Category Archives: collecting

Forty Years On: Favorite Music from 1986 Part III

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Many of you already know the story. I mentioned it waaay back in the day and dubbed it ‘the Clarence Clemons Event‘. At some point between April 20th and 26th 1986 — a long-awaited spring break from my freshman year in high school — I personally discovered college radio. Oh, I knew it existed, I just never got much of a chance to listen to it, mainly because the family home was in a valley that cut off a lot of the more distant radio signals. That, and I was still somewhat enamored of MTV and rock radio. That would continue to be the case for some months to come, but the seed was sown when I stumbled upon WMUA, 91.1 FM, while searching for something to listen to one chilly night. From there on in, armed with the local library’s copy of The Trouser Press Record Guide (I’d own a copy soon enough), my obsession with acquiring music would slowly shift to the left of the dial. While it didn’t yet have the name ‘alternative’ linked to it, it certainly was quite an alternative to what the US pop and rock charts were providing me, and I was hooked.

**

The Art of Noise, “Paranoimia” single, released April 1986. Max Headroom, played by manic actor-comedian Matt Frewer, was a curious and distinctively 80s icon that started in early 1985 in Britain as a veejay, talk show host and central character in a sci-fi TV movie. He was so weird and anarchic yet so blazingly hilarious you couldn’t turn away. Eventually he showed up here on the single version of this surprise hit and would eventually have an American TV series in 1987-88.

The Fixx, Walkabout, released April 1986. I’d been somewhat of a fan of this band even though I hadn’t owned any of their work until much later. They were a mainstay on MTV and rock radio, always catchy yet slightly peculiar in their music and lyrics. I always liked their less-popular singles like “Built for the Future” and the brilliant the single “Deeper and Deeper” from the Streets of Fire soundtrack. Their music has surprisingly held up well over the years.

Soundtrack, Absolute Beginners, released 7 April 1986. I remember this Julien Temple movie being a huge deal when the movie came out, even though it ended up getting mixed reviews and not as big of a draw in the States. After all, this is a very British movie with a very British soundtrack, based on a very British coming of age novel. The Bowie theme song, however, fared much better, and it’s one of my favorites of his.

The Blow Monkeys, Animal Magic, released 7 April 1986. Speaking of things British, “Digging Your Scene” was a surprise hit in the States and got a lot of play on MTV and pop radio, with its cool, soulful style and jazzy grooves. It did reasonably well in the UK, and this one remains their most popular album.

The Art of Noise, In Visible Silence, released 14 April 1986. This group is more known for their quirky electronic experimentation and their occasional cult classic single (not to mention their always clever and memorable videos), so they may not have been a big seller, but one could always depend on being pleasantly entertained. This album was more a critic and fan favorite than a charter.

Cocteau Twins, Victorialand, released 14 April 1986. It would be another few years before I actively bought anything by this band (who would then become one of my all-time favorites, frequent Walkman go-to’s, and writing influences), but I do remember hearing about them in passing from the music writers out there. Surprisingly, I would not own this particular album until my freshman year in college.

Cameo, Word Up!, released 15 April 1986. Like I said, I was still listening to American Top 40 on the weekends (several of my mixtapes of the time used it as a source), and “Word Up” quickly became another favorite. It’s a silly soul-rap track but it’s catchy as hell. A shor time later, this would be the first cassette I’d buy when I joined the RCA Record Club.

Soundtrack, Legend, released 18 April 1986. Say what you will, I loved that Tom Cruise/Mia Sara/Tim Curry movie, which got its US release during this month. I’d even say this was an early influence on my writing, even though I wouldn’t actually try writing in the SF/F genre for another few years. The Tangerine Dream soundtrack was great, and I really liked the Bryan Ferry track that played during the ending credits.

Butthole Surfers, Rembrandt Pussyhorse, released 18 April 1986. This was another band I knew of thanks to music critics, even though I obviously would not hear anything from them on the radio, at least not until sometime in 1987 when I first heard “Sweat Loaf”. I do, however, remember WMUA mentioning them at one point.

Peter Gabriel, “Sledgehammer” single, released 21 April 1986. Previously, the former Genesis singer was more known for his strange and slightly unnerving songs and videos like “Shock the Monkey”, “Games Without Frontiers” and “I Don’t Remember”, so it was quite the unexpected delight to hear him drop the funkiest and catchiest single (and the most eye-popping video) he’d ever released as a teaser to his next album.

