Lost and (not) Found?

Rudy

¡Que siga la fiesta!
Staff member
Site Admin
I've moved a few times over the past 15 or so years, and certain things have still eluded me after all this time.

For instance, I just expanded my LP storage in the family room, and took some time today to go digging through my boxes of LPs. I found the J&K Betwixt & Between album I was looking for, so I will now have the entire A&M CTi collection up here. I found a handful of others that need cleaning, which I will add into the upstairs storage.

But the one item I can't find are two pressings of Paul Desmond's From the Hot Afternoon. I have a lot of good memories of that one, and I bought the AM+ half-speed version when it first came out. I also had my mother's original late 60s copy. Yet I can't find either copy anywhere! I went through all the LP boxes and had no luck. I have a feeling I could have missed a box somewhere, but...where? All the rest are together in one area. I have a few piles of LPs I need to sell off, but they're not in those piles either.

I even looked through all the Laserdisc boxes in storage. And that brings up another dilemma--I must have over 100 Laserdisc titles, more likely closer to 150, and have no reason to play most of them ever again.

I know I was "missing" a few CDs but those are probably scattered in a few boxes of titles I have no interest in keeping.

So that's today's tale of Lost and Found.

Do you have any to share? (Or better yet, do you have my two Paul Desmond LPs??) Let us know below!
 
While I do have a copy of FROM THE HOT AFTERNOON, it's on CD, so that's surely not yours!

I'm currently searching for a missing CD that I know I have. It's ripped to my computer, so I know I have it around here somewhere. This one is a Netherland CD compilation of tracks from Rupert Holmes, called ESCAPE. It's comprised of tracks from just two of his MCA albums, PARTNERS IN CRIME and ADVENTURE. I bought the CD when I couldn't find a good digital copy of PARTNERS IN CRIME nor any digital copy of ADVENTURE, and I used clean vinyl to assemble the full albums that included the missing tracks from the comp.

The space is there on my CD shelf, and I've looked at the rows above and below, but so far I can't find it.

This reminds me of another CD that went missing a few years ago. It was Herb's CD maxi-single of "North On South Street" with seven different mixes. Again, I had the thing ripped to my computer, yet it went missing from my CD shelf. After a long time, I found it. As a thin card sleeve, it had fallen to flat on the bottom of the shelf where it belonged, and the jewel-case CDs were sitting on top of it.

That can't be the case with ESCAPE, since it came in a jewel case. All of the tracks are accounted for, as ADVENTURE was recently released on another Japanese CD, and I still have the crappy MCA CD of PARTNERS IN CRIME, plus the ripped versions of all but one track from ESCAPE. And I still have a very clean LP.

I've got a bunch of LaserDiscs too and now no player to play them on, they've all broken, so I don't know what to do there. There are probably a handful of movies that I'd care about, but most of the really good ones have been upgraded to at least DVD if not Blu.
 
I had a couple of CDs fall behind my CD racks when I went to empty them out. Long-forgotten, they'd fallen at one point and I never remembered to retrieve them. Then after several years had passed..."OH YEAH, I remember that one!!" 😁

I found more LPs in my stash earlier--I had considered getting the John Klemmer Nexus for Duo and Trio set, but I found that I had a copy. I also found the two copies of Klemmer's Finesse. For that one, I checked back upstairs as I thought I had two more copies of it! Nope. And I remember that Finesse was one of those I bought a long time ago where I'd forgotten I had already bought it.

That's one of my problems right there. I'm forgetting what I own. Having something stored away doesn't help matters since I can't lug around all the storage boxes every time I want to locate something.

I found a small stack of a couple dozen LPs just a half hour ago--turns out Pete Jolly's Seasons was in that stack, another one I had wanted to retrieve.

Something else I found were numerous copies of various TJB and BMB albums that I didn't even remember buying--I always tended to buy something, then attempt to replace it if the condition was not too good. So for those, I probably went through many trying to buy good copies, always swapping out so the best copy was in the shelves. On top of that were the original copies we owned through the years. No clue what to do with the extras now.

I have tons of Sinatra. My mother's aunt gave my dad all of the Sinatra records, and now I'm stuck with them! The Columbias, Capitols and the earlier Reprise records are in mono, and many are worn out. They upgraded to a better turntable in the late 60s and those records were always in a little better condition. Anything prior was played on that old VM Triomatic record player. Any Sinatra I like, I own on SACD or CD, or hi-res downloads. The only LP in my "good" collection is Sinatra/Jobim, the remaster by Kevin Gray from a decade or so ago.

And that reminds me, too...I didn't see my copy of the Electric Company LP. I must have another box of records somewhere around here....
 
I have discovered a surefire way of finding that missing Paul Desmond LP. I just ordered another one today. It has a cutout notch in it, but it is still sealed, and the price was reasonable ($16.00). This was for the Audio Master Plus version. The original pressing sounds stuffy in comparison.

So naturally, once I get more into my downsizing project, I'll come across the album in a box that strayed from the rest of them...
 
