This Is Boston, Not UK

The Born Again album was a large hole in my Black Sabbath collection. When I saw Doug post about the record four years ago, it became obvious which pressing I was going to need...the UK Vertigo pressing with those custom labels.

I had actually bought a copy though Discogs a couple years ago, but even though it was listed as a UK pressing, it turned out to be a Dutch pressing with the Vertigo UFO labels. Nope. That was not going to cut it. It was pretty cheap, so I didn't make a fuss, and I just gave it to a friend that wasn't concerned with the pressing info...but it still left me without a copy in my collection.

The album is easy enough to track down, but I kept dragging my feet on actually grabbing one. I got tired of the procrastination and added the record to my Top Wants of 2018 list, hoping it would finally push me to make a move and buy one. No matter how great I think Born Again is, or how many moves I made to keep this on my radar, seven months into 2018, it was still sitting there on my Want List. I'd picked up the mission again, and started looking around for a copy recently...and then Marcus unexpectedly came to the rescue, and delivered one right into my hands.

Marcus was overcoming a serious fear of flying, and was making a trip from the UK to spend a couple weeks visiting the US. His first stop was Boston, and I was looking forward to finally meeting him in person. We've had this online/blog relationship for probably over eight years now, so it was great to finally connect face to face, meet his girlfriend, and spend some time hanging out and doing some records shopping.

We arranged to meet in Boston Common, and I had his copy of the new Battle Ruins LP that I'd picked up for him, and he surprised me with a small gift...the UK Vertigo pressing of Born Again. So happy to be able to finally cross this off the list, and to have it hand delivered from a friend in the UK made it even better.