Rocco's Weird Stuff: LES and his vintage top hat

It's been too long. Rocco has busily been accumulating more weird stuff so it's time for another installment.

Here are some photos of his latest (though temporary) acquisition. It's a very fine moleskin top hat of unknown vintage, made by royal hatters Woodrow of Westmoreland Street and once owned by someone called Les (or of course more sensibly, someone whose initials were L.E.S.).

The best bit is that it comes in a beautiful leather hat box, lined with red velvet that even has secret compartments for love notes and what not.

The other best bit is that the hat belongs to John Boorman, director of such pieces of celluloid gold as this:

Rocco's Weird Stuff: Taxidermied bird diorama

This curio hangs on the wall of Rocco's studio. Initially he was painting the portrait of one of the birds, but now I believe he regards them as companions, curiously characterful as they are. For those interested in other unusual applications of taxidermied creatures see this at once hideous and hilarious guinea pig hair comb by Reid Peppard - see more of Reid's fascinating work here.

Rocco's Weird Stuff: The One Of The First Ever Bootleg Records.

So I was looking through Rocco's record collection for something to listen to. As I flicked I came across a white sleeve with a stamped title on it, that read GWW Talkin' Bear Mountain Massacre Picnic Blues. Rocco had mentioned this record to me before and as a Bob Dylan fanatic I knew what this was, a legendary early bootleg. In fact one of a run of the first bootleg records ever made. "Dub" Taylor and Ken Douglas were quality-conscious perfectionists who pressed all their albums on coloured, virgin vinyl. They infamously released a series of Bob Dylan bootlegs in the 1960's called Great White Wonder, these bootlegs were made up of songs which Dylan had recorded at his label but had never released. The songs on these records are only surfacing now on Columbia's Bootleg Series. The fifth of this GWW series was the one I found. This one is printed on green virgin vinyl with the simple stamp in ink on the cover. It's got some great songs on it and as a piece of musical history it's a pretty special thing. I don't know how much it's worth, I went trawling and the nearest I found was a later release worth 200 US dollars. Here are some pictures.

Rocco's Weird Stuff: Tiny iron from another time

This tiny iron belongs to Rocco. We live with Rocco. He accumulates curious items that are quite often useless, but always in some way interesting. Rocco's Weird Stuff may come to be a recurring theme. 

This was found in a junk shop in Roundwood, Co. Wicklow for a fiver.