Last edited:
The replacement Hot Afternoon arrived about an hour ago, and it got its cleaning, new "rice paper" sleeve and a first spin. I forgot what a good sounding record this was, even better than I remember it, and certain sounds more spacious than the CD version.

Oddly the plastic outer sleeve did not have the AM+ hype sticker, but it has the AM+ badge diagonally across the upper right corner, which my copy did not. Inside was the genuine article, still sealed of course. The only flaw was a cut-out notch on top, but that's not a big deal.

I realized another record or two was missing....so my money is still on there being a box of records I haven't accounted for yet.
 
My CD shelf contains three A&M/CTi Paul Desmond albums.

- FROM THE HOT AFTERNOON - this is the Verve reissue from 2000. It sounds OK to me, for all the times I listen to it.
- BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER - not strictly a CTi, this is a digipak from 2008, Verve/Universal/A&M

and then there's the puzzler:

- SUMMERTIME - it appears to be a homemade CD-R, but I can't locate an LP of this title. Misfiled? Sounds like a typically mid-rangey Van Gelder record.

Lost?
 
I have a feeling both of our Paul Desmond records are hiding in the same place, mocking us... 😁

The only CDs I had of the three titles were of Hot Afternoon--the CTi Digipak version, purchased used, and a promo of a Verve-series reissue that had way too many bonus tracks of alternate takes. I have a digital version of Summertime from who knows where (traded, CD-R, download...I can't remember).

I have (or had) all three of my mother's copies of these three LPs (which is why I'd grown attached to them over the years--she played them often), but I found a used Summertime in the AM+ series a while ago. The AM+ series sounds slightly less muddy overall than the original A&M issues, although I've found in recent months that turning any of these CTI titles (both A&M and beyond) up a bit tends to help pull the sound out of the muck. I'm spinning the AM+ Milton Nascimento Courage at the moment, and gave the J&K Betwixt a play earlier. Nascimento's sounds especially clear, better than I remember it.
 
After our move to Texas I noted that several -- most actually -- of my boxed sets have yet to be found...

These include both the Rhino and Hip-O Bacharach sets, Bowie's Sound and Vision from RykoDisc, The Cramps Smell of Female 7" Boc, Joe Jackson's I'm the Man 7" Box, Rocky Horror box, Disney Music Box pretty much all my 10" albums and a few others that escape my memory at the moment

I'm assuming I put them in one box together as I boxed the music collection. There are a few random boxes from the bar and for my office that I have yet to open. Furnishing this big house has taken longer than I expected (something that annoys me greatly) as unexpected expenses have popped up more regularly than I had hoped, cutting into the furniture budget...

--Mr Bill
 
The space is there on my CD shelf, and I've looked at the rows above and below, but so far I can't find it.

Well I've always found that the quickest way to find something that's been lost is to buy a new one. The longer you have to search to find the new one, the faster the old one will turn up after the new one arrives.
 
Well I've always found that the quickest way to find something that's been lost is to buy a new one. The longer you have to search to find the new one, the faster the old one will turn up after the new one arrives.
That will happen with the Paul Demond I just replaced...that one elusive missing box will show up, separate from all the others, and it'll be there with them. Interesting that both copies I had are gone, though--I never had my mother's copy in my general collection, so why they would be together in the same box is 🤷‍♂️...
 
I'm currently searching for a missing CD that I know I have. It's ripped to my computer, so I know I have it around here somewhere. This one is a Netherland CD compilation of tracks from Rupert Holmes, called ESCAPE. It's comprised of tracks from just two of his MCA albums, PARTNERS IN CRIME and ADVENTURE. I bought the CD when I couldn't find a good digital copy of PARTNERS IN CRIME nor any digital copy of ADVENTURE, and I used clean vinyl to assemble the full albums that included the missing tracks from the comp.

The space is there on my CD shelf, and I've looked at the rows above and below, but so far I can't find it.
Three months later, and I found it! Somehow, both the compilation and an old MCA copy of PARTNERS IN CRIME found their way to the nearly endless string of Sergio Mendes compilations.
 
When I boxed up all the CDs for storage, I found a few that had fallen behind the rack. Must not have been that important since I didn't miss them. 😁
 
The lost Paul Desmond LP still has yet to turn up. 🤣 So my theory of "buy a replacement, so the original reappears sooner" failed me this time around.

Working on a few projects over the past several months, I've noticed some CDs are missing. Some are purchased CDs, and a few others were CD-Rs either sent to me by others, or CD-Rs I had made myself.

With a downsizing in progress this year, I'll be going through every box in the basement, sorting it into storage bins I'll keep, piles of more valuable things I can sell off, others we'll give away or donate, and the rest will be disposed of. So I'm sure I'll come across at least some of the items I'm still missing.
 
Recently I noted Gary McFarland's SOFT SAMBA in the CD rack. I thought I had two copies. I recall having one copy and ordering an SHM-CD from Japan because the one I had was rather gritty sounding, but there was just the SHM disc in the CD racks. Now I'm thinking that I'd made a homemade CD-R from some online files, so there was no second genuine CD.

So this was a never-lost, and never-found.
 
Back
Top Bottom