It was a pretty typical mid-Nineties weekend assignment for a weekly newspaper: Go to the library and get a few pictures of folks looking at books, records and anything else the library might be offering during its annual sale.
So, I drove from my south Minneapolis apartment out to the suburb of Eden Prairie that November Saturday and spent maybe an hour trying to be inconspicuous and stay out of everyone’s way. There was a crowd over by the shelves of children’s books, which was good. Shots of kids are almost always winners, especially if they’re so engrossed in something that they don’t notice the camera, and the kids at the library sale were focused on the books on the shelves and nothing else.
I also got a few shots of adults poking in the mysteries and the cookbooks. Then I backed off and got some wide-angle shots. After an hour and a roll of film, I figured I had at least one shot that would work for the next week’s paper, so I let my camera dangle on its neck-strap and began to dig into the books and records myself.
I don’t remember if I bought any books that day, but I did grab one LP. Now, I’ve been to a lot of library sales and dug through many, many boxes of surplus records (and, eventually, CDs). You can find some interesting titles, but rarely do you find anything really good. But on this Saturday, I came across a keeper, an LP titled Cover Me, which was a collection of songs by Bruce Springsteen as performed by other folks. Some of those performers were Southside Johnny, Gary U.S. Bonds, the Patti Smith Group, the Pointer Sisters and Johnny Cash.
The record was from the library’s collection, not from the donations that local folks brought in, which meant it might not have been treated gently by those who checked it out, so I took a careful look for scratches and hacks, and it looked pretty clean. It went home with me, and there was in fact only one bad spot on the record: during Johnny Cash’s take on “Johnny 99,” the needle jumped into the air and moved ahead about an eighth of an inch. I put the record on the shelves, used some of the tracks when I made mixtapes for friends and told myself I’d get a clean copy of it someday.
That meant that after I shifted to CDs in the early years of this century, Cover Me was one of the first titles I put on my mental list of LPs that I wanted to duplicate on CD. As online commerce grew, I’d check at various sites about four or five times a year, seeing if any copies of the CD – long out of print – were available. There often were one or two copies available, but for prices running from $50 to $100, which was far more than I was going to pay for a CD.
And then, about ten years ago, along with listings for those extraordinarily high prices, I found the CD for about five bucks. And after I got it, I was reminded that among the very good performances gathered for the album, there was one track that was among the best things I’d ever heard. Hearing it again pointed out to me how easy it is to lose track of music I like when it’s awash in a sea of tunes.
The track is “This Little Girl” by Gary U.S. Bonds, taken from his 1981 album, Dedication, an album produced for Bonds by Springsteen and Steve Van Zandt (with every member of the E Street Band ca. 1981 taking part). And “This Little Girl,” written by Springsteen and enhanced by a saxophone solo from the late Clarence Clemons, remains – more than forty years after its creation and twenty-five years or so after I first heard it – high on my list of favorite records:
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