Siouxsie & the Banshees, Tinderbox, released 21 April 1986. Again, another band I’d heard of thanks to music critics and several rock history books I read at the time, although I’m pretty sure I’d heard “Cities in Dust” on MTV on minor rotation as well. It would be a while before I actually picked up her albums, and this was one of the first ones which I’d dubbed from a friend sometime in 1987.

**

I’d still listen to rock and chart radio probably at least until 1987 or so, and then remain somewhat aware of it thereafter — after all, I was an obsessive and wanted to keep tabs on several different genres, and still do to this day — but over the course of the next several months towards the end of the year, my music purchasing habits changed considerably. Whenever our family went to the mall or somewhere that had an indie record store nearby, you’d find me digging through the bins from A to Z and picking up albums, tapes and singles when I could afford them. I even started purchasing more blank cassettes to make even more radio-sourced mixtapes, going from a handful in 1985 to a few dozen in 1986. Two of them would be ‘crossover’ mixes, featuring my first recordings of college radio.

**

Next up: further to the left of the dial

Catching up on music with….Frank Zappa??

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For me, Frank Zappa is up there with the Grateful Dead, Phish, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and his infinite number of projects, and other bands and musicians that many of my friends in college loved and yet they never quite resonated with me until much later in life. Perhaps it was the high-level prog nerdiness and/or the low-level meandering jams that I just didn’t have the patience or the focus to check them out.

Until recently, that is, as I’ve been doing a bit of a deep dive with Zappa. Mind you, I’m quite familiar with some of his more well-known tracks like the VERY 80s track he did with his daughter, “Valley Girl”…

…or his occasional appearance on The Dr Demento Show with the classic “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow”…

…or the deep cut “Flower Punk” (a wonderfully bent take on “Hey Joe”) that my freshman year roommate played me one day…

…or the twitchy “G-Spot Tornado” that showed up on MTV’s 120 Minutes every now and again.

Zappa was definitely one of those musicians that musicians loved. He was also someone you’d hear on the more adventurous AOR and Progressive Radio stations, like I did when I used to listen to WMDK back in the late 80s. You knew he had a ridiculously large discography that spanned studio, stage, and genre. And he was also extremely vocal (and very erudite) against music censorship in the 80s, and spoke at the PMRC Senate hearings.

He’s recently found a place in my ever-growing music library, and I’m eventually going to make my way through his body of work. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get through it all, but I’d like to further understand what he was all about other than being the extremely intelligent and inquisitive weirdo with very little social filter.

Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions on what I should listen to! [And definitely let me know in the comments if there’s a biography about him that you think I’d enjoy!]

Which connection I should cut

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Yes, it’s come to that. I’ve finally admitted to myself that perhaps I should cull some of my digital music library, as it’s become unwieldy. As I’d recently mentioned to my friends on our Discord channel: I might keep the backups on the secondary external (which itself is getting a bit full), but I can definitely see where I have some tracks and albums that I haven’t listened to in way too long. I most likely downloaded some of this stuff because I’m a completist that’s obsessed with full discographies. Or I may have acquired it out of curiosity and it just never resonated with me. Or I heard a track on KEXP or elsewhere and thought I’d give the rest of the album a try.

Part of this was my lingering worry that the music on our Plex server is nigh on impossible to navigate because I have so much on there. But more importantly, I’ve long been at the point where music has stopped resonating so closely with me because I haven’t allowed it to get close. If I’m not listening to it more than a few times by next Friday when the new releases come out, some of it falls by the wayside to be forgotten. And that’s been happening for the last couple of years.

Mind you, it’s weird getting rid of things you no longer listen to when your music library is 100% digital. It’s not as if you can bring them to the local record store for cash or store credit. You just simply…select and delete. Like I said — I’m not completely deleting it, I’m just taking it off my main music external, so I’m not wasting money or anything. Just that I need to give myself time to become attached to the things I like and what resonates with me.

This is most likely going to be a long term culling project that I’ll do in increments over a long stretch of time. And hopefully out of all of this, I’ll reacquire that love for music that’s been eluding me for far too long.

Why do I not have…?

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I know I often go on about how stupidly huge my mp3 collection is (and it is), but quite often I find myself reading a music biography or hear a tune on the radio and realize…why do I not have more of this band’s music? Most embarrassingly, these are often well-known bands that I just never got around to picking up, most likely because I was too busy focusing on completing someone else’s discography, or being distracted by all the shiny new releases.

