At long last, I finally received The Fugs' Tenderness Junction (newly released last year - right after the site update, as a matter of fact - on a 2-for-1 CD along with It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest) yesterday. Which means that I am now missing only two albums from the current AM top 3000:

*Smokey Robinson's Warm Thoughts, which should be coming later this year as part of Hip-O Select's ongoing series of solo Smokey reissue twofers;

*and Rue de Siam by Marquis de Sade, which is quite hellishly impossible to find on CD. There is a copy available on one site for over $100 US, but I'm not willing to pay that much - until such time as I have Warm Thoughts in hand and am only missing one, and this one is still the only option.

NOTE: I admit that I have "cheated" in a couple of instances involving albums that are not actually available in and of themselves but whose contents (or the vast majority thereof) are collected elsewhere:

*The Best of the Ronettes contains 10 of the 12 tracks from Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes featuring Veronica, which I don't believe has ever been released on CD; the two that are missing are covers.
*I've recently purchased the Fleshtones anthology It's Super-Rock Time!, which contains 10 of the 11 tracks from the otherwise-unavailable Roman Gods.
*I know I've recounted this before, but several years ago I was stunned to discover that Rhino's Otis Redding anthology Dreams to Remember closed with all 5 of his songs from the never-released-on-CD Monterey International Pop Festival LP which had Redding on one side and Jimi Hendrix on the other. I bought the anthology and then immediately ordered Hendrix's Live at Monterey (itself long out of print), and now that CD and Disc 2 of the Redding are stored side by side between Goodbye Jumbo and Everything All the Time.

Wow, and I figure that for each new update, you don't care if any of the albums you own have been kicked off the top 3000, you just collect the newcomers? Which means way more than 3000 albums, if you've been collecting for a few years. I don't even know how I can even do that. I can only afford a few albums a month, and the site would've been updated several times before I could finish. Cheers mate. Your music shelf must be the envy of any guest you invite.

that's some crazy sh*t, there, Mr. Wexler. Good for you, and for keeping interest in physical music going (as long as all of your copies are physical copies, of course. hehe)

Harold...are there any cds you wish weren't in your collection?

I tried to fill a pair of ipods with the AM 3000, but I could not bring myself to put a Garth Brooks or a Marylin Manson album on my ipod. Are there some albums that you thought twice about buying?

Harold, I still have those albums that I picked up in Europe. Maybe you emailed me and it accidentally filtered into my junk mail folder, but I'm still willing to send them to you. I've got...

Triangulo de Amor Bizarro - S/T
Standstill - VIVALAGUERRA
Cheb Khaled & Safy Boutella - KUTCHÉ

Bumped because, at long last, Hip-O Select is releasing "Smokey Robinson: The Solo Albums, Vol. 6" - containing 1980's Warm Thoughts (#2840) and 1981's Being With You (a bubbler) - on December 13. I've already got my pre-order in. Which will leave Marquis de Sade's Rue de Siam as the only missing piece of my top 3000 puzzle (give or take those few cheats I've mentioned before). The hunt resumes!

That's quite some achievement, although I'm not much of a fan of all those nines at the end. I'm sure you checked out ebay for possible buys, but a quick check pulled up this:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=marquis+de+sade+rue+de+siam&_sacat=See-All-Categories

$22 seems like a reasonably priced final piece of the puzzle no?

Well, I went to a few sites that sell some used CD's and that's what I found...

http://www.priceminister.com/offer/buy/77764825/marquis-de-sade-rue-de-siam-cd-album.html#prd_information

It shouldn't be a problem to order it from abroad Harold...

Thanks, o.m.!