“Okay, so what's the speed of dark?”
- Steven Wright
The question I saw was, “How many times did you buy a CD (or LP) based on a banger track on the radio, only to find out the rest of the album was garbage?”
The kids these day (fill in your own observations or gripes) will never know that empty feeling of spending their few coins on an LP that turned out to be a total bust, save for that one song that enticed them into buying it. I hesitate to use the term “garbage” like the question did. I'm sure the artists were doing their best, but still, sometimes there's no “there” there.
But nowadays young folks don't have to take any risk with their music. Stream a song for ten seconds, if they don't like it, never mind. But back in the day you often had to gamble. You heard a great song on the radio, none of your friends had the album, somebody had to blaze a trail, somebody had to go first…maybe it was going to be all that, maybe it would be the next Murmurs or Appetite for Destruction. Usually, it was not.
As one who spent a lot of his limited disposable income on music, I tasted my share of bitter disappointment back then. It was worth it though, because occasionally I'd go with a blind hunch and get rewarded with something like Counting Crows' August and Everything After or Patty Griffin's Living With Ghosts. It was like laying that one shot onto the green. Somehow it helps you forget about the other 110 that went into the woods and the water.
A couple of my losers are below. The first one I heard on KSHE 95 in 1977 driving into St. Louis in my 1970 white Ford pickup. I had to get the LP as soon as possible. The rest of the album didn't do it for me and even Black Betty got old after about three spins. The second, Peter Murphy, had to have been around 1989. I'd just gotten my first CD player. I don't know where I heard Cuts You Up, but I think I was itching to buy some CDs. I still like the song but the rest of it didn't do it for me.
What are some of your heartbreaks?