Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: Mellotronists

This guys knows just about everything about music of any genre the
world over. I met him in the mid 1970s when he and John Saltzgiver
(who most recently did prog & obscure music radio shows in Seattle)
were running Intergalactic Trading Company, which was a division of
Music Millennium in Portland, Oregon in the biz of distributing
import records. They put together this incredible loose leaf mail
order catalogue (so done to be expandable with updates and
supplements) filled with reviews of whatever oblique import record
they could get their hands on. They had an incredible biz
capitalizing on imports that came out a few weeks before the USA
versions came out--in those days, domestic pressings had a real
problem with quality control--and who wouldn't want the thicker
pressings with the original artwork, etc. of the land the music
hailed from in the first place, even though it cost a few more $$?

Archie, if I'm not mistaken, was "discovered" by the higher-up's at
the Millennium (who have two stores in the Portland area) and was in
Los Angeles working as a tailor. John and Archie did this excellent
radio show on KINK FM Wednesday nights called "Other Worlds Of
Music". Of course it got to the point where I'd hear music on that
show, and the next day run over to the store and spend all my
disposable cash. I wonder if Salzgiver has a Mellotron...he was such
a fanatic for anything 'Tron.

One real fan of the radio show and prog music in general was a blind
man I only knew as Blind Al. He lived down E. Burnside from the main
Millennium store about a mile and one-half towards downtown. This guy
managed with his red-tipped cane to get through all the horrific
traffic up to the store, and get back to his basement apartment with
loads of records. One day we all payed him a visit. It was amazing
the racks and racks of record albums in piles everywhere. Since he
was totally blind, he filed all his records by the texture of the
covers as opposed to alphabetizing. There's the fuzzy Bee
Gees' "Odessa" Atco gatefold, the Captain Beyond debut and
the 'Stones "Satanic Majesties" with the paste-on little 3-D cards on
the front, the bubbly Gracious! Vertigo cover, the leathery texture
of the debut Nitzinger...you get the idea. Amazing how you adapt and
can find everything, no? I bet he could find any early Rare Earth
label album with the rounded tops, or an Alice Cooper record easy
enough...!

Anyway, back to Archie...it's amazing the knowledge and connections
this guy has...from the experimental electronic music of Artemiy
Artemiev and all his relatives and friends to traditional music of
faraway lands backtracking to early prog and psyche gems not even the
folks at Arkana probably heard of.