Hi, it's me from moneyblows books & music. As life catches up with original creation, we find that that the term "money blows" is being used by various innocent bloggers and other internet denizens. Many people do not realize that the term "money blows" was coined and copyrighted by none other than myself. I am not opposed to granting permission for "fair use" of this term, although I certainly did not create the economic conditions which make it so apt. I do recall, when discussing my creation of this term with someone on a bus in Chicago in the late 1990s, they asked me if it related to some kind of prosperity philosophy. Isn't that ironic, as they might say on NPR. Or, if it were proposed as a question, which many NPR interviews use to frame their comments, I might respond, "absolutely." I do "absolutely" own the term "money blows" or "moneyblows", whether expressed in one word or two words, and anyone reading this or not reading this needs to ask my permission for its use.
It really doesn't matter how you are using it. I am currently using it for my collectibles business, for moneyblows books and music. It is completely appropriate because the value of collectibles is as elastic as the value of money. But even if you are using the term to relate to money, you still need my permission to use the term "money blows" or "moneyblows" or anything like it. My attorney tells me to contact him if ever I have any problems with people thinking they can use this expression, but I told him, hey, I'll give permission if folks only ask. So, let me know if you have any questions. I should mention, some variations on the expression, I do not own. I do not own "honey blows", for example. Or "money knows," which you should use with abandon. Or "money flows," as google suggests without any particular justification. Think for yourself, and use any expression you want, but in any language, ask me before you use "money blows" or moneyblows". Thanks.

Shop.moneyblows.com

We have been gradually rebuilding our storefront where you can shop conveniently with us at shop.moneyblows.com
A quick run-through of the categories we've currently populated on the site:
10-in. vinyl records includes just a few items, never has been a big category for us. But, I should note a few very special items in this category: a Jazz at the Philharmonic Vol. 3 which is rare by any standard, featuring Al Killian, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. And, something from the 1960s, published by Scholastic under the direction of the National Gallery of Art: Music of the Shakers. It's got some pretty incredible songs and performances on it.
The next category is called 12-in. singles. Also a small category consisting of mostly dance singles.
The next category is 45 rpm vinyl records. These are the "big hole" singles, and we have quite a few in all musical styles. To find the single you're looking for, best to use the Advanced Search and enter the artist or title.
We also have 78 rpm vinyl records for advanced record collectors who like to dig deep into vinyl history. There's some great blues, jazz, and r&b here, a smattering of pop and country, and it's also best to use the Advanced Search and enter the artist or title.
Our biggest music category by far is LP vinyl records, with thousands of rare and collectible albums, and also some copies of albums that are very popular, including rock from the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s. This is the "bread and butter" category that put the "music" in our store title. An interesting piece of trivia, is that we were the first dealer to offer vinyl records on amazon.com. You can imagine that before amazon starting offering their site to anyone with a few records to sell, we pretty much owned the category of vinyl records in the early amazon "zShops." (zShops was the "z" in amazon's "everything from a to z.") Likewise, before we pioneered the category of records on amazon, we were a books-only ecommerce outfit.
Other categories: we have some audio CDs & tapes. Once again, a very small category, but with some very distinctive and hard to find jazz and classical items. We were also a pioneer in offering record replacement needles online, and you may find this category very helpful, for we have needles and cartridges not only for many vintage players, but also to replace the needles found on some inexpensive common turntables sold today at places such as Radio Shack and online from Audio Technica. Under the growing category of music history we currently have some rare copies of The Clarinet magazine, and Etude Magazine, both of which are music teacher type specialty publications. We have many more publications to add to this category, so keep an eye out if you are interested in music-related publications. Another popular category is vintage sheet music, not just for collectors but also for musicians who seek the rare verses to important tin pan alley tunes, or original arrangements or chords. Finally, we are building back our books and magazines category, starting out with the very popular Architectural Digest periodicals that have become such big sellers for us.
So, that's a rundown of the current categories, and watch shop.moneyblows.com for more every day!

Autumn day in 2008, books & music going strong!

In the previous post, we gave links to URLs where moneyblows books and music can still be found. I'd also like to announce that the shopping cart is being rebuilt and you can find it (in its current state) at http://shop.moneyblows.com/
It's been quite a ride as we tried to work with our hosting company of 10+ years to restore our previous storefront. To any of you with shopping cart programs, you already realize how difficult it is to back them up, as so many of the pages seem to be controlled by scripts. So our elegant and content-filled storefront was essentially lost to the ages while the tech support people at our hosting company stalled the inevitable demise by making empty promises, leading us to think we might be restored.
In all of our dealings, we take a long-term approach, and we suffer fools gladly. It doesn't help business, though. Nor have other occurrences in the wider world. It's a good time to remind our readers that collecting books and records is not only enjoyable but lucrative. As Warren Buffett recently pointed out, the value of the dollar in the near term is a big question mark. As demand for things like oil goes down, prices have gone down. At the same time, the socialization of banks will play out in the rescuing of real estate developers with their questionable assets. This will probably prolong the recession rather than hasten its demise. We're not economic experts, but I can report that the value of our own collectibles is only increasing, not decreasing. Another virtue of the "long-term" approach is, there's little desperation unless you feel it in sympathy with your fellow man.
If you enjoy our posts, read some of the past ones and you'll learn a lot about why moneyblows books & music can help you find what you are looking for.

