Willie and the Bumblebees

Alright, I feel a little guilty about turning my mp3 blog into a lame travel blog, so I'm going to make it up to you right now. Right before I took off from Guatemala I headed over to Amoeba Records here in San Francisco. I kind of have a love hate relationship with that place. I go there all the time and I'm always buying records. Since I buy so many records at places like swap meets and such I end up with a lot of crap. Well, not really crap, but stuff I don't want and don't have the room for in my shitty one bedroom apartment. Often, while browsing through the records of Amoeba I encounter these same crappy records at fairly high prices. Prices definitely higher than the measely one or two bucks I spend at the swaps. Every few months my stack of crap records becomes so big that I decide to take it down to Amoeba. At Amoeba I wait in line until the record nerd motions to me and my records. He sorts my crap records into various piles while I try not to worry about his judgement of my musical taste. Then, I'm offered a rediculously low price for my records. I know, I know they're my crap records. What am I complaining about It's just that after selling my records to them I feel like I've been reamed.

So, the last time I was at Amoeba, right before I left for my trip, things finally evened out. I was browsing through the stacks of new records and came across something I thought I'd seen before. The record was called Willie and the Bumblebees and had a picture of some goofy looking guys with even goofier sunglasses. Unlike most of the records in the pile, there wasn't a nice plastic protective jacket over the album. Also unlike the rest of the records in the stacks, this record was priced at $1.99. Why did I know this record? I knew I must had seen it on Soulstrut.com or something, but that can be tricky because people post about crappy records almost just as much as they post about good records. Well, I bought the record and headed home to do some record nerd research on the internet.

What did I learn? Willie and the Bumblebees is a private press record from Minnesota that routinely fetches 40 bucks on Ebay. There hasn't been a reissue or boot, so I made a good 38 dollars from Amoeba that day. Ha ha record nerds working at Amoeba!

So, to celebrate my victory over the record buyers at Amoeba I bring to you what I think are the three strongest tracks from Willie and the Bumblebee's Honey from the Bee. I hope you enjoy them.

Honey from the Bee by Willie and the Bumblebees from Honey from the Bee
Dipstick by Willie and the Bumblebees from Honey from the Bee
Sahara by Willie and the Bumblebees from Honey from the Bee