What you ended up with, of course, was a matter of luck and available finance. My mate Eric had a bit more cash at his disposal and managed to get in at the right time to score copies of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Happy Trails, The Band’s Music From Big Pink and the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth.
While I’d possibly have preferred to have those albums sitting in my collection, it didn’t make all that much difference since I was spending a fair chunk of each weekend in the room on the lower slopes of Castle Hill that housed a substantial record collection, along with an extensive library, heavy on science fiction as I recall, but with enough other genres represented to pretty well cover the gamut of what was out there and interesting.
Some of it was definitely out there.
It was around this time that I learned one of the basic facts of music freakdom. No matter how much you’d like to, you can’t own everything. There’s just too much out there.
With access to second hand shops and cut out bins, of course, you can end up with a fair proportion of the music that interests you, and Eric managed to build up at least three substantial collections in Townsville, Adelaide and London, and I’m talking thousands rather than hundreds, but would more than likely have ended up with a wants list that was at least as substantial as the stack of vinyl he’d accumulated in any of those locations.
Once I’d finished Teachers’ College and started pulling in a pay packet, I set off down the same road of acquisition, though there was no way I was going to accumulate anything to match those collections.
To this day, people look at the piles of CDs around the house and assume that I’d have, for example, the complete works of John Fogerty from the Creedence era to today.