Listen: Cruising / The Wildare Trio WildareCruising.mp3

Listen: Bossa Nova Blueport / The Wildare Trio WildareBlueport.mp3

Don’t go to Yahoo searching for info on The Wildare Trio. The message from them: “Sorry, no matches found for “wildare-trio”. If you didn’t find what you’re looking for, try another search.” Why thank you very much. Glad I exchanged my YHOO shares for AAPL some seven years ago.

Now if you do want some history on The Wildare Express aka The Wildare Trio during their Brunswick days, check out FUNKY 16 CORNERS. Well, you really should check it regularly anyways. There you’ll discover many wonders of the 7″ black vinyl world. And specifically, this trio’s swinging, soulful Hammond organ leader Rueben Wilson, not to mention his combo’s historical timeline.

Me, I found this record, as with a good hundred or so more, at an Evangelist Church rummage and cake sale not too far from our house. I’d love to tell you where, but it’s one of my last undiscovered secrets. It’s a yearly do, and all the elderly church ladies sell traditional food: rice, string beans, sweet potato pie, mac & cheese and I mean a MEAN mac & cheese, corn bread, blackeyed peas, the lot. Every last morsel is homemade and laid out in a mismatch of their pots and pans from home. And then there’s the dessert table: pies galore, we’re talking homemade crusts, pineapple upside down cake, fresh peach and cherry cobblers with real, heart attack threatening whipped cream. Heaven right out there in front of a church – perfect.

I’m usually one of the first to show up, really early, like 6am. Certainly the first looking for vinyl. I try to go every year and have for at least fifteen. Even when there’s a bunch of records already out – the pastor still seems to enjoy leading me downstairs to dig through a few more.

‘Crusing’ / ‘Bossa Nova Blueport’ was part of a particularly good crop in that infamous basement. The lot were all pretty used, but nicely scratchy – almost to the point of politically correct. If one didn’t sample the music, the surface noise would’ve been of equal value. Despite their condition, the records were all housed in their original company sleeves. First miracle.

The best part of all this being I didn’t know what record it was for a few years now. Meaning I’d spent one entire festive Saturday night converting vinyl to mp3, getting such a machine like assembly line process in motion, that I forgot to identify a few of them until the next day, by which time the records, mixed with that evening’s simultaneous friends, food and drinks, had been shuffled and re-stacked beyond logic. It was the one last single I struggled to identify for ages, until this past Sunday morning. I was digging, really digging to find something fresh for the DJ set Phil and I were doing at Brooklyn Bowl later that afternoon. I found this, thought hmm and threw it onto the turntable. Boom – it’s that record! Found it. Always hoped I would but you know what it’s like when a single slips into that black hole of the unfiled. This was the last, evasive, unidentified mofo in my itunes library that was making me crazy for years. So I found some sort of peace, just as the Evangelist’s good book promises, I think.