The "Holy Grail" of Stooges Memorabilia...

I'm on a couple different mailing lists for specialty music shops and collectors networks. Not being a huge collector necessarily, at least not in the philistine sense of the word, (I'd much rather just own the music than have an over-priced first edition of whatever that loses its value once you throw the needle on its out-of-print groove), I'm fascinated at the items that are still out there, begging to be owned for the cost listed on one astoundingly appraised price tag. You can imagine three or four generations of a family passing these records on and on and on until their worth is just shy of a baseball team or a mansion in Beverly Hills.

Anyway, one such site is Esprit, which is a British site that specializes mostly in rare music collectibles. I've found a lot of hard to find Rollins Band and obscure Black Flag vinyl through them, so I like to keep track of their inventory.

But, because it's a collectors site, sometimes they bumrush my inbox with drool-worthy items that I couldn't possibly entertain purchasing. This morning, I found a big one:

White label USA Promotional copy of The Stooges' Fun House, legitimately produced in 1970.





How much? A mere $980. To tell you truth, that actually sounds cheap.

Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead