Ten years of emails and phone calls, contractual negotiations, in person meet-ups, the physical relocation of a mess of tapes and probably a bunch of shit I'm forgetting. This is what it took to get Ted Lucas released on Third Man. And for me, spiritually, it was absolutely worth it.

There is so much I could write about this record, but at the moment it feels best to point you to an interview I did with local NPR station WNXP....

https://wnxp.org/on-the-record-ben-blackwell-on-1975-ted-lucas-re-release/

There's audio of me flapping my gums as well as fairly insightful text excerpts of said gum-flapping at that link. If I can further belabor maybe just two points touched on in the interview there, it's as follows:

- there is SO MUCH more Ted Lucas music to sift through and to share. LIke, it might be more that 100 reels worth of material. Across every and all iterations of bands and styles that Ted embodied, from commercial jingles he wrote on spec all the way down to field recordings and answering machine tapes, Ted chronicled and saved just about everything. And film footage? You better believe it. Thank god.

- the digital bonus track of "Love Took A Trip" is just magnificent in every way. I cannot stop listening to it even now, months after first hearing it. This is the song that overwhelmed me and brought me to tears in the Turnip Truck (Iocal grocery store) parking lot. As a raga, as a blues ramble, as an acoustic paean to the twists and turns that are inherent to the nature of "love" as it were...this song inhabits at least three different personas and each one of them is independently brilliant. But married together they take on a profile larger than the sum of its parts. 

Here's how you win a green vinyl copy of this record. Just go to whatever your preferred method of streaming is and listen to the entire album, including the four bonus tracks. Once you've done so, just come back and post a comment here. You can say you loved it, say you need it, whatever. You can also say nothing, maybe just "i listened" and I will randomly select from that pool of commenters. Get in before midnight Thursday February 27th.

You really gotta listen though. If you're gonna lie, what's the fucking point? My job, my goal here, is to use my enthusiasm to help convey to you why something is important. So...pony up kiddos.