Bob Bell's Confessions of a Record Collector

I was laid off from Island Records in May of 1966. The company was undergoing a period of low sales – ska was slowing down, and rock steady had yet to kick in and so my dream job came to an end. I was 19 years old and broke.  

I was living on a crummy bed-sit in Acol Road in West Hampstead. I had to get to the dole office, several miles away in Marylebone, to sign on for unemployment. I had all of sixpence to my name. These were pre-decimal days in Britain. Those six pennies were less than half of what six pennies would be worth a few years later, in 1971, when the currency was changed. In 1966 they weren’t worth much anyway. Might have bought a cup of tea perhaps. Probably would have bought the bus fare to the dole office, but wouldn’t have been enough for a return. So in the spirit of austerity, I set off on foot, with the sixpence safe at home. Didn’t want to spend it on some frippery. It was late in the day, but I figured that if I walked briskly, I would make it before the office closed at 4 pm. I had procrastinated going for several days …. meetings with bureaucracy were not relished. Nevertheless, if I didn’t make it that day, my unemployment money would be delayed another week. The sixpence would most certainly not last that long.

By two-thirty I was making good headway and was probably no more than a mile from my destination. I passed a cluster of small stores, including a junk store. I had discovered the unlimited possibilities of junk stores while still in school when as 14-year-olds, a friend and I would check them out in our home town of Winchester, and also cycle the dozen or so miles to Southampton, and explore the emporiums of the St Mary’s district. That area was especially good, as it was close to Southampton docks - sailors who plied the Atlantic routes to the USA would trade their recently bought 45’s for drink money – and thus a fine source of American R & B and Rock n Roll, on strange and exotic labels such as Specialty, King and Aladdin.

So it became kind of inbred that a junk store spotted was a junk store to be explored. I went in. The usual array of bric-a-brac, old prams, lights, kettles, clothing, all bathed in the usual junk store aroma, a sort of old cabbage, body odour and stale beer smell.

Sitting on the treadle of an old cast iron sewing machine was a box of 78’s. Vera Lynn, Billy Cotton, Ken MacIntosh, old Deccas and Columbias, a smattering of Phillips with Frankie Vaughan and Guy Mitchell, and there, an oasis in a desert of mediocrity, a London American by Smiley Lewis. ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’ / ‘No, No’ with the catalogue number HLP 8367. London was the UK’s best label in the ’50s. Owned by Decca Records, it licensed and released masters from myriad small US independents. Specialty, Chess, Herald, Ember, Savoy, Sun, Imperial …. practically every US indie saw a UK release at some time or another on London.

And there was old Smiley, grinning at me through the dust. I reached down and grabbed him. Examined it. A half-inch chunk was missing from the edge. The rest seemed OK though. Bit scratched, but looked pretty clean. I had been listening to 78s since 1954, when I was introduced, at age 8, to Bill Haley’s ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’. Until 1959, when my father bought a record deck with 33 and 45 speeds, 78s had been all I had bought, and although most of my peers were heavily into 45’s by then, the 78 mystique had taken hold and I always looked for them when junking.

So here was Smiley, in my hand. I asked how much he was. 

‘Sixpence’, was the reply.

I considered the situation. Sixpence was my entire financial holding at that moment. Moreover, it was safely and securely stashed in my little room, at least three miles away. 

Paranoia is never far from a record collector. Until that moment, Smiley Lewis had not entered my mind. Indeed, it is quite possible he had not entered my mind for weeks, if not months. But now things were different. A Smiley Lewis 78, in middling condition, lay right here in this store. Who knew what collectors were prowling, right this instant, just yards away? My god, a Smiley Lewis on London American! Right here, right now! The fact that the sixpence lay in one direction, and the dole office in the other was of no consequence anymore. So I would not get any dole money for over another week. So I’d have to go all the way back to Acol Road to get my sixpence. So I would spend my last sixpence on a broken 78. 

So what?

There are times when circumstances trump logic, times when the irrational makes a lot more sense than the purely rational. 

Learning that the store closed at 4.30pm, I asked the proprietor to please save the record for me, and I would be back to pay for it before he closed. 

I ran all the way back to the bedsit, grabbed the sixpence, and ran all the way back, walking in the door at 4.25pm.

It was mine. 

Just what I did for food that week, or for rent, or for anything, I can’t remember. But I survived. And I still have the Smiley Lewis record. 

Some years later I bought a reissue LP with ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’ and ‘No, No’ on, and finally got to hear the intros.