R e t a i l  E p h e m e r a

29 November 2018

This is a label that I only have one release by, and God Lives Underwater, while a popular band at the time, isn’t one that really stuck with me.  I had to visit YouTube to remember what their big songs sounded like.  The songs are in that vague “good enough” category where anything I liked about a particular song reminded me of another band I liked more.

27 November 2018

This is a big post for me, in every sense.  I lived in the UK from January 1991 to January 1993, and Andy's Records was a fixture of the Cambridge area.  My particular time in East Anglia was during the beginning of a period of success for the chain, which did very well until downturns in 2000 and after, until 2003 when the last of the locations closed.  Most became other record stores, closing due to the crunch of larger retailers such as HMV and Virgin on the mass-market end and Music Zone on the smaller end.  I wasn't around for the downfall, just the upswing.

Andy's Records was a good regional chain to get British music.  As an American in the UK, most releases I was listening to at the time tended to be British or American, which meant there were four options for buying music:

1 - American releases from British retailers.  This was a combination of British domestic releases and expensive American imports.  Compound this by the fact the British Pound was about $1.75-1.85 for most of my stay there.  In fact, I was there for Black Wednesday, which was sort of the "first Brexit" - the day which caused the UK to unlink the British Pound from the ECU, the abstract accounting unit which was the forerunner to the Euro.  When I and my friends watched the pound slide from $2 to $1.60 in a matter of a couple of months, that was the impetus to pretty much change our schedules, stop what we were doing and head to London immediately to spend a several hundred pounds each on music.  We were, after all, paid in American dollars, so our buying power on the local economy had just increased substantially. 2 - American releases from American retailers.  This was an option at RAF Lakenheath or RAF Mildenhall since AAFES ran stores (the Base Exchanges) with a reasonable selection of mostly new music and the selection wasn't bad for the more popular end of my tastes.  Another means was to buy music from American retailers when you went home on vacation.  There was also mailorder since the public internet (see Label · 21st Circuitry for that Gordian knot of differentiation) did not exist yet, but shipping on those orders was generally high enough that it only made sense to do so if you could pool orders together with three or four friends - that's even taking into account the fact that we all had US AE PO Box shipping addresses in addition to local British addresses. 3 - British releases from American retailers.  Imports were probably the poorest of the four options in terms of overall expense.  CDs were not only overpriced, but they were also often overpriced based on a historically stronger pound.  With US domestic reissues, the only advantage is that it was typical for these CDs to contain extra tracks which were not otherwise available to the American market, often to increase the value proposition and to make it unnecessary to release specific EPs or singles in the US. 4 - British releases from British retailers.  These were usually the "full, original album" devoid of extra tracks tacked on.  At the time, I'm sure I saw this as a disadvantage, but now I appreciate the artistic intent of a conceptual whole of the album as originally conceived.  The extra tracks are often enjoyable, but better suited for an anthology release.

Andy's Records was actually very good at #4, but it was surprisingly reasonable in terms of British prices for imports.  It didn't make it a better retailer to get American releases from when there was a way to get them elsewhere (such as AAFES or when visiting home), but if they had something that was only released in France, Italy, Germany, or Japan, Andy's prices weren't exactly bargain-bin close-outs, but they weren't bad, either.

Andy's Records was the sort of record store that music lovers expect out of a small regional chain that isn't necessarily a specialty shop:  down to earth, helpful staff, and not an "experience" like the beastly thing that the Virgin Megastore was, and not a more comprehensive experience you'd expect if you were to go all the way into London for the big Tower Records store there.  Between making more common album purchases at AAFES and Andy's Records in local towns such as Bury St Edmunds or Cambridge, you could use the time in Tower Records to look for more obscure albums, which was a good plan, since that was a two hour bus ride each way, which only left at certain times of the day.

Adorable was a darling of the London music press for a very brief period of time.  They created one album and a few singles worth of music which, if it had come out a bit later, surely would have been pigeonholed as "Britpop".  They were promoted so heavily by NME (referenced here) that they became subject to a bidding war which Creation eventually won, and the easy fame and stress of becoming the Rock Band to Save Indie Rock (all together now!) was too much and they broke up shortly after.  But I'll be damned if this isn't a blueprint of how to do fantastic slightly noisy guitar pop.

This was a representative example of something Andy's Records was great for - filling out a collection of British music locally when the latest releases and reissues weren't all that new.  This was one of the strengths which built the chain.

An underrated album in The Cure's discography, probably due in part due to the fantastic Pornography which comes before and The Head on the Door which comes after.  I am far less enamoured of The Head on the Door than most fans of The Cure; The Top is a more paranoid, satisfying album.

This was one of two live Cure albums which weren't released in the US market at the time, so getting this at Andy's wasn't just reasonably-priced, it was easily the best way to do so from a completionist standpoint.

