12 Inch Singles - True Believers - The Rain Won't Help You (When It's Over)

My soon to be three year old and I have started listening to my old vinyl albums while eating lunch recently. As a matter of fact when I tell him it's time to eat he first goes to the cabinet underneath the record player and calls out for me to join him. Once there I select which lp to play, then get the food, say a prayer and we're off. Yesterday I chose to play a bunch of 12 inch singles that I bought back in 1987 at a flea market here in Tulsa, after coming back from Basic Training and AIT for the Army National Guard. There are about 10 of them, give or take, and all are promotional discs that weren't supposed to be sold but of course luckily for me they were. Some were groups I had heard of before however and some weren't. I can honestly say that I liked every single one that I bought without exception and witout having heard the songs before (except for one I think).

More than likely they were sent to a local radio station for airplay but since it didn't fit the format (then or now)they quickly found there way to the flea market where I happened upon them. It seems like I bought them all at the same time but with as much time that's gone by I can't say for sure. Some memories stay and some don't. I'm sure I didn't put much thought into it since it seemed such a trivial thing at the time. I was just buying music and hoping some of it would turn out to be good. So what I am going to do is every few days I'll find a video or at least the song and talk about it a little. First up is a group called True Believers.



I bought this one mainly for the way the cover looked and if I could I'd scan the cover so you could see what I mean. You'll just have to take my word for it. It intrigued me and so I shelled out my hard earned dollar and bought it. Unbeknownst to me at the time the band featured Alejandro Escovedo, his brother Javier and Jon Dee Graham. I say this because there wasn't one bit of information about who was in the band anywhere to be found. You have to remember that this was in the days before the internet made such information readily available. The only source for finding new music was 1. radio (fat chance there of finding anything good) 2. MTV (yes they still played videos back then and there was a chance of seeing something cool, after about 1 AM) 3. word of mouth (this required knowing someone who knew about such cool music and wasn't very likely) and finally (my most used option) 4. Finding something that looked interesting, taking a chance and getting lucky. Well I definately did the latter with True Believers and it later led me to finding Alejandro's music all over again many, many years later. But that's a story to be told all by itself.