Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
scott@scottlongonline.com
One thing I will miss when music completely shifts over to downloads is the pile of shame which is the bargain bin. To be honest, the bargain bin hasn't truly been the same since the demise of albums, as any flop during the days of the LP would have the further scarlet letter of having its corner cut off. These record covers had the cut-out because I'm guessing it would make the original purchasers feel better about being big enough suckers to pay full price before it was marked down to $3.99.
The biggest portion of the bargain bin was filled by artists who had a huge selling prior release, only to follow up with a stiff. A great example of a classic bargain binner was Peter Frampton's "I'm in You" (or as call it, "Frampton Becomes Dead"), as it quickly got around that this release was a dog. I'm convinced that the biggest reason "Frampton Comes Alive" was so big was Peter's use of the vocal box. It was the only funky thing on album rock radio in the 70's and bringing a little P-Funk and Roger Troutman (Zapp) to the caucasian masses made it stand out. Frampton's studio albums never featured the vocal box, which left his songs too sterile, which is the reason his live songs were the ones played on the radio.
The next evolution in music happened because Compact Discs didn't get easily scratched like LP's, so the used business became a profitable concept. At one point there were lots of second hand disc shops who would gladly offer you 3 or 4 bucks for the brand new CD you just purchased the week before. Like a pawn shop for music, the majority of the discs that were sitting in the racks of these stores were offered up by junkies and desperate gamblers who needed to come up with some dough to make their next score.
With the advent of Napster and then the Ipod, the used CD store is quickly disappearing, much like the independent music shops withered away at the end of the last decade. While it's nice to be able to go to Amazon or Half.com and push a button to find about any used disc you want, I will miss the fun of spending an hour in a brick and mortar building looking for some buried treasure on the cheap.
Another fun thing I would do at a second hand CD store was count how many of some former smash hit had been sold back because people came to their senses and realized, "yo, why did I buy this in the first place?"
Below are my 5 favorites of the CD era that the masses jumped on initially and then within a couple of years were offering up at the local cd warehouse for less than a college student gets back for their textbooks after finals.
(On this subject, I remember selling a economics textbook I bought for $45 bucks at the beginning of the semester for $4 bucks at the end of it. Just to add a box of sea salt to the fresh head wound they were giving me, the shyster paid me in 2 dollar bills. It was his way of saying "not only am I bending you over, but I'm giving you currency that merchants would ask could you pay them in canadians coins instead?" One bonus from this experience was that it was a much better lesson in supply and demand than anything the textbook offered.)
Scott's Top 5 Used Music Returns of the CD Era
1. Hootie and the Blowfish: "Cracked Rear View Mirror"- Never understood the Hootie sensation that happened, as they were to me a second-rate Huey Lewis and the News. Despite their frat band sound, they sold over 16 million copies of this sleep-inducer. Another topic for the future is worst music video of all-time. The one that the (really)blowfish did with golfing and Dan Patrick in it has to be up there.
2. Spin Doctors: "Pocket Full of Kryptonite"**- During the time when jam bands were hitting big, the Spin Doctors were able to keep the songs short and add enough white-boy funk to sell like crazy. They put out a really bad second release and then the lead singer lost his voice and they were pretty much finished. If you don't think this guys were big, they appeared on Sesame Street. (Go to Amazon.com and buy this release for a penny!)
3. Jewel: "Piece of You"- Yeah, I get the cute snaggletooth smile which was augmented by the ample rack, but did anyone ever listen to this disc 2 years later? The answer would appear to be no, considering the ample copies sitting in the racks of used record stores.
4. Creed: "Human Clay"- I loathe these fakers of the lord, who blasphemed Eddie Vedder in a way that Scott Weiland even had to feel sick listening to. "Thou shalt not believe in false prophets" was not heeded by the more than 10 million sinners who purchased this hackfest. By now, most of the buyers of Creed have seen the errors of their ways and have repented, trying to sell this platter of puke to any flea market that will take them off their hands.