This Peel Session is fantastic, and like the Siouxsie & The Banshees Peel Session and a few others, has been re-released in a couple of forms with completely different artwork.  To say that John Peel was an amazing force in British and American music and that his influence was perhaps exceeded by the breadth of his tastes is as pointlessly obvious to state in some circles as it is necessary in others.

Speaking of Siouxsie & The Banshees, this is that wonderful little one-off project which featured Robert Smith of The Cure and Steven Severin of Siouxsie & The Banshees, as well as a singer one of Severin's bandmates was a friend of.

This is one of those albums that was going to be expensive no matter how it was purchased.  I'm not sure what the writing on the price stickers represented, there's no real clarity there: does it represent the stocker, store, buyer?  Some of them aren't even legible to me.

As if to drive the previous point home, three early Pink Floyd albums, including the first two, and the writing isn't consistent on the first two of the band’s albums, which are the top and bottom of this stack.

I believe I also had a number of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath records from Andy's.  Eventually, I ended up selling off most of my "classic rock phase" and my "traditional heavy metal" phase albums, but those two artists I probably could have kept around.  Pink Floyd was a band I've always enjoyed, and it preceded those two phases.  As much respect as I have for Ronnie Dio—he held himself to the gold standard for how rock stars should treat their fans and was known for being gracious and making time for them even during rough tour schedules—his era of Black Sabbath is not one which ever made much of an impact on me, musically, so I probably wouldn't have kept the few Dio-era Sabbath albums I had, were I to have kept any.

More Siouxsie & The Banshees and more Peel sessions.  As I mentioned, this is another of those Peel Sessions that has been reissued a few times, so I'm happy to have a matching pair for this one and The Cure, as the two groups had some overlap.  The vinyl is just decor in terms of this photo, being a much more recent purchase.

22 November 2018

This post is, admittedly, not "high concept", just a mere curiosity.  This Autechre EP Gantz Graf is the only case I have of its size, though I have no doubt there are many others.  There are also other standard cases which are similar in thickness to the standard CD jewel case which I don't have examples of, such as HDCD, SACD, etc.  There was usually a successful branding with these later discs to provide customers with a jewel case style experience just different enough from the standard case that, if you were looking for it, you could easily identify it, often by changing the proportion or corners just slightly.

This Autechre case was designed to hold two discs, the CD and an accompanying DVD.  I suspect its primary purpose was to stand out, as the standard-width jewel case that held two CDs was already quite common at this point, and Autechre's Tri Repetae+++ had already been released in such a case.  Gantz Graf appearing in this style of case was almost certainly meant to put the customer on notice that this was something slightly different.  I would also argue that it's a career highlight, but that's another matter—the few opening bars of “Gantz Graf” has been my ring and alarm tone for about eight years now, and I've never been slightly motivated to change it.

It made me curious whether there was any rhyme or reason to the sizes of the various cases in relation to one another.

The Gantz Graf CD is smaller than the boondoggle of many collections, the original two-CD jewel case.  While both of these cases contain a lot of space for a rather substantial booklet of liner notes, neither of these releases actually have booklets which would tax even a normal single-CD jewel case.  The Autechre release only has a single-sheet bifold.  As I said, physically, these releases could be held in jewel cases no thicker than standard releases as more efficient jewel cases were developed, though as my CDs have aged, some of those two-CD jewel case designs are clearly much hardier designs for long-term use than others have proved to be.  Like the two-CD cases, the thicker case of /Gantz Graf/ allows uninterrupted artwork and typography on the side.  It would have been a more attractive solution had it been more widespread.

In fact, here's how this DVD+CD case matches up to a standard jewel case, and it's actually Tri Repetae+++, one of those two-CD jewel cases that were designed better than others.  Some two-cd cases with more clear plastics tend to be more fragile now, which is unfortunate, as they also allow for more attractive designs, but for Tri Repetae+++, it works well, since this album is a single colour with no text.

On a whim, I picked up a slimline CD single case, and this along with a standard jewel case is almost exactly the size of the combined DVD + CD case used for the Gantz Graf release.  I can't hazard an authoritative guess as to whether this was intentional, but as it doesn't seem to solve any problems by being intentional, I suppose it wasn't.

On the subject of the CD single, it was always a more fragile beast than the CD jewel case, and at a bit over half the thickness, I was curious what the lowest multiple of each it would take to get an even stack.  You know, for science.

The stack ended up being a lot more convenient than I feared, only requiring a three-high CD single stack and two CD jewel cases to come out almost perfectly even.  I toyed around with those clunky two-CD cases, but they come out to such an odd dimension and never working out quite right that it ended up being unsatisfying and I just put them all back.