Books and Music on the internet

Today marks a new generation for moneyblows books & music. We are hibernating the moneyblows.com address for awhile, ditching the virtual "storefront" in favor of stashing our stuff in the internet bazaar. The web storefront has become a standard feature of e-commerce, helping us grow our world market. There's a special place in our hearts for the aggregators who host premium services such as moneyblows books & music. We trundle around in America past, giving new life to old flea market treasures. We have been at this for ten plus years now, so we have learned a lot about stopping the advance of old age in collectible books, magazines, and records. We anticipate what someone might want and maybe we have it when they come looking. The internet is great for that.
So, here are links to some of the places you can still find moneyblows books & music, while our legacy address of moneyblows.com is being re-purposed.
http://moneyblows.gemm.com/
http://moneyblows.musicstack.com/
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BooksBrowse?vendorclientid=28647&page=CLIENT
http://www.amazon.com/seller/workbook
http://base.google.com/base/search?authorid=1044995
http://www.moneyblows.net

To our wonderful customers for record styli, we eagerly await your feedback on our new approach to self-service record stylus ordering. Please use this link to browse through pictures, and then just call us when you see the one you want! Here's the link: http://picasaweb.google.com/michael.pellecchia/Needles
And, while promoting a picasaweb album, might as well also point you to album covers we have recently posted:
http://picasaweb.google.com/michael.pellecchia/MusicLPSpecials
Let us know if you like to shop for record styli this way. Moneyblows Books & Music was the first internet only store to enable self-service stylus selection, so we have done our part to get some old turntables rolling again. Viva vinyl.

A story and a side note

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I was sitting around at my brother's record store, in the shadow of the White Mountains, listening to some blues.
"Is that Gatemouth Brown," I asked.
"You're close," said the bro.
"T-Bone Walker."
"Close. next generation. Swingmasters."
"I was gonna guess that."
"You were scared to."
"No bad notes, that's for sure."
The phone rang.
"Yes, ma'am, we'll be right over," my brother said after listening for a minute.
He locked up the shop and we hopped into my 1987 Volvo 240 wagon with the graffiti all over the headliner.
A couple miles down the road past some mountain vistas, my brother pointed, and we pulled into the driveway.
A nice lady came out and Harlan introduced her to me. She led us down the hatch way into a dank cellar.
All around, there were boxes of old vinyl records. She gave us the tour.
"There's these," she said, pointing to some dank mildewy boxes.
"Those over there." We took a peek at the frayed dust jackets of tag sale detritus. Beethoven box sets. Stereo demonstration records. Old 45s.
Squeezing through the cramped aisle of the tiny basement, a light peered from the distance.
Harlan said to the lady, "can I show him that?"
We followed her toward the light. The dank smelly boxes gave way to some tidy shelves. The shelves had records on them. Ones that didn't smell.
The doorway to a little office was creaked open. That's where the light was coming from.
"This was where he worked," she said.
Until he dropped dead of a heart attack while skiing, she went on. Her late husband was pretty close to retiring from his teaching career. This was his lair, where he sold and traded records by mail order. His great hope was to retire, and then spend full time transferring his massive record inventory to the internet for sale at collector prices.
We tiptoed into the brightly lit office. Not a hair was out of place. I looked straight ahead at the shelf opposite me, just above eye level.
I reached for a record album that was displayed up there.
"This!" I hope I didn't startle the lady.
"I used to vacuum the floor to this record!," I said, startling myself.
By way of explanation, I said, you know how loud a vacuum cleaner is. Well, I would play this record even louder than the vacuum cleaner. It changed your whole perspective on mundane household tasks. Made you feel like you were in a widescreen epic film instead of chasing dust mites on the floor.
"And...."I climaxed, opening the box to show the booklet accompanying the record, "the liner notes are by my good friend, Michael H. Price."
This was none other than the rare limited, annotated reissue of The Big Country soundtrack, by the estimable composer Jerome Moross.
You could have heard a pin drop.
My brother Harlan let out a big gasp.
"We were just listening to the Swingmasters Revue," he noted accurately.
I put the record back up on the shelf.
We all looked at each other.
"I guess we better finish this job," somebody said.

