I knew who Anthony Phillips was because I was already listening to Genesis. I think I had everything up to "And Then Were Three" with "Wind and Wuthering" and "Trick of the Tail" being my favorites and "Lamb Lies Down" being pretty up there. But I'd never heard anything off the Phillips album. I really liked the cover too. Good cover art was always a plus.

But there were always hip record outlets that loaded up their import bins and I salivated at them on sight and raided them like a starving, destitute, horny Viking berserker. I singlehanded kept a few such bins stocked because the owners wanted me coming back and spending my hard-earned cash. I'd walk through the doors and the owner would yell, "I got a bunch of good shit in last week, man! Go check it out!"

The good thing was that there wasn't a lot of competition. One of my all-time favorite bands that I found that way was White Noise. Remember "Black Mass: An Electric Storm"? I found Amon Duul, Cluster and Can that way. Tangerine Dream, Neu, Renaissance. I remember I had an Annie Haslam solo album with Roy Wood playing all the instruments--"Annie in Wonderland." All kinds of stuff from all kinds of bands. A lot of the members of these bands would put out solo stuff that you can't even find anymore. It was rare even at that time and I bought all of it.

I remember I had everything by Kraftwerk including their very first album when they were called Organisation. An album called "Tone Float". Great avant-gard stuff. German bands were great back then. I did find Tone-Float on CD at a store about two years ago but it was a bootleg. I bought it anyway. I had a lot of bootlegs on vinyl. I had an excellent Gentle Giant live bootleg. I still have it somewhere.

I used to make the rounds to all the cool stores on a weekly basis. Now there's hardly any left. Kids today just want MP3s they can download online for free.