20 November 2018

For the last major type of posts (the other two being "Concept" and "Store"), the "Label" posts are going to introduce ephemera specific to record labels.  This will mostly be limited to CD inserts and, unlike price tags, not be an exhaustive collection—if I have five identical instances of a specific reply card, I'm going to detail the first I come across, and I photographed these going through the collection alphabetically, with compilations coming toward the end.  Any of these which show up as compilations is a demonstration that I don't have anything from the label outside compilations, soundtracks, tribute albums, and related material.

Typically, as I mentioned in a previous post, I don't want to get into "record reviews" of a 20-year-old label compilation.  These are going to be nearly impossible to find in a physical record store, and the only real market is the second-hand market.  The "support the artist" argument for actually buying a record like this in 2018 is utterly facile—the label ceased to exist in 1998, the same year of this release, releasing only two more albums after this album, artists typically stop getting paid when a label goes under, and the ugly truth is that retail sales of albums isn't how most artists are paid in the first place, now, in 1998, or in 1958.  Most artists are paid by touring, and merch at tours.  Even under the best record deals, artists are typically paid $0.10-$0.25 per sale of their own album.  But more on that later under "The CD as Tour Souvenir".  Appearances on compilations are not lucrative for artists, to say the least.

As far as the difficulty of obtaining something like this on streaming services, this is a great example of why solutions like that aren't complete solutions for many people.  The Luxt track is there, but that's it.  Spotify would have to hunt down whoever owns the rights to 21st Circuitry's catalogue to even bother with something like this; label compilations are a frequent casualty of streaming economics, this is common when the label is small, as 21st Circuitry was, and particularly unfortunate when the compilation is actually good, as Newer Wave and Newer Wave 2.0 were.  The return on investment for Spotify for doing that much legwork is incredibly low, and really only works in reverse–some company acquires 21st Circuitry's catalogue, probably with the intent to re-press key albums, and an eye to target feeding the back catalogue to streaming services like Spotify to pull in some relatively low-effort residual cash to fund future projects.

There are, of course, other methods of obtaining albums like this that often have very little to do with the economics of buying a CD or a streaming service, and they're treated quite differently for reasons which are often quite hypocritical—the first is YouTube, where the listener is fairly given a free pass on the supposed moral ramifications of listening to a song that literally nobody is able to legally "monetize" under a label-dominated intellectual property structure, and the second is file sharing.  File sharing is treated as a moral outrage despite the fact that the artists will literally receive as much money from it as they did from my walking into a Harmony House and paying the princely sum of $4.88 since I almost certainly purchased it after 1998.  The same would have been true had I bought it as a cut-out (more on that later), or at a second-hand music store, or today via Amazon or eBay.  Rather than take a rational look at whether any particular aspect of intellectual property law makes sense, however, we shroud it in meaningless phrases like "support the artists" without examining whether any particular act actually does.  Make no mistake, there are many ways to spend money on an album which either do not "support the artist" either in any meaningful way or in any way at all, and there are many ways to get music for free which are entirely legal which are different from other ways of getting music for free which are entirely illegal whose differences to the end listener are mostly matters of delivery mechanism, convenience, legal fictions, or which website or software one uses.  This is not a matter of agenda, as I am not advocating any particular agenda here, it is an easily documentable fact.  Whew.  What agenda I will reveal, however, is that this and its predecessor album, with wider exposure, might have been good enough on their own to justify this label by themselves.  They're very fun:  exclusive (I believe) industrial dance covers of 1980s New Wave hits, which is a spot-on combination in terms of influences and audience.  It may not have been tenable for the long-term unless 21st Circuitry had a stable of artists under its own imprint, but Cleopatra could easily have taken this formula and ran with it as well.  They came close to it, but usually focused on single-artist tributes of wildly varying quality.

There's some delicious tangents out of the way.  On to the regular staple of Label posts:  the reply card.  I've got a lot of these because if I've ever turned any of them in, I simply don't recall ever doing it.  Maybe I did send one or two in for a favorite band early on and stopped since I never got much out of it, or maybe I stopped since I never got anything out of it, I'm not sure.  I never quite grasped the value proposition.  By the time the CD era kicked in and I was buying them with my own money, I was toward the end of high school and they were still quite expensive.  By the time I was buying them frequently, I was in the military, and while I signed up for six years and was almost positive I wasn't going to re-enlist after those six years (and didn't), and even though that only covered two different assignments, it still involves a considerable amount of address instability:  Basic Training, Technical School, an AE zip code where you're overseas but you have what is effectively a US PO Box zip code for most purposes, then in the US, a series of apartments, and eventually a townhouse.  I'm not entirely sure what a person was expected to receive:  more little catalogues of the sort that CDs already came with, US Letter or European A4 printed sheets of new label releases, swag?  I'm sure if it was swag, someone would have clued me in and I would have actually bothered.  The concept of new releases is helpful enough, as this period I'm mostly talking about—1990 to 1999—largely either predates the internet or is concurrent with the internet.

