You can't really find LPs as much anymore for cheap because of stupid ebay. If ever there was an argument I could wrap my head around against globalization, it would be buying used records and ebay. It used to be shitty college towns had shitty record stores that were independent and you could find your crappy Pavement and Moby CDs there, plus they would have all these great records for sale that heroin junkies would sell for cheap, and you could accumulate entire genres of great music for relatively cheap. But now with ebay, these motherfuckers go online and see what the actual going rate for something is, and they try to charge astronomical prices for a goddamned record. Fuck those people. And then you look for it on ebay, find it for $7, which is too high as it is, then it's like another $15 to ship and handle it. Fuck those people too.
There are still loungers out there, the straggler stores that no one remembers where it only stays open because the guy teaches guitar lessons to high school kids in the back room, and when you go in, there's a wall of vinyl and some 16-year-olds jamming out a rough version of "Sweet Home Alabama" in the back room. In was in a place just like that I found my latest copy of Fire on the Mountain.
I grew up with this record, in an area where rednecks and hippies sort of morphed into this super-sub-species of dirtbag white people who were working class and all got high all the time. "Longhaired Country Boy" off this record is the anthem for these people, far more so than "Freebird". But it's also got "Trudy" which is a great love song about being in jail and knowing your goddamned girlfriend is gonna run around on you. And "Feelin' Free" is a better Allman Brothers song than anything Greg and Duane could come up with - pure biker rock sunshine head full of things that alter it happiness.
Ol' Charlie Daniels is most known for "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", but saying that's his best song is like saying Metallica's greatest jam is "Enter Sandman". I'm sure if I do more than one of these Lounge Player listings, a few more CDB records will get in the mix as well, but this is the one I've been playing the most today. I have no beer and no money and haven't paid mortgage, so I found a bottle of wine somebody gave us a few months ago, and put it in the fridge to cool down. In the gatefolds of CDB records, ol' Charlie would write little things on each record - redneck poetry of sorts, and the one in Fire on the Mountain says, "Hungover, Red Eyed, Dog Tired, Satisfied - It's a long road and a little wheel and it takes a lot of turns to get there. Thank You, Damn It." [Note the bizarre applications of capital letters.]
No, thank you Charlie Daniels, because I too like to get stoned in the morning and drunk in the afternoon. And in about twenty minutes, when I'm sucking on a free bottle of chardonnay or cabernet sauvignon or whatever the fuck it was I put in the refrigerator and pumping Fire on the Mountain, you will help enable me to not hate everything so much. I will wake up tomorrow, hungover, and happily go scrape at lead paint on some rich dude's porch, with lounge in my heart.
If you do not have this record, and don't have a record player even, don't get it on CD. You can't digitize lounge; it's just not possible. It won't be the same. So save your money and buy a turntable.
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