5. Norah Jones: "Come Away with Me"**- The first single, "Don't Know Why" was the best Billie Holiday song not recorded by the lady sings the blues. The title track is also a gem, but the rest of the disc is warmed over Diane Krall. Jones is a real talent, as her second release much more completely shows, but considering her debut was the biggest selling record of this decade, it's the most recent release I could think of which leads the way in filling the bargain bins.
Please list your nominees for the Used CD bargain bin champion. Let me give you a few guidelines.
Do not list artists like Celine Dion, Garth Brooks, or Shania Twain who have multiple big selling releases.
Let's stay away from American Idols like the Backstreet Boys and Paula Abdul, as it's too easy to list them. I'm looking for offerings that were not aimed mainly at teenyboppers.
No Clay Aiken. Come on, it's too easy.
** This denotes that the author was one of the bandwagon jumpers who ended up selling these CD's later on at a substantial loss.
Can I nominate "Resident Alien" by Spacehog?
and anything by Bush (the band, with the dude who married Gwen Stefani)?
My nomination for the Bargain Bin HOF is "File Under: Easy Listening" by Sugar. There's at least one in every used bin I've ever browsed, and those green Rykodisc jewel cases always stand out like a sore thumb (and they're usually broken).
Oh, I think a lot of the hyped Brit bands find there way in there. The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Blur, etc. People buy the hype.
How about Sponge or Candlebox - fake ass grunge??
Spacehog nearly made it into my yard sale pile as well, but I actually found 3 tracks I enjoy. Usually my cut off is two or less = time to sell (or throw away).
This is probably a tangent now, but the one I discovered in my collection, which I bought in high school, is Dangerous Toys. Hair metal, and I couldn't even bring myself to rip one track. What was I thinking? (Oh yeah, some of my friends liked it, and it had cool cover art.)
Sugar is a great band, while Sponge and Candlebox didn't quite sell enough to make this list. Now I think Bush's first release is a great example for this category. Their first album was very hack, but I've always given them a bit of a pass, as I think their guitar player is awesome. They did become a little more original as their career went along, though of course their sales went down along with it.
If this was a list of bargain binners in England, I'm sure Oasis would be at the top. Since Oasis' first couple albums were really good, I kept them away from this list, as I was looking for more first or second albums that the masses made part of the zeitgeist, only for them to want to sell them back after they came out of the fog.
A better example than Norah Jones just might be Linkin Park, as they sold a ton of their rap/rock stuff, which I'm guessing half of their owners would sell back to you for pocket change.
And they were huge, huge sellers. To the Extreme was the album that knocked Please Hammer Don't Hurt Em off the top of the charts.
In fact, there could be a lot of hip hop on this list, since either artists' sound tend to get dated quickly, or the abundance of one-album wonders.
DMX is an artist I can think of whose albums I'd like to send back.
I disagree with Norah Jones, and disagree with the replacement, Linkin Park. I think a lot of people who owned Linkin Park still own the albums.
Any album by Limp Bizkit on the other hand...
Although, specifically Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, which just pretty much flopped.
After five years of waiting, Metallica's Load and ReLoad sold huge, but were pretty much hated by Metallica fans. Two weeks later, you could find them in any used CD store for half off.
There's also the opposite: Albums you found in the bargain bin because people hated, but they were actually really good albums.
The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique and Pearl Jam's Vitalogy are the two albums I always think of in that situation. Everyone thought those albums sucked when they first came out, and then a few years later, you'd go back, and it'd be like, "Hey! This is dope!"
Anyway, I once read that the most-returned album of the 90s was Sugar Ray's first hit album, "Floored"; my friend Adam had it, and you could tell why: There was that song, "Fly", that was a hit, and everything else was crappy, sludgy, run-of-the-mill punk-metal.