Be sure that by "the internet" I mean the public internet, not the military, university, and contractor internet which is the predecessor to which it owes everything but bears almost no relationship to in terms of culture—the dividing line for culture is quite simple, on that early internet, the closest thing you could be to a normal person and be on it was a university student in particular universities in particular computer labs, and the culture was hemmed in by the requirement that no commercial activity was allowed over the NSFNET, making it a culturally separate creature from the public internet post 1995.  This makes the internet before May 1995 and after quite distinct.  For all real intents, we can talk about April 1995 as "pre-internet" in terms of what we actually use the internet for today, who uses it, and how many people use it.

In that pre-internet era, getting information about new releases wasn't exactly handy compared to today, that much I can admit.  But if you were an active consumer of music, even the increasingly niche corners of musical interest I was getting into at the time, it wasn't exactly obscure gnostic mysticism (unless it was Current 93, then it may have literally been that, but I wasn't interested in David Tibet yet).  I found out about new music and "new to me music" that wasn't new the same way my friends with the best taste did:  by raiding the collections of my friends to find out what was worth borrowing and then buying, scouring record stores relentlessly, some of the few good music shows (120 Minutes Europe on MTV Europe was much better than the US version when someone would either buy a subscription to Sky TV or more likely ... ahem ... hook it up illegally involving a weird proprietary wrench), and most importantly, the best music magazines.

The best music magazines for what I was into at the time included Spin (which wasn't great, but often included short reviews about better albums), AP (which was better), NME (which covered a very broad range of music, but was printed frequently and was huge at the time, both in terms of pages and reach—this was a British magazine which was printed in tabloid newspaper form), and to a slightly lesser extent, Melody Maker (NME's rival which was, at the time, physically similar and a bit more interested in pop music than NME).

Unlike many people, the public internet wasn't a revelation for me, it was an improvement of an older idea.  That older idea wasn't the science-and-military pre-public internet, however.  That older idea was BBS culture typified in the 8-bit and 16-bit consumer computer era, mostly the Commodore 64.  When I'd left the BBS scene in September 1990 to start military training, I didn't have the opportunity to have any actual leisure time until my first assignment in the UK in January 1991.  While I had my C64 there, and purchased my Amiga 500 there from a fellow American (getting a UK PAL system instead of a US NTSC machine would have introduced a lot of unnecessary complications once I had the system back in the US that any retrocomputer YouTuber will happily nod at), what I didn't have running is my handy Volks6480 1200 baud modem—using a US modem in the UK wasn't just a bad idea, it wasn't possible for local systems, and for long distance calls, it would have been some combination of incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and incredibly illegal—there was no possible way to do it that would not have actually covered some of all of those grounds.  Getting a new UK modem and exploring the UK BBS scene would have still been incredibly difficult and incredibly expensive, due to technical considerations not entirely worth getting into involving electricity, device compatibility, and the considerable expense of getting a private line into the dorms in the early 1990s.  The dorms had both UK and US power, but that only solves one part of one of the problems.  When my second assignment brought me to the US in January 1993, I re-connected to the BBS scene at the height of its power shortly before its death due to the public internet.

This BBS scene—particularly the version of it which I encountered upon my return to the US—was quite good for having discussions about music, including new releases.  Part of this had to do with the venue—the DC-Baltimore corridor rather than a disappointing rural Michigan bedroom community—but a lot of it had to do with technology, most notably FidoNet, which allowed for distributed conversations.  With FidoNet, it didn't matter if nobody else in your county knew about an artist like T.H.C. (Total Harmonic Distortion, not the other acronym), they could be in Alaska or even Finland since FidoNet was a distributed conversation.  Imagine if Reddit was distributed by a peer-to-peer network where you logged onto a local host instead of a central server, and those local hosts exchanged packets of posts, usually every night.  Some of you might immediately be thinking of Usenet, and that's a good comparison.  The conversations took on a more freewheeling nature since they were slightly asynchronous.  But it was better than talking on the local exurban BBS in the mid 1980s where there were ten regulars on the BBS total, and the only people you shared any music in common were your other two friends who were computer enthusiasts, probably listened to similar music, and who had the same equally good-or-bad information as you did because we were all at the ass-end of the music information food chain as high schoolers in a rural midwestern hellhole safely insulated from challenging trends.

