Last week I talked about “the Shrink,” the guy at the record show who thinks he knows everything about every artist that ever recorded. This week we move on to another one of my favorite characters: Mr. Random.

Mr. Random is the dude who comes into the twice-a-year record show with thousands of records in milk crates all around the floor and gets pissed off when the records aren’t in alphabetical order. I don’t expect everyone to be a hardcore collector like me, but it still makes me laugh when I see people get angry at randomness. Mr. Random was probably in his mid-40s or so and came in with his wife and two children. He immediately asked the seller, “Are these in any sort of order?” The seller told him that they were by genre only and that he was in the rock and pop section, with country, jazz, easy listening, etc., over on the far wall. After the seller walked away, Mr. Random started loudly complaining to his family: “How does he think anyone will buy any records if they aren’t in order?” Then he started flipping through the crates, you know, like ten records at a time, kind of looking in their general direction and feigning a bit of interest before walking away seemingly disgusted.

I really just wanted to answer his rhetorical question to his wife. “Who’s going to buy them? Well, pretty much everyone who comes here, sir, since you are clearly the only one that just stumbled across this record show. The rest of us are here because of the show, and I’m sure all of us don’t mind not having anything in order, and in fact most of us enjoy the fact that they are random because that’s part of the fun of the search.”

And yes, I completely realize that I sound like a record-show snob at this point, but I’m really not. Ninety-nine percent of the people that were at the record show were totally cool and, really, I couldn’t have cared less what they were doing or buying, but it’s the 1 percent that make for a good story.

NEW MUSIC FOR THE COLLECTION:
David Hasselhoff, Lonely Is the Night
Atlantic Starr, Brilliance
Jethro Tull, Under Wraps
Jethro Tull, Rock Island

More “C” artists to come as we try to keep up with the quality of last week’s songs with 20 more from the bottom of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the ’80s.

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