Snake America Eighty Nine
Snake is a weekly electric mailer covering vintage on eBay. Leg Day Observer is the Leg Sports Paper of Leg Record. This week: Subscribe
eBay: Some idiot's signed Dreamcast that will never sell for $700: This idiot tried to sell his Fred Durst-signed Sega Dreamcast for $700 over and over. No one bought it or is buying it or will ever buy it ... he has been re-listing it since January. eBay texts me in the middle of the night saying the Durst Dreamcast is for sale again and that I have another chance to win it. Like I'd buy anything for $700 ... Fred Durst sang for Limp Bizkit, during which time he had an earring and dressed poorly. His music is revered? -- OK. The Dreamcast was Sony's short-fated answer to the Sega CD, which was also pretty good. Actually it was a way to get after the Nintendo Gamecube, which my dentist had in his waiting room before being sent to jail for tax evasion. The Dreamcast was an aesthetic triumph ... their logo was on Arsenal jerseys, they invented Power Stone (which is like Super Smash Brothers except friendly babies), produced a cool pillow and the games are still playable. There's a good selection of Dreamcast titles at that store on 6th and like 37th, near the old Chick-Fil-A, the one that has a Pikachu outside of it.
The principals seem to be getting remembered in different lights. Durst's band didn't have tracks, but one of their records sold a million copies in a single weekend, and people who grew up on it are now older so the band isn't a punchline anymore ... it's not like I won't listen to them in a bar, just saying. Sega moved eight or nine million Dreamcasts over a few years, but is a failure ... not recommended.
eBay: Nike Goldenrod Dunk High NYC, sz 10 $50 not sold: I can't believe these didn't sell. Nike originally made Dunks in 1985 for competitive NCAA basketball programs -- players wore them -- and they retroed them in 1999. "Goldenrod," aka Iowa black and yellow, was produced alongside UNLV grey/red, Kentucky white/blue, etc. Goldenrods were the only ones to get extra custom batches made up. One edition had the little NYC logo on the heel and another had the Wu-Tang W. I read they only did 32 with the W. The NYC ones are the better ones since St. John's plays here and because Wu-Tang is best heard in 10th grade and not seen(1).
The Dunks didn't move during that late-90s retro and around then they hit discount shelves. By 2002 they were gone to either Japan or eBay and selling for money in both places, and by 2003 they were a thing, in magazines and so on. Nike started a division, SB, more or less based on the shoe, with many more variations than the handful of college colors and a few years later it was the company's fastest-growing category. (IDK what the leader is now.) 15 years later, this poor SOB can't sell these Goldenrods for cheap. The Dunk was run so incredibly hard into the ground 15 years ago, though. Maybe it's still not time yet -- no one is touching them.
eBay: Naomi Petersen's Three shirt, sold $170: Naomi Petersen was a ... key person at a key time, when Black Flag was doing its thing in LA in the early, mid 1980s, She took photogaphs of the band and others then and was a photographer for longer than that. She took a lot of photos of Flag, Meat Puppets, GNR, St. Vitus, Nirvana, and people who went to shows. She took the photo of the band in the Dunkin' Donuts holding their coffee in the air:
and the photo where they are in a field of lillies where Henry is holding a peony or something:
also the photo where Henry and Ian are dressed like Urkel:
It was her, Glen E. Friedman and Ed Colver doing most of the shooting, but neither of those guys shot anything as good as the Urkel photo. By the mid-80s she was really the one doing LA stuff -- Friedman was shooting rap and IDK what Colver was doing, probably something awesome. She moved to DC and kept taking photos ... she passed away at 38 in 2003, from drink. Someone connected to her brother is selling her old shirts one by one. I emailed the seller to see whether it's her brother and am waiting to hear back. One of her friends sold her first round of shirts a couple years ago to fund her photo archive, which doesn't appear to exist.
Three is a band who played out of DC in the mid-80s and had Jeff Nelson on drums. They were pretty good. Nelson, who was in Minor Threat, moved to Columbus like 10 years ago and sold all his stuff too, he had the abovementioned design but as a crewneck sweatshirt and eith a cheap Buy It Now. It's amazing. I got outbid on her Bl'ast shirt, Manic Ride era ... the completed items from the recent sales are amazing ... there's a Bolshoi Ballet sweatshirt, Boomtown Rats, a joke Relapse shirt (from the '90s), Saccharine Trust tee I've never seen, some St. Vitus tour stuff, Holy Rollers, OG Egg Hunt, Dinosaur (pre-Jr.), Entombed off the Wolverine Blues tour, LA Guns, A Naked Raygun shirt in UCLA colors, Breadwinner (which is insane?), Santa Cruz black cat fireworks ripoff, a Rat sound systems shirt(1), etc, etc.
