I took the opportunity a few weeks back, during Discogs' select retailer sale, to snag a cheap copy of this from the good folks at Academy Records, a joint I've tried to visit every time I've gone to NYC in the past twenty years, and a semi-regular haunt when I'm looking to fill in gaps of my Impulse! collection and what not. They're a helluva good spot to find those random records I wanted a quarter century ago,
So it was, in addition to a Benny Carter CD I'd never owned and a pair of Lungfish records I sold off a number of years ago, that I ordered this, one of the earliest looks at the 3rd wave of ska. I'd never been able to lay hands on a copy when I was living that life back in the 90s, but, for nostalgia's sake, I couldn't pass this up. This is all mainstays of that era; the Toasters, Bad Manners, Mr. Review, Skaos, Potato 5, and Bim Skala Bim. I was a bit taken aback from the number of names I didn't recognize. I knew Les Saxas, but didn't know they appeared here under their old name "Saxawhaman", I knew nothing about the Donkey Show, who had a terrible name but a secret weapon in future Slacker/Hepcat Dave Hillyard. The Deltones, Kortatu, Spy Eye, Blue Chateau: it's pretty cool to discover these bands 35 years in the past, coming just a few years after 2-Tone petered out. There's five volumes in this series, and I'm sorely tempted to track them all down, $5 at a time.
I initially planned to post this last week, in honor of Skanksgiving. I'll see myself out.
