Lost on Liftoff have plans to release their debut album on Labor Day Records later this month. When they do, I’ll make sure to remind you that frontman Walt Craven is now on his third wildly popular Portland band. Most of you remember 6gig, certainly, but what was that other band? Do you know? What did they sound like? Who else was in it?
Do a quick search for Craven on portlandphoenix.com and you’ll find the information you want pretty quickly. Except for that "sounds like" question. That, even the vast resources of the Phoenix Web site can’t deliver.
So where would you go to find a copy of (okay, I’ll tell you) Goud’s Thumb’s album? We don’t have it here at the Phoenix offices. We launched in 1999, after the album came out, and we never got a copy (I have one in my more selective personal archive of about 200 albums; the Phoenix collection sits at about 500 titles). Bull Moose doesn’t have any copies. I called over to Chad Verrill in their buying office and he says that though they’ve got about 800 local releases in the system, most of them go back no farther than 2003.
The Portland Public Library? Well, a search for Goud’s Thumb on the online catalog turns up only a handbook of modern Greek language by Albert Thumb or The Plan of Redemption by Our Lord Jesus Christ: Carefully Examined and Argued by Inquiring into God’s Revealed Purpose in the Creation of Man, by I.C. Wellcome and Clarkson Goud. Arts librarian Tom Wilsbach guesses that the library has about 100 local titles, integrated by genre into all the other CDs in the collection, but couldn’t say for sure. Local music "is one of the things I try to emphasize," he says, but with a yearly budget of $5000 or $6000 for CD buying, there’s only so much he can do (and he does have, for instance, My Dirt, Rooms by the Hour, and Viva Nueva, by Rustic Overtones—searching for local music on the library’s site, portlandlibrary.com, is a pretty great time-killer, actually).
What about the Maine Historical Society, our historical gatekeepers? Nah. John Mayer, curator of the Maine Historical Society’s museum, says they’re "pretty much in a reactive mode in terms of how we collect stuff." Thus, since nobody has really donated any contemporary recordings, they don’t really have any. But they do have some very cool old scores of Civil War-era compositions.
A recent visit to WCYY and WCLZ turned up some 300 or so titles, but nothing of much vintage, and no Goud’s Thumb (though "Spinout" DJ and Labor Day Records honcho Mark Curdo certainly has a copy he might let you listen to).
