Thrift Vinyl #1: Gary Ryan’s Me, Myself, and I

Every month, I go to the thrift store to buy a record. There are only two specifications for which record I buy:

1. It has to be by an artist I have never heard of.

2. It has to cost less than $5.

This is Thrift Vinyl. Enjoy.

For the first installment of Thrift Vinyl, I decided to strictly go off of price. That way, I could hear just how bad the quality of a less-than-a-dollar record is. At the local Goodwill Thrift Store (where I will be buying most of my records) I found a faded black sleeve in the back of about a hundred old records, all sitting in the back corner of the store. The record is Me, Myself, and I by Gary Ryan – the word “RE-RELEASED” was plastered on the front. I purchased the album for a whopping .79 cents.

Before I ever take a record out of the sleeve, I examine every little part of the outside. I think this is because I grew up with CD’s and now mp3 players, so even though I have been buying vinyl for years now, the concept is still instinctively foreign. On the back of Me, Myself, and I, there is a black and white picture of Gary Ryan posing in the middle of the woods with the track list above his head. To the right, there is a large paragraph explaining why you should listen to this record. I can’t help but share it in its entirety (any use of bold and capitalization matches what’s written on the sleeve):

“Gary Ryan was born August 3, 1941 in Wellsburg, West Virginia. Wellsburgh is a small town in the steel valley between Wheeling, West Virginia and Stubenville, Ohio. GARY’S interest in music began with piano lessons at the early age of six. Very quickly he began to develop his own unique singing style and started using the organ to accompany himself. This album reflects his love for music and his natural ability to express himself. The album title is appropriate for it means that every note in the background is being played by GARY, simultaneously, as he does his own exciting vocal interpretation of these great songs. In other words, GARY does it all, and realizing this, it is easy to understand why he is not only a great entertainer, but he is a very impressive businessman. At nineteen, in addition to working THE ANCHOR ROOM near Wheeling and other night clubs, he was associated with GERRERO MUSIC STORES selling pianos and organs. In 1967, he moved to the Cleveland, Ohio area and became co-owner and manager of a retail piano and organ outlet, appropriately called THE MELODY MANOR, located in Elyria, Ohio, in the Midway Mall Shopping Center. After GARY closes up shop, the beat goes on at a plush area supper club called, MR. LARRY’S BEEF AND TAILS. MR. LARRY’S clientele appreciate the talents of this young man so much that GARY’S appearance there has packed them in for more than fifty-eight weeks. Now, with great pride, we would like to introduce GARY to you singing and playing your favorite songs. This is GARY RYAN’S very first album, but it will not be his last.”

The fact that so long a biography about an artist would be on the packaging is unbelievable to me. Today, most people buy an album online, but if they happen to buy the physical record, this level of intimacy is left to users’ changes to a Wikipedia article. I couldn’t find one snippet about Gary Ryan online.

Me, Myself, and I is a collection of covers – probably the ones that were requested most often at Mr. Larry’s Beef and Tails – including Lee Hays and Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer” and Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

For some reason, old records give me the creeps sometimes. They’re old and dusty, and most of the musicians that made them have seemed to drop off the face of the earth. On this particular record, there are several spots where it hits a snag and repeats the same 3 seconds over and over again until you physically move the needle – creepy, but again, an example of true intimacy between the music and the listener. There is something really endearing about these old records – these old artists that never really got anywhere but still tried to make a music career out of nothing. Maybe it hits me the hardest because, as a musician, I totally get the feeling of working on a few songs, only to have them heard by a small group of friends and family.

So, here is Gary Ryan on the front of a vinyl sleeve, surrounded by two old organs and singing God-knows-what into a microphone. And, for some reason, I really wanted to know what you would have heard had you been the guy taking the picture.

The album is one of the most simple that I have heard – not so much in the songs as much as in the instrumentation. The entire album is composed of stock drum tracks taken from one of his organs that could only be described as cheesy. They are simple beats, and you can tell that they are from the exact same machine – the snare in particular becomes quite familiar after a song or two.

Ryan’s overdubbing organs would have, at the time of the record’s release, been associated on the back of the sleeve with phrases like “ahead of his time!” or “old songs in a new way!” However, listening to the record today, I only hear tacky organ tracks that would possibly be put into the background of a Radiohead song, cascading back and forth through a heavy bass and overbearing synth.

I can only describe Ryan’s vocals as an impression of Elvis, only a step or two higher.

But, having said all of this, it all works for me. I really enjoy the record, and I think it is because Ryan’s performance is earnest. You can almost imagine him pushing the release of this album with determination, only to hit his musical zenith in a crappy steak restaurant.

The songs match my imagined sadness of Ryan’s. The first song is called “A Mixed Up World,” which is followed by “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife,” a song dedicated to the sad lot of many selfless women. Songs like “Hey Little One” would fit right into a Peanuts special if the vocals were left out. My personal favorite on the album is “Green Green Grass of Home,” where Ryan whines the lyrics that everyone has grown to know by heart. Every song maintains the melancholy of the previous track, even if the song’s message doesn’t dictate it.

Me, Myself, and I isn’t a fantastic record in and of itself, but it is a rare find that I am happy to have heard. Most of all, it makes me really excited to sit and wade through unending boxes of dusty, forgotten records, looking for an exception.