Moving back to the early 1990s, the best approach for a label to get their releases into my hands was to get them into record stores.  With the exception of must-have albums by favourite artists, if I was in a record store, I was more often than not looking to spend money on something interesting to listen to, I wasn't merely looking for a specific record.  If your new release wasn't there, I'd probably find something else.  If I was looking for something specific, and it wasn't there, I'd be annoyed, but if it was one of those stores where the store could "special order it for you", they might as well have asked me if I'd like to order it from China and ship it by sailboat and it would take two months.  "No, I don't want you to special order it for me and take forever, I want you to have it right now and I leave with it and listen to it when I get home, that's what I want.  Figure it out."  Barring that, what I want to do is find another record store that has it.  It should be pretty obvious that I enjoyed being in record stores, so this wasn't exactly a high bar, so that wasn't an infrequent internal response.

What I didn't see the value of was a mailer being sent to wherever I lived when I originally returned the reply card.  I do some work with statistics and music, so I completely understand how the questions on this reply card have value in getting a handle on the demographics of the listeners, particularly in the pre-internet era (putting aside for the fact that this particular album is from 1998, the practice was constant throughout the era where the CD was a primary delivery media).  You couldn't just link it with data from Facebook or Google or Spotify or Apple.  This reply card is replete with questions that smack of this sort of thinking.  It screams "please give us data points" to the point where it sounds like a database asking the questions.  There's no voice of a human in it, much less of a human talking to another human who is interested in the sort of music their record label is actually known for.

15 November 2018

13 November 2018

Rather than impose a timeline, which Tumblr isn't exactly the best platform for in the first place, I'm just going to start heading through the stores I have photos of in alphabetical order.  This means that the first entry about a store is actually a newcomer.

2nd & Charles started up in 2010, but it first came to southern Michigan a couple of years after Borders had closed its doors (more on Borders later).  In fact, using the date feature on Google Street View in several other random locations on their 2nd & Charles’ website, this seems to be a relatively common timeline.  While 2nd & Charles parent company is Books-A-Million, a franchise I had only become familiar with while living in Maryland and which has only recently come to my attention as having local stores in southern Michigan, 2nd & Charles has wisely picked up some of the social-commercial space left over from Borders by operating in the same locations.

The similarity goes deeper than this because although 2nd & Charles goes a bit deeper into the non-book content such as toys, music, and games, the price stickers are, shall we say, familiar looking.  Given my warm feelings toward Borders, I'll be the first to admit that I'm very conscious of how much this transference works even though I'm aware of it on a conscious level.  It's not Borders, which I miss greatly, but it's better than not having a large bookstore with some other related merchandise and there are parts of it which are familiar.

8 November 2018

Something I'm going to have to come to terms with on Tumblr is that it's not a blog, but I'm kind of using it as a very specific type of blog.  Since it doesn't include dates and I want a sense of time, I have to add that.  But since it's not a blog network, it's last-in, first-out, which is to say, if you read the posts, there's no guarantee, in fact, a reasonably high likelihood that if you read any particular post, you've not read anything else.  This means I may have to repeat any autobiographical context whenever it is relevant.  This is unfortunate, but it means that most items must be self-contained, and maybe that's not such a bad thing.

This photo is very special.  The actual composition itself is reasonably straightforward, there's nothing terribly special about that.  But this is the Wax Trax! 13th anniversary box set, Black Box, a three-CD compilation.  I believe there were two versions, the version which is pictured above, and a slightly less involved version which only included the CDs and probably the large booklet, and possibly a sleeve.

Of course, there are two of the set pictured above, and that's because several years ago, my sister and my brother-in-law decided they were done owning CDs.  I was always luckier with my CDs, and by luckier, I mean much more careful.  This one, however, probably went back in the box when not played, so both are in great condition.  I regret that the price stickers were removed from both of them, and it's from a record store I have no price stickers from, or whose price stickers carry no record store name or logo - Wyatt Earp Records in Flint, Michigan, an important store in (and for) the area which I'll talk about later.  It came out toward the end of November 1994, and these were Christmas gifts from my mother to my sister and me.

Mark 6 November 2018

There are actually several topics I'd like to discuss that haven't, or simply can't take any personal photos to make them more relevant.  The subject of CD "long boxes" is one of them.

The CD Longbox is the subject of a 99% Invisible episode I'd highly recommend, though to be fair, I'd say this about most episodes.

When the CD first launched, retailers were faced with decisions about how to display and house it, which usually meant new, custom shelves, which meant committing expenses to a new format.  The sooner they adopted the format, the riskier this decision was, and the later they did it, the bigger the conversion expense was all at once.

The record labels and the retailers, dependent as they were on one another, needed a solution, so the record labels very quickly came upon an obvious solution - the CD longbox.  This was as wide as a CD and as tall as a vinyl LP, which meant that you could house CDs in vinyl racks in the same space that typically held about the same amount of units - CDs were twice as thick as LPs, the same height in a longbox, but half as wide.

