One of my occasional pastime hobbies is scouring the bargain bins at indie record stores.
To really experience this hobby in its highest form is to travel to the Mecca of the bargain-bin, Los Angeles. I've only been to Los Angeles once (for about a week), but the stuff I found at the few places I visited made me wish I had that around me all of the time. Apparently, with the major record labels all based there, whenever a "new" band's time has passed, they dump all of the leftover promos on the used CD stores. And since I rarely care about "trends" with music, I'm more than happy buying last year's record for $1.
College towns are also great for this hobby. The local college radio stations are usually bombarded with promos, largely from bands they would never play. I've never been sure if the stations give or sell them directly to the stores. My favorite theory is that one or more of the dj's at said stations pilfer the leftovers from the cabinet and hawk them for beer money.
When I was in school, the bargain bin became my favorite location to buy music. It's always hard to justify spending $15 for Goldfinger's "Here in Your Bedroom" not knowing how the rest of the CD sounds. But I'll throw a dollar or two for a copy of the CD with a hole punched through it!
Sometimes, it's shocking what ends up in the bargain bin. While Mother Love Bone didn't find an audience until the band re-emerged from tragedy as Pearl Jam, it was still a surprise to find their 2-CD compilation in the bargain bin recently. And while that was a surprise, it was nothing compared to finding both Apple and Shine (the two original, now out-of-print releases that compile that 2-CD set) in the bargain bin.
I don't gamble, but, to me, the rush of finding something truly valuable has to be what winning the big prize must feel like. Or maybe when the hundred- and-thirty-ninth quarter in the slot machine rewards you with a hundred bucks. On top of that, there's something so much more rewarding when you find something you've really been looking for on the bargain wall.
In October of 1999, I took my seemingly ordinary trip over to Big Shot Records (now Schoolkids) in Athens to poke through their bargain wall. (That was before they put a large rack of CD's in front of the bargain wall, but that's a rant for another day.) I'm not sure why I chose that day to do so, but I decided to take the time to go through the whole thing to see if I'd missed anything from previous trips.
While running my finger across the C's, I thought I saw something. It didn't seem possible, so I scanned back up to see if I saw what I thought I saw. Immediately, my heart rate went from a comfortable 65 to about 130bpm as the words on the spine cleared in my eyes. I snatched out this CD, titled Deep in the Heart of the Beast in the Sun, and proceeded to stare at the cover incredulously. (It had that musty "I've been in storage for a really long time" smell.) When it finally sank in, I glared over at the store clerk, as if he might be playing some cruel trick on me.
Back in the comic book collecting days of my youth, it wasn't uncommon to go to some random comic book store, find some rare issue without a price sticker on the bag, and hope for a bargain, only to feel helpless as the clerk pulled a copy of the Comic Book Price Guide out from under the desk to charge the "full market value" of the book. So the little voice of history in my head told me that the guy at the front would see the disc, recognize the name, and charge me a fortune.
When I threw it on the counter, he glanced at it and responded, "Enh. Five bucks." Probably out of guilt, I reached back and grabbed the two other bargain wall "finds" that I had pretty much decided I wasn't going to buy. I've never had any delusions of being an actor, but I was seriously putting on my best "Enh, whatever" face while the rest of me was freaking out. Even as I drove away, I still felt guilty, like I'd ripped them off right under their noses. But mostly, I just celebrated the fact that I finally owned a real copy of the Colorfinger CD.
Truthfully, I'd always wanted that CD, but the prospect of paying $100 or more for it just wasn't appealing at all. And, ironically, I'd been telling people for a couple of years that all of the copies in existence were probably in the hands of collectors by now, and you probably wouldn't find one at a used CD store. (Yes, Alanis, this is a proper example of irony.) So I assumed I would never own it. And I was okay with that. Actually, I was more than happy just to have the CD-R copy that someone made for me a couple of years earlier.
I'm just not a real "collector" in the true sense of the word. I'm not the kind of person who collects every version of the Foo Fighters' "Everlong" single in existence just to have them all. The only redundant single in my collection is the Pearl Jam UK "Jeremy" single, which I originally bought because it had "Yellow Ledbetter" on it. But, a year later, I acquired the Austrian version, which had the same tracklist, save for replacing "Alive (Live)" (which I already had on another disc) with "Footsteps" (which wasn't available anywhere else). I think I only kept the UK one for nostalgia reasons, and because the artwork on the CD is pretty cool.
I'm just a music fan. So if someone makes me a CD-R of some rare release, I'm way more than happy. I don't really need The Real Thing™.
The added bonus is that when I really do find something, it's so much more rewarding. For the next few months, if I was ever in a bad mood, all I had to do was pull out that Colorfinger disc, hold it in my hands, remember that rush in the store, and I was in a good mood again. I would be amazed if I could have paid "full market value" and still get that feeling so long after the fact. (I have this fear that I'd have eventually felt guilty for having paid that much.)
Of course, this doesn't in any way mean that you can run to your local indie store, poke through their bargain bin, and find a copy of Jimmy Eat World's first self-titled CD from 1994. I couldn't even begin to count how many hours I've spent staring at crappy disc after crappy disc. (Of course, to me, it's crap. But to someone else, Colorfinger was crap.)
I'm almost worried that this is the equivalent of taking a metal detector to the beach. But maybe I now can understand why those old guys do it. It's not for the quarters, the dimes, or the nickels. It's for that random chance that one day, completely unexpectedly, they'll find a copy of the Colorfinger disc buried in the sand.
What, you think they're looking for jewelry?
