Having grown up in SW Alabama, all I can say is: I hear ya. We were lucky enough to have an indie record store open up when I was 15, the same year I discovered punk music. I pretty much lived there.

Yup. We had a place like that, though they specialized in stoner music and the sorts of things you hear on classic rock stations now (Zeppelin, Allmans, Dead). However, they also had lots of punk and funk you couldn't get at Musicland. They sold me my first Replacements tape.

MTV, ironically, was our primary dispenser of the non-mainstream, thanks to 120 Minutes. Then we got a short-lived lightbulb-powered alternative station that played lots of goth and college rock.

This made me laugh: that highly obscure album of AC/DC songs performed as tender acoustic ballads

It's on eMusic? I need to check that out. I have a soft spot for musical changeups and contrarian covers.

It's Mark Kozelek's What's Next To The Moon. It's great. His previous EP, Rock and Roll Singer, has different versions of three of the same songs. Kozelek has a penchant for slowcore covers of 70s metal. His version (with the Red House Painters) of Ace Frehley's "Shock Me" (which was always one of my favorite Kiss tunes, for the obvious reason) was quite the revelation when I first heard it.

I mean, I've got the Stumblebunny single mentioned once in the second edition of The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll (New Wave: America chapter). That only took about ten years of looking. I own the Hackamore Brick LP, which is sort of famously obscure. I've got the vinyl semi-bootleg of Rocket From the Tombs (pre-Ubu) which only had a pressing of 2000.

The bootlegs I have are pretty famous ones, like Patti Smith's Teenage Perversity & Ships In The Night (her greatest recording by far, incidentally), and the early Television demos with Richard Hell (which rewrite punk history, in my estimation).

The rare exotica (Russ Garcia's Fantastica, White Goddess), crime jazz (Johnny Staccato) and bubblegum (Lancelot Link) LPs I've got are all expensive collector's items because collectors know about them. But I guess they're obscure to the average music fan.

Emusic has tons of Kozelek stuff - not just his solo albums (almost everything minus some tracks from Rock 'n' Roll Singer) but Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon as well.

Kozelek has a penchant for slowcore covers of 70s metal.

And lordy are they gorgeous. He also does a really beautiful cover of "Around and Around" by John Denver.

I am actually making a best of Kozelek mix - but it's only in its baby stages.

I'm trying to think of what I've got that really qualifies as obscure.

How are we defining obscure? I have tapes of local bands that never made it to the label level - is that obscure? Or do we mean odd cross genre covers and like albums by 70s kid TV stars that later become porn stars? Do we mean hard to find, impossible to find or just really really strange?

Do we mean hard to find, impossible to find or just really really strange?

All of these qualify. Though now I'm sort of mentally just listing the things which haven't come out in digital media. Because once that happens then it's on a blog and everybody has it.

How are we defining obscure? I have tapes of local bands that never made it to the label level

Which just reminds me that I MUST ransack all the boxes at my parents' and find my copy of the original Alice n' Chains demo, from back when they were convinced that "Lip Lock Rock" was going to be their ticket to the bigtime.

I'm trying to think of what I've got that really qualifies as obscure.

I'm wearing a "Vivians" t-shirt right now! (AIFG!)

Music is beginning to sound like "blah, blah, Ginger," again. This bums me out, but I suspect it's my fault.

So, am I overreacting when I call this guy the tooliest tool who's ever been compared to a socket wrench?

Not hardly. He needs a healthy whack of the get-over-yourself stick.

I don't think I have anything truly obscure. I doubt I own anything anyone else who went to shows in D.C. in the mid-90's doesn't have, and most of my peers have much better collections of Dischordania and related.