There are bargains to be had on eBay. I picked up a VG++ copy of Bernie Green's Futura for $2.99 plus postage last week. The seller had not mentioned that it was a Stereo Action release and the photograph he used was of the inner sleeve, so I was a bit doubtful of what I was actually getting - but at $2.99 it wouldn't have mattered if it had been a reissue or missing the outer sleeve. But it was the real thing. I've seen similar copies listed at $50 dollars. Not the sort of deal that I can retire early on, but a nice surprise.

And the record is even better than I imagined. I've mentioned Futura before and got the concept slightly wrong. It was Green's imagining, in 1960, of how music would sound in 1970. He was a little optimistic - I don't seem to remember hearing many electric vibraphone quartets in the early 70s or songs like "I Love Paris" arranged for seven electric guitars and "animated tape," a sort of magnet tape and scalpel version of the melotron requiring over 700 splices for the trumpet part on a two minute track, didn't catch on. Green was somewhere between Raymond Scott and Esquivel, adding electronics to unusual arrangements, using stereo panning as part of the rhythm as well as for effect. Most of his ideas were so unusual for the time they had to be packaged as "comedy" records, but Futura was his serious album, without having to hide behind funny titles or mad artwork. I think it was also his last album, which suggests even RCA's Stereo Action division wasn't ready for innovations like the "tonalizer".

I also caught the fleshy part of my thumb in a rat trap on Saturday afternoon, which wasn't half as much fun.