BMG

  When I was doing record shows, I had a variety of items to sell.  Mostly, I sold records and videotapes.  As I wrote about earlier, I used to deal in bootleg material.  I used to sell bootleg video and audio tapes.  They were concerts not available in stores.  The quality was questionable, but people wanted to spend money for these things.  There was a guy in Atlanta that sold videotapes for $20, so I undercut him and sold mine for $10.  We had a lot of the same stuff.  

 Across the room from me in Spartanburg was a guy named Randy who sold bootleg cd's.  He was asking top dollar for his stuff.  The promoter came up to us about halfway through the show and said that BMG was coming to the show to look for bootlegs.  BMG had a plant in Spartanburg, and our bootlegs were breaking the law.  I just put my videotapes under the table.  A tablecloth went to the floor.  Randy gathered up all of his product and quickly loaded them into his car.  He was pulling out of the parking lot, as BMG came in.  No bootlegs were found, so they left.  

 A few years later, Randy got caught with his bootlegs at a record store in Columbia.  He went to federal prison for a while.  One had to know how to advertise them.  They were either "imports" or "promos".  Keep them on the down low.  After Randy went away, those of us stopped selling them at record shows.  It was just too dangerous.  I ended up selling my collection on eBay as blank tapes with stuff on them.  I hope they liked the blanks.

Spartanburg

  I used to sell stuff at Record Shows at several cities in South Carolina and North Carolina.  If I had to travel, I would usually book a motel room for the night to be ready for the next day, and hopefully where the show was going to be held.  One such motel was in Spartanburg, SC.  

 I had arrived early to look around town.  One place I visited was the First Baptist Church, where my father had been on staff back in the late 1930's.  I enjoyed that visit, but I heard so much about the downtown area being filled with shops and pedestrian friendly.  I walked across the street to a jewelry store to get directions to downtown Spartanburg.  The man in the store took me outside and pointed across some woods.  He said that was downtown, but he said:  "You can't get there from here".  It was kind of weird, so I never made it downtown.

 I went back to the motel to eat and relax.  In the next room to mine, a TV was blaring through the wall.  It was so loud that I couldn't hear the TV in my room.  I knocked on their door to ask them to turn it down, but I got no answer.  I called down to the front desk to see if they could call that room and ask them to turn it down.  They told me that it wasn't their responsibility to control what others did in their rooms, even if it was disturbing others.  I just felt they didn't want to get involved.

 Now, it was approaching midnight.  I had to get up early the next morning to set up for the Record Show.  Still, the TV was so loud that I was getting irater.  I walked down to the office and demanded that they go up to the room next to mine and get them to turn off their TV.  Reluctantly, the guy at the desk walked with me to the offending room and pounded on the door.  No answer.  He used his passkey to enter the room and found no one there.  He told me that the room was occupied by a man and his son.  Apparently, it was homecoming at Wofford College, and they were in Spartanburg for that.  

 I finally went to sleep.  At 2am, I was awakened by those two coming back.  Thankfully, they didn't turn on the TV again.  The next morning, I saw them in the lobby and just glared at them.  The clerk at the desk apologized for my lack of sleep.  He said that the man apologized to the clerk for the TV.  It seems his son had cranked it up when they left, and he didn't know his son had done it at the time. The motel should have credited my account for the room, but they didn't.  I went to the Record Show with very little sleep under my belt.  Somebody could have bought all of my stuff for $1, and I wouldn't have known the difference.