Andrew Earles

Didn’t see a lot of you self-proclaimed “vinyl experts” out there in the trenches today…aka April 27th Record Store Day 2011: Part II!!! All of my local stores were participating! I practically had the entire town to myself; each store was fairly quiet but that’s the privilage enjoyed by The Record Czar, which is a new persona for which you can thank me now or thank me later. Just what ’til I knock your dicks off (wow, what little family I have……pretty sure they read this thing) with some of my April 27th Record Store Day 2011: Part II finds! Coming soon (as in….tonight).

This is one of the best things I’ve ever written. A much-edited version appeared in The Overrated Book, but this quite superior ”breathing room” edit ran in one of the latter issues of Chunklet.

Pack your lunch.

Where to start? Who knows? I do know where not to end. That makes sense, it really does, and it’s important…to me, which is all that matters right now. FACE! Ok, let’s do this thing…

"Stop sneaking in here and cluttering up our store with your breakfast table, personal copies of your book, and bootleg event sign!!! BANNED FOR LIFE!!!

Bullet Point Number One

A big thanks to the 20 or more people that showed up to my book signing and Q&A at Davis-Kidd Booksellers last Saturday afternoon. You people actually sat there for two hours and listened to me talk about a lot of potentially alienating nonsense…all the less alienating when I’m answering your potentially alienating questions. Don’t blame me for the sausage party! No really, I love nothing more than to stretch the boundaries of what is commonly understood as “thorough” or “longwinded” on behalf of my first book, Husker Du: The Story of the Noise Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock, which is currently # 77,447 in book sales on Amazon.dot.com. Do something about that. Please. Please order the book. Here’s an incentive:

Bullet Point Number Two

My book is now in its second printing, having sold, (“cough”) shipped over 8,500 copies. The second printing is a cautious 1,500 copies, but it’s an important batch, as a serious headache’s worth of mistakes were corrected, rough edges softened, and embarrassments pushed farther back where they belongs: The past. While we’re on the subject of embarrassments…

Bullet Point Number Three

Hey! I’m writing this post like I wrote my book….with very little respect for chronological sense. I mean, it’s a lot harder to detect such an approach when you read the book, but I know how I wrote the damn thing, so don’t get wise…I’m god at andrewearles.com! Anyway, back before Davis Kidd graciously hosted me, before I was interviewed on our CBS affiliate’s local celebrity profile show (more on that whenever I get to it), I ”moderated” a “panel” at this year’s SXSW Music/Film conference. The information communicated in that sentence is perhaps the loosest interpretation of an actual event since the last time Weasel Walter used the term “metal” to describe a personal endeavor. So I’ve got a five minute lead on the world record for loosest interpretation. Can this day get any better?

So I roll up into Austin Teehouse after driving a ten hour, night-into-morning-into-getting-momentarily-lost-in-Dallas-into-late-morning stretch from Memphis, TN. I get my ass registered (“We already have a picture in the system”….from 2007….fine by me), forget my booty-bag then end up with what the small Asian cool-breeze behind the Peanuts-style Doctor Is In counter told me was, “the second to last music bag!” When I said I’d cut him in halfsies and have it up on eBay by one in the afternoon,  his response showed me what happens when one’s brain gets a good raping by god-awful music-biz culture and instruction: “Please don’t do that…” I fully expected his female co-worker to at least issue a playful slap-to-the-shoulder followed by “He’s joking around…” but instead I was awarded a stink-eyed stare normally reserved for someone wearing a ”The quickest way to a woman’s heart is straight through the f**king ribcage” t-shirt to a Food-Not-Bombs potluck. Well, it’s true! Oh, and so is that story, which represents no more than the proverbial tip of the ice-tray, people! [A side-note: I do not, nor have I ever, advocated violence against ribcages...regardless of owner]

It looks like I'm in prison...enjoying my only source of sunlight