From 1982-1985, the CD was a fraction of the popularity of the vinyl LP or the cassette, but by the early 1990s, vinyl was swiftly disappearing.  Cassette sales were still steady, but it was pretty clear that the CD's sales were cementing it as the preferred format for more listeners and more types of listening.  By 1990, the retailers were split - many thought of the longbox as an ally in theft protection, and others would prefer to modernize their racks, particularly as some releases were not arriving in longboxes.  The labels often considered it an extra cost they'd love to get rid of but didn't want to alienate their retailers.  Many artists were practically at war with the format and protesting against it, putting stickers on their albums about how the longbox was something they were forced into, REM agreeing to use it to promote the Moter Voter Bill since they had the extra space anyway, and culminating with Spinal Tap's protest via parody, an 18-inch tall longbox - a full 1.5x height of an LP for their 1992 album Break Like the Wind.

In early 1993, the major labels came to the decision that the longbox was dead, as Warner Music's CEO Jeff Gold decided it would be cheaper to stop making them and pass off half the $25 million a year savings (about $44 million in 2018 dollars) to music retailers for a year in the form of a rebate, and Warner would keep the rest of savings that year, and by extension all of the savings every other year by not having to produce longboxes ever again.  That amount of savings was just from Warner Music, the largest US label at the time (it had reached 22% by 1995, so it was probably about the same in 1993).  Other record labels were also glad to rid themselves of this extra cost.

But what of the longbox itself and what of customers?  By and large, there were two types of longbox, the type which had some sort of artwork and a box which was clearly only used as a placeholder with no intention to add value, no matter how little, to the product.  The second type was generally single-colour with a window to display the CD itself, sometimes including a record label logo, with the album name and title along the top.  The first type usually had artwork derived from the CD or LP re-arranged so that the best part of the artwork was displayed in the 1:2 ratio box.

Most of these boxes were immediately thrown away, of course, which led to a lot of the irritation voiced by artists and activists who derided them as a wasteful use of resources.  Some weren't discarded, however.  When I lived in England with the Air Force, we were moved into newly built dormitories shortly after I arrived, and while they were attractive and livable enough, they were a bit sterile at first.  When I came home with CDs packaged in artwork-heavy longboxes, I cut off the front panel of the art boxes and tacked them to the textured wall of the front room of the dorm to give it a lively bit of colour and to declare the tribes to which I belonged, which is half the point of any music-based art.  It won't exactly be a shock that some of these tribes to which I then belonged - Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Megadeth, Ministry - were judged solely on musical criteria, while a few - The Cure, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Love and Rockets, Suede - were judged on, how shall we say, social criteria.  Let's just say that even as a heterosexual, it was very clear to me that "don't ask, don't tell" was actually "ask all you want, don't ever tell, insinuate".

The story of the longbox is that once 1993 rolled around that the cardboard which was dead and buried and that's all there is.  But real life is rarely that cut and dried.  Many record stores, particularly smaller independents where low levels of theft cut significantly into thin profit margins, still have the longbox in spirit, with tall hard plastic theft deterrent cases to hold CDs that have to be unlocked at the register.  In fact, the longbox lives on in fact, with that second type - the art-free variety - living on in fact at warehouse retailers such as Costco and Sam's Club.  I actually had to ask around a bit to verify that this was the case, not so much because I'm so much of a music snob that I would refuse to buy an album from a place like that (but see an upcoming post on the CD as tour souvenir on exactly that point), but because these places cannot afford to carry the type of music I'm interested in, there's no margin in marketing to someone into avant-garde electronic, minimalist electronic, industrial dance, drone, witch house, or whatever else it is that currently catches my fancy.  They're only going to carry something they know they can sell 100,000 of and not be hanging onto for years and years before they package it all off and haul it off for Goodwill to put 100 of in every store.  That's just good business sense.  So, Neil Diamond, not Die Warzau, and Lynyrd Skynyrd over Laibach.

Warehouse club stores overpackage items for a reason.  For bulk items, the value proposition is that you buy a lot, and the price you pay reflects value per unit.  Unfortunately, if you're buying a men's electric razor, a phone, or a memory card, the only way it's sold is inside a baffling amount of exterior packaging.  Some of this is theft prevention in small items, but a lot of it is to maintain the psychological notion of value.  And somewhere in these two justifications is where CDs lie - and in some of these stores, CDs lie in longboxes to this day - boring, plain, longboxes whose only end-of-life destination is the trash bin.  To be fair, that's where almost all of the best longboxes were, too.

As noted earlier, though, echoes of the longbox live on, and not just in theft-prevention devices, but in the form of many box sets.

