Long have I dodged collecting or caring about rare soul, funk or r&b records from Detroit. The colossal WEIGHT of it all, the British having scavenged the depths of the city for decades all in the name of Northern Soul leaves an odd taste in the mouth of a teenager in the 90s frequenting record stores, trying to get the lay of the land, trying to fully grasp the history, the lineage, the importance of it all. 

Like trying to win a marathon when your competitors are all Kenyan and have a two hour head start...how could you even begin to compete? What could lil' old me do to try and scare these hard-to-find and expensive slabs?

I personally felt overwhelmed trying to make sense of it all and back then didn't have the focus to just plunk down the $60 for the Manship's soul price guide which would've been the smart, easy move. Maybe I would've done it differently looking back now, oh well oh well.

So barring one of two dumb luck things falling in my lap, this portion of my collection, a collection I pridefully trumpet as being primarily focused on Detroit and Michigan, is woefully inadequate.

In terms of personal taste, if given the option I would always plunk the money down for a garage single before anything in the soul realm. Never felt otherwise and don't think I ever will.

But when you walk into People's Records and THIS thing gets plopped in front of you, a complete unknown, weirdly funky in a no wave James Chance kinda way, with "Wind" being misspelled as "Wined" whether purposeful or just plain ignorant and coming from the year of your birth...well, it becomes a FOCUS. Infatuation. A quest. Something I could not stop thinking about.

Traded a spare original copy of Flying Wedge's "Come To My Casbah" for this one, I may have included some other spares I had kicking around as well, which of course is the entire purpose behind accumulating multiple copies of a record...to use them to get other records!

"Reaching" side I guess is more preferred by some (smooth? modern? kinda neither or those, but if you know, you know this is a weird in-between sorta vibe) and Brad at People's told me he thought that "Wined" would connect with the low-rider world when he sold his spare (only known public sale) for $4000 and change. AND HE SAID HE THOUGHT IT'D GO HIGHER?!?!?!?!

So now I'm stuck with this beautifully rare expensive albatross of a damn good record, where I've done my "job" well enough across the previous 30 years that I am now hard-pressed to come up with a garage (or rock, or punk) record from Michigan I would NEED to trade this T&R record for.

So this is how one slowly descends into madness.