So, without further ado, I am about to embarrass myself by providing you with a bit of a selection of bands and singers whose songs I am sorely lacking from my library. I really should do something

I have exactly two Sly & the Family Stone songs — the above one and ‘Hot Fun in the Summertime’. I really need to rectify that. Especially since they’re a local band!

I’m also woefully missing out on a lot of Tamla/Motown stuff too. I grew up on a lot of this stuff playing on the radio and I love it, but I guess I’ve just been so distracted by alternative rock all these years that I keep forgetting to make good on adding it.

I have maybe five or six Byrds songs, and that’s it. They pretty much kickstarted the folk rock scene of the 60s and only now am I starting to appreciate that genre and its history.

Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” was one of my favorite mid-80s pop-rock songs, and I loved his work with The Power Station…so why do I only have Riptide, a few singles, and absolutely nothing else of his?

I was far too broke to catch up on a lot of early 90s music at the time it all came out — and there was a lot I had to catch up on — so I’m sadly missing a lot of the classic riot grrl/grunge scene. [As mentioned in a previous post, I was too busy focusing on the shoegaze stuff from the same era.]

Yes, even current bands are missing from my collection! I came to appreciate bands like Against Me! only recently, so I’ve been pretty much gathering those titles when and where I can.

*

Now that I have the time and the wherewithal (and now that I’ve caught up with so many other discographies), I’ve been slowly making my way through the histories of popular music and making mental notes. Many of these are songs and albums I can stream, or find in the dollar bins at Amoeba, or borrow from the library or elsewhere.

It’s a petty argument, I know…

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…but I just quit following a few music blogs that I’ve been following for quite a few years.

Why? Because they and many of their readers lost their shit yesterday when news broke that Phil Collins, following up with his recent reissue campaign, decided to release the numerous related-era b-sides and remixes as two digital-only compilations rather than physically on CD.

No, it wasn’t because of all the Phil Collins hate. I like his stuff just fine, but I’m not upset about that. I’m just exhausted by the digital hate.

People like myself, who once had a stupidly large physical collection of vinyl, cassettes and CDs but decided that having room for other things in their homes and their lives is just a little more important, have no issue with digital. Maybe it’s just me, having grown up listening to third-generation dubs from friends, that I don’t mind if the sound quality isn’t completely pristine. I’m here for the music, not for its perfection. I’m definitely of the school of Not Hearing an All That Noticeable Difference Between Digital and Vinyl and Not Caring Much Either Way. I love the fact that I can own so many complete discographies that take up an index card-sized external drive. I love that I can filter it any way I like — especially by release date. I love that I can make mix tapes by copying and bundling these same mp3s together.

I mean, I get the whole collecting thing. I used to be that person. I’ll still buy the occasional box set, especially if it’s a complete discography. I may even buy it if it’s a brand new and improved remaster. And I will definitely buy it if it’s Beatles-related. But you know how I am about collectibles. I have no space for them, no turntable or cassette player to play them on. And if they’re on cd, I’ll rip them to my collection and store them away, if I have room…and I may sell them for store credit at Amoeba at a future date. Back in the day I might have thought the mere idea of all this was heresy, but nowadays digital suits me just fine.

But let me tell you, it’s really damn irritating when a favorite band releases a new track that’s only available on a 7″ single selling for $25, or has a limited edition of 140 and only available on cassette during Record Store Day. These music blogs will fall over themselves with excitement about this sort of thing and shell out whatever money it takes, though, and I won’t take that away from them. That’s their jam, and they’re welcome to it.

I just feel left out and forgotten by the bands I happen to like when they pull this.

So when us digital people get a pleasant surprise project of things we’d like to pick up, it’s doubly irritating when those same collectors cry foul by refusing to download, shouting “no cd, no buy”, claiming label stupidity, questioning the business acumen of the musicians, and generally being pouty children. I can’t help but eyeroll. I even saw one state “why have it digital only when you can listen to it for free streaming?” Which, okay, some digital fans like streaming only, but there’s just as many of us out there who love being able to download. Not to mention there are numerous indie bands out there who are doing pretty good on bandcamp selling equal numbers of downloads and physical copies. To dismiss digital collectors like this is not only annoying as hell, it makes you sound like an elitist snob.

I’m just tired of that snobbery. I have other music blogs and sites to inform me of new releases. (AllMusic in particular seems to help greatly for me.) I’m tired of being lumped as Not a Real Fan because I don’t own the physical copy.

I just want to listen to the music I like, damn it. Is that too much to ask?

