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Guess you’re stuck with that Spin Doctors CD, or ‘The Do Not Never Ever Buy List’

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Laurie’s Planet of Sound, a used record store in Chicago, has leaked its do-not-buy list.

It includes the Spin Doctors, 10,000 Maniacs, Joan Osbourne, Alanis Morrisette and Sting and pretty much every other singer or band you thought was cool in the ’80s and ’90s.

“The Do Not Never Ever Buy List” isn’t “a list of music we don’t like,” Laurie’s says on its Facebook page. It’s “ just stuff that we watch molecularly break-down on the shelves due to lack of interest.”

In other words, it’s a list of music nobody likes.

OK, that isn’t fair.

Someone likes it, or they did, once. That’s why there are so many copies of the Spin Doctors’ Pocket Full of Kryptonite out there.

You have to remember that 21 years ago you couldn’t download “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” or “Two Princes” from Amazon or iTunes, because there was no Amazon or iTunes. If you wanted the singles, you bought the album.

Pocket Full of Kryptonite

Pocket Full of Kryptonite (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Pocket Full of Kryptonite was huge. According to the RIAA, it sold upwards of 5 million copies. Quintuple platinum. So, when people got tired of listening to “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and “Two Princes,” the supply of used CDs pretty quickly outweighed the demand.

Laurie’s doesn’t want any more Spin Doctors CDs because it doesn’t think it can sell them. It isn’t personal. It’s business.

If you’re like me, you have spent a small fortune over the years on music. Used to, I’d cull the ones I didn’t listen to anymore and sell them or trade them in, but a few years ago, the used record stores stopped buying. I understood why, but it still stings a little to think my CD collection is literally worthless, even to me. The music itself is still worth something, but it’s all on a hard drive.

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Before there was Spotify, there were jukeboxes

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I saw something a while that I hadn’t seen in years: a jukebox. I don’t mean one that plays CDs. I mean a real, honest-to-God jukebox that plays 45 rpm records.

We were a ways outside Nashville, and we’d stopped for lunch, and I knew there was a real jukebox as soon as I walked in and heard Alan Jackson singing “Little Bitty.” I knew it, because the song sounded grungy and a little wobbly, like maybe the band had been out partying too late the night before and hadn’t quite sobered up.

Old jukeboxes sound that way because of bad speakers and because of the records themselves. I know guys who wear that vinyl sounds better than CDs or MP3s, but I don’t think anyone would defend the 45.

When I was 14, I got a job as a disc jockey (it was a small town, and there was only one station), and I don’t think there was a lot of quality control when it came to 45s. You’d pull a 45 out of the shuck and it might be a little warped, or the hole in the middle might be a little off-center, so even new records sometimes sounded bad.

On top of that, a record dies a little every time you play it. When the needle rides along the groove, it erases a little of the music. The sounds start to fade, the highs and lows giving way to a murky middle.

That’s the sound I heard when we walked in the restaurant.

“Look at this!” I said.

The jukebox had a window, and I wanted Things 1 and 2 to see how it worked, how pressing A-6 makes the mechanical arm slide down a rail until it finds the record you want and grab it and hold it upright against the turntable, but they couldn’t have cared less.

We were the only ones there besides the owner, so I played whatever I wanted – some Brooks & Dunn, some Alan Jackson – and I suddenly remembered the peer pressure that goes along with playing a jukebox.

When I check Facebook, I see what my friends are into on Spotify. I know, for example, that my friend, Andrew, has a previously undocumented weakness for Daryl Hall & John Oates.  

Well, when you play a song on a jukebox, you’re telling everyone within earshot, friends and strangers alike, who you are.

Every song you play on jukebox is a statement, and there is absolutely nothing as embarrassing as pressing the wrong buttons and playing Barry Manilow instead of the Boss (which I did once, back in high school, when a buddy and I were at Pizza Hut).

You hear a lot today about social media, of sharing your likes and dislikes with your friends online. Jukeboxes let you do that, too, one quarter at a time.

Photo by Anonymous Account (Flickr)

Does anyone still send Christmas cards?

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American card, circa 1940

When I was a kid, we got a ton of Christmas cards. Today, not so much.

When I was a kid, we got so many Christmas cards that my parents ran out of places to put them. They taped them around both sides of the doorway leading from the living room to the kitchen. They sat them on the kitchen table, side tables, the TV (televisions were these massive pieces of furniture that sat on the floor) and on the stereo (stereos were also massive pieces of furniture that sat on the floor).

We, on the other hand, get a few Christmas cards, mostly from older relatives. We put them in a sleigh-shaped card holder on the kitchen table. We get fewer Christmas cards, and every year, we send out fewer Christmas cards.

I did a little digging, and I was relieved to find that it wasn’t just us. A story in the Los Angeles Times a couple weeks ago says we’re buying about a billion fewer holiday cards a year than we did just 15 years ago. According to the Greeting Card Association, people in the United States bought 2.7 billion holiday cards in 1995. Last year, it was 1.5 billion.

Christmas cards used to be how you stayed in touch with people you didn’t see every day.

We’d get Christmas cards stuffed with school pictures and, sometimes, long letters bragging about what a terrific and prosperous year someone had. (These letters were often read aloud and usually mocked, and bets would sometimes be taken as to how soon the couple would be divorced.)

These days, though, we keep up with folks on Facebook.

We’ll post a general “merry Christmas” message on our walls and maybe an ironic e-card or a YouTube clip of a Christmas song we like (lately, several of my friends have posted links to Bill Monroe’s “Christmas Time’s a-Comin’.“)

We’ll send a few Christmas cards, mostly to those older relatives who aren’t on Facebook, but then we’ll wait to see who sends us a card and send them one back. Of course, if they’re waiting for us to send a card first, pretty soon, no one will be sending Christmas cards. So, here’s a little quiz: