy to do that. The Horsehunter was also absurdly cheap, I’m not really sure why. Between that and the Black Rainbows, it was much easier to justify paying upwards of $14 for new discs and $20 for the Labour of Love Latitudes session from Wino & Conny Ochs. I was on the phone griping to The Patient Mrs. as I walked around the store that somehow even though compact discs are “out of fashion” prices haven’t come down on them and she reminded me to think of it as a premium for being in a place so awesome. She was, of course, 100 percent right. Issue resolved.

Parliament‘s Motor Booty Affair to feed my continued funk addiction, and Stoneburner mostly because it was there, it’s Neurot and I don’t already have it. The Swans is the three-disc special edition of last year’s To be Kind (review here) that also comes with a live DVD as a bonus. Can’t imagine I’ll ever watch the thing, but it’s nice to have. Speaking of stuff I won’t actually put on, I know for a fact I haven’t listened to the Electric Wizard since I reviewed it (the promo was digital), but I heard something about them having a spat with Spinefarm over money or some such and that the album was subsequently out of print, so I figured better now than five years from now on eBay or Amazon. It will likely stay wrapped, but at least it’ll be in the library.

It’s been six years and I still recall enjoying Tekhton‘s first album, Summon the Core (review here), so to find a copy of the 2009 follow-up to that 2007 debut was cool enough to drive me toward the purchase, and Wovenhand are Wovenhand, which is all the justification that one needs. Speaking of bands who played Roadburn this year, as Wovenhand did, I nabbed 2013’s More Constant than the Gods by SubRosa mostly because I missed them at that festival and they’ve continued to haunt me ever since. I’m not sure if playing the record or having paid for it — like a church bribe — will exorcise that demon, but it seemed worth a shot. I’m sure I’ll let you know how it goes.

Tomorrow is more work stuff, starting bright and early and ending less-bright and late. I may or may not make it to Aquarius Records, as had been my hope, but if this turns out to be all the shopping I get to do on this trip, I can’t really complain. And of course, if you’re in SF, get your ass to Amoeba Music.

SubRosa, More Constant than the Gods (2013)

Amoeba Music

Amoeba San Francisco on Thee Facebooks

Okay, so I never called it “The Cali-Frag” before. If I’d thought about it, I would have, so that makes this part three. End of explanation.

It is currently 1:16AM local time, which makes it 4:16AM back east. My plan is essentially to keep myself awake until I have to get on the plane back to Newark, then to conk out. I don’t know whether it will work. The Patient Mrs. and I have acquired a room at the Super 8 for the next several hours, so here I am. How this is all going to pan out, I don’t know, but at least I’ll get to shower before tomorrow night.

Today was a long day. Aside from driving back from Napa (a valley to humble my own) to return a rental car, catching the BART to the airport to pick up another so we’d have a place to stow our stuff, going to the park, seeing the ocean and catching the Snail/Flood show at Kimo’s, I also revisited Aquarius Records, Shaxul Records and Amoeba Music San Francisco today. As far as days go, it was long enough.

Purely on a record-rundown level, I wanted to pick up some stuff that I had seen but not grabbed already. Bong‘s triple-CD Novum Castellum at Aquarius was especially on my mind, given its limited run. While there, I also grabbed Exit 13‘s 1995 full-length, …Just a Few More Hits, from the used bin, just for the hell of it. I was in and out, but didn’t at all regret stopping. Gotta get it in while I can.

It should be noted that, on the way to Napa Valley yesterday, for an afternoon of tasting and spending entirely too much money on wine (everywhere except the Robert Sinskey vineyard, where the guy was such an unreasonably, unwarranted rude asshole I didn’t even bother to tip him — which, if you’ve ever seen me in a tipping situation, you know means something), I stopped in at the Vallejo store of Rasputin Music and grabbed Daredevil by Fu Manchu. It was the 2003 Cube Farm reissue, but I wanted to get something from the store, and it was $14.99, where everywhere else I’d seen it, it had been at least a dollar more. Record rules anyway, so no regrets.

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Just how hip is San Francisco‘s Aquarius Records? Well, I knew going into it yesterday that it was gonna be some hip shit, but if you’d like a real-life example, Aquarius Records is so hip that, in the metal section, there is a section devoted to one-man black metal act Leviathan and not one for Black Sabbath. To be fair, there may have been a Sabbath section under the “Rock” heading, but I didn’t see one. Doesn’t mean it’s not there.

In any case, damn that’s hip.

Being a fan of Aquarius‘ regularly-updated website reviews but never having seen the inside of the store before (unlike either of the two Amoeba Musics around here), I didn’t know what was coming in terms of size. It’s a mid-size store, more on the side of organized than not, with a really good selection of stuff you won’t see everywhere else. Hip is a specialty, but it’s not like it was all girl jeans and swoopy hair in there either. I found some killer discs in a decent environment for doing so. It wasn’t as dream-fulfilling as Amoeba San Francisco was, but it was also roughly one-fifth the size, so I’m not about to complain.

Here’s the full report:

Bong, Gilgamesh Lives
Lord Vicar, Fear No Pain
Planet Gemini, SuperGod DevilMan
Primordial, Spirit the Earth Aflame
Thumlock, Emerald Liquid Odyssey
Unearthly Trance, In the Red
Various Artists, Listen Without Distraction: A Tribute to Kyuss
Yearning, Frore Meadow

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For anyone who’s never been to Amoeba Music in San Francisco, please just take my word for it when I say there’s a reason that, after flying out of Newark at 7AM local time and landing on the West Coast at 10:30, I wanted to go there before even checking into the hotel, before showering, changing my clothes or any of it. Six hours on a plane — get me some shwarma and get me to Amoeba. So it went.

If Heaven is an ideal locale and God is a mythical being reigning over that ideal locale, Amoeba Music is both God and Heaven at the same time. I had to draw up a wishlist before I got there, because I knew that once I walked in, I’d be like a hyperstimulated three year old and forget everything I’d wanted to buy. I had a few necessities. For example, I’d have felt like a failure if I didn’t find something on Man’s Ruin. I wanted something specifically Californian, and I wanted something rare.

For the first, I was pleased to find Drunk Horse‘s Tanning Salon/Biblical Proportions, for the second, Citay‘s Dream Get Together (reviewed here) and for the third, the Sheavy/Church of Misery split on Game Two Records. Because it was there and I could, I also grabbed Boris‘ Smile (Live at Wolf Creek) in the grey die-cut foam case, and just because it has Los Natas covering “Paranoid,” the Black Sabbath tribute, Sabbath Crosses, which is all South American bands.

Not all of that was on my list — Drunk Horse specifically was — and I didn’t get to pick up either of the first two Fu Manchu albums or any Kyuss promos or either of the first two Desert Sessions releases, but there’s always Amoeba in Berkeley to give it another go, and for my first day here (which also included a brief stop at Shaxul Records right across the street), I did pretty well. Here’s a full rundown of the haul:

Blind Guardian, Tokyo Tales
Boris, Smile (Live at Wolf Creek)
Burst, Prey on Life
Citay, Dream Get Together
Drunk Horse, Tanning Salon/Biblical Proportions
Khanate, Clean Hands Go Foul
Rainbow, Rainbow on Stage
Trouble, Live in Los Angeles
Various Artists, Church of Misery/Sheavy, Born too Late
Various Artists, Sabbath Crosses: Tributo a Black Sabbath
The Wizar’d, Follow the Wizard

More to come…