In the vein of Sam's "opposite", I'd say that Aphex Twin's "Richard D James" is the album I most often notice in bargain bins -- it's noisy and frequently ugly, and people who bought it for "Girl/Boy Song" or "Milkman" probably are turned off by the drill 'n' bass routine.
Also, I once found a copy of Sly & the Family Stone's "Anthology" in a bargain bin at Amoeba, priced at three bucks. Lucky for me, sad for whomever sold it -- I mean, "Thank You (for Lettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" is worth three bucks all by itself!
The one thing about this discussion is that you have two categories - one hit wonders (and the rest of the cd that sucks) and trends that catch on across the country.
I think Creed and Hootie fall into that latter category and when everyone realizes that just because it's trendy doesn't mean it's good, they realize what they're listening to really sucks. The Mararena craze comes to mind. To that category I would think there has to be a ton of Goo Goo Dolls, Harry Connick Jr, Chris Issack, Train.
The former category is what I think fills up more used bins - one hit wonders where the rest of the disc sucks. And THAT is the beauty of iTunes. I know Augustana sucks. I don't need to hear the whole disc. But I like Boston, so I can buy one song. My former collection of hardware is filled with horrible cd's but each with one song I dig (and maybe a 2nd upon further listening). To that category I will add Eve 6, SR-71, Goldfiner, Lit, Marcy Playground, The Shins, Verve Pipe, etc.
And a final category I think would be songs that the public liked and then heard the whole album and it was a totally different genre. Goo Goo Dolls, A Boy Named Goo, was a not a soft album although everyone bought it for "Name". Green Day - pick an album. The Offspring.
OT - I was listing to old Remy Zero the other day. There's a band that really flew under the radar. I heard they had the title track to a couple WB shows. What an inglorious way to die.
The one album I seem to see in bargain bins more than any other is Extreme's III Sides To Every Story. And, I'm not ashamed to admit, I can't understand why anybody would sell that back. Cretins.
13 - I would disagree with Green Day, those guys have been surprisingly resiliant, much more so than I expected way back when I first started listening to them. My 14 year old sister told me she actually had this conversation last year -
Friend: "Wow, did you know Green Day has a bunch of older songs too???"
Sister: "Um, you mean the ones my brother has made me listen to MY WHOLE LIFE?"
5 - Be Here Now is a terrific album, it really does bridge their first phase with their most recent work very well.
Oh, and who else actually bought the "Night at the Roxbury" soundtrack for that one song from the SNL sketches, you know which one I'm talking about...?
http://www.eonline.com/On/Single/
http://www.thesuperficial.com/archives/2006/01/31/lisa_loeb_in_a_thong.html
Lisa Loeb is wearing a thong now. That's what she does. And a tv show or something. I don't know, as I didn't read the article.
Scott, you are correct: Sugar does indeed rock.
If you have never listened to 'Workbook' or 'Black Sheets of Rain', do so immediately.
That said, her music is really bland. Or at least that one song was. I haven't heard any of the rest of it.
Can't say I ever saw much Britpop, but maybe that's because I would snatch it up if I did. Except for the last Happy Mondays studio album and the live one, both of which were spotted used in abundance.
Someone scored Anthology by Sly for 3 bucks? Dang! I had to subsidize my purchase of it by selling my copy of their Greatest Hits....
I like Norah.
As the previous poster noted, MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice are obvious but classic examples, and you can add Ace of Base to that list.
Always available at my outlet 6 months after release was the album with "The Future's so Bright, I gotta wear shades", I (perhaps appropriately) forget the name of the band and the album.
Typically it seems that bands who hit with some sort of novelty sound are prime candidates. Think everybody held tight to that Buster Poindexter debut album long after its release?
Lots of Paul Westerberg solo albums in bargain bins, which surprised me a bit.
Eric Clapton - Backless. Used to always be in the bins.
I can see why Westerburg's in the bins. His solo albums aren't that good. I 86'd all of mine.
