Mink DeVille - Cabretta

I remember when this record came out.  Pretty much no one bothered with it.  At least no one I knew bothered with it.  I thought Willy DeVille was a pretty cool looking guy and I heard Cadillac Walk once or twice on WMMS, so I figured these guys were just around the corner from getting big.  Apparently that corner is a lot harder to get around than I ever seem to think, because I was talking to someone the other day about great dollar records, and I mentioned that I got the first Mink DeVille album for a dollar at a Record X back when they were trying to make their records just go away.  I wonder if Record X would put three or four dollars on a Mink DeVille album these days, or if it would still just be a dollar?  I have a feeling they wouldn't even take it in trade because i don't think anyone really remembers them.

Which is kind of a shame, because I thought these guys were really cool.  They had what I kind of considered a sophisticated garage sound.  Which meant that they could kill it with a song like Cadillac Walk, but they could also bring it all down a couple of notches and make a pretty song like Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl really work.  These guys were on Capitol, so you'd think they might have had some publicity behind them, but like I said, I was talking to a guy about dollar records and he said he'd never heard of Mink DeVille and didn't know if it would be worth it to take a chance on them.

In this day and age how can you  not be willing to spend ONE DOLLAR on a record someone tells you is good?  I'd even consider pretty much any record, even if it was recommended by a friend that listens to Kiss, Nickelback and Def Leppard.  I mean, if the record is clean, and it's ONE DOLLAR then where's the risk?  I was telling him about how I thought Mixed Up, Shook Up Girl was kind of like The Stones' Beast of Burden in that it was slower and kind of pretty, but not at all smarmy or gross.  Then there's songs like the rocking Gunslinger, and a great cover of Moon Martin's Cadillac Walk.  Ya know, for a dollar if you can find a record with two songs that good on it, you really need to go out and buy the damned thing!

I'm not sure what ever made it so these guys didn't get noticed by anyone.  Looking on the internet, it looks like Spanish Stroll actually cracked the Top 20 over in England.  I like that song, but I don't remember ever hearing it anywhere.  It sort of reminds me of what Lou Reed was up to in the latter part of the 70's, with a touch of the Barrio thrown in for good measure.  I really wish I had been one of the kids that bought this back in 1977.  I think if I had I'd have forced my friends to sit and listen to it all the time.  As it is, I pretty much listen to it myself quite a bit these days, because it really has a kind of timeless quality to it.  I can hear the touchstones from the 50's and 60's and the record was produced by Jack Nitzsche (yeah, that Jack Nitzsche) so the sound is very natural and not the kind of thing that gets dated easily.  What a really great album.  It's hard to believe I've had it for like twenty years and even though I've had it for so long I still feel like I really missed the boat on Mink DeVille.

My copy is nice and flat, the cover shows some ringwear and there's a click on it here and there, but like the big sticker says, it was ONE DOLLAR.  It's definitely one of the best dollars I ever spent.