1 November 2018

With the exception of record store price stickers, I've decided to not comprehensively gather photos of every example I have of a given idea I'm talking about, and this is a good example of that.  While I don't have a vast amount of these around, I do have three or so that have actual VHS tapes, and a few more that have DVD or Blu-Ray.  The VHS ones are automatically a bit more special, not because VHS tapes were anything magic - people either look at them with rose-coloured lenses or malign them far worse than they warrant - but because once you added a CD jewel case to a VHS tape, you had a packaging inconvenience.  Once you had those two things, you might as well throw in some additional material and packaging to add value to the endeavour to make it worthwhile.  That could be an outsize booklet, a full-size book, cards, coasters, additional art prints, metal hardware such as in Front Line Assembly's Hard Wired, and other goodies.

Not incidentally, the CD box set (including the CD + VHS box set) was, for a long time, a lot more likely to be CD-width but vinyl-height for the same reason that the longbox existed, because though it would probably not fit any CD-specific shelving, it probably would fit any vinyl specific shelving, and any CD-specific shelving that was somewhat open could be used in a way where the full-height boxed sets were in back but still commanded attention.

30 October 2018

What a CD box set even is requires a bit of decision-making.  Surely, it's more than a double-CD album, because if that were the only criteria, a very common but long double-CD album like Pink Floyd's The Wall would sufficiently be described as a "box set".  On the other hand, there are plenty of two-CD box sets.  What of single-CD albums with cardboard stock sleeve or actual box editions?  Surely those are a sort of boxed set.

A value-pack re-packaging of two independently-sold albums is a certain kind of box set, but it's also a low bar.  Having said that, I've got a few of those, and even one, Siouxsie & The Banshees Twice Upon A Time, which was a cardboard sleeve for itself and Once Upon A Time, sold separately.  This approach was very common in England, and in the 1990s, it was actually more common for singles than albums or career anthologies such as these Siouxsie CDs.  I'm not sure why it was not quite as successful in the US - I can only presume the sales for such stunts didn't bear the practice out and that it wasn't any aversion to the overt consumerist appearance of such a stunt.  Once a record label committed two different versions of a single with different B-sides released simultaneously, that bridge was crossed.  But, as an American in England who was buying CDs in both countries, it's simply a fact that I saw much more evidence of multi-version singles, and singles where the first version contained a box for both versions in the UK than I did in the US, despite CD singles being pretty common in both markets.

My own relationship to the retail ephemera of the box set cardboard box and multi-CD sleeve itself ran the spectrum from interest to annoyance.  In as much as it made me notice something on the shelf, it was successful, but it wasn't generally something I was interested in paying a premium for; fortunately, such products were often priced competitively.  It was CD storage where the annoyance often factored in.  Since my CD collection spans the range of the CD as a popular medium, with an MSFL Gold CD of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon being either my first or second CD, up to a recent concert purchase, most of my listening to CDs as a primary physical media (as opposed to ripping a CD once and listening to it in a more convenient data format) stops gradually from about eighteen to ten years ago.  After that, there's no circumstance I can imagine where I would pop a CD in and listen to it directly in a dedicated player unless something very unusual was happening.  My collection is large, however, and sleeves and boxes always got in the way and caused grief.  My tendency was to use a small container such as the one I use now, a spare small wooden CD crate big enough for about 24 CDs, and pop the spare smaller boxes and sleeves in there, with any extra material that doesn't fit into the jewel cases.  So that's the pile you see above.

25 October 2018

For this project, there will be three main types of entries, with photos to go along with them.  In rare cases, I may have to venture into a subject without photos.

Concepts: These posts will discuss different themes encountered in dealing with a physical music collection.  I want to say a few things about a particular style of case, and jewel case stickers.

Labels:  I’m using this to share label catalogues and label reply postcards that are included with compact discs, and in one case, with a vinyl LP.  Discogs.com is an invaluable resource for preserving album and booklet art for CDs, but frequently, the catalogues and postcards included with a release are not included, as they do not constitute part of the release itself, but are added by the record label.  As I’m using a camera and not a scanner, this will be a slightly compromised offering, but for these, I have performed a bit of clean-up, correcting skew and optimizing for contrast.  They’d be better off being scanned, but that’s not really my priority.

And last and foremost:

23 October 2018 - Nitzer Ebb - The Magic Stick, Detroit, MI

This may be the final ticket stub post, as I found it while photographing the next segment.  The Magic Stick is, as I mentioned, a rather intimate environment for live acts, and hopefully, this hasn’t changed since the major remodel.

18 October 2018 - The Legendary Pink Dots - The Magic Stick, Detroit, MI

Unfortunately, for this one, I’m a victim of memory and the web isn’t a lot of help.  The Legendary Pink Dots is one of the bands I’ve seen more than any other, and this could be one of several shows.

Not that that matters...

...one of the most memorable aspects of LPD from this era was Niels Van Hoorn.  LPD have an ever-evolving lineup and an astonishingly large catalogue - these two facts go hand-in-hand.  Add in collaborations, solo work, side projects and related bands, and it quickly forms a picture of creative excess, a phrase which if I spoke aloud might sound like “creative success”, and frankly it wouldn’t matter which way you heard it, as both are equally true.