Singles Going Steady

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Some things do in fact come around again. Back in 1999 or so, during the back end of my HMV years, I remember both managers and distributor reps — and numerous music journos — saying that the single was a dying format. No one wanted to buy a cd with only four or five tracks on it (and most of those tracks being a nine-minute danceathon remix of a three-second sample of the song at that point). And certainly no one wanted to buy a cassette with those same tracks because who owns a tape deck anymore?

In the ensuing years, bands continued to release the occasional single, but only as a promo release, or a special to the fans, or a collectible for Record Store Day. It was no longer a major moneymaking format like its original ancestor nearly a century ago.

And yet, over the past five or so years, I’ve been seeing a significant uptick of releases from well-known bands dropping EPs of five or six tracks, or one-track mp3s. And they’re selling quite well. Not as high as back in the day, but well enough for them to make money.

Beck has been using this to exellent effect, having dropped numerous singles in between his album run of Modern Guilt, Morning Phase and Colors. Some of them, like “Dreams”, eventually ended up on albums, but many of them remain single-only releases. His current single “Saw Lightning” is another variation, one that Depeche Mode was known for back in the 80s: the teaser single. The new song that will most definitely be on the new album, which may or may not show up for another few months.

Other bands like Broken Social Scene and Belle & Sebastian have started releasing multi-volume EPs over the course of a year. Many groups have stated that this seems to be a more creative and less stressful way of recording and releasing music, as it affords them the time to work on a smaller batch of songs in between shows, business work, day jobs and family life. Failure did a variation on this last year, recording and releasing a full album as four EPs.

And from a commercial aspect, 2018 has shown that the single-only release has become a working format again. One of that year’s biggest singles — which won four Grammy Awards at that — was Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”…and to date it does not appear on any full album.

Even b-sides, the favorite of many avid collectors like myself, have not exactly fallen by the wayside, either. Instead, they will show up as true b-sides on collectible seven- or twelve-inch singles, rarities compilations for Record Store Day, or extra tracks for Expanded/Deluxe Editions. The latter will often be released on the same day as the regular edition and given a reasonable price point, often for only a few dollars more.

And lastly but QUITE importantly…the single is a perfect platform for the indie band who wants to put themselves out there, either one song at a time or as a calling card for more future music. This has become a career-saving outlet for bands who are not on major labels (or chose not to be, essentially ‘self-publishing’ via bandcamp and other online shopping sites). I can’t tell you how many great new songs and bands I’ve discovered on a single release over the last few years.

The resurgence of the single format in the music business is due to multiple and varying reasons, but I’d say the most important one is that labels and distributors have come to terms with how the average listener buys their music. The casual listener will use a streaming service and, if they’re dedicated enough, will download the single from one of the many online sites. I think they’ve also taken improved release schedules into account as well; we will rarely see multiple non-promotional singles dropping from already-released albums, but a teaser single a few months preceding the album is definitely on the upswing. Services like Amazon Music and iTunes will offer the single as part of the upcoming release, either on its own or as part of a pre-order, letting you buy the rest of the album at a reduced price.

It’s taken a long time for the business to catch up to the changes in collecting and listening over the last twenty years, but they’re finally catching up. And it’s working.

Dialing it back — just a little bit

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wrecka stow.gif

Quite possibly my favorite scene from a Prince movie…

One of my many resolutions for this year was to dial back the music purchasing.  And let’s be brutally honest here — I purchase a LOT of music.  Other guys with midlife crises buy sports cars or hang in their mancaves, I obsess over discographies and release dates.  Go figure.

Anyway, I’ve realized that while I do like to surround myself with a lot of tunage, I really have to dial it back.  Not the listening part of it, no — just the buying.  I came to this realization when I started going through my purchases over the last five or six years just to give them a listen, and noticed that a sizeable amount of these albums didn’t stick with me.  They were good albums and I liked them at the time…but five years on, I don’t remember this or that album at all.  Which is fine if I was still a cd purchaser, but you can’t sell mp3s back to Amoeba, can you?  I’m stuck with these puppies.

So…maybe I should figure out a way to dial that back.

As I’m an Amazon Prime member and thus an Amazon Music user, I have my own perfect streaming service.  (Many of you know that I’m not an avid user of services like Spotify…I have weird and quite varying tastes and I break algorithms easily.)  I can use it to listen to albums multiple times to see if it sticks with me before I buy it.  Which is what I’ve been doing the last few weeks.  I’ll give the albums at least three or four listens before I decide to buy it now.  I’ve successfully weeded out a few titles like that already, so this will save considerable money (and hard drive space) for me.