These shirts are all second- or third-tier and span a bunch of different eras. The first-tier stuff (Black Flag tour T-shirts, early SST stuff) sold a few years back ... this was a collection of an obsessive who went to every show. Just amazing. Joe Carducci, her friend who did the auctions in 2015, wrote a memoir about her a few years back, "Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That...," which was blurbed by no less an LA authority than Mike Davis. I love the idea of Davis at a DC3 or Suicidal show. Carducci's book isn't scanned or anything but an article he wrote a few years after her death is still online in a badly-formatted version on a messageboard. It leads with Naomi and is about her life ... it's more about LA and a lot about him. I get it. The scene back then was so unreal that is has to be written down, and he does a good job about it but the writing is kind of inside and indirect. It feels like he's just dissing everything? It would be awesome if there was a big direct thing about her and her work. I may just be missing the point. ... It's a shame most of her photos were just of clowns in bands but they say she has other shit... will it see the light? Rest in peace.
eBay: Peter Max Kinney sneakers, unsold, $500: I love Max ... these are the best sneakers ever made. They sold them at The Mall. They are amazing. There's a kids' pair that's even better for sale now, they smile when you look at them:
Even the box is amazing. Fetishizing objects is ... I don't know. People need things, having and spending money is awesome, you're going to spend money, and design is cool. These aren't life-changing or anything, but every aspect here is well-considered and amazing. Like everything about it! You don't get stuff like this anymore because the only consumer goods now that are super-well considered are either iPhones, which aren't interesting, or products are only made by luxury companies. With the exception of steamer trunks, stuff made for rich people isn't cool. Who wants something you can just buy for money?
eBay: TC Electronic Booster pedal, sold for $400: I keep getting told and then not told that this was the pedal the Cro-Mags used on "Age of Quarrel," the good record from the 1980s. The guitars on that thing don't sound good but they sound right. They sound very thin. So most people don't ask about the particulars of the recording. Everyone was doing their best.
This pedal selling for $400 above is the strongest case that it was used on the album. Whoever bought it must have known. The thing is, some people say that the Cro-Mags used a different guitar pedal on AOQ, and the best argument for that is that the exact same pedal is still for sale for $300. "I know they didn't use it, so I'm spend my cash on candy." Facts.
Boost pedals boost the signal going to the amp from the guitar -- it makes shit louder but it doesn't distort it. I like the idea of someone cosplaying a pedal to make a record that sounds like garbage. My reporting tells me they used both the Booster and an original Ibanez Tube Screamer on that record. Booster for the solos, super good with old Marshalls and they were off JCM800s. When I messaged Doug Holland, the rhythm guitarist, on MySpace 10 years ago about his set-up he didn't give me any answers about pedals but that's because I didn't ask. He did buy his Gibson Les Paul new at The Mall for like $200 in 1975 -- not bad!
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Leg Day Observer 5:
Great example of Naomi Petersen's approach to taking photos of important people in Urkel clothing spreading. The guy on the left is a Russian lifter from Kaliningrad(3) who won Bronze in 2008 but I think had it stripped, and David Rigert is on the left, who is Russia's Arnold maybe? But stronger and drank more. Considered one of the best weightlifters ever, in both the two-lift and three-lift era, etc. Also coached the Russian team for a while. The best Rigert story I heard is that when he was abroad for a competition he came back to the hotel pretty late and was so drunk that he ripped the door off of its hinge. He usually held his liquor ... that night he was also pretty cold, so he used the door as a blanket, sleeping on the floor under the door. And the coach came in for practice and found him like that, also the bellhop was there and he plotzed. His exact words. I'm not sure how much of that story is true -- I like that he hangs around nerds, though.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
Last Snake: Transistor watch, Beams, Champion, NYAC, Victor Conte.
Snake before that: Pierre Cardin credenza, Longhorn squats
(1) my stance on this is that all rap music over three months old is unlistenable. About five records older than three months ago
(2) This thing, it's Ratman, the Black Flag's soundguy from the long hair-era of the band's vanity line of like soundguy shirts. What an unbelievable artifact. It's the John Jay Wrestling shirt of Black Flag. I can't believe this only sold for like $30. This is like a zipper from one of the jackets in the Wonderwall video. It might be in the Flag documentary Reality 86'd, but I don't see it.
(3) Like Lesotho it's totally within another country (Ukraine), but it't not an enclave since it's Russia.