One of these things is not like the other. The Shins are actually a good band. Although, I prefer Oh, Inverted World to Chutes too Narrow. Too many people jumped on the bandwagon after Garden State and the O.C., but if you are a fan of 60's pop, these guys are great.
*Please list your nominees for the Used CD bargain bin champion. Let me give you a few guidelines.
Do not list artists like Celine Dion, Garth Brooks, or Shania Twain who have multiple big selling releases.
Let's stay away from American Idols like the Backstreet Boys and Paula Abdul, as it's too easy to list them. I'm looking for offerings that were not aimed mainly at teenyboppers.
No Clay Aiken. Come on, it's too easy.*
I should have also put some kind of units sold measure, as most of the acts listed in the comments sold less than a million copies.
Vanilla Ice and Hammer are American Idol rap. I wasn't going for pop music.
Macy Gray is a great choice, as she sold waaay more Cd's than she ever should of. I would put her in place of Norah Jones. Let me resate, I think Norah is incredibly talented and has a couple great songs on her debut, but the rest of the disc is pretty lame and has had millions selling it back or using it as a coaster.
Candlebox is really a good choice.
Those two terrible 'Illusion' albums from Guns and Roses were everywhere as well.
My local store has a new arrivals section, and since I stop in once a week that's usually the only used section i look at. I can't count the number of times I've seen in filled with 10 Morrissey CD's, or 8 Cure albums, or the entire catalouge of My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. That's always shocked me, I can see not liking a particualr disc; but selling off everything by one artist?
Example 1: Jesus Jones, DOUBT, which went platinum on the strength of "Right Here, Right Now". I love both the album and the band (their 1997 album ALREADY is even better, to my ears), and I don't understand the massive rejection of this album. Stylistically and quality-wise, the album follows nicely on the single, while also having variety (it's not "Right Here" and 11 inferior copies). Perhaps the single's optimism about the post-Berlin-Wall world started to embarrass people?
Example 2, a quite different case: Primitive Radio Gods, ROCKET, also a million-seller. This had that single "Standing outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand", where the mumbly white guy duets with a sample of B.B. King singing "I been downhearted, baby" over a drum loop. An immediate mega-hit single, which gave no indication that the rest of the album was a very 1980's sounding hard-rock album.
This, of course, explains perfectly why the album showed up in the used bins en masse. I think it's a darned good 1980's-sounding hard-rock album, though. You could fault the marketers who picked the single, but how do you record a song like "Standing..." and not let the world now?
Commenter 28: i've known people who sell off entire catalogs. The reasons i've seen are
- Urgent need for money
- Urgent demands of new life-partner
- Embarrassed outgrowing of old stylistic preferences. (This may be the most tempting. My wife has not sold off all her Slayer or Nuclear Assault albums, but she hasn't listened to them since college either; others in her shoes have gone for the extra cash.)
I often imagine a fantasy world where 90's english music and not grunge reshapped america. I'd trade My Bloody Valentine for Nirvana in a heart beat.
Mase: Hip-Hop/Rapper who I frankly thought was going to be bigger than he was.
Coolio: From the "thought it was good but now I see..." pile. See Macy Gray comments from above.
Maria Muldaur "Greatest Hits": This one hurt to see since I was literally the only guy on the playground who dug her. She still plays, still sounds great and doesn't give two hoots for how famous she might've been.
The Scorpions: I tried to warn my nephew but would he listen? Noooo...
Billy Ray Cyrus "Some Gave All": Like Brittney Spears, no one I know has ever confessed to owning the music, even when they had it blaring in their CD player.
I checked the bargain rack since this thread was on my mind. Jewel: "Piece of You" was there.. .LOL spot on Scott. No Norah though. The store guy could not recall if he had seen any of Norah's albums. I am still looking to pick one up for cheap for my female friend just to see her reaction ( not really sure if she likes Norah but I have a hunch she may ).
Great list, Scott.
I have a few more
Everything by David Lee Roth
Night Ranger "7 Wishes"
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