Hello he's Wayne Kramer.
And he's Billy Bragg.
And we're here at Amoeba with our bags.
You gotta remember, I come from a small island off the coast of Europe.
It doesn't really have any record shops anymore.
So when I'm in America and can find a record shop, I do kind of go crazy a bit.
Let's start with the top one. This first one is the album by Valerie June.
Brand new album. As far as I'm concerned, album of the year.
The songs on this are really great, she sings really great, plays really great.
Valerie June, brand-new record. There she is there.
I've got another great new record by Neko Case, who I really love. I think she's great.
I'm so pleased that she seems to have gone for a rather dark period
but she's back now with a new record and this was on top of my list when I get to America.
Shit we can't find in England. I mean obviously you could find this in England, but you couldn't find a record shop.
Neko Case, I understand, is a huge fan of Jail Guitar Doors.
Well if she wasn't already so high in my estimation she would've gone up even further now.
This is Grant Green with Yusef Lateef, Jack McDuff and Al Harewood.
I started playing music before the British first wave
So the idea of long hair and singing songs hadn't hit yet
and these guys were the coolest guys on the set.
Grant Green is one of the just most soulful jazz and blues guitarists.
Carried around his own B3 with him, because he loved the sound of the guitar and the B3.
So he was the guitar player but he owned the organ.
The guy with the bad back?
Yes.
One of the things you have to do when you're in the United States of America
is find stuff to take home for people.
My son, who's 19, is going through a big Harry Nilsson period at the moment
based around Nilsson's greatest hits.
He won't have heard all of 'Schmilsson' so I always have to bring something home
for the folks when you've been to big America.
Another great unknown guitarist, Tal Farlow.
These guys play on a level that has never been equaled in contemporary music.
There's a lot of guitar players in the world. None of them can play this well.
Sometimes you find things that you've only ever heard about and never actually seen.
'Bye-Bye Birdie' is a very early rock and roll movie, features Ann Margaret.
I'm very interested at the time in popular culture, when rock and roll emerged.
The differences between its emergence in the United States of America and its emergence in Britain.
How the young people here in America were playing different types of music before the British Invasion.
And how the British Invasion came about. I think this is a little bit of evidence.
So I'm really looking forward to seeing this. It's 'Bye-Bye Birdie.'
This is Jackie McLean, 'Out.'
Jackie McLean was one of the first alto and tenor players to really embrace the hard edge of Bebop.
I haven't heard this for ages. Just saw it on the racks.
Thought, oh yeah, I'd love to have a listen to 'Transformer' again.
What a great album that is. So I just got that.
Bob Dylan's latest Bootleg Series from his period of 'Another Self-Portrait'
which is a maligned period. I'm a huge fan of Dylan. He kind of drew me into songwriting.
And, very weirdly, this portrait of himself on the front here
he looks like an English soccer manager called Mick McCarthy.
It's very strange. I want to see if he's done a drawing of Mick McCarthy
and put him on the front of the record. So just for the weirdness of that, it's worth hearing.
My day job these days is I write music for movies and television.
There's a guy around here named Cliff Martinez
who kind of comes from the same background I come from.
He's doing real well as a film composer.
This is from a relatively new film called 'Only God Forgives.'
Merry Clayton, 'The Best of Merry Clayton.'
Who even knew that there were Merry Clayton records out?
This is a great thing and why we need record shops.
Spotify would never have found Merry Clayton for me.
But walking around a record shop I saw a record by Merry Clayton.
I have lovely memories of her. I have no idea what these tracks are, what it's going to sound like.
I'm so pleased. It's probably, of all the records, my favorite one I was pleased I've found
and know it's going to be great.
So thanks very much Amoeba, for letting us come and run through the racks.
It's just fortunate I don't actually live near this record shop
because it'd probably cost me a fucking fortune.
'Bandersnatch' is when you're on stage and the support band nicks all the groupies.
That's a bandersnatch.