Hollywood Records was my favorite record store to haunt. It was cozy, located in a small strip mall and there was usually just one employee working and it was never busy so conversations were easy. They also maintained an extensive collection of promos and "returns", open records that they played in store. On this particular day, the two 12" singles above caught my eye but not with their ugly cover art: on the back of the "Too Much Blood" it said remixed by Arthur Baker while "Concealed Weapons" didn't credit a remixer it did say Extended Dance Mix and I liked the album version a lot so I bought them both. (Another cool thing about Hollywood Records was they wrote everything up by hand on invoices.) Already a weird song (serial killer, cannibalism) to begin with, "Too Much Blood" is stretched out to twice its six minute album length by Baker and on the flip side there was an eight minute crazy dub version. "Concealed Weapons" was a basic elongated version of the album track, nothing too special.
NOW:
Hollywood Records no longer exists. A small Mexican bakery occupies it's spot in the strip mall. The chain was one of two (the other was Circles), headquartered in Phoenix, under the Associated Distributors letterhead. I found these two articles written by a former employee:
COLLECTION STATUS:
J. Geils was liquidated in the great purge of 1987 but the Stones' single still resides on the shelf. Listen to both songs via YouTube links below:
scans courtesy of discogs.com
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Like most value-minded music fans back in 1985, I had at least one membership in both the Columbia House and RCA Music clubs. On this day, I placed an order through Columbia House. Based on the selections, I'm guessing that some were gifts or replacements for albums I had given away. More will be written about the albums once they've arrived in about a month:
- In The Heat Of The Night - Pat Benatar (1979)
- Wild-Eyed Southern Boys - .38 Special (1981)
- Built For Speed - The Stray Cats (1982)
- Billy Idol - Billy Idol (1982)
- Law And Order - Lindsey Buckingham (1981)
The TOTAL TALLY:
records bought: 3
money spent: $14.84
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