Last weekend Rhino Records on Westwood Boulevard had a special
promotional sale. The deal was, go into the store and spend ten
dollars on any item of your choice and you get a yellow ticket.
This ticket entitles you to go into the parking lot where the store
had set up its entire clearance stock (thousands of used or
bargain-bin CDs, records, and video tapes), and walk out with as
much as you could carry for free.
So I went. I got slightly gouged for the one Elliott Smith
record I didn’t already own, and then I went outside and
lived the life.
The sale was supposed to start at 10 a.m., but when I arrived at
9:45 there were already several people browsing the seemingly
endless rows of crappy discs. A few had already assembled
formidable collections.
The scene was daunting to say the least, and no one knew quite
where to begin. So after about five minutes paralyzed with
indecision, I decided to just start at the end of one row and see
what I could find.
I was not disappointed.
When I started looking in earnest I found the bulk of the
selection to be just as I had suspected: obscure bands, terrible
late releases from mediocre acts, and infinite, randomly assembled
ska compilations. Initially I was discouraged. With so much
worthless garbage, how could I ever hope to find anything
worthwhile? I wasted at least fifteen minutes saying to myself,
“this copy sucks, that copy sucks, does every copy here
suck?”
But then it hit me: sure, every copy sucks, but it’s all
free, so it’s all worthwhile.
With this new approach I started taking anything that was even
remotely intriguing. At first I focused on eighties rejects that
everyone remembers only through hate. In this modern ironic age,
isn’t hate kind of the new love? I hope so, because I am now
the proud owner of records by Color Me Badd (“I Wanna Sex You
Up,” anyone?), Huey Lewis and the News and, coincidentally,
the currently most infamous band in rock, Great White.
Along the way I came up with some fairly worthwhile compilation
discs. I got a Nonesuch records release featuring avant-garde works
by the likes of Steve Reich, John Zorn, and the Kronos Quartet. I
got “American Country,” “Kentucky Country,”
“The Country Collection,” and Speedbuggy’s
“Hardcore Honky Tonk.” Sweet. I got two copies of
“Brother Can You Spare Some Ska?”
There were a few surprising and genuinely great finds. I found
12 Rods’ superb album “Split Personalities,”
which I donated to my companion, as I already had it. He did even
better than I, finding copies of “Fizzy, Fuzzy, Big and
Buzzy” by The Refreshments, and the eponymous debut from The
Fire Show. Incredibly, he found a copy of “Secaucus” by
The Wrens, an album that’s been out of print for years and
that I’ve been actively looking for. I had to give up my
factory-sealed copy of a Redman album and a Spoon record before he
would give it up. He had the leverage.
Still, probably the most memorable acquisitions of the day were
those records no one had ever heard of, the records we picked up
based simply on their unique names or cover art. From the ranks of
these unknown but undoubtedly future classics I found an album by a
band called Angry Salad featuring “The Milkshake Song.”
I got something called “Spooky Pie in the Sky,” about
which L.A. Weekly raves: “this pie is in your face.” I
got the latest, and perhaps only, release from The Reptile Palace
Orchestra simply because of the plastic dinosaur on the cover. I
got the mysteriously titled record “This is Offensive.”
I hope it is.
All told I walked away with nearly 80 CDs and six LPs (mainly
for carrying purposes). I have weeks ahead of me to go through them
and find whatever gems might be hidden among the obscure
selections. Ultimately, that’s the best part of the
experience.
Dan Crossen lives in a wooden shack by the sea, in which he is
currently humming along to Angry Salad’s version of “99
Red Balloons.” E-mail him at dcrossen@ucla.edu.