I had friends who used to scam Columbia House Record Club.
Columbia House, some of you will remember, was the only record club that mattered back in the day. (There was also RCA Record Club, which later became BMG Music Service, which later would merge with Columbia House.)
Their ads were as ubiquitous as they were seductive. All one needed to do to receive 12 long-playing record albums was tape a penny to one of the little postage-paid tear-out cards, stick on the proper miniature album cover stamps for the records you wanted and allow four to six weeks for delivery.
And the records would actually show up!
The hitch was that by filling out the card and mailing in the penny, you were obligated to purchase a specified number of albums over the next few months. These records were priced at full retail and Columbia House added shipping charges. If you were careful and judicious in your choices, maybe you could keep it from becoming a horrible deal. But the record club strategy was to hook a bunch of hippie slackers with the promise of free music, and when they didn't follow through by mailing back the cards that said they didn't want that month's featured selection, automatically ship the album and bill them. They backed this system up with a very aggressive collection policy.
CH's business plan (the technical term is "negative option billing") relied on people not reading the fine print. They were counting on people slipping up and having to pay for stuff they didn't want.
(Sometimes you'd still get an album you didn't want even when you didn't slip up. A girl I knew slit open the shrink-wrap on what she believed was Linda Ronstadt's Heart Like a Wheel only to find a copy of Uriah Heep's Salisbury inside.)
Most of the recordings sold through record clubs weren't precisely the same as those sold in stores. They were pressed by the clubs -- "manufactured under license" -- which may or may not have made any difference in the sonic quality, but made a huge difference to the musicians. Record club sales were classified as promotional copies in most artists' contracts, so they didn't get paid royalties for them.
Pearl Jam's Vs. sold an estimated 1 million copies through record clubs. Hootie & the Blowfish's debut, Cracked Rear View, sold 13 million -- 3 million of which were record club copies.
None of this justified what my friends did, but maybe this also gives you an idea about the ethics of record clubs.
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What my friends did was commit mail fraud. They filled out the insert cards with genuine addresses and fake names. They ignored monthly mailings, accepted the albums that followed and never paid a dime. When the clubs sent collection letters, they ignored them. When the club's collection managers got around to calling "Maxwell Smart" or "Annie Greensprings" or whatever name they'd scrawled on the card, they told them they'd never heard of them. (Or in the case of one precocious 12-year-old, they let their parents deal with the record club thug.)
And it worked. Every time.
Some of my ambitious friends did it more than once. Some rented post office boxes for the specific purpose of fraudulently receiving record club albums. Some had more than one fraudulent account under the same address at the same time. Several were serial scammers. (There was a legal way to beat the system -- one could fulfill the requirement by judiciously ordering "bargain" records and cancel the membership as soon as contractual stipulations were met. Then the record club would send a new 12-for-a-penny offer and you could start the process again.)
In the days before computers cross-referenced names and addresses, it wasn't that hard to stay ahead of the record club's skip tracers. Besides, 13-year-olds couldn't enter into legally binding contracts. While a lot of people may have been guilted into paying up, very few were prosecuted.
The ones who were became, among a certain segment of society, folk heroes.
In 2000, 60-year-old Joseph Parvin admitted bilking CH and BMG out of 26,554 CDs worth an estimated $425,000. Parvin admitted that from 1993 to 1998 he received the discs via 2,417 fake accounts. He had them shipped to 16 different post office boxes and his home address. A few months before Parvin's case was adjudicated, a 33-year-old New Jersey man named David Russo admitted receiving 22,260 record club CDs. Russo used 1,630 aliases and 12 addresses in seven towns. Russo told the court he made "each address just different enough to avoid detection, adding fictitious apartment numbers, unneeded direction abbreviations and extra punctuation marks."
Parvin sold most of the CDs he acquired at flea markets. Russo went further, setting up his own mail-order business, which he called CDs for Less.
Still, there were enough "honest" subscribers that the record clubs remained profitable. As late as 2000, record clubs were grossing an estimated $1.5 billion a year. What killed record clubs was the digital delivery of music -- legally and illicitly.
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There was something in the record clubs' advertising that appealed to my obsessive geek side. I like collecting things, and, contrary to what Tom Petty says, the waiting wasn't the hardest but usually the best part. I'm not going to grump about how the album has been atomized and marginalized or cry about how the single has again become the primary currency of pop music. There's nothing wrong with being able to get what you want when you want it and not have to take a bunch of stuff you don't think you want along with it. (Though maybe there's something in the idea that the record clubs taught us to expect that music should be free.)
But I still think in albums. I still, as stupid as it is these days when anybody can hear practically anything at anytime by typing in a few keystrokes, collect them.
All that is prelude to what I meant to be the main part of this piece but has ended up the coda -- a listing of my favorite albums of the year. I'm not saying these are the best, but they are what I would spend my penny on in 2014 (in no particular order); my full comments on these albums are on the blog, blooddirtangels.com:
1. Lucinda Williams, Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone (Highway 20) -- It's taken a while for this double album -- Lu's Exile on Main Street -- to sink in, but it's starting to. I love the snarl and fire of it as much as the open-hearted title track, based on a poem by her father, Miller Williams. I'm not an impartial observer, but this strikes me as a particularly ambitious and meticulously crafted work from one of our most evocative songwriters. Lucinda Williams' words come at you deceptively straight, but like they say of some pitchers, she throws a heavy ball.
2. Beck, Morning Phase (Capitol) -- To hear it feels a bit like looking at one of J.M.W. Turner's subtler watercolors, say, Norham Castle Sunrise or Colour Beginning. Maybe you think it's pretentious to compare a pop album to a painting, but there's something in Beck that inspires synesthesia. Morning Phase is an environment, a mood-altering substance.
3. Rosanne Cash, The River & the Thread (Blue Note) -- Cash's latest might be read as a travelogue of the South, the place to which, author Willie Morris said, every Southerner eventually comes home, even if it's in a box. It's about Cash's rapprochement with her homeland, albeit one that touches down in Paris and Barcelona before inevitably returning to Memphis, where the Delta -- the fertile crescent that incubated all that American music -- begins.
4. Black Keys, Turn Blue (Nonesuch) -- My alternate choice here would be Jack White's Lazaretto (Third Man).
5. Adam Faucett, Blind Water Finds Blind Water (Last Chance) -- An artist out of time, Faucett is a remarkably inventive singer and lyricist who wends his voice through black woods and back alleys, past junk-store guitar bursts and old weird Americanisms. "Daydrinker" and "Edgar Cayce" are amazing. It's a bonus he's from Benton.
Other local albums to be considered: The ever reliable Jim Mize's eponymous album on Fat Possum and Mothwind's self-released In the Clutches of the Novae, a heavy progressive record with a sense of humor.
6. Parquet Courts, Sunbathing Animal (Mom & Pop)
7. Bonnie Prince Billy, Singer's Grave a Sea of Tongues (Palace/Drag City)
8. Sturgill Simpson, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (High Top Mountain) -- Like mid-'70s Waylon without the hyperbole and a philosophy degree. My kind of country.
9. St. Paul & The Broken Bones, Half the City (Single Lock)
10. Jenny Lewis, The Voyager (Warner Bros.)
11. Robert Plant, Lullaby and ... The Ceaseless Roar (Nonesuch)
12. Mac DeMarco, Salad Days (Captured Tracks)
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
blooddirtandangels.com
Style on 12/07/2014