I'd traded some CDs in at the local used shop last week, so I had about $100 credit burning a hole in my wallet...and here's some of the stuff I bought. The Essential Santana I've probably heard most of the songs on the first disc of this 2CD comp a thousand times, without ever having physically owned a Santana record. We were listening to one of those Mojo comps the other night, something to do with songs inspired by Jimi Hendrix. The first half of the CD was just awful...totally made you appreciate Jimi as a stylist because the songs without him were upsettingly horrible, but then it recovered with a Santana song (and went on to pick up with Curtis Mayfield's "Freddy's Dead", a Funkadelic, a Bootsy...much better thanks), and I realized that I had to have a little Santana around the house. Listening to it, though, it struck me how incredibly strange it was that Santana got as huge as it did in the 1960s. I mean, we're talking way before Hispanic was a target market, before the Latin Grammys, etc., and here was a band singing in Spanish, covering Tito Puente, taking super long instrumental breaks and incorporating, I don't know, mamba beats into Top 40 hits. I haven't gotten through the second disk, and I am totally prepared for this stuff to water down as time goes on (most things do)...but disc one is amazing. The Chavez, I'm just getting into now, a promo "selections from" disc drawn from the recent Matador reissue...but it's awesome, confrontational but oh, so intelligent guitar assault, proto-post-rock if that makes sense. I also got a copy of the National's Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers, the album before Alligator which was one of my favorite's last year. So far, it seems more country-ish, a bit more noir (song called "Trophy Wife" is one of my favorites) and quite a bit less rock. Still it's great stuff, full of those whispery, caustic asides and embellished with Padma Newsome's violin. It's not knocking Alligator off the pedestal, but going a long way toward explaining where it came from.I also got an out-of-print copy of Tony Conrad's Slapping Pythagoras, which I am very excited about but haven't cracked open yet. Oh, and Sean bought a DVD of Nacho Libre and I got an orange and black tie-dyed tee which everyone around here is calling "the Tigger shirt."A good weekend all around.