Niels Van Hoorn’s particular contributions included playing woodwinds on stage, (typically alto and soprano saxophones at this point in time, as well as a digital woodwind instrument), stuffing lights into his instruments which activated while playing, playing while wandering the crowd (so, if that note sounded like it was coming from behind you, it almost certainly was), and wearing suits which were so loud an actor playing a pimp in a blacksploitation movie might suggest that this may cross a line and be a bit too ... “loud and extreme”.  Niels is quite a character.  I love LPD, that much should be clear, and I’d like to see Niels wander back into the fold sometime in the future.

16 October 2018 - Nine Inch Nails - The Palace of Auburn Hills, Auburn Hills, MI

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t typically get to arena rock shows.  That’s not out of some distaste for arenas, or some desperate flailing for “authenticity”, it’s merely because the acts I like most don’t draw the size of crows sufficient to fill an arena.  The prices are not ideal, of course, but as a value proposition, I don’t really intend on scoffing at $60 versus $20.  I do find it predatory and extremely dishonest when a venue such as The Palace adds a $25 parking fee on top of ticket prices, however, but I digress.

The Palace is what it is - everything a mid-80s sports and event venue could have wanted to be, except well-located.  It’s at the very edge of the outer-ring suburbs, and the trend lately has been to pull everything back into Midtown and Downtown for reasons which make sense.

I’ve seen Nine Inch Nails four times, I believe, twice at The Palace, once at George Mason University in a rain that was so heavy I could barely read the road signs in an unfamiliar area in Fairfax, Virginia, and once in a DC club, I believe.  The most memorable was probably December 31, 1994.  As this was New Year's Eve, and we were so close to the stage, maybe three people from the front, any time someone was goofing off with champagne, we were getting a great deal on us.  Despite not having drunk anything that night, I’m glad I wasn’t pulled over that night, because I’m sure I smelled like I was into my fourth bottle of brut.  It was a truly great experience; I was not only a fan of Nine Inch Nails, but I was only visiting family in Michigan for the holiday.  When I’d worked in the UK, I’d become very familiar with the opening band, Pop Will Eat Itself, which had recently expanded from a sort of weird alternative dance rock to out-and-out industrial rock.  The audience didn’t know what to make of PWEI at first, and you could see an arena warm up to them in real time, which is always a lot better than the alternative.  Incidentally, it’s the opposite of what generally happened to Nine Inch Nails when they were opening for Guns N’ Roses on that disaster of a tour.  Between the two acts was the Jim Rose Sideshow Circus, and Rose is a man practically built of stage presence, audience engagement, and graciousness who happily mingled in the crowd when he wasn’t needed on the stage.

On this day, however, I did miss the opening act, Does It Offend You, Yeah?, which was not intentional and unfortunate.  The production values of the tour were sky high, to put it mildly, and that’s just not me speaking out of turn due to not doing arena rock tours, since they end up on YouTube.

Usually, if I show up late for a club show, it’s specifically because I don’t want to see an opening act.  I’m open-minded and interested in things I haven’t heard before, so this is usually only if it’s something I already know I don’t really care about.  This has, however, bit me in the finest form on at least one occasion.  Type O Negative and Cradle of Filth were touring together.  The smaller band opens for the bigger band, and no doubt about it, Type O Negative were on a roll at the time.  Unfortunately, the bands were alternating opener/closer positions every night out of some misguided attempt at fairness.  So applying logic to the fact that I despise the banshee vocal style of black metal, I showed up late enough to miss most of Cradle of Filth to find out I had missed most of Type O Negative instead.  To add insult to injury, I was turned back at the door because for whatever reason, they decided to enforce an additional restriction about cameras that day.  By the time I got in, I heard maybe three songs by the band I intended to see.  Since I’d already paid the money in advance and made the drive, it was a loss so I stuck around to give Cradle of Filth a chance in case I was completely wrong.

11 October 2018 - The Dresden Dolls - St. Andrews Hall, Detroit, MI

Talking about Amanda Palmer tends to get divisive quickly.  This show was at Detroit’s iconic St Andrew’s Hall, and it was before the Kickstarter issue or any of the rest.  All Palmer was really known for then was for being a talented musician and songwriter, and prolific oversharer, and that much hasn’t changed.

9 October 2018 - The Pixies - The State Theatre, Detroit, MI 

Now, you’d think that I had some sort of fetish for the State Theatre.  It’s not true, it just has to do with factors I’ve mentioned before:  smaller venues aren’t as likely to print custom tickets, I’ll show up without a ticket and just pay at the door, I’ll pay in advance but use will-call, or all I’ll have is a printout or email receipt to show at the door.