#############

Side Note: Moneyblows.com has been down for all of August and our hosting company hasn't been able to get us back up yet. We apologize for the inconvenience

Digital vs. analog for vinyl record buffs

Analog recording-- which is the source of most used vinyl sold at moneyblows books and music-- can be thought to essentially reflect the Victorian scientific imagination, in which sound is mechanically inscribed, rather than digitally encoded.

By contrast, the pitch, tone color, and loudness of a digital playback starts out as binary numbers intelligible to computer circuits. In other words, the presence or absence of an electric pulse (“1” or “0”) is detected and digitially converted in the original reproduction.

The waveform of the sound, as a human might hear it at this point, becomes a representation of the audio frequency, possibly encompassing more than half a million bits per second. For more than a quarter century now, this torrential bit stream has become audible when a digital recording is played back.

It all begins when a musical waveform is "sampled" at least 40,000 times per second. Each sample represents a point in time as the music unfolds. Then, the height of the sound wave at each of these 40,000 sampling points is numerically expressed. Together, these two factors accurately describe the sound wave so that it can be recorded as a series of numbers.

In playback, those numbers are fed into a device called a digital-to-analog converter which produces voltages corresponding to each number at precisely defined points in time. In this way, the digital signal is reconstituted as a waveform.

Once it is digitally encoded, the music’s fidelity is undisturbed—whether it’s on vinyl or CD, or played via a computer's own file or an internet stream, theoretically makes no difference.

A moment of digital silence—or an analogous very faint pianissimo, is preserved without tape or vinyl noise. An explosion of musical loudness needn’t be intentionally (though expertly) distorted for the putative convenience of the end user, or the delicate constitution of a record stylus.

In a digital recording, bass response is extended from 30 to 20 Hz to encompass the very lowest notes of the musical spectrum. Frequency deviation over the entire range from 20 to 20,000 Hz is reduced from ± 2 db to ± 0.5 db, resulting in clarification of tonal timbres and textures thanks to greater linearity in the crucial overtone range.

Dynamic range, i.e. the maximal span between loud and soft, is enlarged to 90 db, closely approximating the natural loudness range of live music. Distortion at maximum loudness shrinks from the traditional norm of 1% to an amount too small to be measured, resulting in the added clarity of loud passages. Finally, flutter and wow - those marginal wobbles of pitch that cause a sense of false vibrato in some conventional recordings - also reduced from the usual 0.050/0 to the point of unmeasurability.

A vinyl record, though, remains the manufactured product of its Victorian heritage—a representation of the musical waveform in inscribed (actually stamped) grooves. It’s necessarily imperfect compared with computer playback, and presents the listener with a Hobson’s choice of whether one should listen with digital ears or analog ears.

Ears are the definitive equipment for listening. The ultimate choice of digital or analog, I think, is cryptically (though oddly appropriately) laid out in the movie “Pulp Fiction,” when (I’m paraphrasing here) Uma Thurman asks John Travolta, “Do you spend your time listening, or waiting to talk?” Travolta hesitates for a moment and says, “I guess I spend most of my time waiting to talk…. But I’m working on listening.”

In listening there invariably is background noise, whether or not it disturbs the foreground intent. A truism of hearing loss is that the two eventually blend, so that the person suffering some auditory loss will say, “I can’t hear you,” particularly in a crowded room.
Using this standard, I don’t mind listening to the background noise in a vinyl record, until it gets so bad I might say to the music, “I can’t hear you.”

Digital techniques can fix that, too. People buy HD TVs so that can get better resolution of a lousy show. The greatest invention of modern culture, television, is about to be bumped off the analog spectrum as of February 2009. You are already being asked to give it up.

I have VHS tapes and records to play. Judge for yourself who is better equipped-- the digital only consumer, or the one the one who admits the imperfections wrought by Thomas Edison when he lit the known world.

R.I.P. Bo Diddley

Bo Diddley made page one of the New York Times, Tuesday, June 3, 2008. Both there and on page B1, times critic Ben Ratliff wrote insightfully as suggested by the page one headline, "Bo Diddley, who Gave Rock His Beat, Dies at 79." Here's what we have in our store:

1959 maroon checker single

1957 maroon checker single

La Bamba soundtrack with Bo Diddley on it

Black label Go Bo Diddley on Checker

1958 black label on Chess debut album

It was what we called the Bo Diddley Beat and it does have a sibling resemblance to the Latin clave. The beat can be found in songs from then til now. As a founding father, he was revered by many rock'n roll fans, musicians, and students of popular culture. Like Chuck Berry, he brought a different kind of rhythm/lead guitar to the fore. Here's the times obit from 6/3/08.