I’m quite curious to see how this will affect my overall purchasing over the year!

Listening versus collecting

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peanuts several hearings

[This is something I wrote on my Dreamwidth account this weekend but thought I’d revise it and post it here as well.  I don’t repost all that often, but figured this was something worth talking about here at WiS.]

I was thinking recently about the way I’ve been listening to music over the last few years. No big surprise there.

As far as expensive habits go, at least I’m not collecting cars that I won’t drive, or picking up housewares that I’ll never use. And I’ve always been pretty frugal about it, very rarely spending an absurd amount in one go.  I’ve gotten pretty good at finding sweet deals.  The more tunage I can get for my money, the happier I am.

But at the same time, I know I’ve made some purchases over the years where I’d probably have been better off streaming instead of buying, or maybe purchasing an album track or two.  These are albums that I liked but don’t listen to all that often.  Sometimes it’s the sound of the band that fascinates me, but the song or album as a whole doesn’t make an impression.  In the past, these would have been cds that I most likely would have brought to the record store in exchange for credit, but as I’m mostly a downloader these days, that method is impossible.

I was also thinking about some of the radio stations I’ll listen to online. There are some that have an interesting mix that keeps my interest, and there are others that adhere to a set rotation to the point where I get bored easily.  One particular station I’m thinking of was a favorite of mine, but now I rarely listen to them because they’ve been playing the same songs for the past 2-3 years that I’m not really a fan of.  As a former radio person, I understand the idea of set rotation, but it needs to be recycled after a few months otherwise you’ll lose a portion of your audience who really doesn’t want to hear that same damn Lumineers song for the 374,539,453rd time.

I also feel like I’m not quite immersed in the sounds when my listening habits are stretched too thin. Don’t get me wrong, there are some years where a ton of great albums come out and I love them all, but there’s only so many hours in the day where I can listen to the albums. Not to mention that I’m not listening to current albums all the time…sometimes I want to listen to something from a few decades ago, or a different genre altogether. For instance, I’ve been listening to the Beatles channel on SiriusXM lately because a) c’mon, it’s the Beatles, and b) it was a refreshing change from all the noise I’ve been trying to escape.

Perhaps my collecting habits are getting the best of me. There are moments where I’ll be a little too focused on trying to find a band’s entire discography and not enough on their music. The idea that I’d listen to their full work is there, but it doesn’t always work out…it really does depend on how connected I am to the music. I never really wanted to be a music collector for the sake of owning something — I find that a bit wasteful and pointless. This is precisely why I’ll pass on collectibles if I already own the songs.

Is this partly due to wanting to recapture the excitement of turning to a station and hearing favorite songs? Who knows. It might be part of it. But it’s definitely my collecting habits getting the best of me. I need to rein them in again.  I love buying albums on release days, but I don’t necessarily have to do so.  That’s partly why I signed up for Amazon Prime, so I could stream the albums where I’m on the fence.

This of course doesn’t mean that I’m giving up buying music I love; it’s merely that I need to be smarter about it.

Get off your ass and jam

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So apparently I did have a slice or two of P-Funk in my collection….just not the originals.


(samples “(Not Just) Knee Deep”)


(samples “Pumpin’ It Up”)


(samples “Let’s Play House”)


(samples “Man’s Best Friend”)


(samples “Mothership Connection”)


(samples “Come in Out of the Rain”)


(samples “Atomic Dog”)


(samples “Get Off Your Ass and Jam”)

Giving some of those early Funkadelic albums a listen and OH MAN are they tight. I have no idea why I didn’t get to them sooner.

It’s half past four and I’m shifting gears

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So I ended up buying the new Golden Earring box set, The Complete Studio Recordings, (at a pretty sweet deal — 28 cds for a little over $100, coming out to about $4 a cd) and I’m quite looking forward to giving it a listen.

They’re a band I’ve always wanted to hear more of, especially since their history reaches way back to the early 60s.  Most of you know them from their two US hits “Radar Love” (one of the best 70s bass lines ever) and “Twilight Zone” (one of the most memorable early 80s MTV videos).   I owned their Cut album for a long time and absolutely loved it as a kid.  I never got around to picking up more of their albums though, as they were often hard to find and were never a big draw in the US.

Still, they’re considered the Netherlands’ biggest rock band and what I have heard of their early stuff I quite enjoy.  Including their amazingly ridiculous yet fascinating seventeen-minute prog cover of The Byrds’ “Eight Miles High”.

It’s going to take me a while to sift through this collection, but I’m looking forward to it!